He didn’t bother knocking this time but instead used his key—this place was too primitive for cards—to enter the room he and Melissa had originally taken together but never shared.
And then he froze.
The black hole of the barrel on Melissa’s Colt M1911 was centered on his forehead.
“Should have knocked first.” Richie did his best not to move any muscles except those he needed to speak.
Melissa was slow on lowering the gun. Her gear was packed, a simple duffel at her feet. She wore the scuffed boots and camo pants that the whole team had adopted as their standard paramilitary look. Her other hand was clutched about the silly doubloon medallion that dangled over her black T-shirt. He couldn’t tell if she was holding on to it or about to yank it off and throw it away.
Her eyes looked haunted.
He had the sudden feeling that she’d been sitting in exactly this position the whole time he’d been cleaning up the hangar and packing the plane. Was she waiting for something, or was she deciding whether or not to get on a flight to Fort Bragg for reassignment?
“You okay?” He couldn’t read her expression at all.
“I should be asking you.” She stared at his face. “You’re the one who took on The Reaper.”
Richie grimaced and then wished he hadn’t because his jaw still stung. “I’ll heal soon enough.”
She nodded a few times in acknowledgment. “You two okay? You and Chad?”
“Yeah, we’re fine.”
Melissa dropped her hands into her lap and studied them.
Richie resisted the urge to kneel before them and grab hold. He didn’t know if she was drifting away from him or already flown. He heard Chad down the hall telling Duane to hurry up his ass. Richie let the room door swing shut to buy them a few more moments.
Asking the next question would be horrible, but he evaluated it and decided that not knowing the answer was worse.
“Are we okay?” Richie managed.
“You’re something really special, Richie Goldman.” Melissa rose to her feet, shouldering her duffel as she did so. In the small room, they were now standing just a foot apart.
“But…” he offered because he knew it was over. That he’d blown it with the most amazing woman he’d ever met. Is this what it felt like to be shot, to be the one who caught the round rather than the one who was left standing? The pain was far worse than anything Chad had handed out to him earlier.
She studied him with those infinitely blue eyes.
He could hear Chad and Duane coming down the hall, Chad calling out Richie’s name.
“We never get time do we?” Melissa’s tone was still unreadable.
He shook his head and ignored the twinges of the ill-considered too-fast motion.
A fist thumped on the door. “Ass in gear, buddy. Time to rock.”
Melissa didn’t look away.
“Hang on,” Richie managed without turning, but it came out as a croak, his throat tight before the pending verdict. He managed a deep breath, seeking calm. And he found it in Melissa’s soft scent of icy mountains and warm fires. Whatever other craziness was happening, she was still his Ilsa. Even if she wasn’t anymore. Perhaps especially then as Bogey hadn’t gotten his Ilsa either. He hadn’t liked that ending to the movie.
“Please,” he whispered. “Say that we’re okay.”
“Do something for me, Richie.”
“Anything!” That elicited a small smile.
She patted his cheek, the unbruised side, and smiled a bit sadly as she said, “Don’t worry so much.”
That reference back to their first meeting warned him that their universe had just had its timeline reset all the way back to the beginning as surely as if they had a time machine.
But the soft kiss before she moved by him to open the door gave him reason to hope that this new future still stood a chance.
* * *
“The airfield is very unique for the approaching.” The pilot that Analie Sala had sent to meet them spoke nervously, as he had from the first moment he’d come aboard. He was in Melissa’s seat and she hated that. Hated the loss of control.
She readjusted her headset and crouched between the two pilot seats so that she could see what Richie and Claude Mura—a small Japanese man with a distinct French accent—were seeing.
“You will be making the use of this unique approach and departure route every time you come to this place and you will stay very low for the last fifty miles.”
They’d been dodging the jungle’s treetops for over twenty minutes.
“See? The river? How she bends there?”
Melissa tried to rise up to see where he was pointing and banged her head on the Twin Otter’s low ceiling for the tenth time in this flight alone. They’d left the Orinoco behind five miles ago, flying up the Río Atabapo, which now took a hard turn to the east.
“Go southwest here.”
They made the turn, the last of the setting sun blasting into the cockpit. The horizon was a blaze of orange beneath an indigo-dark sky. Experience told her that in minutes it would be too dark to see where they were landing.
“If you go due west,” Claude continued hurriedly, “you will pass over Inírida. Erreur grave, oui? The military, they have many units there because of FARC.”
Melissa would bet they were flying for the FARC, which made it good advice. The Marxist guerillas of Colombia had been at war with the various national governments since the early 1960s. By the 1970s they were using kidnap and ransom, and illegal mining to finance their operations. Since the 1980s, the bulk of their income had shifted to the massive flow of cocaine out of the country. Whether an ideology existed at all anymore was an unknown.
“See, there.” Claude pointed excitedly and Melissa again banged her head on the plane’s low ceiling.
