“There are no secure lines anywhere around or in Heathrow the young British police officer said, not the kind I think you are talking about. You would have to go to the American embassy downtown.”
I turned away in frustration and walked back to the King Air, noting that the propellers still rotated at a very slow rate, which seemed odd since the plane didn’t appear to be anything that had been specially equipped.
The captain stepped through what was more a deep cut in the side of the plane’s fuselage rather than a real aircraft doorway. Standing on the tarmac with me, he put both his hands on his hips, as if to invite some confrontation.
“What’s our flight plan and when?” I asked, directly, assuming that the man had had to know what I did not.
The man stared at me for almost a full minute before answering. “Yes, I knew what was going on, and yes, I kept the secret of who the patient was, and yes, I do understand that you are leading this mission.”
I waited, but the man said no more. He hadn’t come close to answering my question, but he had covered the ground I needed to be covered. He’d spoken with a very slight English accent, but that didn’t mean he was a Brit by birth.
“His condition?” I asked, taking a different tack.
“Stable but sedated for the travel,” the captain replied.
“Time?” I said, looking at my watch.
“Now.”
“Destination?”
“Cleveland.”
“Why?”
“Cleveland Clinic.”
“Why?”
“Heart.”
Our short exchanges were rapid fire. The man was capable, laconic, and quick. I wondered where they’d found him and what his position really was, although there was no question he knew how to fly the version of King Air we’d come in on.
“We need consumables. The plane was never supplied with food or drink. Can we raid the airport here for some of that before we lift off?”
“Spot on,” the captain replied. “I’ll get the ship ready to meet the air again.”
I watched the man climb back into the aircraft and disappear. Kingsley and Nguyen hustled the gurney to the open slot where the stairs came down.
“Weird guy,” I whispered to Kingsley as I worked to help him begin the transfer process of getting Denis aboard the small plane, finally letting go and simply serving as the I.V. tower for the bottle of liquid dripping into the man’s arm.
“SAS,” Kingsley said, as if that explained the captain’s odd behavior and speech.
“Special Air Service, yes, I’ve heard. They are quite something, so he’s not one of ours but one of theirs. Interesting mix for this thing, whatever the hell it is. I sure don’t feel like I’m the leader of anything.”
We shuffled Denis aboard; Nash and Quincy had reformed a seat into a bed.
I took a wad of cash out of my pocket and handed it to Nash.
“Head into the airport over there and buy some food and drinks, non-alcoholic,” I ordered. The captain will hold for you.”
“What about customs and all that?” Nash asked, shuffling hundreds into his right front pocket.
“What about them? You see anybody around?”
Nash craned his head around. I hadn’t intended for him to take me seriously that way
“No,” he said.
“No shit,” I replied, “get going, double time.”
Denis was settled in, a spare I.V. bottle pushed into his side ready to replace the one hanging from the cabin wall coat hook.
“What do you suppose he’s going to bring back?” Kingsley asked
I ignored the unanswerable question with my own.
“How in hell is the pilot going to stay awake for another eight-hour run or more?”
“SAS “, we both said to each other at the same time and laughed.
I knew it was unlikely that anyone else, or either of us, would have much of an idea about just how wildly bizarre and intensely trained and experienced SAS members could be.
Who’s going to be aboard to watch over the Prime Minister’s husband?” I mused, more to myself than to Kingsley, who would likely know very little, but he surprised me.
“I talked to the co-pilot, who’s actually more of an intercept officer since the King Air is equipped with advanced avionics. The Prime Minister’s staff is trusting that very capable medical care will be provided for Denis along the way.”
My right hand went up to rub my forehead without my ordering it to. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The leader of a major power and the closest ally to the U.S. had placed her trust in the CIA to save or/take care of her husband, whom she supposedly loved madly. And now, her husband was in the possession of a band of make-believe screwballs assembled to somehow get the obviously seriously ill man to one of the world’s top heart clinics.
“Where’s John Nash?” I asked suddenly. “Get to the entrance over there across the tarmac where he went and get him back here. General Quarters. I want all hands on deck. Our singular goal is to get this aircraft into the air and move at flank speed toward Cleveland. Only time can save him because it’s sure none of us.”
I brushed past Kingsley and raced to the plane. Once inside the cabin, I went straight to the two pilots facing forward in their seats.
“Are we fully loaded with fuel?” I demanded.
