Prologue

Southeast Asia, 1965

DON O'CONNELL STRUGGLED to correlate the view through the windscreen with both his memory and a well-worn chart spread out and clipped to his kneeboard. He was concentrating on holding a heading with one hand and running his finger along a penciled-in line on the chart with the other. His finger arrived at a small hand-drawn circle representing a position on the ground. He noted his watch and penciled the time next to the position, the rote activity providing a momentary reprieve from his personal hell. He could visualize the site, having seen it on occasion: a nameless river crossing. He searched his mind, trying to assemble a memory of the mountain terrain surrounding the river valley shrouded by the opaque mass of cloud.

It wasn't supposed to be like this, but a trip to the mountaintop strip labeled 57 on a chart wasn't routine like logistic flights going somewhere with a proper name. He had made the run before and hundreds like it. The four or five grand a month he was pulling down wasn't nearly enough to cover his current dilemma. With time on his hands, Don was beating himself up.

"Why did I take this piece of junk airplane?" he demanded of the empty space of the cockpit.

Don's morning started in the hole, in an argument about the condition of his tires with the Filipino mechanic who Don accused of being a "damn farmer" and then chased him around the hangar with a wrench. Adding to his displeasure, the novice loadmaster had loaded everything to the "ass end" of the single engine Pilatus Porter.

"I'm going to fly the damn thing, not drive it! Move all this crap to the middle!" he screamed into the vacant stare of the little Thai loader.

In frustration, Don lugged everything forward himself, saturating his flight suit in sweat while the man stood aside. When he was through, Don lifted the man off his feet by his shirt all the while pointing with his free hand at the repositioned contents of the plane.

"That's where you put shit in an airplane!" Don dropped him with a shove toward a cargo net. "Now throw that over that pile!" The loadmaster knew what to do with the net and proceeded to spread it over the mound with catlike agility.

By the time Don was ready to sign for the load, his limited patience had boiled off. Climbing into the plane, he lit off the engine, ran through a memorized checklist, and called Udorn tower for taxi. There was no response. After a second attempt, Don selected the number 2 radio and put in the ground frequency. A third call on the number 2 radio brought a response, and he was cleared to taxi.

"You, boys, hear any previous calls?" he asked the tower.

"Negative," reported the tower.

"Piece of junk radio," mumbled Don.

With the communications side of the number 1 radio out, Don decided to try its navigation function, fumbling with the knob of the course-deviation indicator (CDI) but giving up in frustration. The little bar representing a course line refused to budge from its centered position.

"Christ! I got junk for radios, and half that junk don't work! No wonder the Commies are runnin' amuck!"

Pulling up and holding short behind a C-123 transport at the end of the runway, Don scanned the sky. The weather guessers had called for a one-thousand-foot overcast with tops of the stratus layer at 4,500 feet. He would be climbing through over two thousand feet of dense white soup before breaking out on top. The number 2 navigation receiver appeared to be working, and the automatic-direction-finder (ADF) needle pointed decisively in the direction of the local AM radio station in town. The TACAN mileage looked accurate as well. Waiting for clearance, Don contemplated his choice. With the number 1 out of commission, his options would be limited. Vientiane, Laos, would serve as a suitable alternate; and he planned to return under the cloud layer, so no instrument approach would be necessary. He could get some rough-course information from the ADF, but it was mostly just background noise reminding him he was in Southeast Asia. Depending on his altitude, TACAN would provide guidance and mileage. The tiebreaker was the air-force controllers at Vientiane. They were good with the precision-approach radar (PAR). They could talk you down with heading and altitude advisories if he got caught on top of the overcast, and Don had learned to trust them. The analysis and decision took about ten seconds; the ramifications would play out in an agonizingly slow display of time.

"Porter 36 Yankee, cleared for takeoff."

"Roger, cleared to takeoff."

Don broke out of the overcast at 5,300 feet and called the tower.

"Udorn, 36 Yankee. The tops are at 5,300. Looks like it's gettin' thicker."

"Roger. Have a good one."

The little animal gnawing at his guts retreated when the sun had appeared, but Don still harbored an ill feeling about the whole affair, as he climbed in clear air. Leveling off at 9,500 feet, he could make out clouds building vertically over the mountains of Laos in the distance. He switched to the common working frequency, reported aboard, and began monitoring the traffic.

"What's the weather like around 57?" Don called in the blind.

A chopper answered, "Pretty good buildup around twenty. The bases are one thousand feet where I've been working."

"Roger. Thanks for the update."

