Shayne tried questioning Moss about who had organized the hijacking, but Moss turned the questions with a vague smile.
“It’s not like a truth drug,” the co-pilot explained. “It just takes off their edge.”
“Sit down, Moss,” Shayne said.
Smiling engagingly, Moss slipped down the wall to a sitting position on the floor.
“It seems to work,” Shayne said dubiously. “How long until it wears off?”
Clancy shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. I only had to use it once, and the guy was still behaving himself an hour later. We hit Maiquetia in fifteen minutes, which gives us plenty of leeway.”
“Get me a couple more of those syringes. I’ve got another problem out in the cabin.”
Clancy stepped into the crew compartment. Shayne turned back to Lassiter.
“Joe, remember the girl you had drinks with last night?”
“Vaguely. Why?”
“Who made the first move? Her roommate had visitors later. They knew they’d find her alone.”
Lassiter’s shoulders lifted. “I believe in mixing with the passengers. It’s not part of the charter, but I do what I can to make the trip memorable. I’m a slob that way-after a given amount of Scotch, they all look like Elizabeth Taylor. Last night there was quite a bit of coming and going.” Sue Cornelius, the stewardess, entered nervously with a silver tray. She shied back from Shayne in his grotesque mask and looked in surprise at Jimmy Moss relaxing on the floor.
Moss grinned up at her. “Honey, from this angle you’ve got the nicest pair of stilts on this airline. Is one of those drinks for me?”
“No,” Shayne said.
He emptied the two bottles over the ice and handed a glass to Lassiter.
“Captain, are you sure you ought to-” the stewardess began.
“I’ve had a lunatic holding a gun to the back of my neck for the last ten minutes,” Lassiter said, “and I’m vibrating more than the Goddamned airplane.” He drained the glass in one long swallow. “Which is vibrating more than usual, it seems to me. What’s it like in the galley? Are you feeling a kind of drag?”
“I didn’t notice anything.”
“A sort of downward yank to the left.” He took a quarter turn on the stabilizer. “There it is again.”
Clancy, returning to the cockpit, handed Shayne two syringes. “Captain, shouldn’t we take another look through the drift meter? If one of those baggage hatches has sprung open-”
Lassiter set the autopilot button. The drift meter was a periscope-like device which snapped into position between the seats when a catch was released. Lassiter brought the eyepiece up into position and squinted into it. He grunted.
“Open?” Clancy said quickly.
“Ease back on the throttles. More. A bit more. The Goddamned pod is three-quarters out of the compartment. I’m going to try something.”
He snapped off the auto pilot, peering out the windshield, down and to the right. During the last few minutes the clouds had thinned into ragged ribbons of mist. Shayne saw a low-lying coastline and the mouth of a big river.
He tore off his mask. Crouching, he applied his eye to the drift meter. The long coffin-shaped container protruding from the plane’s belly was the one that had held the gold.
“Why not dump it, Joe?” the co-pilot said. “The insurance will cover. If it kicks out over land we may kill somebody.”
“No, there’s something funny about this. I mean that explosion back there. Tell me what happens, Mike.”
He gave the engines a sudden goose, kicked the pedals, and banked sharply. But the pod had already moved to its exact point of balance, and the sudden twist, instead of sending it back safely into the plane, shot it out and away.
Shayne watched it fall, tumbling end over end until it splashed into the water some fifty yards offshore.
“Lost it,” he said, lifting his head. “Clancy, I want a fix on where it went in, as close as you can get it.”
“That’s like seventy-five or a hundred feet of water,” Lassiter said. “Do you really want to bother?”
“I really do,” Shayne said.
The stewardess breathed, “Mike Shayne!”
“Don’t spread it around.” He pulled the mask over his head. “Didn’t somebody tell me you think I’m sexy?”
“Not in that,” the girl retorted, and left the cockpit.
Shayne leaned past Lassiter to look down as the dense tropical foliage of northern Venezuela ran past beneath them.
“Where did he tell you to land?”
“An airstrip in the oilfields,” Lassiter told him, “but I know that strip. It wasn’t built for this big a plane. I see the way your mind is working, but let’s not, huh? I’ll put down at Maiquetia, where they expect us, and we can tell our story. Much safer. Much better all around.”
“Clancy, get another couple of Scotches up here for Joe. We’re going to land on that airstrip.”
“Like hell we are,” Lassiter said. “I’m captain of this airplane, and we’re landing in comfort and safety at a modern airfield with up-to-date radar and good communications. I’m not that interested in rounding up a few guerrillas. If it comes to that, I sympathize with them. This government’s Godawful.”
Shayne broke off the plastic tip of one of the syringes. “Jimmy Moss is no guerrilla.”
“I am, in a way,” Moss said from the floor. “But I’ve got my own methods.”
Darting the needle at the side of Lassiter’s neck, Shayne depressed the plunger. Lassiter started up.
“I know what you’re trying to do! But you won’t get away with it!”
The anger drained out of his face and he concluded, sitting back, “Well, it’s going to be a tight landing, but just as you say, Mike.”
“Can you raise the Maiquetia tower?” Shayne said to Clancy. “Tell them we’re making an emergency landing and to get a company of infantry up here as fast as they can because we’ve been hijacked by the National Liberation Front. Then break off and don’t answer any questions.”
