Chapter 11

As Helen approached Dennis and his two guards, she tripped over her own feet and fell against her partner, which gave her the chance to reach into his jacket pocket and grab Peno’s gun.

One of the “soldiers” pulled her away from Dennis and she thrust the gun directly into the man’s side. By rights, she ought to pull the trigger, then turn immediately and kill the other man. But the vision of a bullet tearing through this guy’s wonderfully miraculous arteries and veins, muscle bundles and connective tissue, lymph nodes and bone was repellent to her. God or something had created all that stuff too perfectly to disturb the harmony of its functioning.

She jabbed the pistol into his ribs, successfully conveying the idea that he’d better lower his weapon or else. He threw his gun down. The other Zapatista—if that’s what they were—looked confused at his companion’s action. Before the second guard could bring his weapon up to assert his domination over the prisoners, Helen whipped Peno’s gun into the man’s face. She hoped that Dennis would do something to help, but she wasn’t certain that he had the training to maximize the situation.

Her friend wasn’t entirely without resources, however. He stooped down and took the first guy’s AK-47, bringing it up and pointing it at, well everyone—Helen included. Feeling a little nervous at having the military automatic aimed in her direction, Helen picked up the second soldier’s gun and moved quickly beside Dennis—out of range.

“Into the plane,” she ordered Dennis, backing up toward the Learjet.

“That’s not our airplane,” protested Dennis. “We don’t know if it’s fit to fly.”

“It’s fine,” she barked. “It’s fine. Get in.”

They made their way up the steps backward, still holding their guns on the two fearful revolutionaries. “I don’t know,” Dennis kept repeating. “I don’t know.”

She battened down the door and scrambled into the cockpit. She could hear Dennis calling to her from the cabin. “It’s night. They don’t have any lights on the runway. How can you fly in the dark?”

For once, he had a good point. The sky was pitch black out there and with no lights at all Helen would be without any depth perception. She sat without moving, considering their options. Had runway lights even been installed, or did Peno and his rebels rely solely on day flying? She would have to go outside again and find out. Just when things were going so well, too. She heard shouts on the tarmac. No doubt the guards they’d escaped from were alerting their comrades.

She was about to stand and pick up the weapon again, when, suddenly, entirely unexpectedly, the spotlights went on all along the path to freedom. A feeling of relief and gratitude swept over her. Even though the illumination of the runway was followed by gunfire, this was absolutely the most welcome of events. The soldiers didn’t realize how they had helped her. They thought they would be able to recapture Dennis and Helen—or eliminate them—by turning on the lights but what they had done was enable their flight to safety.

Helen started the engines and began to roll down the runway. Not that she wasn’t nervous since she didn’t actually know what, if anything, had been done to the plane. But it was a far, far better thing to get out of there post haste than to wait around and be tortured and mutilated. Or whatever Peno would have in mind once he got out of those handcuffs.

She accelerated and plunged forward, opening the throttles to achieve sufficient speed for a righteous lift-off. The moment gave her a rush of pleasure, despite what they had gone through and the trouble they might be in. Her bladder was empty, and she was taking off skyward—that was all that counted. “Yes!” she shouted. “Yes! Thank you!” She pointed the plane northeast and plotted a flight path that would take them back to Miami International.

The Learjet was a nice little plane, a darling, but deserting the Cessna in Mexico was a wrenching disappointment. The loss was almost equal to the death of a loved one. And the Learjet, however adorable, wasn’t even remotely hers. Helen wouldn’t be able to fly it again after they landed.

She was lucky to be alive, she supposed, but she hated what lay ahead, back in the old U.S. of A. Someone—or many someones—was/were going to want to interrogate her about their unauthorized invasion of a foreign power. Not to mention how mad Viscotti was going to be because she had left the plane behind.

And poor Dennis. She hoped the FAA wasn’t going to find out what he had been up to during his sick leave.

The radar scope showed some heavy cloud cover up ahead and she decided to skirt the possible storm. Heck, she wasn’t on any particular flight path anyway—although that wasn’t exactly reassuring, either. A very good reason existed for everyone to announce where in the sky there were. All the better to avoid you, my dear. She flew on and on, winging it through about an hour’s worth of turbulence alongside the nearby evil weather. To add to her troubles, the Lear performed a little sluggishly, she thought, and was sucking up more petroleum than an oil rig in the Kuwaiti desert.

Referring to the global positioning system, she found herself south of where she wanted to be, but still aiming in the general direction of Florida. Maybe she should have headed for California, a relatively short hop from where they had been, but she didn’t want to be stuck out on the West Coast without transportation.

She was over the ocean when she began to wonder if she would have enough fuel to make it to Miami, what with having to change her path because of the storm and the extra fuel the jet seemed to be swilling. She did some basic calculations. Whether the fuel would last to Miami was questionable at the most optimistic.

