White Cargo (29 page)

“Thanks,” Cat said. “I'll try and remember that.”

Hedger walked over to a counter and found some cleaning equipment behind it. As Cat watched he effortlessly fieldstripped the weapon and began carefully cleaning it.

“You know,” Hedger said, looking only at the pistol, “I hated your guts for a long time.”

Cat said nothing.

“You whipped my ass more ways than one at Quantico, and I didn't like it.”

“I'm afraid I liked it more than I should have,” Cat said, apologetically. “I'm sorry.”

“No need to be,” Hedger said. “It made me tougher, later, when I needed to be tougher.” He went on cleaning the weapon in silence, then reassembled it and handed it to Cat. “I admire what you're doing down here, what you're about to do. I'd like to think if I were in your place, I'd do the same. I wish you luck, Cat.”

It was the first time Hedger had ever called him by his first name, Cat reflected. He took the offered hand and shook it.

C
AT OPENED THE ALUMINUM CAMERA CASE AND COUNTED OUT
ninety stacks of a hundred one-hundred-dollar bills—nine hundred thousand dollars. He set Barry Hedger's canvas-and-leather grip on the desk and opened it, then removed the false bottom. He loaded one of the three clips into the H&K automatic pistol, arranged it in the compartment with the other clips, the shoulder holster, and the silencer, then loaded Bluey's .357 Magnum and tried it for size. There was barely enough room in the compartment for the second pistol and no room for the box of cartridges. Cat found a roll of cellophane tape and managed to fit another dozen cartridges into odd spaces. He replaced the false bottom and stacked the money in the case. It was still only about half full, so he put some shirts on top of the money, and Barry Hedger's high-tech portable radio on top of those.

He still had another million dollars in the camera case, and he was beginning to feel a little foolish about it. It was fortunate that he had misunderstood Bluey about how much money to bring; at least he had had the “franchise fee” when he needed it. Still, the other million dollars was something of a burden. He had thought of it, so
far, as only a lot of paper, but now he remembered that the extra million represented everything he owned, except the house and the company stock. He dismissed the thought from his mind. If it took that to get Jinx back, so be it. He was going to have enough to occupy him without worrying about the money. He thought of leaving it in the hotel safe and coming back for it, but there was always the chance, he reckoned, that it might come in handy. He closed the camera case and spun the combination lock. His wristwatch said seven o'clock.

Cat checked out of the hotel and got a taxi to the airfield. The flying school was deserted, and Meg was nowhere in sight. It was just as well, he decided. He wanted her with him, but now he was heading into a situation where he might be better off alone, without having to worry about her safety.

At the airfield, he threw his bags into the back seat of the airplane, then got out the little stepladder and checked the wing tanks. They were full, and so was the auxiliary tank in the luggage compartment. He gave the airplane a thorough preflight inspection and added a quart of oil. Then he got into the airplane, pulled out his charts and flight plan, and rechecked all his figures—courses, distance, and fuel. Everything tallied with the flight planning he had done the night before. He had a weather forecast from Eldorado Flight Services, and with the help of an English-speaking staffer, he had filed an instrument flight plan, something he had never done before. What the hell, he thought, his bogus Ellis license said he was instrument-rated.

It was a little after eight o'clock now, and there was nothing else to do but leave. Suddenly, he felt terribly alone. There were eight hundred miles of mountains and
jungle to cross, and nowhere to put the airplane down in an emergency. Up until now he had had the help of, first, Bluey, then Meg, then Hedger, Gomez, and Bergman, but now he was on his own. For a small moment, he wanted to run—abandon the airplane, leave Hedger, Bergman, and Prince to their own devices. But he couldn't forget Jinx. He had no way of being sure that she was where he was going, but if there was even a chance she was there, then he would be there, too. He took a couple of deep breaths. Meg was nowhere to be seen, and he had to take off on time or have his flight plan canceled.

