It was maybe ten days later—I think I already had malaria by then, and things were fuzzy—when it happened. Byron was standing off to the side of the plane, watching the unloading, anxious to get back into the sky. But there were enemy planes in that sky. Huge chunks of ground blew up all around us from whatever they were sending down. No point in running—the blasts were completely random. And nobody ever used that foul tunnel they called a bomb shelter twice.
Suddenly, Byron went down, a piece of shrapnel in his thigh, blood flowing, not spurting. The rest of the crew ran for the plane. “We’ll pick you up on the return!” one of them shouted.
Byron knew what that meant. He started crawling to the plane, pulling himself forward with his arms, the useless leg dragging behind him, holding him back. I ran ahead of him to the cargo door of the plane, pulling the .45 out of my field jacket.
“Hold it!” I yelled at the two men in the bay.
“We got to go!” one of them shouted back over the roar of the engine. “The sky’s filling up!”
“Go get him!” I yelled, pointing with my empty hand at where Byron was still crawling.
“No way, man. He’ll leave us!”
I knew who they meant. The copilot. The pilot now. I gestured them to step back, boarded the plane. “No, he won’t,” I told them. “The faster you get back, the faster you can leave.”
They jumped out to get Byron while I went forward to explain things to the guy at the helm. I stood there explaining things until I heard them come back into the plane. Then I put up the pistol, ran right past Byron and his “rescuers,” jumped down, and headed for the deeper jungle. The plane took off.
I wasn’t sure Byron had made it until a few years later. A group of hijackers I knew were trying to put together a team for a job at a private airport, and his name came up as a candidate. The guy who recommended him said he’d worked with Byron a couple of times and he was solid.
We never did that job, but Byron had come to one of the meetings. It was … awkward. He didn’t know what to say, and neither did I.
And now we had another chance.
“You know,” he said, “I never asked you …”
“What?”
“Why you did it.”
“I don’t know,” I told him, truthfully. I was nineteen years old when it happened. I couldn’t have told you why I was in that jungle, in that war, much less why I …
“I think that’s a problem with people,” he said softly. “Who cares about the ‘why’? I don’t. Sorry I asked.”
“Sure.”
“Okay, what’s on the agenda?”
“I need to check something out. In Vancouver, that’s just—”
“—over the border from Portland,” he finished for me.
“Yeah. Look, I won’t bore you with all the details, but I’m supposed to be dead. So I need a way to go in under the radar.”
“Who better than me?” He smiled. “I live there.”
Byron’s ride was a restored-to-new oxblood Jaguar XKE coupe. He drove it like it was a real car, though.
“You’re doing well for yourself,” I said.
“Wait till you see the plane.”
It turned out to be one of those baby jets, with a custom cabin designed for luxury, not space utilization.
“Yours?” I asked, as I settled in next to him.
“Right!” He laughed. “It belongs to the studio. That’s my job, flying very important people around to very important places.”
“And you can just …?”
“Borrow it? Sure. They bought this sucker in the glory days, back in the late eighties, when money was gushing. Today, the smart boys rent—like time-shares: use it when they need it, pay by the hour. But this one’s all theirs. Nobody pays attention. They wouldn’t know what a flight log was. And they never check on fuel and maintenance. Only risk is if one of the big shots gets a sudden whim, decides he needs to go to Vegas or something.”
“That’d cost you your job.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, unconcerned.
“Recognize it?” Byron asked, banking low over a string-of-jewels city.
“No.”
“Seattle.”
“Not Portland?”
“You come
“But how far is …?”
“Couple of hours. Don’t worry, I got you covered.”
“These things hard to drive?” I asked Byron.