“How you doing back there?” she yelled back to Dennis. He didn’t answer. Probably busy breathing, she guessed. Then she heard a noise in the little toilet. It had been a long trip, after all.

Dennis came forward. He was doing good if he could walk around in the plane, she thought. Then he lay down on the cockpit floor. “Don’t you ever get scared up here?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. That wasn’t entirely true. She became fearful in the midst of lightning or when her plane was about to run out of fuel—such as right now. “I remember when I was a kid, I asked my dad how airplanes could fly. He told me that God holds them up on a string of prayer.” She smiled down at Dennis, whose eyes were closed.

“He sounds like a religious man,” Dennis commented.

“Not really. He’s a minister. That was probably a knee-jerk professional reaction. But what he said did give me the sense that flying was special. I guess I carried that idea with me as I grew older. I always wanted to be a pilot. It didn’t occur to me to join the Air Force until college. Who knew that women could become military pilots?”

If she was going to land in Miami, she would have to cross the storm path at some point, she realized from looking at the radar. The added turbulence would drag her around more than she had the tolerance for—fuel-wise. Although a destination further than Miami as the crow flies, she decided her best bet was to land in Cuba. Well, not in Cuba, of course, but at the U.S. base on that same island—Guantanamo Naval Base—United States soil.

“Could you go back in the cabin?” she asked Dennis. “You’re cramping my style.” She didn’t want him to hear her Mayday call to Guantanamo.

When her friend was out of earshot, she got on the radio, and transmitted a message to her military brethren. She was nearly out of gas, and she needed to land. She gave her name, rank, and serial number, forgetting for the moment that the rank and serial number weren’t exactly up to date. A pleasant give and take with the naval air controller then ensued.

They fired up the runway for her and she could see an emergency vehicle standing at the tarmac’s edge, causing her to snort. She had told them that she was almost out of aviation juice, that was all, not that she wasn’t competent to place the plane down as smooth as butter.

The controller brought her through a series of turns and she slid into runway three as if, indeed, God had pulled her there on a miraculous thread of powerful blessings. The Learjet stopped on a dime. No burnt rubber on this one.

She came out into the cabin where Dennis now felt free to look out the windows. “Is this Miami?” he asked, slightly puzzled.

“I guess not,” she told him. “We’re at our Naval base in Cuba, ninety miles or so south of the mainland.”

A seaman drove them from the tarmac onto the base proper. Helen didn’t like the way he looked at her and when he addressed her in a rather wiseass fashion, she announced her rank. “You can call me ‘ma’am,’” she added. He blenched.

They got out at the post commander’s office, where a young ensign ushered Dennis and Helen in the door. Two officers awaited inside. The colonel at once began to question Dennis, asking him how he had gotten off course, and how in the world he had run out of fuel. Dennis looked confused. “Why are you asking me all this?” he blurted out at last. “I wasn’t flying the plane.”

The officers’ heads swiveled to take in Helen whose presence they had not previously noted. She was suddenly aware that the sleeve on her blouse was torn, her face was swollen where Peno had punched her, and she probably otherwise looked a little ill-kempt.

She reminded herself that she wasn’t under their command and that these men had no right to scold her whatsoever. “This is government business,” she cautioned the base commander brazenly. “We aren’t authorized to discuss anything with you at this time. We need to talk to Special Agent John Garcia in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”

Then she smiled. “We actually haven’t had anything to eat all day,” she added sweetly. but forgoing the batting of her eyelashes. “As for me, I’d also love to get washed up.”

She was given her own room in the officers’ quarters, and she presumed that Dennis had been given his own room as well.

Helen always found something special about a military installation. She liked it. Everything was neat and clean, and people were respectful to the point of saluting when the circumstances were right.

She washed her face and hands and put on a freshly starched and ironed Navy shirt. The Navy’s generous welcome made the Department of Defense seem very much like a caring parent, and she wanted to sink into its protective arms. But not Navy arms. That was the one discordant note for her. She was Air Force, and although she had left the fold years before, she could always find some solace in an Air Force ambiance. Navy was different. Navy was “them” and not “us.”

She stepped into the corridor in order to make her way back to the colonel’s quarters for a late dinner. Three of four males lounged in various states of undress, a handsome sight. She tried to suppress a smile as they looked up at her in astonishment. Surely they had women on the base! Surely some of the females were officers! “I’m an aide to Secretary Barrett,” she told one of the men who stared at her. She wondered if he knew that Barbara Barrett was secretary of the Air Force.

