The hangar doors were wide open. Two white gliders sat pushed against the rear wall, their wings overlapping like the carcasses of giant birds awaiting the arrival of a taxidermist. Otherwise the building was empty.
Could you actually fly to Phuket in one of these things? I had heard that gliders stayed up for hours when the conditions were right, but the only time I had seen one airborne it had been mostly going in circles and that was something I was already doing fine all on my own.
I took a few steps toward the back of the hanger and examined the two gliders more closely. They were odd aircraft, awkward and beautiful at the same time. Their fuselages were thin cylinders, just wide enough to hold two people sitting in single file under an elongated Plexiglas bubble, and their wings were long and spindly, impossibly fragile-looking. From the nose of each plane a huge steel ring extended up and forward, and I assumed that was where the tow rope was hooked up to the powered aircraft that hauled them several thousand feet into the air where they were then cut loose to make their own silent way back to earth.
While I was unhappily contemplating the place on each plane where the engines should have been, a miniature door in the right-hand wall of the hangar squeaked open. A woman leaned in and beckoned to me. She was tiny, probably weighing not more than a hundred pounds, and her gray hair was neatly bobbed. I might normally have taken the woman to be somewhere in her sixties, but the brown coveralls and black work boots she wore and the red bandana on which she was wiping her grease-stained hands made me wonder.
I walked toward her and when I got closer I saw the red stitching over the right breast pocket of her coveralls.
Ike, it said.
“Okay, hotshot,” she snapped. Let’s kick the tires and light the fires.”
Well, wasn’t that wonderful? Grandma Moses here was about to take me flying in an airplane with no engine.
“You’re Ike?” I asked.
“No son, I’m the fuckin’ Easter Bunny.”
I glanced back and forth between Ike and the two gliders for a moment, but then I gave up al hope of salvation and just pointed toward the gliders. “You want me to help you pull one of these out?”
Ike snorted in disgust and stalked away, leaving the little door standing open for me.
“Not those, hotshot,” I heard her say from somewhere outside. “We’re taking the tow plane. It’s back here.”
The tow plane was a yellow Piper Cherokee with a white stripe down its side. It looked old and a little tired and there was a big dent right in the middle of the vertical stabilizer. On the other hand, there was something about it that I liked a lot: it had an engine.
Ike did a quick walk around, wiggling the wing flaps and poking at some other parts I couldn’t identify. When she actually did kick the tires, I almost laughed out loud. Eventually, Ike pulled herself up on the wing, climbed from there into the cockpit, and strapped herself into the left seat. I followed, the duffle bag slung over my shoulder.
Strapping myself into the right-hand seat and stowing the duffle under my feet, I slammed the cabin door and snapped the bolt into what I hoped was the locked position. Ike fired the starter and a couple of minutes later she was gunning the engine and dancing down the bumpy asphalt strip. We were airborne.
The little plane climbed out quickly, its engine pulling more powerfully than I would have thought possible for its size. Below us was a monotonous configuration of brown and green sheets streaked with shards of muddy water. They were rice fields mostly: long, narrow strips laid out between widely spaced roads like the lanes in a giant’s bowling alley. The flat, marshy land surrounding the delta of the Chao Phraya River was an ideal place for growing rice. Building a city there, on the other hand, was a different matter entirely.
After a few minutes we popped like a champagne cork out of a marmalade-colored layer of crud and Ike leveled off in deep blue skies that seemed to go on forever. She nudged our course to the west, pointing us directly across the narrowest part of the Gulf of Thailand and toward the neck of land about fifty miles on the other side that connected Thailand with Malaysia far to the south. Off on our right, Bangkok spread all the way to the horizon. The place was a colossus, a thick forest of towering, mostly egg white buildings that choked the marshy plains as far as the eye could see. When you were on the ground, the city enveloped you, taking away your sense of perspective. Only from the air could you grasp the magnitude of it, and it never failed to overwhelm me.
Ike didn’t seem to have anything to say, so I kept quiet as well. We had flown in silence southward along the western edge of the Gulf of Thailand for almost an hour when I spotted the virtually uninhabited necklace of limestone islands that made up the Angthong National Park. As we came abeam of the islands, Ike pushed the Cherokee’s nose to the west and we headed inland over what I was pretty sure was the town of Surat Thani. Tracking to the southwest, we crossed over the isthmus toward the Andaman Sea where Phuket lay just off the coast.
Ike reached out, twisted some dials on the instrument panel, and pulled down the microphone.
“Phuket Center, Cherokee Hotel Sierra Golf Zulu X-ray is with you inbound thirty miles north of the airport at five thousand with negative traffic.”
“Hey, Ike. How’re you this morning?” an American-accented voice responded. “Ah… nothing in our pattern at this time, but we’re painting a northbound Thai heavy climbing through flight level one two zero at four miles ten o’clock of your position. There’s also a Bangkok Airways Otter about one four miles to your six o’clock at eleven thousand.”
Ike bent down and twisted her head to look up through the Cherokee’s left window.
“Got the heavy, Center. Zulu X-ray out.”
“Roger, Ike. Contact Phuket tower on one twenty three point seven. Have a nice day. Phuket Center out.”
“That didn’t sound like a Thai on the radio to me,” I said.
Ike’s eyes flicked over at me. “You’re not nervous, are you, hotshot?”
“No, I’m… yes, of course I am.”
Ike nodded as if that satisfied her, then she reached across and patted me on the knee.
“Relax, son. Aviation talk’s always in American. Prab went to the University of Oklahoma. Take it from me, he’s as Thai as tai chi.”