A tap on her shoulder and she turned to see Chad was close behind her. He had a plastic bin of assorted parts that must weigh close to a hundred pounds though he moved it like it weighed ten. He waved her aside and he slid it into place close between the pilots’ seats. He’d made a seat for her so that she could learn what she needed to in order to support the team.
He watched her steadily for a long moment.
At her careful nod, he returned the same in kind before moving back to his seat.
Maybe Richie hadn’t been lying when he said that he and Chad were okay. She’d cautiously take this plastic bin seat as a peace offering…and see where the future led.
She was now sitting at about the same height as Richie and Claude and could easily pick out what Claude had been pointing out.
The jungle was a low roll in this region. Rather than brutal ridges and carved canyons, the contour of the treetops indicated that a pleasantly rolling set of hills lay somewhere under the green canopy. There were signs of water everywhere, crisscrossing rivers and streams that glinted through the lush foliage.
They had left the land of tepui—vertically-sided mesas with their amazing waterfalls—to the east. Here there was little above the roof of the jungle, except for the trio of abrupt, unforested hills straight ahead of them.
Out of seemingly nowhere, two great mounds of black stone rose five hundred meters above the roof of the jungle and soared up into the sky. Close beside them, a third rose to half again the height. The Río Inírida twisted around their base, reflecting their dark images on its smooth-flowing water. The jungle didn’t climb the steep faces of the three peaks; rather it slammed into the sides and could go no farther.
“Those are seriously weird.”
“You must fly through the Cerros de Mavecure. Between Pajarito and Mono, the Little Bird and the Monkey. They are the tall one and the middle one. You must always do this at night. If you do it in the day, we would have already been shot down, even with the special permission of Analie Sala. Also, do not try to
land if you are not expected. This is tonight’s frequency.” He dialed it into the radio and transmitted just one word, Ibis. “Never leave without first finding that night’s frequency and what bird is the password.”
They flew down into the saddle between the two hills that towered above them.
Melissa had never had the luxury of watching Richie fly without being observed herself. He had become so natural in the seat that it was hard to credit that a week ago neither of them had ever flown such a large or complex aircraft. His motions were assured and steady. He didn’t even look as he reached up to tweak one of the prop controls.
He was the consummate professional trained to a level that few ever achieved. She knew that because it was a level she’d had to fight to achieve herself. She might feel a little less put out if he didn’t make it look so easy right at this particular moment.
His face was awash in the ruddy glow of the last of the sunset, making him about the handsomest man she’d ever seen. And she knew that she was biased now, but she didn’t care. He wasn’t some museum exhibit that was all facade and little substance like most guys. The beautiful outer shell was only enhanced by the inner man.
“There.” Claude forced her attention back to the line of flight.
They had crossed over the saddle between the twin peaks and were once again facing the boundless jungle.
“See those lights?”
And she did. Of the oddest things to find in the middle of the Colombian jungle, airport glide slope VASI lights would have been high on her list. Visual approach slope indicators were paired lights that were designed so that when you were at the right descent angle you could see red lights shining above white lights. If you saw double white, you were too high. You saw red over red, you were about to fly into the ground and be dead. “Red is dead” had been repeated a thousand times by every pilot ever trained.
It was especially strange to find the lights here because—
“Where the heck is the runway?”
* * *
Richie wanted to know exactly the same thing. All he could see was the darkness of the forest canopy.
He spotted a second set of the lights fifty meters to the right, still lost in the darkness of the trees.
Even as he watched, they were shifting to white over white, they were too high.
“No!” Claude shouted. “There is no missed approach allowed on this field. Go down! Now!”
Richie hesitated just a moment, not trusting the man.
Then Melissa pinched the back of his arm sharply, forcing him to jerk his arm forward to get clear of the pain. That shoved the wheel forward and forced him to nose down.
Between Melissa’s reinforcement and Claude’s panicked tone, Richie started pulling power and setting flaps as if they were actually on final approach to a runway he couldn’t see. He was only peripherally aware of Melissa reading down through the checklist for him as he did each task.
“Claude, there is nothing but trees.”
“Trust me, mon ami. It will be aéroport when you need it to be. Just stay between the lights and on the glide path no matter what. Our lives depends on it.”
So Richie continued his descent toward the dark jungle canopy.
“Do I at least get landing lights?”
“Not yet. I will turn them on when you can have them.”
Richie considered apologizing to Melissa because he was about to kill her deep in the Amazon rain forest in a place their bodies would never be found.
“Are we going in on water or land?” He didn’t even know why he bothered asking; they were going into the trees.
“Land.”
He lowered the wheels, flipped off the yaw damper, and double-checked that the propeller’s controls were full forward.
Richie kept to the glide path, terrified each time he saw even the least bit of incorrect color in the lights. It was pure nerve that had him diving into the jungle. That and the suspicion that they’d be shot down if he didn’t.
Delta had taught him plenty about how to handle a crisis—stay loose, stay flexible, accept the moment, and find a way to take advantage of it.