Helen stopped at a pay phone and dialed in her calling card sequence and Eric’s phone number. He wasn’t in, but she left a message. “Hi, honey, guess where I am? I’m in a communist country, but I’m on an American Naval base. I’m within waving distance of the land of Bill Gates and Frank Purdue. I miss you and stuff.” Helen hung up. Eric might be reconsidering his desire to take that trip to the altar right about now, after the bad things that she had done recently—the car and getting Katherine in trouble and all. She felt sad.

She found her way to the post commander’s quarters where the table was set for a romantic little dinner for four. She held back a salute in greeting Colonel Baker. She was out of the military, and he was in the wrong service anyway, poor man.

The colonel cleared his throat. “So you were the pilot of that little jet,” he said.

“Oh yes, Colonel. I’ve flown about everything there is to fly except the fighter bombers. We don’t consider bombing the enemy ladylike, do we? I’m also a pretty good helicopter pilot and I’ve done a lot of that. That’s the hardest type of flying there is, in my opinion, aside from being a combat pilot, or maybe a tailhook flyer.” She saw a flicker in the colonel’s eyes. He no doubt wondered what she meant by her reference to “Tailhook,” whether she was referring to the old sex abuse scandals that had sullied the Navy’s reputation. “I mean landing on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, of course,” she clarified.

He cleared his throat again, “Yes, a very precise maneuver,” he agreed. “You’re quite an impressive young woman,” he added. She smiled enigmatically.

Captain Backster entered in a state of excitement and glared at Helen with a wild look of accusation. “We’ve found a cache of military weaponry on Miss Robbins’ plane,” he told the colonel, “a hundred or so AK-47s, a hundred or so M16s, a number of M60 machine guns, some Soviet-style RPK rocket launchers, some British LAW-80 rockets, a grenade launcher, five 57-millimeter recoilless rifles…” He stopped.

“One likes to travel light, yet provide the necessities,” Helen murmured. She grinned. Maybe losing the Cessna had been worth it, in a way. To have flown off with so many of Peno’s weapons of destruction was quite a coup, really. Her airship had felt a little weighted down, come to think of it. “Viva la revolución,” she added wickedly. The men looked at her. She shrugged. “We’ve been helping out the ATF,” she assured them.

Dennis was shown in by an ensign and looked a little brushed up at last.

“I hope you haven’t gone to any particular trouble over dinner, Colonel,” Helen went on.

“I suppose they fly fresh vegetables in to you here almost daily,” Dennis piped up hopefully.

Oh yes, her friend Dennis. She could explain away the rifles and the rocket launchers easily enough, but how in the world could she give a rationale for having a vegetarian traveling companion?

“Mr. Malloy is a respected reporter from the Charlotte Observer,” she told the colonel without hesitation. “He loves to fly. He’s agreed to strict secrecy on this mission, as well. He won’t write a word for 25 years.” Helen looked Dennis straight in the eye. She was trying to save his job at the FAA, that was all. Dinner was chicken and biscuits—and baked potatoes, luckily for Helen’s friend.

Garcia and Carlis must have arrived sometime during the night because there they were bleary-eyed and rather too disheveled for a military establishment at the morning mess. Even Dennis looked quite a bit crisper than the ATF team did. As for the colonel, he appeared to be in a state of disorientation, but managed to belt out orders as if he had carefully studied Jack Nicholson’s performance in A Few Good Men.

Dennis ate his way around the bacon, she noticed, although he did gulp down the scrambled eggs. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the white toast, however. The splat of grits that came with the meal, he seemed to find acceptable. Helen was used to grits herself. They had eaten them at Langley.

She gazed at Garcia. He was tired, she noted, but he still exuded more animal magnetism than a lion on the plains, if that was an accurate analogy. “Were you ever in the military, John?” she asked him.

Carlis answered instead. “I was in the Marine Corps.” He grinned. He still appeared menacing, Helen thought.

“I went to law school,” Garcia said, shoving egg bits across the plate with his fork. “At Georgetown.”

“I went to law school at Georgetown,” Dennis contributed, surprised either by his own attendance in the university’s hallowed halls, or by Garcia’s. “That was before your time, of course,” he added. “Long before, I suppose.” He gazed at his plate as if trying to read the past.

“What do you do now, Mr. Malloy?” Garcia asked. “You’re a newspaper reporter?”

“Oh, Christ,” said Dennis. He looked around. Most of the Naval personnel had finished breakfast and were off to their daily duties. A few men were tidying the mess hall. “I’m an FAA inspector. I’m the investigator assigned to this case.”

“All right,” said Helen. “Dennis and I single-handedly tracked down the skyjacker who’s been stealing all the private jets and killing their owners—and returned one of the planes and a bunch of serious weapons to U.S. territory. But go ahead, find something to blame us for. Be angry at us. Get both of us fired from our jobs. That’s fine. If we can face an armed platoon of Mexican Zapatistas, I guess we can handle the ire of the ATF.”