“Tai chi is Chinese.”
“You know what I mean.”
The fragile limestone stacks and placid surface of Phangnga Bay were coming up just left of our nose and beneath us was an unbroken carpet of mangrove trees.
“The Phuket airport doesn’t seem to be a great place for me to slip onto the island without being seen,” I said to Ike with what I hoped was an appropriately diplomatic note in my voice.
“It’s not. That’s why you’re not going there.”
“But weren’t you just talking to somebody about landing there?”
“Yep, because I’m going there. Just trust me, son. You’re in good hands.”
I figured Ike would explain what that was supposed to mean when she was good and ready.
Below us I watched the Phuket highway twisting south toward the Sarasin Bridges, the twin roadways that were the island’s only connection to the mainland. Off to the left Krabi’s famous beaches were strung out like pearls tucked into pockets of green satin. Waterfalls gushed down from the low mountains and in some places I could track the course of the rushing streams through the thick jungle canopy until they reached its edge and fell into the sea.
Ike changed some numbers on her dials again and took down the microphone.
“Ah… Phuket Tower, this is Cherokee Hotel Sierra Golf Zulu X-ray with you. I may have a little problem here.”
I stopped admiring the beaches and waterfalls and started listening very carefully.
“Go ahead, Zulu X-ray.”
“I’ve got a rough engine and… ah, I’m losing power pretty fast.”
The engine sounded okay to me. I looked at Ike sitting placidly to my left.
“Are you declaring an emergency, Zulu X-ray?”
“Negative, Phuket Tower. Not at this time.” Ike absent-mindedly keyed the mike three or four times. “Let me stay with it and see what happens. Be advised that I’m losing altitude and may be off your radar shortly.”
Ike pushed the nose of the Cherokee over gently, nudged our course back toward the east, and settled into a gradual descent in the general direction of Phangnga Bay.
“Can you make the field, Zulu X-ray?”
It was a different voice on the radio this time.
“Ah… say again, Phuket Tower. You’re breaking up.”
I’d heard every word. The radio sounded fine to me.
“I asked if you can make the field, Ike.”
“Cannot copy, Phuket Tower. Repeat. Zulu X-ray cannot copy.”
Ike reached for a toggle switch on the instrument panel to the right of the radio. When she flipped it, the dials went dark. Then she turned to me and winked.
With a snap of her wrists on the control wheel, Ike rolled the Cherokee up onto its left wing until we were ninety degrees to the horizon and then she peeled off like a World War II dive bomber making an attack run on a battleship. Another snap of Ike’s wrists and the little plane leveled off about fifty feet above the water. Before I could say anything, she banked through a hundred and eighty degrees and crossed inland over a beach. Then she banked steeply again just above the tree line and a short, empty stretch of asphalt road abruptly loomed up in the rainforest right in front of us.
As we roared over the end of the road, Ike hauled the plane’s nose up to a forty-five degree angle and jerked on a lever between our seats that looked a great deal like a parking brake but which I devoutly hoped wasn’t anything of the sort. Her right hand shot straight out, chopping off the throttle, and as the engine dropped to a purr I heard first the left and then the right landing gear squeal onto the road.
Ike pumped her toe brakes a few times and the little plane stopped rolling almost immediately. Gunning the throttle while she held one brake, Ike spun the Cherokee smartly on its left gear until it was lined up on the roadway pointing back in the direction from which we had just landed.
She reached over, popped my harness release, and shoved open the passenger door. The pulsing of the plane’s engine filled the cabin as she leveled her index finger toward the wing. I got the idea quickly enough and scrambled out, dragging my duffle bag.
“Don’t fall in the prop, son!”
Ike slammed the door shut behind me and I slid off the wing to the ground just as the engine gave another roar and the Cherokee began its take-off roll away from me. The whine of its engine made it sound like a very large and angry lawnmower and I clapped both hands over my ears to avoid the worst of the racket.
That was why I didn’t hear the jeep as it drove up behind me.
“She’s a hell of a pilot, yes?” a man’s voice shouted over the noise.
I turned around and saw a man wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette slumped over the steering wheel of an open jeep that was dented and covered with dried mud. His accent was thick and French and sounded like stale smoke.
“Now she’ll call the little fuckers in the tower with some stupid story about dirt in her fuel or some shit like that and then fly right on into Phuket just like nothing ever happened. Nobody will ever know she was here.” The man shook his head in admiration. “Big balls for an old lady. Big balls.”
I walked around the jeep and pulled myself up into the passenger seat. Pushing my bag onto the floor, I looked the man over. At a glance I took him for forty-five, maybe fifty. Fit looking and wiry with a bit of a burn on his face and forearms, his hair was very long and gray and it hung in a thick mop down to his shoulders. He was wearing a crisp khaki shirt with epaulets, matching shorts, and ankle boots with floppy green socks.
“Welcome to Phuket, Professeur. Just think of this as Casablanca with no fucking heroes.”
The man straightened up, flicked away his cigarette, and threw me a professional-looking salute.
“I’m Captain Tom, a genuine civilian no longer affiliated with any military unit, government agency, or other form of socially oppressive organization.”
“Captain of what?” I asked.
“Ah well, merde…”
The man shrugged in that elaborate sort of way that only looks right on a Frenchman.
“They used to call me Major Tom, but that sounded too bourgeois so I busted myself down to captain.”
Christ, another one.
The man checked his watch. “Enough of the small talk, Professeur. We shall go, no?”