Pansy had me. And Stanley knew she did.
THIRTY NINE
IT TOOK STANLEY HO less than eight hours to deliver.
When Pansy called, Pete and Archie were with me in the suite and we were watching a replay of a Dallas Cowboys game on ESPN. The Cowboys were ahead, and we all had side bets on how they were going to blow the game this time.
“Are you upstairs?” Pansy asked me.
“I guess that depends on whether you’re downstairs.”
Pansy hung up without saying anything else. I guess she was downstairs.
THE DOORBELL RANG A few minutes later and I got up and let Pansy in. Everyone seemed to know everyone else already so I didn’t waste any time on introductions, and Pansy didn’t waste any time on small talk.
“They’re not on a ship,” she said. “They’re on an airplane.”
“Does your father know which airplane?”
“Yes. He said that a flight plan has already been filed. It’s departing for Sunan Airport in Pyongyang at eleven o’clock tonight.”
I looked at my watch. A little after eight. That was less than three hours away.
Pete was looking at his watch, too. “That doesn’t give us much time to convince whoever runs the airport to stop that plane from taking off,” he said. “Does anyone know—”
“No!”
Pansy’s interruption was so sharp we all stopped and looked at her.
“If you get someone official involved, all this is going to become public. You’ve got to stop that plane yourselves.”
“Where is Bruce Willis when you really need him?” I shrugged.
Nobody laughed, probably because it wasn’t really very funny.
“IS IT A REGULAR commercial flight?” I asked Pansy.
“No,” she said. “At least I don’t think it is.”
She handed me the piece of notepaper she had in her hand and I read what was written on it.
“It’s something called Yas Air,” I said, looking at Archie.
“That’s an Iranian freight carrier,” he answered.
“Tail number is EP-GOP. The plane is an Ilyushin Il-76TD.”
“That’s a Russian military transport that’s been converted to civilian use. It’s a big motherfucker. High wings, four engines, probably a hundred and fifty feet long.”
“How are we going to get on the airport?” Pete asked. “I know Macau isn’t exactly New York, but they still have security. We can’t climb over the fence and go looking for the plane.”
“And even if we do get to the plane,” Archie continued, “what are we going to do then? Shoot the crew? They’ll probably be Iranians, and if they are—”
“One thing at a time,” I cut in. “Let’s figure out how we can get to the plane. After that we’ll figure out what to do when we get there.”
Archie and Pete looked at me and waited.
“You up for this?” I asked Pete.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Archie?”
Archie shrugged.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“I CAN GET YOU onto the airport,” Pansy said, and all three of us stopped looking at each other and looked at her. “MGM has two Falcon 50’s we use for VIPs. I could take you in as high rollers we’re flying home.”
“Wouldn’t work,” Archie said almost immediately. “When was the last time any casino in Macau VIPed white guys? Everyone would smell a rat the minute we got out of the car.”
“It’s still a good idea,” I said, “but we don’t go in as high rolling gamblers.”
Everyone looked at me.
“We go in as pilots,” I said. “Half the pilots in the world are Americans or Aussies. Nobody would look twice at us.”
“We’ve got less than three hours,” Pete said, looking at his watch. “It’s a little late for us to learn to fly.”
“We don’t have to fly anything. We only need to look like we can. Uniforms and IDs ought to do it.”
“We’ve got spare uniforms in our pilots’ lounge downstairs,” Pansy said. “And I can get IDs made up in fifteen minutes.”
“There you go,” I said. “We’re pilots.”
PANSY GRABBED THE ROOM phone and went to work. Within a few minutes an elderly Chinese woman appeared with a digital camera to take our pictures for the IDs and five minutes after that a selection of uniforms was delivered to the suite. The three of us started trying on jackets, pants, shirts, and hats. Archie and I found pieces pretty close to our size right away, but Peter was having trouble finding a pair of pants large enough. When he caught me watching him with a little grin on my face, he said, “Shut the fuck up.”
By the time we were dressed, the elderly woman was back. She gave each of us an ID in a little plastic sleeve with a clip on it and a black leather flight case like the ones everybody sees pilots lugging through airports. We clipped the IDs to our pockets, picked up the cases, and checked ourselves out in the mirror.
“Pretty damned real looking,” Pansy said. “Let’s go.”
Archie jacked a round into the chamber of the Glock 19 I had seen back at the Grand Lapa and put it into his flight case. Pete put a little 9mm Walther into his. It was so small I hadn’t even realized he was carrying it until we started changing into our uniforms.
I went to the room safe, got the silver Halliburton case I had brought from Hong Kong, and tossed it on the bed. I slid the Ruger LC9 9mm out of its foam rubber mount, loaded the clip with hollow points from the box in the case, and screwed the Osprey sound suppressor onto the barrel. I slipped it into a black nylon holster and put it in my flight case.
“Pretty fancy rig,” Pete said. “For a civilian.”
“Laser sight?” Archie asked.
I nodded.
“Good,” Pete said. “At least you won’t shoot me in the ass.”
“Not by accident at least,” I said.