The plane droned on for an hour and twenty minutes while Don watched a squall line grow to menacing proportions. The stratus layer below began to break up with the rising terrain, revealing a dense, inhospitable landscape of sheer vertical drops. After Don began his descent, it was all-dead reckoning and look-out-the-window navigation. He struggled to pick out landmarks and flew between shifting towers of cumulus clouds and shafts of impenetrable rain, until he found himself in a shrinking hole of clear air. Don realized he was failing the "this" test, when everything you begin to think or say starts with "this," like "this sucks" or "this is bullshit." Mere moments after this realization, Don's world turned aquatic; the sky unloaded torrents; the visible world shrank to the size of the cabin; rain sheeted off the windows and pounded the plane. Don's headset served only to muffle the sound of the beating blows of wind and water. Struggling with the controls, he put the plane into a climbing altitude, focusing on his flight instruments. He then turned to a heading he hoped would lead him back the way he had come. He found it hard to believe the engine continued to run while it ingested the massive quantities of water offered up by the weather gods. Water started dripping, then streaming through every pore of the plane, down the inside of the windscreen, dripping from the overhead, working its way through the door seals; water saturated everything. Time slowed to a crawl. Don's mind was clear, acutely aware of each breath. His heart pounded; he could easily count the beats. He forced himself to relax his grip on the yoke. Looking down, he realized his chart was getting soaked, so he pulled it from his kneeboard and stuffed it inside his shirt. Long moments turned to long minutes. Then the dark gray mass began to lighten. Don emerged from a wall of water into clear air. Instinctively, he checked his watch. His little excursion into water had taken all of five minutes. Relief crept out with the cessation of rain and the brightening skies. Don took up an orbit in the clear air. Pillars of white billowy clouds stretched in a continuous line to the east and north; rain obscured the land below. Don had played this game long enough. He was going home.

The white mat of stratus spread out ahead as Don picked up a heading. Depressing the transmit button, all Don could hear was a variation in the level of static. He tried several more times, calling in the blind, to no avail. Wishful thinking led him to try the number 1 radio again. It hadn't healed, and although he could still hear the chatter on the low-frequency radio, the directional arrow no longer responded. Don eyed at his fuel gauges and performed some mental gymnastics. He had an hour and a half of fuel remaining. One way or another, he would be on the ground. The little intestinal animal began to nibble again. The moist air in the cockpit grew stale.

Don dug the chart from his shirt and spread it across his knees. Making a mark at what he calculated his present position to be, he succeeded only in poking a hole in the limp, wet paper. Checking his watch, he made a mental note of the time. He tried the radios again and then looked outside to see if any of the peaks breaking the surface of the cloud tops looked familiar. There weren't many to choose from, and they all looked the same. Another five minutes had passed.

As time dragged on, Don's options were shrinking. He could only guess where he was and estimate where he would be at a point in the near future. Eventually, he would have to descend into the clouds, and the odds were heavily weighted against finding a good place to put the plane down. Below was hostile ground, Indian Territory. He needed to go as far south as possible before he let down. If he could manage to miss any terrain obscured by clouds, he could try to fly around underneath looking for a soft place to crash. He realized if he crashed, a virtual certainty, everything in the back of the plane would shift forward and crush him. For the second time in the day, Don moved the contents of the airplane, this time out the door. He trimmed the plane as best as he could, made his way back, and slid open the cargo door. He managed to toss a few items overboard before he had to return to the cockpit and straighten out the plane before it achieved some unusual altitude. It took ten trips shuttling from front to back, but Don managed to empty the plane. The activity served to occupy his mind but didn't stave off his feelings of impending doom. Collapsing into the pilot's seat, he tried the radios again. Ten minutes had passed. An hour remained for him to contemplate his fate, to consider the different choices he might have, to script what he might say to his three kids and his wife. She wasn't really his wife anymore, but he still thought of her as his wife. He had slapped her around too much after he caught her in bed with that prick. That prick didn't have a name; he was just That Prick. She had divorced Don, and he had gone back to Laos, because he couldn't think of anything else to do. If he hadn't gone to Laos in the first place, maybe they would still be together; and he'd be sitting on his porch in Twain Hart instead of waiting for a place to die.

Mexico, 1978

"It's the worst thing you can imagine. All that time to think. Knowing you're going to come down through them clouds. Nobody to talk to. Nobody knows where the hell you are. Even if I survived the crash, it would be blind luck if some gook didn't show up and blow my brains out. All that time, just eating away at you." Don lounged in the left seat of the cockpit, in the captain's position on the plane.

In the right seat, holding down the copilot's spot and listening to the tale, sat Woody Grant. Woody was concentrating on holding the heading and altitude of the DC-6, an old freighter, level at 11,500 feet and headed southeast over the mountainous interior of Mexico.

"So, what happened then?" asked Woody.