Feeling hollow inside in spite of a good breakfast, he picked up his checklist and started to work through it: seat belt and shoulder harness fastened; doors closed; radios and navigation aids set to correct frequencies; cowl flaps open; avionics power switch off; circuit breakers in; mixture rich; propeller control in; carburetor heat off; prime engine; master switch on; area clear—he made a sweep of the area to make sure nobody was standing near the prop. As he turned to his right, he jumped: Meg's face was framed in the window. She rapped on the glass.

He opened the door; she tossed her bags into the back seat, climbed in, and kissed him on the neck. “Sorry I'm late; you weren't going to leave without me, were you?”

“I was,” he said, “and I still think I should.”

She looked hurt. “You don't want me along?”

He shook his head. “It isn't that. It's because of you I've gotten this far. I don't have time to explain the whole thing right now—I've got to make a time window or they'll cancel my flight plan. All I can tell you is that if you come with me, there's an awfully good chance that neither of us will get out of it alive, and I don't think I
should ask you to take that risk. I hope you'll believe that I'm not exaggerating.”

She cocked her head to one side. “Listen, sport,” she said, “I expect I've been in more tight spots than you the past few years, and I'm still in one piece. I'll stay that way—don't worry about me.”

“I'll explain on the way,” he said. “We can always part company in Leticia.” He looked around the airplane again, opened his window, and shouted, “CLEAR!” He turned the key, and the engine coughed, then came to life. They both slipped on their headsets, and he continued with his checklist. There was no control tower to call, so he taxied to the end of the runway and stopped. He throttled up to 1,700 rpms and did his run-up checks. Finally, all was ready. He craned his neck to see the skies around him—no incoming traffic—then taxied onto the runway. It was shorter than what he was accustomed to, but plenty long enough—1,000 meters. Mixture—full rich. He announced his takeoff to any possible traffic in the area, then shoved in the throttle. The airplane began to roll. Cat watched the airspeed, waiting for sixty knots, when the airplane could be flown off. The needle rose to forty, then forty-five knots, but it seemed to be moving upward very slowly. The airplane had used up three-quarters of the runway when Cat realized they were not going to make it.

He glanced at the instruments, ready to slam on brakes, but he knew they would never be able to stop. They would drive straight ahead into the low shrubs off the end of the runway. Then he noticed that the manifold pressure was low, and suddenly he realized what was wrong. “Oh, shit!” he yelled, startling Meg. Quickly, he put in twenty degrees of flaps, and as the runway came to an end, the heavily loaded airplane lifted sluggishly a few feet into
the air. It seemed to take forever to get to two hundred feet, then he reduced the flaps to ten degrees, and the airplane began to climb faster.

“What was that?” Meg asked, a little breathless.

“My fault,” Cat replied, mopping his brow. “I forgot we are at about nine thousand feet of elevation here. The air is thin and the engine won't develop full power this high up, so the airplane needs more runway to get off. If I had put in flaps at the beginning, it would have worked a lot better.”

He took out the last ten degrees of flaps, started his turn toward the Eldorado VOR beacon, and called Bogotá departure. The accent was thick, but the controller gave him his departure instructions. Soon they were out of the mountains and over the Magdalena Valley. Cat switched on the autopilot and relaxed, checking his position with the distance-measuring equipment. They would soon be out of range for that, and there was no loran this far south. There were enough other navaids to get them to Leticia, though.

“Okay,” he said finally, “what have you been doing for the last couple of days?”

“I had some people to see,” she replied. “Once I knew you were all right, I had time on my hands, and I'm always looking for a story.”

“I thought you
had
a story,” he said, a little miffed.

“Now, now,” she said, “don't get jealous of my time. I had nothing else to do. Could I have come to all those meetings with you if I had been around?”

“No,” he said. “Barry Hedger thinks you're a Communist agent, or something.”

She gave a short, derisive laugh. “Of course. He told you about my father, didn't he?”

“Yes. I remembered the incident.”

“It was a hell of a lot more than an incident, let me tell you. Father never recovered. He was only fifty-one when he died. They broke his heart.”

“Hedger says most of the reporting you've done is about various Communist revolutionary movements.”

“A lot of it has been,” she agreed. “My father's name got used by all sorts of left-wing groups; he was a real hero to them. I suppose it was a sort of entrée for me.”

