By Order of the President (Presidential Agent 1)

When Lease-Aire acquired an airplane—their fleet had never exceeded four aircraft at one time; they now owned two: this 727, and a Lockheed 10-11 they’d just bought from Northwest—they stripped off the airline paint job, reregistered it, and painted on the new registration numbers.

Then the aircraft was offered for sale. If they couldn’t find someone to buy it at a decent profit, the plane was offered for charter—“wet” (with fuel and crew and Lease-Aire took care of routine maintenance) or “dry” (the lessee provided the crew and fuel and paid for routine maintenance)— until it came close to either an annual or thousand-hour inspection, both of which were very expensive. Then the airplane was parked again at Philadelphia and offered for sale at a really bargain-basement price. If they couldn’t sell it, then it made a final flight to a small airfield in the Arizona desert, where it was cannibalized of salable parts.

Lease-Aire had been in business five years. LA-9021 was their twenty-first airplane. Sometimes they made a ton of money on an airplane and sometimes they took a hell of a bath.

It seemed to Vice President MacIlhenny they were going to take a hell of a bath on this one. Surf & Sun Holidays Ltd. had telephoned ten days before their sixty-day charter contract was over, asking for another thirty days, check to follow immediately.

The check didn’t come. A cable did, four days later, saying LA-9021 had had to make a “precautionary landing” at Luanda, Angola, where an inspection had revealed mechanical failures beyond those which they were obliged to repair under the original contract. And, further, that inasmuch as the failures had occurred before the first contract had run its course, Surf & Sun Holidays would not of course enter into an extension of the original charter contract.

In other words, your airplane broke down in Luanda, Angola. Sorry about that but it’s your problem, not ours.

When Terry, who handled the business end of Lease-Aire, had tried to call Surf & Sun Holidays Ltd. at their corporate headquarters in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss the matter, he was told the line was no longer in service.

On his first trip to Luanda, MacIlhenny had stopped in Glasgow to deal with them personally. There had been sheets of brown butcher paper covering the plate-glass store-front windows of Surf & Sun Holidays Ltd.’s corporate headquarters, with FOR RENT lettered on them in Magic Marker.

In Luanda, he had quickly found what had failed on LA- 9021: control system hydraulics. It was a “safety of flight” problem, which meant MacIlhenny could not hire a local to sit in the right seat while he made a “one-time flight” to bring it home. He had also found that most of the seats were missing. Parts—from seats to hydraulics—were often readily available on the used parts market, if you had the money. Lease-Aire was experiencing a temporary cash-flow problem.

Terry had wanted to go after the Surf & Sun bastards for stealing the seats and abandoning the aircraft, make them at least make the repairs so MacIlhenny could go get the sonofabitch and bring it home. MacIlhenny’s sister had sided with her husband.

The cash-flow problem had lasted a lot longer than anyone expected, and the price of the needed parts was a lot higher than MacIlhenny anticipated, so thirteen months passed before he and four crates of parts finally managed to get back to Luanda and he could put the sonofabitch together again.

As he took the few steps from the cockpit door to the passenger compartment, MacIlhenny had an almost pleasant thought:

If these guys steal this airplane, we can probably collect on the insurance.

And then he saw the local pilot who had come on board LA-9021 expecting to pick up a quick five hundred dollars sitting in the right seat for an hour or so while MacIlhenny took the plane on a test hop. He was sitting in the third— now last—row right aisle seat. His hands were in his lap, tightly bound together with three-inch-wide yellow plastic tape. His ankles were similarly bound, and there was tape over his eyes.

“We will release him, Captain,” the first man with the Uzi said, “when, presuming you have cooperated, we release you.”

“I’m going to do whatever you want me to do, sir,” MacIlhenny said.

“Why don’t we get going?” the man with the Uzi said.

He stepped out of the aisle to permit MacIlhenny to walk past him.

MacIlhenny went into the cockpit, and, for the first time, could see the second man.

I guess there’s only two of them. I didn’t see anybody else back there.

The man now sitting in the copilot’s seat looked very much like the first man with the Uzi, and he was also wearing an open-collared white shirt with Air Crew shoulder boards.

The right ones, too, with the three stripes of a first officer —formerly copilot.

The copilot gestured for MacIlhenny to take the pilot’s seat.

As he slipped into it, MacIlhenny saw that the copilot had the checklist in his hand and that there were charts on the sort of shelf above the instrument panel. MacIlhenny couldn’t see enough of them to have any idea what they were.

And I can’t even make a guess where we’re going.

MacIlhenny strapped himself into the seat, and then, feeling just a little foolish, raised his right hand.

“You have a question, Captain?” the man with the Uzi asked.

“Am I going to fly or is this gentleman?”

“You’ll fly,” the man with the Uzi said. “He will serve as copilot, and you can think of me as your ‘check pilot.’ ”

It was obvious he thought he was being amusing.