The prop spun, the engines caught. They drowned out the rest of my sentence, but that didn’t matter. Everyone knew the ending.
Chapter 18
As our pilot pointed out, it wouldn’t be fitting to hover permanently in the air over the Cuban Pavilion. Helicopters buzzing to and fro were a common enough sight at Expo, but helicopters on stakeout duty might draw stares. We worked out a pattern of lazy, looping circles, dipping here, rising there, but contriving to keep the Cuban building constantly in view. Our pilot came up with a small pair of binoculars, and I kept them trained on the pavilion as well as I could. I wished I had thought to bring Claude’s field glasses along. These were less powerful and spotlighted a smaller field.
The pilot was giving us a surprisingly smooth flight, and I found myself almost relaxed. From time to time the memory of our near miss of the British Pavilion would set my nerves on end, but by and large the ride was far less harrowing than thoughts of what would happen if we missed them.
This watching and waiting was a pain in the ass. It seemed I’d been doing a lot of it lately. Sitting endlessly around the apartment while Arlette ran errands, crouching interminably on the crest of the hill waiting for the fireworks barge, and now circling eternally around the Cuban Pavilion waiting for-
Waiting for what? For a whole lot of people to leave it, and to do so in a secretive manner.
The pilot began shouting something. I couldn’t understand him at first, then realized he was offering me a drink. I wondered how it might affect me. The little voice in my head still blurted out some fool thing every once in a while, and I didn’t know whether liquor would oil its tongue or rust it. I decided to find out and accepted the bottle of McNaughton’s, tilted it, and let a gratifying quantity leap straight for my liver. The pilot gestured at the boys and I passed the bottle their way. When they sent it back, I returned it to the pilot and watched him pour an impossible amount down his throat. He didn’t even swallow, just tucked in his glottis and poured it down the pipe.
I said something about drinking and flying. “Don’t give it a second thought,” he said, and hiccuped. “Any bloody fool can fly this crate with his eyes closed. Want to try your hand at it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, come give it a try. I’ll show you what to do.”
“I’d better keep an eye down below.”
“How about you boys, then?” They came forward, and he had Seth sit at the controls while he and Randy watched over his shoulders. “A good skill for any man to know. Especially for you boys. Americans, are you? Now when you get over to Vietnam, you can be helicopter pilots. It’s the key weapon of the war, do you know. One lad at the controls like so, and another on the side potting away at the wogs with a tommy gun, and one more man to send the naphtha on its way. Pay attention while I teach you, now, and they’ll make officers of you.”
While the fair itself didn’t close until the small hours of the morning, most of the national pavilions began shutting down a few hours earlier. At 11:15 the doors of the Cuban Pavilion were closed. Not long afterward the lights went out – one by one, though, not all at once, as they must have when Arlette hit the switches.
“Won’t be long now,” I said. “There goes the building across the street from them. As soon as a few more shut down, it will be safe for them to start moving prisoners.”
“Good thing, too. We’re running a shade low.”
“We’re running out of fuel?”
“No, not that. Or yes, in a manner of speaking.” He held up the bottle of McNaughton’s. It was not the original bottle – that had plummeted into the canal after we’d emptied it. This was the second bottle, and not too much whiskey remained in it.
There had been a great deal of whiskey swallowed, and not all of it by our nameless captain. Not by any means. We all of us had achieved a precarious balance somewhere between happiness and sobriety, and with the alcohol working in our bloodstreams we had turned into rather a cheery little group. The four of us careened drunkenly through the summer skies, Seth and Randy leading us in such traditional pacifist anthems as “Halls of Montezuma” and “Those Caissons Go Rolling Along.” The pilot contributed “It’s A Long Way To Tipperary,” and I sang “If You Don’t Like Your Uncle Sammy Go Back To Your Home ’Cross The Sea.”
By this time we had all had a turn at piloting the copter. Of the four of us, I guess I was the worst at it. He was right, though; it was an extremely easy machine to manage, and it certainly did seem as though one could handle it better drunk than sober.
Randy was warbling “I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier, I Don’t Want To Go To War,” and doing so in a lamentably inadequate Cockney accent, when I saw something through the glasses and motioned at him to shut up. Several dark cars had drawn up at the rear entrance of the Cuban building. I shouted to the pilot to take us in for a closer look. There were four cars, identical black sedans with what looked like some sort of crest painted on the front doors.
“That’s how they move them,” I said. “Consulate cars. They even have diplomatic immunity going for them.”
We flew in a straight line, moving as far off from the building as possible while still keeping the cars in sight. I saw the doors open and told the pilot to move in closer again. A dozen people emerged from the building and entered the cars. Two men seemed to be carrying something heavy, something that looked as though it might be Arlette.
The car doors slammed shut and the cars moved out from the curb.
“Now we follow ’em, Mr. Tanner?”
“Right.”
“And no problem, that. Easier at night than in the daytime. With their headlights glowing, they look like a pack of fireflies now, don’t they?”
“What do we look like?”
“Could you let me have that again, sir?”
“We’ve lights of our own,” I said. “And with all due respects, this thing does make a hell of a racket. It’s one thing to fly back and forth over the fairgrounds. There are always helicopters doing that, and one looks like the next. But in downtown Montreal-”
“Then, you think they’ll” – burp – “head for the city, eh?”
“The city or the open road. Either way we’ll be pretty obvious in our pursuit, won’t we?”
He swung around to grin at me, showing more teeth than most families have under one roof. I still hadn’t entirely gotten accustomed to the idea that he could fly the thing without seeing where he was going. “I could turn our lights off,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound like a good idea.”
“’Tisn’t, but I could. Still, the noise is worse than the lights, wouldn’t you say? But there are tricks to every trade, don’t you know, and I can keep on a course with them and not let them know about it. Used to fly highway patrol out in Ontario” – burp – “bouncing radar at the bleeders. It was a rare one saw me quick enough to slow down. I’ll follow these Cuban rascals as sure as my name is – now what in the devil!”
So I didn’t find out his name then, either. “Something’s wrong?”
“Lost ’em for a minute,” he said. I winced; we hadn’t even left the fairgrounds yet. “But there they are, four little glowworms on parade. Can’t let that happen again, can we, now?”
A little while later I had to admit that he knew what he was doing. His trailing method amounted to guessing where the cars were going next, dropping back out of sight, then circling on ahead and getting there ahead of them. It wasn’t even necessary to keep them constantly in sight, just so long as we were able to guess where they would go next.
In built-up areas this still amounted to fairly close pursuit, since the motorcade might turn off onto another route at any time. We were still out of their sight almost all the time, and the generally high noise level in those sections, plus the screening effect of buildings, kept us concealed. The cars worked their way around the city and struck out northeastward. Once they hit open country, they were easier to follow than a juggler on the Orpheum Circuit. There was one main road and they stayed on it for miles. We would lay doggo behind them, make a wide sweep to the left or the right, hover until they came into view, then cut off to the side again. There was always the chance that they would pick up a side road, but our fearless leader assured us he could locate them easily enough if they did. The branch routes were few and far between, and the Cuban convoy, four identical cars doing a steady sixty-plus miles per hour and spaced five car lengths apart, would be virtually impossible to miss on a lightly traveled minor highway. Especially at night, with their lights visible miles away.