Jesus, has she heard about this diplomat's wife? Did Mrs. Winters hear about it already, and tell her?
"Abuela, nobody's going to kidnap me."
"Just be careful, Carlos, is all I'm saying."
"Si, Abuela."
"I'll say a prayer for you."
"Thank you."
"Vaya con Dios, mi amor," Dona Alicia said, and hung up.
III
[ONE] Aeropuerto Internacional Ministro Pistarini de Ezeiza Buenos Aires, Argentina 0615 22 July 2005 Aerolineas Argentinas proved to be much more accommodating about luggage than Delta had been. Just as soon as Castillo had stepped aboard through the main cabin door, a steward had offered to take his briefcase on wheels from him.
"I can store it with the coats, sir," the steward said. "Save you from having to hoist it into the overhead bin."
This courtesy was followed as soon as he took his seat in the first-class compartment of the Boeing 767; a stewardess appeared with a tray of champagne glasses.
He took one, even though he told himself he didn't need it after the three drinks he'd had in the Club of the Americas.
He hadn't needed the glass of merlot that came with the appetizers just as soon as they reached cruising altitude, either, but he took that, and a second glass with the entree-a nice little filet mignon, served with roasted potatoes. And the glass of brandy he had with the camembert and crackers dessert wasn't needed, either.
When the movie came on, he thought the odds were that in a couple of minutes he would doze off and sleep the sleep of the Half-Crocked and More or Less Innocent most of the way across the Southern Hemisphere.
Nothing wrong with that. Unless you're sitting in the left seat in the cockpit, that's the only way to fly: unconscious.
He didn't fall asleep. It was a Mel Gibson movie; Gibson was playing the role of a prosperous businessman whose kid was kidnapped.
Well, let's see how he handles this; maybe I'll learn something, Castillo thought as he pushed the overhead button to summon a stewardess to order another brandy. Castillo thought Gibson was a fine actor. He had played, very credibly, the role of light colonel Hal Moore in the movie version of the book We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, written by Moore and Joe Galloway.
Castillo had read the book, the story of what had happened to one of the first battalions of paratroopers who had been converted to air assault-helicopter inserted-troops at Fort Benning, and then followed them to Vietnam, where some nitwit in the First Cav had inserted them in the wrong place and almost gotten them wiped out.
It was nonfiction, and he'd bought the book because he'd heard that Galloway-who had been at Fort Benning and then gone to Vietnam with the battalion-had done a good job describing the early days of Army aviation, and he thought it might tell him something about what the late WOJG Jorge Alejandro Castillo, boy chopper jockey, had gone through before he bought the farm. And because he knew the light bird battalion commander Galloway had written about-Moore-had wound up with three stars; there had to be a lesson in that alone.
He'd really liked the book, and had taken a chance and gone to see the movie. He almost never went to war movies; most of them were awful. The ones that didn't make you laugh made you sick.
The Soldiers movie had been as good as the book. He thought it was just about as realistic as the movie version of Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden's book on the disaster that hit the special operators in Mogadishu in 1993, and he had viewed that one with the expert eye of someone who'd been flying a Blackhawk in Somalia at the time.
And Castillo thought tha
t Gibson's portrayal of the battalion commander was right on the money. Gibson's portrayal of the distressed father was very credible, too. Gibson was being forced to make the very tough call between not paying the ransom, or following the advice of the FBI and the cops-and his hysterical wife, the mother of the child-to pay it. When a stewardess gently woke him to offer orange juice, Castillo was more than a little annoyed-if not very surprised-to realize that he had fallen asleep before Gibson had made the tough call.
That last glass of brandy did you in. Now you'll never know what Gibson decided.
I wonder what he did decide?
What the hell would I do in his shoes?
Jesus, it's only a movie.
But you're about to get close to a real kidnapping.
Let this missing the end of the movie be a lesson to you, Charley me boy.
Now you're working. Lay off the booze.