the vain hope of a breeze to cool the interior. 'Jason, I can't…'
'Can't what, Charlie? You know how many planes were stolen in the Caribbean last year, snatched just to make a single dope run, then abandoned? Hell, look how many old dope wrecks you see in the water 'tween here and Provo! Your plane gets stolen and it's unfortunate but not even unusual.'
'But in the daylight, right here at Grand Turk?'
Jason began to slowly fold the bills up as though to return them to the money belt. 'I'd thought theft was the reason the man who owns your charter service paid for insurance. But that's okay, Charlie. I understand you can't take a risk to save my life from those men with guns. I understand…'
Charlie's hand grabbed Jason's. 'You let go that money, Jason.' He gave the area a quick, nervous survey, the look of a small child checking to see if parents were watching. 'Jes' you sit here; let me get into the terminal. What you does then, that be yo' bidness.'
'Remember: about thirty minutes before you report the plane stolen.'
Charlie nodded. 'You be in Haiti, the DR by then.'
'Never mind where I'll be.'
Charlie stood and walked away, then stopped and turned. 'Jason?'
Jason looked up.
'Good luck!'
There wasn't time for a complete preflight inspection of the aircraft. Jason only unscrewed the caps to the plane's two gas tanks to visually verify they were full. He had never flown a Piper, let alone an Aztec before. He had, however; taken the hours of flight instruction mandatory for all Delta Force officers. He could only hope there was enough similarity between the Aztec and the light miliary trainer to keep him from killing himself.
His first glance at the panel was both encouraging and a little frightening. What gauges were present were familiar: altimeter, turn and bank, and their like. A number of empty holes told him he would have a single radio and navigation unit, no transponder or other electronics common to even small aircraft.
The switches were double what he had been used to, one for each engine. He flipped the first one on the right to on and did the same with one marked pump. He heard the reassuring whine of a fuel pump. He gave a winged switch a twist and the left prop began a slow rotation. Keeping the knob turned, he used his other hand to work the fuel-flow lever in the middle of the panel back and forth. He was delighted when the small plane quivered and the prop caught, disappearing into a blur.
He was about to do the same thing with the right engine when something made him look up in time to see an old Buick almost collide with the parked Lincoln as it came to a stop. The four men piled out, this time not even taking the trouble to conceal their weapons. They had not noticed the Aztec yet as they looked around for Charlie before running into the terminal.
Now acquainted with the procedure, Jason had the second engine started and was rolling toward the runway in less than a minute. There was no time to seek taxi and takeoff clearances from the tower. Instead, he went to the western tip of the runway and prepared to do a run-up, the procedure by which magnetos, fuel-flow, and propeller pitch were given a final check.
Through the aircraft's windshield, he saw the four men racing across the general aviation area, guns held out. They might have missed him earlier, but even the poorest of shots was going to hit the Piper somewhere if they could get within the Uzi's limited range.
So much for the run-up.
Jason pushed the two center levers flat against the panel and the Aztec began to creep forward.
The four men certainly saw him now. They were gesturing in his direction.
The airspeed indicator was quivering around twenty- five knots. The white arc showed Vmc-liftoff-to be between sixty and sixty-five.
Nothing to do but press the fuel levers harder, hoping for any increase in power. The outside-air-temperature gauge read eighty-two, and standard humidity here was at least the same, adversely affecting power. Too bad he wasn't trying to escape from an arctic desert.
The four men stood in a line, Uzis raised. The guns were designed for massed fire at close range. The Aztec would be at the outer limit of the weapons' accuracy and reach. The plane was going to take some punishment, but not nearly as much as it would have from twenty-five yards closer. The fragile aluminum skin was too thin to protect vital parts or Jason from the bullets that did get that far.
The gauge's needle was crawling past forty knots. If only the damn plane would accelerate a little faster…
The needle hovered between forty-five and fifty.
Parts of his brief aviation instruction came back with the suddenness and impact of a thunderbolt. There was a way to get this thing off the ground quicker.
His looked at the bottom of the panel, where he saw an oddly shaped switch. Pulling it down produced a whir of electronics, and the plane unweighted like a diver about to leave the board. He had hit the flap switch, lowered the flaps at the back of the wing. A procedure designed to slow the aircraft for landing, it also changed the airfoil of the wings, producing more lift, if less speed.
The small plane clawed its way into the air, with Jason pulling the control stick back far enough to keep the stall warning screeching. A stall would occur when the aircraft's angle of attack could no longer be sustained by available power and the plane simply quit flying. It was an acceptable landing maneuver, but to have all lift spill from the wings only a hundred feet or so in the air left neither time nor altitude for recovery.
But no more fatal than a hailstorm of automatic rifle fire.
There was a loud sound like the clap of hands, and the plane shuddered. At least one of the men had hit the mark. Jason could only hope no essential had been struck. The gauges told him nothing.
At five hundred feet he let the nose down to only a few degrees above the horizon. Turning his head, he could see Grand Turk shrinking in the distance. He lifted the flaps, anticipating the sinking of the aircraft with the loss of extra lift. At a thousand feet he leveled off, pulled the power back to his best guess of economy cruise, and put the Aztec into a slow right turn until both compass and gyroscope indicated a few degrees east of due south.
He sighed as he looked around the small cockpit. He gave the rudder pedals an experimental push, testing the force required to operate each. Maybe flying was like riding a bicycle in that you didn't forget how.
Quit kidding yourself, he thought. You've got to land a plane you've never flown before and with possible characteristics of which you're ignorant.
Oh well, his other self-the pilot self-replied, you've already seen the speed at which this baby comes right up to a stall, and what is a landing but a stall into the ground?
You'll be fine as long as you can find a nice long, deserted beach to put her down. Nothing to it.
A flicker of a needle caught his eye. The left fuel gauge was bumping against the empty peg. Gas gauges in airplanes were notoriously inaccurate; hence the visual check of the fuel level before takeoff. Still, the wing tank could have taken the hit he had heard. He quickly searched the floor between the two front seats and found a lever for each tank. He switched the left engine to feed from the right tank. He was unsure exactly what that would do to the balance of the aircraft, but better another unknown than the certainty of a fuel-starved engine.
Squinting, he peered into the blue haze. Clouds made dark patterns on the water easily mistaken for islands. Each form had to be examined closely. Where he was headed, he would quickly run out of altitude at a mere thousand feet. The mountains were some of the Caribbean's highest.
In a pocket in the door beside him was stuffed a tattered map, a color chart published periodically by the United States government's Coast and Geodetic Survey. Jason unfolded it carefully, fearful it might tear. To his pleasant surprise, the side that did not show part of the Turks and Caicos depicted the north coast of the island of Hispaniola. It was well out-of-date-he would riot be able to rely on the printed radio frequencies-but he had no intent of making contact with facilities that could well have been alerted to the theft of the airplane. The depiction of the physical shape of the coastline, however, would be valuable.
He glanced up from the map in time to see shadows ahead coalescing into a definite form. A strip of foamy white surf along a golden beach confirmed his arrival. The question was, exactly where?
He turned to fly almost due east along the coast and passed over what was clearly a resort area. A golf course was laid out amid a jungle; the blue of a swimming pool twinkled in the sun. He was low enough to see people on the tennis courts. A few minutes headed the other way and he was over a finger of land running east and