"Well, I was running outta gas. I couldn't find a hole, but I started down. I kinda corkscrewed down through the clouds. I tell you that was one sick feeling, letting down into that soup. I could still hear that radio station babbling away as I got lower, so I figured I might not be too far from the base. I don't know how I did it, but I broke out in a valley, missed the mountains; and right down the middle of the valley was a river. I set up on a downwind to ditch the plane, and the engine quit. I turned base and barely missed the trees rolling out on final. I hit the water wing low, and the plane cartwheeled. I went ass over teakettle into the river, broke my arm, and had a helluva time getting out. So, there I was, hanging on the wreckage, half-drowned. Then I hear little plinking noises. Plink plink plink plink. Some bastard is shooting at me! Then I see this little boat headed toward me with a guy shooting back at the other bank, and I ain't got a clue who the good guys are."

"I guess you made it," observed Woody.

"The guy in the boat was kinda crouched down, and all I could see was his hat with a big red star when he'd pop up and take a shot. I figured I was screwed. Well, that old boy pulled up next to me yammerin' and wavin' for me to get in the boat. I was takin' fire from the other side of the river, so I figured what the hell and swam over. They pulled me in. Well, it turns out they were Laotian, and I was one happy son of a gun. Those little guys fixed me up and kept me for a week before anybody showed up to claim me. I had a little silver pistol, and I gave it to Tran; he was the guy who picked me up. He acted like that was about the best thing anybody had ever done for him."

Woody looked out at the shadow world and thought about the common threads binding Don's story with their current adventure: the same element of doubt and plenty of time to think about what might happen. He sat contemplating the odds that he and the other five people on board the airplane would survive.

"What the hell is Charlie doing in the back?" asked Woody.

"I don't know. Probably trying to keep the stowaways and your buddy Wallace out of trouble."

"Wallace ain't my buddy. I swear, I ain't never been on such a screwed-up trip."

"How do you think your sister got the damn fool idea to hide out back there with her little Indian anyway?"

"I don't know. She probably thinks she's doing him a favor. She's going to get him killed. I think Charlie ought to spell me awhile."

"You just stick with it, Woody. Charlie knows how to fly this thing. You need all the time you can get." Don leaned over and peered to the back of the plane.  

"How we looking for gas?" asked Woody. "I thought these things went a little faster."

"We ought to be just fine. As long as your associates don't do anything stupid and hold things up on the ground," said Don.

"What are they going to do to hold us up?"

"Don't you worry your little head about it, Woody. Just keep flying."

"There's no telling what those boys are gonna do when you show up without the general. I don't know what you hoped to accomplish, slipping Wallace on the plane instead of the general."

"We just thought we'd play a little joke on everybody," taunted Don.

"How are you going to help Tater? I'll admit they were pretty stupid holding on to him, but you're never going to get him back without the general: you got nothing to trade. You don't know who you're fooling with," Woody warned.

"First off, they didn't just hold Tater: Zia shot him in his good leg! He was already crippled up with a broken ankle!"

"These folks don't give a damn. They want their money. General Zia's money. Without him, they can't get it."

"Just stick to flying this thing; you're losing altitude. According to this chart, there are some pretty big mountains down there."

"Y' know, Don, we could just turn around. They probably won't kill me, but I don't think much of your chances; and I don't want anything to happen to my sister."

"Why, Woody, you're turning into some kinda humanitarian. When did you start thinking about anybody but number one?"

"Screw you."

"That's it, Woody! That's the Woody I know. Now why don't you see if you can pick up Mexico City on the ADF radio, so we can keep track of where we are, while I go back and see what the crew is up to?"

"Y'all, just gonna leave me alone up here?" Woody whined.

"You're doing just fine, Woody. Just hang on to your altitude, watch your heading, and don't change a thing."

Don took off his headset and climbed out of his seat. He gave the cockpit a once-over, satisfying himself there were no impending disaster indications among the multitude of gauges, indicators, and warning lights.

Woody tossed him a worried glance.

"Watch your altitude!" Don yelled above the din of the cockpit.

Woody's head snapped back, front, and center, and Don headed aft. Wooden crates marked Machine Parts, resting on pallets, formed a sort of maze in the back of the plane. Some had been opened.

What the hell are these idiots into now?

Don worked his way back. The aft-cabin folks were conferencing around one of the crates. Don shook his head wondering how he had ended up with the unlikely bunch.

Four people rounded out "the crew." Two had simply materialized an hour or so into this, the last leg of the flight, having stowed away in the belly of the plane. The four now stood around the perimeter of a big wooden crate. Woody's sister, Nancy Grant, was one of the stowaways and the only woman aboard. She was the kind of woman who made an old man like Don think about women he had spent time with. She had looks that would leave a trail of broken men in her wake. And she was headstrong, with the God-given confidence of the young.