FIVE MINUTES LATER WE were downstairs in front of the MGM. Pansy slid behind the wheel of a silver VW van with the MGM lion on both doors, and the three of us got in the back.
We pulled out of the driveway and Pansy turned west on Avenida Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, heading for the bridge to Taipa. She pulled out her phone, dialed with her thumb, and began speaking rapid Cantonese in a low voice. I thought of reminding her that it wasn’t safe to drive and talk on a cell phone at the same time, but then I realized that was probably the least of our problems at the moment and kept my mouth shut. For once.
I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty. We would be at the airport in about fifteen minutes. We had done well to get everything together as fast as we had, but we would still have barely an hour before the Ilyushin’s takeoff time. Not much time to think of something. Even less much time to do something.
“Okay,” Pete looked at me and said, “what’s the plan?”
“I guess the first thing to do is to find that airplane.”
“I got that part. But what do we do when we find it?”
“I have no fucking clue.”
“What I thought,” Pete said.
WE CAME OFF THE MILE and half long Ponte de Sai Van bridge and drove along the north coast of what used to be Taipa Island until Taipa was joined to Coloane Island by the massive landfill that was now covered end to end in megaresorts. Passing between the Regency Hotel and the Grand Hyatt, we picked up the Estrade de Pac On and headed east toward the airport.
There is only one airport in Macau and the terminal and the hangers are built on the eastern edge of Taipa while the single runway sits offshore on a narrow strip of reclaimed land. I usually took the ferry across to Macau from Hong Kong, but I had been through the airport a couple of times and was trying to remember what I could about it. It wasn’t very much. There was the usual sort of glass and steel terminal building, as I recalled, but I didn’t know anything about the layout of the hangers or the service facilities.
Through the windshield of the silver van I could see the lights of the terminal building ahead of us. The field was out
to our left, but I couldn’t see much of it through the darkness and fog. Here close to the water the fog was no longer the gauzy and romantic thing you saw in travel magazines. It looked hard and menacing, like a steel-colored wall.
“I don’t think an Ilyushin is going to be parked at the passenger terminal,” Pete spoke up. “It’s a freight aircraft.”
“This is the only road into the airport,” Pansy said. “Both the freight terminal and the private terminal are on the other side of the passenger terminal. Fortunately they’re right next to each other. I called our hanger and told them to tow one of our Falcons out, park it as close to the Ilyushin as they could, and prepare it for take off.”
“And is it going to take off?”
“Not unless one of you guys learns how to fly within the next hour.”
THE LIGHTS OF THE passenger terminal drifted by on the left. They were ghostly and indistinct in the heavy fog. Up ahead I saw another clump of buildings, but not clearly enough to make out what they were.
“How do we get out to where the Falcon is parked?” I asked.
“We always drive our pilots straight out to the aircraft so I can bring you right up to the doorway. But after that…”
Pansy trailed off. She turned her head and looked at me. I understood what she was saying.
After that, we were on our own.
PANSY BRAKED SHARPLY AND moved the van to the left side of the road. We bumped slowly along parallel to a high chain-link fence until a large drive gate appeared out of the fog. The van came to a stop at the gate and a uniformed security guard stepped out of his hut and raked us with a flashlight beam. The light found the MGM logo on the door and almost immediately the gate began to rattle open on an unseen track.
The van rolled slowly across the field and I listened to the gate clatter shut behind us.
FORTY
I’VE ALWAYS LOVED THE way airplanes look at night when they are parked on an airfield under floodlights. They appear to exist in only two dimensions, like giant stage sets ready for the play to begin just as soon as the actors show up.
When I saw the Falcon out on the field in front of us that was exactly what it looked like. Of course, in this case, that was pretty much what it actually was. A stage set. The plane wasn’t going anywhere. It was there as a backdrop. The problem was I still had no script for the drama we were going to play out against it.
The Falcon was painted white with a discreet blue-black stripe down the side below the cabin windows. The vertical stabilizer displayed a stylized version of the MGM lion that looked like a particularly untalented student of Picasso must have drawn it.
The van approached the Falcon from the rear, circled around the wing, and came to a halt next to the forward door. It was standing open and the air stairs were down. The Ilyushin parked on the other side of the Falcon, two bays down. It was, as Archie had said, a big son of a bitch. It had wide green and gold stripes down the side and the vertical stabilizer was green with some kind of logo on it that looked like a marijuana leaf, but probably wasn’t. The wings hung down from a sort of hump on the very top of the fuselage and two bulky engine pods were slung below each wing. The plane was anything but sleek. It looked crude and brutal, like an angry hunchback crouching in the darkness.
We all put our flight bags at the foot of the air stairs and walked around to the driver’s side of the van. Pansy lowered the window.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“He has no fucking clue,” Archie answered for me.
I shrugged. When you’re right, you’re right.
“LET’S DO A WALK around,” Archie said, gesturing at the Falcon. “That will give us an excuse to check out what’s going on around the Ilyushin without being obvious about it.”
“What’s a walk around?” Pete asked.
“Pilots always walk around their aircraft and inspect it for damage before they take off,” I said.
“Damage? You mean like if there’s a wing missing?”
“Exactly,” I nodded.
