“You know what I like about this, Ross?”
“Can’t imagine.”
“At the end, I mean the very end, I do believe Rodrigo truly knew which direction he was headed in.”
“Yeah.”
“You see that, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Vicky, she was standing on the church steps. The girl was already halfway to heaven when she died.”
“Yeah.”
“Well. I guess that’s all you can ask for.”
Stoke got up and stuck his hand out to help Ross get back on his feet.
“I guess it is,” Ross said.
Chapter Forty-Six
Suva Island
THE BIG DAIMLER ROLLED UP JUST OUTSIDE THE MASSIVE corrugated hangar and hissed to a creaky stop. The sleek little Gulf-stream jet that would very shortly whisk bin Wazir home to the Blue Mountains was parked just outside on the tarmac, engines warming.
As Tippu hauled his ancient Vuitton steamer trunk up the steps of the G-3, Snay and the doctor stood for a moment outside the cavernous hangar filled with blazing arc lights. Snay bin Wazir’s heart was beating wildly. He knew what to expect inside, and still he was ill-prepared for the sight of the freshly painted behemoth standing in the glare of endless banks of lights.
It was beyond perfection. An exact copy. Down to the last nut and bolt.
His chief pilot, Khalid, strode forward out of the mass of technicians huddled under the nose of Snay’s now- unrecognizable 747-400. Thick cables, connected to two ancient Cray supercomputers on rolling platforms, snaked out of the nose wheel bay. Snay, grinning like a ten-year-old, opened his arms and embraced Khalid, clapping him on the back.
“It’s magnificent! Absolutely flawless!”
“Thank you, indeed, sir,” Khalid said, in his crisp English accent. He took a step back. “It does rather look like the real thing, doesn’t it?” The handsome, middle-aged pilot, whom, along with his copilot, bin Wazir had lured away from British Airways years earlier by doubling their salaries, was dressed in a perfectly pressed black pilot’s uniform, another exact copy of the original, right down to the last gold button. The pilot removed his cap and saluted. At that moment, his first officer, Johnny Adare, approached and snapped to attention. Like his senior officer, he was wearing a crisp black uniform.
“Sir!” Adare said smartly to bin Wazir. “The aircraft is nearly fueled. We have almost completed the downloading of the pirated transponder codes and GPS coordinates. My lads on the ground at Singapore Changi International Airport were able to ‘borrow’ the original flight plan for an hour and replace it onboard the BA plane without notice. As you assured us, security at the hangar there was conveniently absent. All we will need now is our friend’s squawk number, which we can easily obtain from the radio. As soon as we have finished downloading and fueling, we can begin boarding. Sir.”
“How long?” bin Wazir asked Adare, looking at his watch. The incident at the dragon cage had cost him nearly an hour. In order to avoid any high-altitude surveillance cameras, and make its rendezvous over the Pacific, his plane had to be airborne an hour before dawn.
“Two hours, sir.”
“Make it one.”
“Done,” Adare said. “I’ll whip these wog bastards a little harder.” Bin Wazir smiled. Adare still had a bit of the rowdy IRA kneecapper about him. Adare paused. “One thing, sir, a bit curious to me if you don’t mind. Passengers are due to start loading in half an hour. We have not yet received the…cargo.”
“Last-minute change of plans,” bin Wazir said. “The good doctor here will explain it in some detail. A colleague of mine. His name is Dr. I.V. Soong. He’ll be joining you in the cockpit. Stick him in the jumpseat.”
“Very good, sir,” Khalid said, looking closely first at Soong and then at his employer. “No changes to the flight plan? The destination is unchanged?”
“Nothing to be concerned about, Khalid. The blessings of Allah be upon your epic journey. I wish you a good flight.”
“Very good, sir. We’ll get moving, then. Doctor Soong? If you’ll follow us?” The pilot and second officer turned on their heels and headed for the rolling stairway leading up to the opened cabin door just aft of nose. Adare looked back over his shoulder at this strange little figure struggling with the two big black Halliburton cases. He was making a series of unintelligible noises.
“Is there something else?” Adare asked the man.
“Yes,” Dr. Soong said. “There is. You must get someone to help me, please. A mechanic. I need to make some last-minute changes in the aircraft’s emergency oxygen system. Minor alterations. Good, good! Let’s go!”
The man lugging the big black suitcases followed the two pilots up the steps to the open door of the gleaming, freshly painted Boeing 747.
“I don’t like it,” Adare whispered to Khalid, stepping inside the plane. “Not a bit of it. No payload. Now, this little bleeder wants to screw around with our air. If that’s not Poison Ivy himself, I’m Lady Margaret Thatcher.”
“I don’t much like it either,” Khalid replied. “But it’s payday, isn’t it, Johnny boy? We just drive the bus. So who the bloody hell cares.”
When this was over, Khalid was going to use his million dollars to buy that little semidetached cottage in Burton-on-Water. Send his kids to a good public school, give his wife some pretty dresses and a little garden, finally read all of T. E. Lawrence, starting with Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Johnny was going to buy that corner pub in his old Belfast neighborhood, the one he’d had his eye on for so long. He already had the clever name. The Quilted Camel.
With 63,000 pounds of thrust per engine, the roaring jumbo jet sent volleys of thunder through the dark jungle, scattering such wildlife as perched, scurried, or slithered there, the deep rumble rolling right up the western slope of the smoldering volcano, waking up every bone-weary farmer’s wife an hour early.
Carrying vast quantities of extra fuel in her wings and tail section, and with four hundred passengers aboard, the heavily over-loaded airplane still managed to reach her takeoff speed of 180 miles per hour before she ran out of runway. She rotated, and lifted off into the predawn sky. The few early risers, farmers who stood beside their oxen at the edges of their fields to watch, shuddered at the sight. They could not have said why, but there is something unnatural and malevolent about a large airplane flying into a dark sky with no lights illuminated.
Something secret and threatening.
Lumbering down the runway in the pale light of the dying moon, a long row of darkened windows glinting from her fuselage, she looked like a ghost plane. No red flashes at the wingtips, not a single light from within, not a bulb, interior or exterior, was lit. Now, airborne, the stark black flying machine was a moving silhouette against the stars. Accelerating low out over the rooftops of the old Bambah Hotel, the pilot could now see what all the fuss was about on his radar screen. A rapidly approaching black wall; a storm front moving in from the South China Sea.
Normally, the pilot would just vector around it, or climb quickly above it. Not today. Not now. He was staying right here, right down on the deck.
Crests of the wind-whipped waves below, some as high as a three-story building, lapped at the airplane’s broad belly and spattered the undersides of her fuel-laden wings. A typhoon had been building in the South China Sea and this was the leading edge. The four Pratt & Whitney engines howled ahead into the teeth of the headwind.
“Pull up! Pull up!” Dr. Soong said, after a long minute in which the aircraft did not appear to him to be climbing. “What is the matter? Are we going down?”
