I let him have another long look at the gun and told him a second time what I expected of him. He opened his mouth to say something, and a strange expression flashed briefly over his face, and then he nodded. “Sí, Señor,” he said. “Irlandia. Sí.”
A hand fastened on my arm. “I couldn’t make out all of that,” said our Eddie Rickenbacker, “but I saw the look on his face. The bloody greaseball’s going to shop us.”
I translated quickly, and he nodded. “He won’t fly to Ireland. He’ll head out over the water and put us on course for Havana and we won’t even know the difference. We’ll be in some Spic airport before the bleeding sun comes up.”
“We can watch him-”
“There’s a hundred ways he could put it to us. And I wouldn’t be quick to believe he could find Ireland if he tried. Tell him to take off his helmet.”
I translated the command. The pilot, puzzled, removed his crash helmet and set it upon his knee. He asked if I wanted him to remove the goggles as well, and I passed the question on.
“Just the helmet will do,” said the Flying Tiger. And he hefted his Magnum and dented the pilot’s skull with it. “That’s the ticket,” he said, hauling the little man out of his seat. “Direct methods are best, Mr. Tanner. Now I’ll fly the effing plane, and we’ll be in Shannon in eight hours flat.”
“You don’t know how,” I said.
“Ah, they’re all the same. Fly one and you’ve flown ’em all.”
“This is a jet. A large jet.”
“It goes up in the air like any other.”
“And comes down like snow. It’s not a helicopter.
“I’ve flown crates besides helicopters. A Piper Cub once, a Cessna-”
“This is different.”
“Bigger and faster, that’s the only distinction.”
“Can you, uh, find Ireland?”
“It’s east of here, isn’t it? We’ll go east until the ocean stops and then we’ll buzz down and look for it. It’s not such a small island we’d be likely to miss it.”
I started to say something else, but he seemed to be ignoring me. He was fiddling with different levers, playing with the control panel. I glanced at the pilot, who was in deep slumber in the aisle. It seemed we had little choice.
I said, “Look, Mr… dammit, what is your name, anyway?”
He hesitated. “James.”
“Well, Mr. James, or I guess it should be Captain James-”
“It’s my first name.”
“What’s the rest of it?”
A sigh. “James F. X. Corrigan.”
“Francis Xavier?”
“None other. Fifty percent Irish on my Dad’s side. County Cavan.”
“Well, then, you ought to… oh.” He wasn’t looking at me. “I get it,” I said. “That’s why you keep it a secret, huh? Corrigan. I bet you got tired of the jokes, didn’t you? I bet an awful lot of clowns called you Wrong-Way Corrigan-”
“No relation at all,” he said doggedly.
“Wrong-Way Corrigan,” I said, as the waves of hysteria began to build. “What else? Wrong-way Corrigan. And… and we’re heading for Ireland… and… oh, Christ, I bet we wind up in Los Angeles!”
Chapter 19
But I was wrong. We didn’t wind up in Los Angeles. The flight took ten hours instead of eight, and we very nearly did overfly Ireland, but at 7 o’clock Irish time he bounced us down on the runway at Shannon Airport.
It was undoubtedly the worst flight in the history of aviation. We hit every air pocket and crosscurrent between Montreal and Shannon, and we knew at once when each of our passengers shook off his drug-induced stupor. As soon as they straightened out, they promptly vomited. Everybody on the plane threw up at least once, and one poor woman had dry heaves for an hour running. Every last one of us was sick.
Everyone, that is, except Corrigan. Corrigan! There was no whiskey, but one of the captive guards had a pint of Cuban rum and the nurse’s bag contained a bottle of grain alcohol, and between the two he kept himself fried all the way across the ocean. Corrigan! It wasn’t enough that he flew the plane himself. He insisted on giving Seth and Randy a turn, and would have put Minna at the controls if I’d let him.
Corrigan! He put us through a ten-hour wringer, and when the plane landed, we gave him a standing ovation. We sang a song to him – C-O-Double R-I-, G-A-N Spells Corrigan, Corrigan. We christened him Right-Way Corrigan and gifted him with quarts of Jameson Redbreast. We told each other that his name would live as long as birds held the monopoly on wings. We nominated him for Aviation’s Hall of Fame – the Wright Brothers, Lindbergh, Earhart, and Right-Way Corrigan.
Never in the course of human events has any man earned so much acclaim for making so many people vomit.
During all of the backslapping and cheering, all the joyous excitement of being alive and on the ground and out of that hideous plane, through it all I tried to figure out what the Irish authorities would do with us. It would be no picnic, I was sure. Lengthy interrogation, some form of confinement, telegrams back and forth between Dublin Castle and Washington, Ottawa, Havana, and London.
I had forgotten what Ireland is like.
There was none of this. An official in a splendid green uniform took me aside and asked why we had made an unscheduled landing, and I explained very briefly what the Cubans had been doing and how we had dealt with the situation. He found the Cuban plot dastardly beyond belief, our action praiseworthy, Corrigan’s performance heroic, Arlette a charming young lady, and Minna a treasure. He talked to a few of the others, confirmed my story, and filled out special visa forms for all of us so that we could stay around Ireland as long as we wanted. He may have filed a report, but I would guess it was something he never got around to.
And that’s all.
Honestly.
Because no one made any noise. Ireland would have had to answer official inquiries from other nations, but there weren’t any. Havana certainly didn’t want to raise any static. They were out two guards, one pilot, one nurse, and one plane, and they could always hijack an airliner to even the score. They were hoping everyone would be very quiet about the whole thing.
Ottawa didn’t know what had happened. They knew that they wanted to get their hands on Evan M. Tanner, American, and Arlette Sazerac, Canadian, but they didn’t know we were in Ireland and would probably have rejoiced to learn we were out of Canada.
Washington probably didn’t know anything, either. And wouldn’t act unless forced to. And London was completely out of the picture. No one had the vaguest idea that there had been a plot to make Prince Philip a widower. As far as anyone knew, a batch of MNQ lunatics had made a successful attempt at dynamiting a fireworks barge. London cared as little about the affair as Modonoland.
I suppose you’re wondering why the Cubans were collecting Negroes, and how they got Minna, and all that. So was I. I pieced out the story on the plane and someday I will probably have to explain it to the Chief. I’m afraid he’ll think I’m putting him on.
Ready? They wanted to train American Negroes as revolutionaries to serve as shock troops in an eventual Black Revolution. I suppose the riots generated enough wishful thinking to get the plan approved. Their theory was that heavy indoctrination under the influence of drug therapy could turn any Negro, whatever his prior political outlook, into a Castro-oriented terrorist.
I don’t think they could have made it work, but who can tell? Pavlovian conditioning techniques have undergone considerable refinement of late, and so have drugs. Maybe they didn’t even expect it to work but felt that it was worth a try for research purposes.
In any event, they were using the pavilion to kidnap Negroes. They would select someone, steer him over to the sliding panel, and throw the switch. When he landed, a guard downstairs slapped a wad of chloroform over his nose and that was that. They had put in the wrist brackets and such when they built the place, but they never even bothered to use them.