“Good grief,” exclaimed Garcia. “I had no idea we were so terrifying. Now, if you all are done with your fine military meal, we have the colonel’s office for our meeting.”

“I think Dennis and I have pretty much brought this whole affair to a successful conclusion,” Helen announced to the assembled group. “We returned with the proof of Peno’s guilt. I’m sure the Mexican government will be as pleased as we are to stop this air pirate in his tracks. All you have to do now is move to have Peno extradited and put him on trial.” Sure, that was all. No problem. Even her own partner Dennis stared at her as if she were a little battier than usual.

“True, you messed things up with great flare,” Garcia commented genially. “You fouled up an ATF undercover operation. You also entered Mexico illegally, violating their air space in the process—but, hey, we have a trade treaty with them, so they aren’t going to get too piqued at this juncture. Let’s see, you lost the airplane you yourself were flying and nearly got yourselves both killed…”

Garcia paused, but he smiled at her kindly, making Helen feel as if she were in the presence of royalty, he beamed with such beneficence. He was so perfect, so attractive, she was forced to react mulishly. “Any other crimes, your majesty?” she dared to inquire. Her black eyes flashed at him. She hoped he wasn’t taking her behavior as flirtatious. She checked to be sure the top button of her shirt was buttoned; the fastening had seemed a little insecure.

“I wouldn’t call it a crime exactly, and it isn’t entirely your fault, either…” Garcia looked at Carlis, who was engrossed in studying his nails. “But you missed the main point about Peno and his mission in the United States.”

“Oh,” Helen snapped. “So the main point isn’t that private pilots have been getting hijacked and murdered. I obviously have a twisted view of the matter.”

Garcia laughed without restraint. “Yes, that’s important, but merely a skirmish in Peno’s war. I’m telling you now because we can’t have you involved in this case any longer.” He stared at Dennis. “Either one of you. The FAA has agreed to steer clear and we’re coordinating efforts with one or two other agencies, which shall remain nameless.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said Helen. “This is so childish.” She knocked her fingernails nervously against the wood frame of her chair.

“Peno has other agendas in the United States. For one thing, he has minor operations trying to disrupt the civil aviation system. But that’s only a distraction, we believe, from a more serious matter. We think he has managed to steal a quantity of weapons-grade plutonium from Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State.”

“He’d need hundreds of pounds for a bomb,” Helen contradicted dismissively.

“Yes, for an atomic bomb,” agreed Garcia, radiating his magnetism in her direction. “But if the fuel was merely used as a trigger for a hydrogen bomb blast, they wouldn’t need more than a pound or two per bomb. ATF came into this when we thought he was simply running weapons. Then we found out about the atomic fuel.”

“One point four metric tons of plutonium are missing from Hanford,” Dennis declared. They all looked at him. “Well, I read it in The Washington Post.”

“Nuclear weapons,” Helen mused aloud. “Yes, for one thing, Peno’s evil enough. He’d like that actually. Dropping a nuclear bomb on people would certainly be his idea of a barrel of laughs.”

She and Dennis caught a ride back to D.C. with the ATF agents on a Navy jet. Dennis covered up his nervousness as best he could since others were in the plane, but Helen whispered in his ear, “We’re on God’s string, you and I.” He smiled palely.

They stopped at Norfolk to let out some Navy guys, and Helen was tempted to get off, cross over to Langley and catch a ride in an Air Force jet back up to New York. Then she remembered. She had to face the music with Henry. She had lost his plane.

“This is the end of the line for me,” said the pilot, coming back into the cabin. “A helicopter will take you folks into downtown Washington.”

Helen looked at Dennis. He definitely wasn’t buying into this one. “Norfolk is good,” he said. “I think I’ll stop over for a couple of days. I have lots of vacation time coming to me.”

On the tarmac, Helen pulled Dennis aside and got his home phone number and address and gave him hers, all the world like fellow tourists who had seen several wonders and were now promising to stay in touch. “How are you going to get home?” she asked him as she watched Garcia and Carlis heading for the waiting whirly bird.

“I’ll take a bus to Richmond and then the train to D.C.,” he admitted.

“Some time I’ll take you for a ride in a helicopter,” she promised. “You’ll like it if I’m the pilot. Don’t worry,” she assured him as she turned to go. “This investigation isn’t over yet. We’ll catch that bastard Peno next time. I’m going to get my Cessna back.”

Dennis looked at her in horror and reached out to pull her toward him. “No,” he shouted in her ear. “Stop. Don’t do another damn thing about Peno. Give it up. Life isn’t so terrible. You’re young. Try to live a few more years.”

She backed away from him and smiled. She waved, then turn and trotted toward the big mechanical bird whose blades had started to rotate briskly in preparation for an imminent takeoff.