The ‘copilot’ turned his head and nodded, looking worried.
“How long to get clearance for takeoff?”
They’re waiting on us,” the left seat pilot said.
I looked out through the left front windshield of the King Air and saw Nash running towards the plane, me managing to carry a load of thin, square boxes as he ran.
I pointed at the glass window. “When he’s aboard, I want this thing in the air as fast as you can get it there and headed for the Ohio target area.”
Nash hit the steps as I turned to help take the stack of boxes from his hands.
“Button us up,” the pilot yelled, as the two big turbines began to spool up and make their blades whirl.
The wheel chocks had been removed earlier if there had been any, because the plane began to move and turn.
“Seats for liftoff,” the captain said.
I tried to enter and push the boxes Nash brought back onto a counter, but there was no time to find a seat. I pressed myself into the countertop instead and waited. There was no clearance talk that I could hear at all, only the screaming whine of the propellers moving ever faster. The plane at first rolled and then was in the air in such a short time that it shocked me.
The cabin floor was still fairly steeply angled upward toward the front of the plane.
“One thousand feet, and ascending…” the captain reported to his copilot out loud.
I slithered into a seat across the aisle from the patient, wondering how long his second I.V. bottle would last because I hadn’t seen any more stuff sent with him on the gurney, which we’d taxied off and left sitting alone on the Heathrow tarmac. Not professional at all, and hopefully would go unnoticed. Transporting the Prime Minister’s husband on a critical flight for life was a bit more important, but the building and sustainability of SOS was now of major importance.
I picked up one of Nash’s boxes and pulled back a corner of the cardboard. Frozen pizza. I groaned. All the plane had was a hotplate. Not a galley, stove, microwave, or any of that. I pulled a chunk of raw frozen pizza out and went to work chewing it. I had no idea what kind of pizza it was; my ability to taste was as screwed up as my ability to understand what the mission was all about. The pizza was simple, but the mission was much more complex.
I almost wished that Weh would have been along, a hard, bright, analytical commander, but then he was not like Nguyen, Kingsley, or me. He was out there like Marcinko…adrift after monstrous alpha male performance but coming home to find no place to apply such ability and life experience in a seemingly pacified world run by those who’d never engaged.
The raw, semi-frozen pizza tasted good, or I was that bad off. I consumed my handful, discarded the box, and crawled on my stomach toward the break in the canvas shelter-halves that allowed for some sort of informal pilot cockpit.
I split the canvas in half with both hands, reared up a bit from the deck, and started asking questions of the pilot, only then realizing I didn’t even know his name.
“Commo,” I got out. “What kind of radio communications does this thing have?” I asked, a globe of the world, like the giant one always revolving in the lobby of the National Geographic building in Washington, revolved in my head.
“We are in contact with Heathrow but will not be handed off to New York until we are past the halfway point,” the copilots replied.
“We’re not going to make Cleveland for twelve or more hours, depending on the winds aloft, but we sure as hell can get Denis to Reykjavík
in Iceland in less than four hours. A Starlifter could depart Andrews and be in Iceland not long after we land. The trip from there to Ohio would be about four and a half hours.”
The copilot conferred in whispers with the SAS pilot.
“What’s your point?” He said, without any expression on his face, like he couldn’t do the math in his head.
“We’ve got a critical patient aboard and we’re going to deliver him in twelve to fifteen or more hours, with refueling. If we go to Iceland right now with a C-141 waiting or close, the patient gets to the clinic in Cleveland in eight hours at the latest. I don’t think any of us want to be on this airplane with the Prime Minister’s dead husband, particularly if they might decide to look into our qualifications or backgrounds, but that all depends on whether you can reach Iceland on the radio and then get Washington to scare up a Starlifter.”
The copilot conferred with the pilot again before turning back to me and giving me an answer.
“Hold on,” he said, as the King Air turned so quickly and abruptly that the deck seemed to fall out from under me. I held on to the canvas flaps and at least stayed on my feet, and quickly came to understand the pilot’s decision. We were going to Iceland. I was about to ask about the cargo plane, but didn’t get a chance to as the copilot pulled off his earphones and handed them to me.
“This is the six actual?” came through the headphones, a masculine voice, flat-toned, patient, waiting.
I was abruptly taken back to radio days and nights in the valley. “Six actual affirmative,” I answered, not truly knowing much of anything but responding in kind.
