According to Redden, whenever the alternate plan kicked into play, the situation at Bayfield was not entirely known to the pilots. Their instructions were to taxi to hangar No. 2 and unload the money into a truck that would be waiting there. The client and the guard would stay with the money. The pilots could leave. And that was the end of the affair as far as they were concerned.
The hangar, luckily, had a back room, which was the rear end of the hangar partitioned off and having a flat ceiling which formed a loft under the high-pitched roof of the hangar itself.
Inside this back-room “office” Graver, Murray, and Last waited. There was a door in the partitioned wall and a sash window covered with a glaze of dirt and two walnut-sized clods of dirt dauber’s nests. The place smelled of undisturbed dust and oil as they stood among stacks of used tires and misshapen cardboard boxes Riled with disassembled parts of old airplanes. Just outside the partitioned office, Remberto hid in the corner formed by the walls of the office and the hangar, wedged between another stack of old tires and an aluminum flat-bottomed boat which was leaning against the front wall of the office. The tin walls of the hangar were still crackling but now it was because the tin was cooling down from the day’s heat.
They had not been in their places more than ten minutes, having hurriedly hidden the two cars in adjacent hangars, when a truck approached along the caliche road that led from the highway three miles away. From the sound of its revving engine, the driver was in a hurry, the sound growing louder until the truck roared up to the closed doors of the hangar and stopped. While the engine idled, a door opened, and someone quickly approached the hangar doors and started fiddling with the latch. Then suddenly the doors slid apart and a man stood between the headlights of a panel truck, its high beams illuminating the glaze of dirt on the office window. Graver and the others pulled back in the shadows.
For a moment Graver thought the man was going to search the hangar, but then he turned, got back into the truck and drove it into the hangar and cut the lights and the engine. Again the man got out of the truck and went back to the hangar doors and pulled them closed, or nearly closed, leaving a space of about a foot between them. He stood in the opening looking out and nervously took out a cigarette and lit it, blowing the smoke out the opening into the darkness.
Then, immediately, there was the distant sound of an airplane. The driver heard it too and threw down his cigarette, shoved the doors a little farther apart and stepped out The sound of the plane grew louder as it approached until it changed tone slightly and suddenly burst low over the hangar and continued out over the Gulf.
The man hurried back inside the hangar, went to an electrical box installed on the wall to the right of the doors, and threw a switch. Through the larger separation of the doors, Graver could make out a string of weak lights spaced far apart along either side of the runway. It appeared to be a makeshift lighting system. The landing strip itself was very obviously only a daytime landing field. The man returned to the door, stepped outside, and looked either way.
Almost immediately the sound of the plane returned, but this time it was coming from the direction of the Gulf. Graver listened to it, imagining the aircraft coming in low over the water and leveling off. He heard it trimming its speed, the tone of the engine deepening, and then it cut way down, and the plane was on the tarmac. Graver saw the lights flick past the crack in the door as the plane wheezed to taxiing speed, revved slightly as it turned, and headed toward the hangar.
As the sound of the taxiing engine approached, the driver of the van began pushing aside the two hangar doors until they were wide open, and the plane taxied up to the opening until its nose was almost inside the hangar. Then the pilot cut the engine, and the prop feathered to a standstill.
The driver slapped open the latches on the back doors of the van, and flung them open. At the same time the door to the airplane, which was situated almost midway in the fuselage and contained the second window back from the cockpit, opened from its middle, the top half hinged at the top swinging up and out of the way while the bottom half folded down to make steps.
Graver watched with one eye peering through the dirty window as a large man wearing a sport coat without a tie and carrying an Uzi equipped with a silencer was the first to disembark.
“Everything okay here?” he asked, standing at the bottom of the steps and looking at the back of the truck where an interior light was throwing a splash of illumination on the concrete floor of the darkened hangar.
“I’m ready to load up,” the driver said from inside the back of the truck, but not exactly responding to the guard’s question.
The guard nodded unenthusiastically, and looked around as the pilot-Wade Pace, Graver reminded himself- came down the steps followed by a man who must have been the copilot, followed by a man in a business suit who was unsteady and unsure about coming down the narrow steps of the plane.
Pace came up to the back of the truck and looked in.
“I’ve got eight boxes,” he said.
“Okay, fine. Bring ’em out, and I’ll stack ’em in the back here.”
Pace looked at the guard who was standing near the door of the plane now. The guard looked back at him.
“Go ahead,” the guard said, jerking his head toward the steps of the plane.
“We could use a little help,” Pace said.
The guard gave a jerk of his head that said tough luck and checked the silencer on the Uzi as if to make sure it was secure.
Pace hesitated, still looking at the guard, then turned and started to the steps of the plane.
“I want to call Kalatis about this,” the client said, standing awkwardly near the hangar door. He was visibly jittery, one hand on his hip, the other one wiping his face. “This sort of thing’s never happened before. This is a hell of a long way from Mexico.”
“We can’t risk radio contact from here,” the guard said. “Security is Mr. Kalatis’s special expertise. He knows what he’s doing.”
The client clearly knew he was in no position to demand anything. If his money was being stolen right now, there was nothing he could do about it, and he would be lucky not to be shot. If it wasn’t being stolen, if this was a legitimate security maneuver, then he ought to keep his mouth shut and not alienate the people who were trying to protect his money.
Pace swore and climbed into the plane. In a moment he began handing out banker’s boxes to the copilot The client watched them. It apparently didn’t occur to him that he might help, or if it did he had decided that it wasn’t his job either. No one said anything else until Pace handed down the last box to the copilot who lugged it to the back of the van and plopped it down on the carpeted floor at the rear door.
“That’s it.” Pace said, coming down the steps. “We’re outta here.”
“You remember what to do?” the guard asked.
“I think I can manage,” Pace said, pissed at the guard’s surly haughtiness.
“You’ve got the coordinates… fifteen miles out, and then you can do whatever the hell you want.”
“Let’s go,” Pace said to his copilot, and the two of them slowly pushed the plane back away from the hangar doorway into the darkness at the edge of the tarmac.
In the dim light coming from the back of the van, Graver could barely make them out climbing back into the plane and pulling the steps up behind them. In a minute the plane engine kicked alive, and Pace revved it to a whine, held it a minute and then maneuvered his flaps to turn the plane toward the tarmac where it taxied toward the end of the runway. He squared for the takeoff, revved his engine, and then the plane was barreling down the runway and lifting off over the water toward the Gulf the way it had come in.
The guard, the van driver, and the client stood just at the edge of the splash of light and watched the plane’s lights disappear into the stars, and then the guard turned, lifted his Uzi, and shot the other two men.
The two muted bursts were startling, the rapid thupping sounds incongruously matched to their effect, which was to cause blood to spray from the two men’s backs while simultaneously knocking them cleanly off their feet.
Graver felt Murray and Last flinch on either side of him, and as it happened his mind rapidly registered a decision to do nothing: It would do no good to shoot the guard now. They could not prevent the two deaths they had just witnessed. If they could have anticipated that and prevented it then shooting him would have been justified. But now, the guard was more use to them alive. Graver was grateful for Remberto’s training. Another man might have shot the guard instantly.