They hadn’t taught him shit about killing his entire team.
He was nearly on top of the glide path lights themselves when Claude flipped on the landing lights. A runway of hard-packed earth appeared not twenty feet below him. He flared the plane hard, dumped power, and got them down alive by some miracle he hoped he never had to repeat.
The runway was in good condition and he dropped speed quickly. The only light was his landing lights reflecting off the dirt. He could see shadows that might have been trees to either side, but beneath their overarching branches was a full airport.
“Where the hell are we?” Melissa voice was soft with wonder.
“You just swore.” He glanced over at her and could see that she was bending down and forward, craning to look upward. Then he looked up himself. “Holy shit!”
Chapter 16
Melissa tried to take in the scale of it all as Richie taxied the plane following Claude’s directions. The runway was crowded to either side by towering trees. Somewhere far above in the darkness, the trees’ crowns probably merged, hiding the runway from view. Any final hints of the last of the sunset were gone.
From the air would be nothing but jungle. Jungle with a big hole at one end where planes must follow glide path lights if they didn’t want to crash. The entire field was hidden except for that one, slanted opening in the trees.
Beneath the jungle canopy lay a small city. She closed her eyes, rubbed them, shook her head, and tried clicking her heels together three times. It didn’t change anything as Richie turned the plane and they taxied to a stop at a place indicated by an actual ground controller signaling with a pair of light sticks, as if they’d just landed at USCG Air Station Clearwater.
In moments the entire team had tumbled out and simply stood and gawked. Even Richie slipping his hand around her waist and pulling her against his side didn’t help her feel any more grounded.
On their side of the runway was a long line of parked airplanes. On the opposite side, winding between the trunks of the canopy giants of jungle trees, lay a softly lit tent city for a hundred people or more. But it wasn’t some slipshod huddle of individual tents. One big canopy tent with open sides covered a long chow line with dozens of picnic tables, most of them filled with people eating their dinner. Maybe the population was closer to two hundred. Next to it was a wooden structure with a broad thatched roof. Rows of chairs and benches were spread around card tables or gathered around a big screen TV, currently showing Bruce Willis dying hard. A small tent sported a large blue-and-white H, marking it as a medical tent. Farther along were large tents that appeared to be barracks housing.
Richie pointed upward and Melissa squinted up into the darkness.
High across the entire runway, great nets had been suspended. Leafy vines were filling in the camo nets.
“They’ve been here a while,” she whispered into the strange silence of the night.
The Tin Goose was now parked in a line with a dozen other planes. There were several small craft, but most were at least twin engine. A trio of Beech King Airs and a Cessna twin were all about half the size of their Twin Otter. Their plane was the second biggest on this side of the packed dirt field, looking particularly oversized and clumsy compared to a pair of sleek small business jets. A midsized, four-engine jet was parked at the farthest end.
She pointed the jets out to Richie and pretended she was a radio announcer. “When your drugs absolutely, positively have to be there overnight.”
“They’re slick. But they all land at around a hundred and fifty miles an hour, we just landed at sixty. I’ll pass.”
“You did it great, Richie.”
“I don’t know, Ilsa.”
Why did she feel goofy
every time he called her that? She and Ingrid Bergman had nothing in common except for some weird connection deep in Richie’s mind. It should make her scoff, but instead she was charmed.
“I wouldn’t want to try doing that again or the Tin Goose just might end up on the other side of this field.”
She followed the direction Richie had indicated.
On the other side of the field were more aircraft, or perhaps large piles of aircraft would be more accurate. A DC-3 fuselage rested belly-flat on the ground with its engines and most of the wings missing. A pair of small Cessna 152 fuselages rested right where its engines were supposed to be. The tail section of a midsize jet lay crossways against a much smaller de Havilland Caribou but there was no sign of the rest of the plane. An Albatross, the big flying boat they’d practiced on in front of the USCG offices, towered over most of the other wreckage, but it had only one wing.
The far side of the field was a drug-runners’ scrap yard. All the planes that hadn’t succeeded on the passage Richie had just flown.
At first it appeared to be a haphazard arrangement, but it was a little too neat and some of the windows had cheery lights shining from the inside even if engines or whole wings were missing. Private residences?
As her eyes grew used to the dim lighting under the trees, she could begin to see the activity of the operation. On their side of the field there were forklifts and golf carts running about with cargo or supplies for different planes.
On the far side, beyond the line of wrecks, workers shuffled back and forth, some moving fast on an errand, some apparently just going about their lives.
A heavy-duty ATV drove up, dragging a trailer with a large, plastic fuel tank.
“Gasolina?” the female driver asked him. She was dressed rough: khakis, boots, and a button-down shirt that wasn’t buttoned up very far.
“I’ll take some of what she’s selling,” Chad whispered to Richie from close behind Melissa.
“Para aviones?” Richie asked the woman, because regular gasoline would be a problem. The Tin Goose used jet fuel.
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