A wiry small Indian named Jorge was her shadow, who had, likewise, been secreted to the plane. He was engaged in the disassembly of an AK-47. The unlikely image of Nancy and Jorge huddled together dissecting an automatic weapon in the aluminum tube of the old freighter halted Don.

Charlie Jones and Wallace Clayton were the other two in the back. Charlie was actually the copilot on the expedition; Woody was sitting in as an unofficial trainee, a crash course, so to speak, because Charlie was looking after things in the back. Wallace, dressed in the unlikely garb of a Mexican general, an ostentatious outfit no fewer than two sizes too large for him, had been recruited to impersonate a hostage, the Mexican general Zia, on this quixotic flight.

Everyone on the plane had his or her own motive for being on the flight. Don's was to save a friend, from the denizens of a cocaine cartel holding one Charlie Tate captive. To that end, Don and Charlie had set off with a skeptical, but willing, Wallace. Woody was looking to make a killing in the weapons trade while visions of easy money, after partnering up with some high-level cocaine traders, danced in his head.

Charlie and Wallace were also engaged with an AK-47, its internal workings spread out across the top of a crate.

"What are you, people, up to?" yelled Don above the deafening noise radiating from the bare aluminum structure of the plane.

All except Jorge looked up.  He had been aware of Don's approach and so continued working.

"You ever see one of these things before?" asked Charlie.

"Yeah. I seen one or two," replied Don. "Why are you, guys, monkeying around with 'em?"

"Oh, just curious. Killing a little time," Charlie explained.

"Maybe you ought to spend a little time figuring out what we're going to do when we land. With all those pissed-off people waiting for us," Don suggested.

"I've been working on it," Charlie said.

"So? Anything pop into your head, hotshot?"

"I have a couple of ideas. Like, in spite of how bad they are going to want to kill us, they still need someone to fly the plane. Woody can fill the right seat, but they'll need somebody who knows what he's doing to be the captain," Charlie commenced.

"Well, that narrows it down to me, and maybe you. In a pinch."

"Yeah. And with the special relationship you share with the general and his boys, they'd probably kill you even if you were the last pilot on the planet. I think I'm elected," said Charlie.

"I'll just shoot myself and save them the trouble," scowled Don.

"How about if you just weren't on board?"

"How's that supposed to work?"

"We took off with people we didn't know about. Why couldn't we land with people they don't know about?" Charlie tested.

"What about Woody? He knows who's here, and he's one of them."

"Yeah, I know. But I think we can get Woody to play along. He's greedy, but he's worried about his sister. If we can convince him he's got nothing to lose, I think he'll go for it."

"I think Woody is going to be a tough sell."

"Look, if we deliver the weapons and the plane, Woody has done his part."

"So who's going to be on board, and who's going to play hide-and-seek?"

"Woody, Wallace, and me will be on board when we land. We only need three: pilot, copilot, and General Wallace. Woody still has a credible story. You, Nancy, and Jorge will be in the hellhole. Nobody knows Nancy and Jorge came along, and if anybody asks, I'll just say you bailed in Alamogordo."

"Just for fun, let's say we manage to find El Salvador and land this thing; and they don't line you up and shoot you. Nancy, Jorge, and me are supposed to live in the bowels of this plane until when?"

"Look, Don, they have to swap out the weapons for the drugs. It's going to be the middle of the night when we get there. You should be able to get out through the hydraulic-compartment door in the belly. The door opens to the inside of the plane. You drop to the deck, take off, and hide."

"I ain't never been to El Salvador, but it sounds a lot like Laos. A big ugly white guy like me kinda stands out."

"You're not going to take up residence. Jorge l'l fit right in. All you have to do is figure out how to get back out of the country. See if you can find a plane," Charlie explained.

"You mean steal a plane, don't you?"

"I doubt you'll find one to rent. Yeah. Steal an airplane. Hopefully one with some gas and the legs to get us a long way from there."

"You just lost me, Charlie. Me, Nancy, and Jorge are hiding out and looking for a plane to steal: you're the designated pilot on this thing with Woody. What about Wallace? How do you propose we all get back together and fly off into the sunset?"

"Sunrise," Charlie corrected. "I'll get away somehow; I'll figure something out. Harry is supposed to be working some angles for us. It's up to him to get Tater out, and he said he would work on some backup for us when we land."

"Harry is a good guy and a hell of a boss, but we're going to need more than a little backup. I'm betting half the Salvadoran Army, and a bunch of Colombian drug hoods will be waiting to greet us."

"You just find a damn plane!"