“Orders?” the steady plain voice asked.
I was taken aback. Someone, some entity with apparent real power, was going to take orders for something substantial from a person who simply claimed to be a ‘six actual?’ I wanted to ask about whom I might be talking to, or if air control was involved, and if there were others on the frequency, but I made the snap decision to go straight to the time problem.
“An Air Force C-141 needs to be on the tarmac, fueled and waiting for the coming arrival,” was what I decided to say.
I waited for a reply, the copilot having turned his attention back to the rather lavish instrument panel in front of him. I noted a large, kind of out-of-place monitor off to his right side near the edge of his window. I presumed it to be part of the ‘intercept’ equipment mentioned earlier.
“The aircraft will be standing by engines hot with no tail number.”
The headphones went silent, and I presumed the captain had cut the connection, so I took off the earphones, tapped the copilot on the shoulder, and handed them back. Whomever was really running the mission was running it with a whole lot more power than I could ever hope to draw on and focus.
I was sleepy, which I shouldn’t be, I knew.
“What’s the altitude in here?” I asked the copilot
“Climbing to thirty-five thousand with interior pressurization set to eleven thousand,” was his answer.
I understood why I was sleepy. No oxygen or at least much less oxygen than normal, even for someone coming from such a high ambient altitude like Albuquerque. I knew the King Air was too small an aircraft to have an APU, or Auxiliary Power Unit, like commercial airliners had, which meant that the pressurization was being drawn off the small but powerful twin turbines, which also meant that the pressure was diminished to those engines and therefore need to be the least parasitic as might be affordable for passenger and crew comfort. Hence, the very high relative altitude inside the aircraft caused me to be sleepy.
The rest of my team was asleep already, some no doubt having consumed a good bit of the frozen pizza John had brought back. He’d proven that a big, six-foot-five-inch Caucasian with short hair wearing faded green scrubs would not be stopped or encountered by regular airport security. That part of the mission was proven again. I also realized that the number of people who would come to know about the medical problems assisted by ISOS would be very small, unless he died. That meant that the credit for his salvage, if it was to be, would never reach the eyes and ears of the usual regulators and overseers, field agents, and missions might be accustomed to receiving. But the training and the holes in the system revealed in the evacuation of Denis would be invaluable in the future. There had to be some medical training for the crew. The bogus evacuee might not always be bogus, and those real patients would deserve better.
I slept the flight to Iceland, the pilot never choosing to back down from the emergency nature of the mission, which was in the best interests of the patients but possibly not the crew. The crew, however, was expendable, including myself, but the patient wasn’t. Margaret Thatcher was going to owe a massive debt to the U.S. if her husband recovered and the secret of his being saved was kept. Either that or the U.S. already owed her big time, and I did not know. Iraq was beginning to talk tough stuff about annexing Kuwait and taking all the oil, not just the fields it already had. Might that play a role in what we were doing? I faded into the oxygen-deprived sleep, vaguely wondering if Denis would not suffer from the depletion as well, and why no oxygen bottle was provided, or an additional I.V. bottle for that matter. The transfer in a few hours might just be the thing that saved his life, given the Starlifter had sufficient medical staff, drugs, and medical paraphernalia aboard.
The arrival was without emotion or fanfare. Two people, who looked like professional medical personnel, stood with a gurney. The Starlifter’s tail cargo ramp was down. Between all of us, we got Denis out of the King Air and onto the gurney. I noted to the two attendants that his I.V. bottle was empty. They took his vitals quickly but said nothing, merely taking off and guiding the gurney to the ramp. Kingsley was made to help them, but I pulled him back.
“We’re done here, and hopefully the pros will do the kind of job we have to get SOS ready for in the future. Let’s get into the air. At least he won’t have died in our plane.”
“Cold conclusion but very true,” Kingsley replied, as we climbed the small stairs and closed up the King Air.
Once the refueling was done, we flew out on the day after tomorrow and back into seeming reality when and where the mission kicked off. The flight was long back to Albuquerque with one refueling stop along the way in Tennessee. None of the stops along the way allowed for sightseeing or much of anything else. Defrosted pizza, heated by the slice on the plane’s single hotplate, was the fare with strange, bottled water Nash had picked up in only a sparing quantity. The plane’s water tank had not been filled in the rush to get it ready for the mission. There was a brief manual on the airplane aboard. I read it with interest. The plane had to be in for maintenance every two hundred hours of operation. I wondered what that cost. Our flights alone, with the flight from the factory included, added up to half the time toward the first service. For all its value, I wondered if the CIA would find the cost worth it, after factoring in the price of piloting and staffing, food, and more.