Cat was silent.

“Oh, I see, you want to know if I'm a Communist spy, right?”

“Well?” he asked. “I mean, I don't really give a damn, but I would like to know.”

She unclipped her shoulder harness and turned to face him. “Yes you do care, bless your heart,” she said. “You're afraid you've gotten involved with a regular Red Menace, aren't you?”

“Look . . .”

“Well, I suppose I'm glad you care. No, I'm not a Communist spy, or even a Communist. I despise what a lot of the guerrilla movements are doing—or at least the way they're doing it. On the other hand, I despise the way the United States does a lot of what it does, too. Politically, I suppose I'm a stateless person. I mean, I'm glad that part of me is an American, and I'm glad that the other part is a South American—I feel just as comfortable here as I do in the States. The United States has a right-wing administration that I abhor, and Colombia has a left-wing guerrilla movement that I hate, too. There's no political home for me unless it's a place like Sweden, and I couldn't live there, because I'm not a Socialist, and half of me is a hot-blooded Latin.”

Cat laughed. “I'll vouch for that.”

•   •   •

Now they were over jungle. There was nothing else as far as the eye could see. It was so thick, Cat thought he could land the airplane on the treetops. Every couple of minutes, he scanned the instrument panel, looking for reassurance. The needles held steady, and the engine drummed monotonously along. Fuel flow was a bit more than he had planned, but he had a much bigger reserve than he and Bluey had had on the flight from Florida.

Meg had cranked her seat back and was sound asleep. He looked at her face, innocent and childlike in repose. He knew there was nothing he could say to talk her out of going to the Trapezoid with him, and he was glad. He remembered the terrible moment that morning, when he had thought he was alone.

•   •   •

They had sandwiches a little later, then, early in the afternoon, Cat looked out ahead of them and saw a strip of brown cutting across the green of the jungle. Cat felt a thrill of anticipation and of fear. The Amazon—the biggest river in the world, dwarfing the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi. It was a good thirty miles away, but down here there was no air pollution, only a haze rising from the rain forest. As they flew closer the river widened, until it became apparent what a huge body of water they were approaching. It stretched, east and west, as far as the eye could see. Twenty miles out, when Leticia was a smudge beside the Amazon, Cat called the tower and was instructed to start his descent. A few minutes later they were entering the traffic pattern, and as Cat turned onto the base leg for landing, a large helicopter rose from the airport and headed away north at a low altitude.

The heat was apparent long before they landed, and as soon as they were on the ground Cat and Meg opened the airplane's windows. They were waved into a tie-down area by a teenage boy, and Cat switched off all the electrics and the avionics power switch, then cut the engine. He was sweating already, and he wasn't sure it was the heat.

While the boy got their bags onto a hand trolley, Cat made arrangements for tie-down and refueling, then they got a taxi to Parador Ticuña. As the cab pulled up at the hotel, a crowd was gathered out front. Meg asked the driver what was happening, but the driver didn't know. He got out and went to the trunk for their bags, ignoring the commotion.

Cat and Meg got out of the cab and approached the edges of the crowd. As they did so a policeman pushed past them, shouting at the crowd. The group parted to let him through, and Cat was able to see what was at the crowd's center. A man, a gringo, dressed in an American seersucker suit, lay stretched out on the ground, faceup. His head lay in a pool of bright red blood, and his lips and teeth were a mess. He had been shot in the back of the head, and the bullet had exited through his mouth, but he was still recognizable. Cat's eyes remained locked on the sandy hair and badly pockmarked face until the crowd closed in again and blocked his view.

He turned away, feeling ill. The man had joined Bluey Holland as a casualty in the effort to protect Cat Catledge. Who else would Cat get killed before this was over?

C
AT LOOKED AT HIS WATCH AGAIN
. I
T WAS A LITTLE PAST SIX,
and they had been sitting in the bar since midafternoon. He had not told Meg who the murdered man was. He didn't intend to. At first, they had had the place to themselves, then, around five, the bar had started to fill with people, locals and a group of German tourists. He had begun to worry.