“You come get me.”
“I will.”
He stood and went out the door. A few seconds later he heard Sepie call to him from down the hall. “Hey!”
Tuck turned.
“How come you don’t try to sex me?”
“I will.”
“Okay,” she said, and she went back into the room.
Jake was waiting for him at the Island Adventures hangar. A Hughes 500 helicopter with its doors removed sat on a pad by the hangar. “I rented it for an hour. I fuck it up and we owe Mary Jean five grand for the deposit.”
Tuck looked at the helicopter sitting on the pad like a huge black dragonfly and he began to get a very bad feeling. “You don’t want me to do what I think you want me to do, do you?”
“I’ll put the skid right over the hatch. You just step out of one aircraft onto another. No problem. It can’t be half as bad as what I had to do to get the hatch left open.”
Tuck began to protest, but Jake was already walking to the helicopter. Tuck climbed into the helicopter and slipped on the headset. Jake threw the switches and the turbine began to whine. In a few seconds the blades slowly began to rotate.
Tuck keyed the intercom mike on his headset so Jake could hear him over the blades. “You’ll never get past the tower.”
“I’ve done it before,” Jake said. “I had to repo a Jet Ranger for a guy once.”
“They’ll never clear you.”
“There’s no traffic. Besides, you think they’re going to clear you? It’s Captain Midnight’s rock ‘n’ roll express from here on out, big guy.”
Jake pulled the collective lever by the side of his seat and the helicopter lifted into the air. Within seconds, Tuck heard the tower jabbering over the radio, warning the Hughes 500 to wait for clearance. Jake brought the helicopter up just high enough to clear the top of the hangar and flew in a low wide circle around the airport, then began his own jabber.
“Honolulu Tower, this is Helicopter One, approaching from the west on Runway Two. I have a problem with my tail rotor. Requesting emergency landing.”
The tower came back: “Helicopter One, didn’t you just take off without clearance?”
“Negative, Tower. I’m in from Maui. Request emergency clearance.”
Of course, Tuck thought. Jake flew the circle below the radar and without the running lights. They have no idea whether this is the same helicopter that just took off.
Jake sent the helicopter into a horizontal spin that moved it closer to the planes by the hangars with every rotation, just as it moved Tuck closer to throwing up. Jake stopped the spin for a second and nodded toward a United 747. “That’s your baby. Get out of your harness and get ready. They won’t know you’re there. Get inside and wait two hours before you start your taxi. I don’t want them to connect the helicopter with the jet. By the way, how’re you going to get your natives on board?”
“They’ve got ladders,” Tuck said. “I hope.” Tuck hung his headset behind the seat and unsnapped his harness just as Jake resumed his spin. Tuck grabbed on to the seat to keep from being thrown out the open door. What looked like an out-of-control aircraft was, in fact, a pretty elementary move called a pedal turn. Tuck found no comfort in that knowledge as he watched the tarmac spin below.
Jake pulled the helicopter up just in time to miss the tail of the 747, then leveled it off and crept forward along the length of the huge aircraft. The tail would obscure the view from the tower. “You ready?” he shouted.
Tuck shook his head violently. He could see the line of the hatch he was supposed to go through. He stepped out on the skid. Jake brought the helicopter down and the skid touched the top of the jet. “Now!”
Tuck stepped off onto the plane and ducked instinctively below the blades. He looked back at Jake, shrugged, and shouted, “That was easy.”
“I told you,” Jake shouted. He pulled the helicopter into the sky and started his spin toward the Island Adventures pad.
Tuck got on his knees, dug his fingers into the seal around the hatch, and pulled it open. He jumped into the dark plane, sealed the hatch behind him, then sat in the pilot’s seat and began to study the controls. He clicked on the nav computer and punched in the longitude and latitude for Alualu, which he knew by heart, then pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and put in the coordinates for his second destination. He put on a headset and turned on the radios. The frequency was already set for the Honolulu tower. Jake was receiving the official FAA ass-chewing of the century, but there wasn’t a word about anyone dropping to the top of a United jet. He had just taken off the headset to settle down for the wait when he heard a scratching sound outside the escape hatch. He opened it and Roberto plopped inside.
63
No Frills
The Sky Priestess was drunk. She and the Sorcerer had made two million dollars in the last ten days and she couldn’t even buy a pair of shoes. The new pilot, Nomura, was a heavily tattooed, taciturn prick who spoke marginal English and looked at her like he’d rape her in a second, not for the pleasure of the violence, but to put her in her place. Since his arrival, even the ninjas had started to get cocky, joking in Japanese and laughing raucously when her back was turned. Even the Shark People seemed to be losing their fear of her. The last time she had appeared to them the children were left in the village. So the Sky Priestess was watching television in a torn T-shirt and some sweatpants and she was drunk.
The intercom beeped and she let it. If it hadn’t run on batteries, she would have unplugged it. Instead, she threw it through the french doors, where it beeped the beach for two more minutes, then stopped. The next time she saw it Sebastian was standing in the door holding it like a prosecutor exhibiting a murder weapon to the jury.
“I suppose you think this is funny.”
“Not particularly. Now if it had hit you in the head, that would be funny.”
“We have an order, Beth. A Kidney.”
“Oh, good. I’m in great shape to assist a surgery. Let’s do both kidneys. Give the buyer a bonus. What do you say?” She sloshed her tumbler of vodka.
Sebastian picked up the empty Absolut bottle from the end table. “This isn’t going to work, Beth. You can’t appear as the Sky Priestess like that.” He seemed more afraid than angry.
“You are absolutely correct, ’Bastian. The goddess has taken the night off.”
Sebastian paced back and forth in front of her, rubbing his chin. “We could stall. We could put you on some oxygen and amphetamines and you could be ready in an hour.”
She laughed. “And ruin this buzz? I don’t think so. Tell them to find another source for this one.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I can do that. Nomura’s been on the phone with them. He told them we could deliver in six hours.”
She hissed. “Nomura’s a fucking grunt. He does what we say. This is our operation.”
“I’m not so sure, Beth. I really don’t want to tell him no. Please take a shower and make some coffee. I’ll be back in a minute with an oxygen cylinder.”
“No, ’Bastian,” she whined. “I don’t want to spend six hours in a plane with that asshole.”
“You won’t have to, Beth. They’ve requested that we send him alone this time.”
She sat up. “Alone? Who’s going to watch him?” Suddenly she felt very sober.
“No one needs to watch him, Beth. He works for them, remember? You were right. We shouldn’t have gotten a pilot from them.”
An hour and forty minutes after he dropped through the hatch, Tuck started the procedure to power up the 747. He’d never actually flown anything this big—or anything nearly this big—but he had done twenty hours in a simulator in Dallas and only crashed twice. All planes fly the same, he told himself and he started the first engine. Once it had spooled up, he had the power to start the other three. He put on the headset and looked out the side window to make sure he had room to turn the plane and taxi it to the runway. As soon as it started moving, the tower began to chatter, trying first to get him to identify himself, then to stop. Roberto, who was hanging from the straps on the flight officer’s seat beside Tuck, barked twice and let loose a high-pitched squeal.