“So you want me to walk around the plane and pretend to be looking at stuff?”
“That’s right, Pete, Just walk around and pretend you know what you’re doing. It’s pretty much the same thing you FBI guys do all the time.”
Archie slapped the side of the van with his open hand. “Let’s go, you clowns,” he said.
ARCHIE AND PETE CIRCLED around the nose of the Falcon, while I squatted next to the nose gear pretending to examine the tire and checked out the activity around the Ilyushin. The rear cargo doors were open and from a loading platform positioned under the tail a half dozen local laborers were pushing cargo containers into the aircraft. The front loading door behind the cockpit was open as well, and a set of air stairs were pushed up to it. A fuel truck was parked under the wing. While I watched, a fueler unhooked the hose from the wing tanks and curled it back into a hatch on the top of the truck. That was a bad sign. If they were done fueling, they could take off any time they wanted.
I spent so long pretending to look at the tire that I started feeling conspicuous, so I stood up and strolled counter-clockwise around the Falcon. I tilted my head up as if examining the wings and fuselage with great care, but I kept my eyes on the Ilyushin two parking bays down. The cargo loaders looked like they were finishing and preparing the loading platform to be pulled away. Yet I still saw no sign of either passengers or crew. Either they were already aboard or hadn’t turned up yet.
There was nothing inherently suspicious about the plane, even it was an Iranian airplane that had filed a flight plan for North Korea. Watching people loading cargo containers into it told me nothing at all. The question of the day was what was in those containers. Was it really the piles of clean Hong Kong dollars that the MGM had paid out in exchange for the counterfeit $50 bills and €100 notes, or was it something entirely unremarkable? There was also the matter of whether Freddy was actually on board or not. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t.
I simply had no better idea what was really on that Ilyushin now that I was standing a hundred feet from it than I’d had before. That hundred feet might as well have been a mile. To find out we had to get on board ourselves. It was just that simple, and just that complicated.
The whole idea of getting on board seemed hopelessly farfetched. There were only three of us and we had no weapons other than our three handguns. It wasn’t exactly the makings of a military operation, and it looked to me like that was exactly what would be needed to take control of an aircraft of that size.
All I really knew for sure right at that moment was that Stanley Ho had told Pansy that both the money and Freddy were on a Yas Air Ilyushin with the tail number EP-GOP. And now that aircraft was right in front of me.
I fully understood that the triads had people everywhere in Macau, and I had no doubt they kept close tabs on what was moving through both Macau’s airport and its container port, because they no doubt dipped into the passing stream here and there and extracted a bit for themselves. Whether Stanley Ho was really a triad boss himself or not, I had no trouble believing that he could reach out to people who could locate almost anything or anybody in Macau he wanted to locate.
I simply wasn’t certain Stanley would necessarily tell me the truth about what he found out when he did that reaching out, even if the reason I wanted to know the truth was to help his daughter, Pansy.
WE MET BEHIND THE Falcon’s vertical stabilizer where we were momentarily out of sight of the Ilyushin.
“Did you see any sign of passengers or crew?” I asked.
“Nothing but the cargo containers,” Archie said.
“The money could be in them,” Pete added.
“And it could be food packages from the Red Cross.”
“Whatever is in there, they’re about ready to close up and take off,” Pete said. “We need to think of something fast.”
He was right, of course, but I still had no idea what we were going do about it. We couldn’t exactly
rush the plane with our little popguns.
While I was still thinking about it, a white van that looked very similar to the one Pansy was driving pulled up next to the air stairs at the front loading door of the Ilyushin. Two men wearing uniforms that also looked pretty similar to the ones the three of us were wearing got out. The van drove away and the men climbed the air stairs lugging their flight bags with them.
And that was when I saw exactly how we were going to get on that plane.
“WHEN THEY COME OUT to do their walk around, let’s go over and talk to them,” I said. “Just pilots being friendly with each other.”
“Where does that get us?” Pete asked.
“Probably inside the Ilyushin. We ask those guys if they would give us a look at the cockpit. How can they say no to fellow pilots?”
“They can say no because they’re Iranians and they probably hate Americans.”
“I don’t think they’re Iranians,” Archie said. “Look.”
I glanced back at the Ilyushin and saw the two pilots coming down the forward air stairs. I wasn’t sure I could pick out an Iranian at that distance with any certainty, probably not with certainty at any distance, but it looked to me like Archie was probably right. Whatever two Iranian pilots might actually look like, it almost certainly wasn’t like these guys looked. Both men were tall with very fair complexions and light colored hair.
“I’ll bet they’re Eastern Europeans or Russians,” Archie said. “It’s possible they don’t hate you after all. At least not as much as Iranians would.”
“Even if we can get them to let us into the Ilyushin, what do we do then?” Pete asked. “We can’t just start searching it.”
“Maybe we can. If we reason with those guys, they probably won’t get in our way. They’re foreigners being paid to fly an Iranian airplane ferrying cargo to North Korea. They’re not going to get into a fight with us.”
“But what if they do push back?”
“We can always shoot them.”
“You’re kidding.”
THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) Page 25