It was daytime and under a full hot sun when we landed in Albuquerque.
Of all people to greet us, Allen Weh stood out, his hands on his hips and a scowl covering every millimeter of his face. I climbed down the stairs to meet him as the turbines spooked down. The plane would be towed into the hangar and not taxied in, as was done only in the movies. All kinds of flammable liquids and gases were to be found in most hangars.
The pilot and the copilot departed the hangar and walked off toward the larger part of the airport.
“Who were those guys piloting my plane?” Weh said, looking at their departing backs, “And where are they going?”
“SAS,” I replied, “No doubt supplied by the British government.”
“Who the hell was on the flight, or I should say flights, that could have made that happen? They needed clearance from Charter Services to fly this plane,” he said, although there was no strength in his tone or words.
I didn’t answer any of his questions. After staying awake for the entire return trip from Iceland and participating in the mission, I was dead tired. I just wanted to get back home and fill in my wife, although I was unsure just how much I should relate.
“What’s this thing like inside?” he asked, as both of us watched Nash, Quincy, Nguyen, and Kingsley climb down the steps and then stand in a rough circle, not paying attention to either Weh or me.
“I’ve got to get to the office,” I said, needing to get to a secure line as fast as I could. I didn’t know who was talking to whom about what had happened, but I understood with certainty that I needed to know.
“Your Rover’s here where you left it,” Weh commented, examining the rather dirty outer aluminum skin of the King Air from a distance. “Gather your horde of whatever the hell they are and go. It’s my plane, your rental, and God knows who owns it.”
“Are you comfortable with all this?” I asked, just blurting the question out.
“I’m comfortable in the air and running my own company,” Weh replied, answering so fast that it didn’t seem like he’d given the question much thought at all. “I’m not comfortable with you, but I then I don’t think I ever will be.”
I turned to join my men, fully realizing that the man had given me the same answer I would have given him if the situation were reversed. Our minds were side by side in so many ways, but moving near the speed of light, quite distant from one another.
Kingsley drove while I sat in the passenger seat, somehow relegated to being a copilot instead of the main guy. It was okay. I had to reach Tony and get hold of the budget. There had been no preparation or planning for the surprise mission, but the importance of it and its success were huge. Had Denis made it to the clinic, and was he okay because of what we’d pulled off? Was it all still hush-hush, and what was the availability of cash to pay my team with, and more? Above all, I needed a plan. My children were growing, my wife was in full bloom of approaching middle age, and the projects I was supposedly in control of were in control of me.
When we reached the office, I went inside and immediately put a call in to Tony. He came right on the line, which meant that he was waiting for my report.
“Your first run was a smashing success, I hear,” he began, but that was as far as he got.
“Whatever that was,” I began, before taking a deep breath to control my growing anger, “It was more of a mission than anything else. The first run, as you put it, pales in comparison to what went on out there. Now, please listen carefully, I will never impersonate a doctor or have any of my people do it if a real patient is involved. I fully believe that the Brits thought that they were shipping the Prime Minister’s husband, and I presume he’s alive, with a fully capable and qualified medical team. That man could have died on that flight, and murder one or two would certainly be applied to me and others on the flight, not to mention being forever the guys who killed the Prime Minister’s husband.”
“Settle down,” Tony said, but his voice was soft when he said it. I knew he knew I was right, or ‘spot on’ as the SAS guy would have said.
“You made it work, and that’s what we were counting on.”
“No, you were counting on what those people at the Western White House were counting on,” I said, wanting to get off the subject now and get money to pay the guys. “If something terrible happened, the Secretary would sure as hell disavow ever having heard of or knowing me.”
“There’s some truth to that,” Tony replied, his voice gaining in strength. “What is it you want and need now?”
I worked my breathing in and out to relax as he waited patiently, probably knowing I was trying to pull myself together.
“No more unqualified people unless it’s all an act. No foreign nationals flying the planes as they are not controllable, as they work for a different master, and twenty grand for each of my men and me. We’re broke,” I lied.
“In cash?” Tony asked, and I knew I had him.
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