They passed over a huddle of derricks on the bank of a river. Lassiter put the plane into a slow bank to the left.
“See that little ribbon of Scotch tape down there?” he said happily. “It’s a real challenge.”
Picking up the PA microphone, he called, “Going in for a landing. You’re about to see a picturesque portion of Venezuela that’s not on the regular tour. We are now in oil country. Never mind fastening your seat belts, because, if we don’t make it on the first pass, we won’t make it at all. But we’ll make it. If I can keep from hitting those derricks, I think we’ll be fine.” Clicking off the mike, he told Clancy, “Drop the gear. Then give me the flaps. Gradually.”
“We’ll still be going one-seventy, Skipper-”
“So we’ll lose a few doors. You said a very deep thing a couple of minutes ago-let the insurance company worry.”
Shayne left the cockpit. The passengers seemed rigid with fear. When he passed Naomi Savage, she said bitterly, “You know you’ll be shot for this.”
He didn’t reply. The Brazilian in the galley was conscious, leaning on his elbows staring up balefully at Ward.
The Negro said quietly, “Are we in control of the plane, or are they?”
“I still don’t know,” Shayne said, stripping the plastic guard from the syringe. “We’ll find out when we land.”
The Brazilian, seeing what was coming, tried to shield his face from the needle, and Shayne injected him in the back of the wrist.
“We’re all friends,” Shayne told him. “Follow me and don’t say anything. Do as I tell you. Ten minutes from now we’ll be having a drink to celebrate.”
The Brazilian asked a puzzled question in Portuguese. Shayne repeated his instructions, but the man still didn’t understand. One effect of the drug had been to knock all the English language out of his head.
“Send Christa back here,” Shayne told Ward. “Then, for God’s sake, get rid of that clerical collar.”
Christa hurried down the aisle.
“Do you speak Portuguese?” Shayne demanded without preliminary.
“Mike!” she exclaimed. “You know-I wondered when I saw those shoulders. Portuguese, yes. Well enough.”
“Tell this guy I want him to do exactly what I say. To stick close to me and keep his mouth shut. When I want him to do something, I’ll use sign language.”
She nodded. “But I don’t want to make any mistakes. I’d better understand what you’re doing.”
“Making it up as I go along, as usual,” he said abrasively. “We’re being met. I want to find out where they take us. He’s tranquilized, but I want him to understand that I’m the boss. And ask him if he has another mask. He must have brought one for Thompson.”
She nodded again, thought for a moment, and broke into a stream of Portuguese. The Brazilian, looking up at Shayne, beamed with pleasure. “Sim, sim.” He pulled another monster mask out of his pocket. “Thompson. Pois sim.”
Shayne tossed it to Ward when he came back, wearing a black turtleneck.
“Hang on, boys and girls!” Lassiter yelled over the public address.
Shayne saw Naomi Savage watching him, her eyes narrowed. The plane touched down, bounced high in the air, and came down again. Shayne gestured to the Brazilian, who leaped to his feet, eager to start cooperating. Shayne took a loop in the neck of the mail bag and brought it with him.
The plane skidded the last fifty feet with locked wheels, slewing around and coming to a stop less than half a length from the end of the asphalt. Lassiter met Shayne at the head of the aisle.
“You may not know it, but that was a pretty piece of flying.”
“Not bad at all,” Moss agreed, behind him.
Shayne pushed the door open. A battered pickup was racing down the strip.
“Moss,” Shayne said crisply. “Everything’s going to go just the way you planned it. Who’s in charge of the truck?”
“Guy named Nikko. A Greek. And talk about wild men.”
The truck skidded under the wing and pulled up below the open door. Three men burst out of the front seat. All three were dressed in splotched green-and-brown coveralls, with full beards and wraparound dark glasses. One of them began unloading a ladder.
“Viva the NLF!” one of the others yelled, waving his submachine gun, a battered German Schmeisser.
Ward said in a low voice, “That’s a lot of fire power there, Mike. I think we ought to stop it.”
“Too late,” Shayne said as the ladder dropped into place.
He motioned to Moss. After an instant’s hesitation, Ward followed Moss out the door. Naomi Savage, running up the aisle, stumbled against Shayne before there was room for him on the ladder. As he thrust her off, she pressed a crumpled piece of paper into his hand.
Two of the bearded men were unloading luggage containers while the third, a big, smelly man with a broad chest and powerful bare forearms, hurried them along with sweeps of his submachine gun. Shayne threw the mail sack into the back of the truck.”
“That you, Nikko?” he said. “We had a little trouble. I think they got off a radio message before I smashed the set.”
“Christ,” Nikko said hoarsely. “Then we hurry, eh?”
Shayne’s men, Ward and the two tranquilized hijackers, jumped in the back of the truck to load the pods as they came out of the plane. One of the guerrillas yelled something in a language Shayne didn’t understand, certainly not Spanish.
“Only two containers?” Nikko said. “There were to be three.”
“I don’t know about that,” Shayne said. “I do know we’d better get the hell out of here.”
Nikko signaled and the men mounted.
“In front, Thompson,” he told Shayne.