Jay started to protest, but Sherry Lincoln was already saying hello. He took down the names and numbers she gave him and asked her to monitor the line while he pulled out the cellular phone, hoping the battery was fully charged. There would be at least a day of work to do in the next fifteen minutes.
EIGHT
“What do you want to do, Craig? It’s decision time,” Alastair asked, his finger poised over the transmit button.
“Hold. We hold. Tell them we need some time to sort out a problem. Don’t tell them what.”
Alastair punched the button and made the requisite call as Craig lifted the PA microphone and blamed the arrival delay on Italian air traffic control.
The mixed nationalities of the 118 passengers aboard Flight 42 were typical of the melting pot that Europe was becoming in the first years of the twenty-first century. Scattered through the cabin were Turks, Italians, Greeks, British, Germans, Swiss, Dutch, Spaniards, French, and a single Dane, all in the company of forty-four Americans on a guided tour.
With the exception of two British passengers, only the Americans were aware that a former U.S. President was on board, a fact that had spread excitement through the group on the ground in Istanbul when John Harris was ushered into the otherwise empty first-class cabin by the EuroAir station manager.
Several members of the tour had come forward in flight to invade the first-class section and say hello, each of them graciously received by the President, who each time had waved down Jillian’s attempts to chase them back to coach.
As the President finished talking to Jay Reinhart and handed the phone to Sherry Lincoln, the tour director herself came forward and knelt by his seat.
“Mr. President?”
“Yes?” he replied, forcing a warm smile to his face and offering his hand to the well-dressed woman, who appeared to be in her sixties.
“It’s an honor to be aboard your plane, sir!” she gushed. “It feels like Air Force One.”
He laughed easily. “Well, hardly that. Air Force One has a lot more room. I didn’t get your name?”
“Annie Jane Ford, sir, from Denver. I’m the tour director for the group back there. All Americans.”
He held her hand and squeezed slightly. “Annie, please don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on a bit of a scheduling problem at the moment, and I need you to excuse me so I can go talk to the captain.”
“Oh! Sure! I’m sorry!” She got to her feet and stood aside as he thanked her and moved forward. Jillian had seen him coming and opened the cockpit door.
John Harris moved inside the small alcove and put his left hand on the captain’s shoulder as he nodded to Alastair Chadwick.
“Captain?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Where are we?”
“Descending through twelve thousand, Mr. President, and approaching a holding fix south of Rome. You can see the city up there about thirty miles.” Craig Dayton pointed in the right direction and Harris followed his finger as Craig let a few seconds of silence elapse. “Do you have any word from Washington?”
“Captain, I have a very large favor to ask you,” Harris began. “I know you already raised the issue, but I didn’t know I was going to get the advice I just received.” He explained his counsel’s recommendation of Sigonella. “Are you familiar with the base?” Harris asked.
“Yes, sir,” Craig replied.
“And… you have enough fuel?”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Craig answered, aware that Alastair had tensed in the right seat.
The President turned to the copilot. “Alastair Chadwick, isn’t it?”
Alastair turned, surprised his name had been remembered. “Yes, it is.”
“You’re from the U.K., correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“And while Captain Dayton here, as a U.S. Air Force officer, feels an obligation to help an ex-president, you obviously have no such allegiance, and your job is very much at stake. Is that a correct analysis?”
“I’m very much afraid that it is, Mr. President,” Alastair replied cautiously. “I’m sorry to be thinking of myself.”
“Nonsense. That’s responsible. However, I am in a jam here, and I would very much appreciate any help you could provide in getting me to Sigonella instead of Rome. I can tell you that the legal process waiting ahead is being misused, and while I’m rather prejudiced on the subject, I think you’d be doing international justice a substantial service by preventing what Peru is attempting. Other than that, I have no right to pressure you.”
“I… understand,” Alastair replied, turning back to the forward panel.
“Regardless of what you decide you can do, I want you to know I deeply appreciate the help you’ve already given me so selflessly. Thank you!” Harris patted Alastair’s shoulder, saluted Craig, and left the cockpit, securing the door behind him.
“Entering holding,” Craig announced, triggering a radio call from Alastair to Rome Approach Control.
They made the first outbound turn in silence, the racetrack-shaped pathway showing on the horizontal situation indicator screen in front of them as generated by the flight management computers. They were cleared to fly south on a heading of 170 degrees for a minute and a half before reversing course and flying a heading of 350 degrees back to an artificial point in space ten thousand feet above the Italian countryside, then were to repeat the outbound and inbound legs until cleared to leave and make their approach.
A call chime rang softly through the cockpit and Craig toggled the interphone to answer.
“Captain? This is Ursula in the back. We have two men back here who will miss their connections to New York if we hold very long. They insisted I call the cockpit.”
“Tell them we’re doing the best we can.”
“What does that mean, exactly? Jillian has briefed us why you’re holding, but these men are quite upset.”
“It means we’ll know in a few minutes when we’re going to land, Ursula. Don’t tell them anything more.”
“They’re not the only ones grumbling, but I’ll tell them. Elle is also being questioned.”
He disconnected and studied the forward panel as they flew in silence for several minutes. Alastair’s fingers were drumming an insistent, nervous tattoo on the control yoke, the muscles along the side of his jaw working overtime, his mind in furious thought.
“It’s bloody professional suicide,” Alastair said suddenly. “For both of us.”
“I know it.”
“We’re as good as sacked right now!”
“I am, at least. I still say I can get them to believe I made you go along with it.”
“Look,” Alastair continued, “I know I wouldn’t be doing anything but practicing law if you hadn’t sat in that bar in Abu Dhabi and bullied me an entire night about flying commercially someday. Of course, come to think of it, I would never have had to listen to you in the first place if you and your juvenile delinquent wingman hadn’t blown down my bleeding tent the week before with your F-15’s.”
“Yeah. That was fun. You RAF types were being too standoffish.”
“It was funny, I’ll grant you that. But, dammit Craig, now that I’ve got this job, I rather like it! I love flying more than the law. I’ve told you that ad nauseam. That’s why I took so long leaving the RAF, despite your harassing E-mails.”
“Alastair, seriously, what if I ordered you to get out of the cockpit and go sit down in the back?”
“Herr Wurtschmidt, our esteemed chief pilot, would still cashier me for not breaking down the cockpit door and clubbing you into compliance.”
“You’re probably right,” Craig said.
“But you are going to bloody well do this thing regardless, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know how I can do it without you, Alastair, and yet I don’t know how I could possibly land and turn him over to Peru, for God’s sake.”