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“My contract with Fortran runs for another few months,” Lawless told him.
“Don’t you think after what happened to you that they would let you out of it?”
“Yeah, probably,” he drawled. “Um, listen, though, Ah’ve got a little girl to support.” He paused, swallowed, and went on. “My folks are raisin’ her, and they need the extra
money Ah make.”
“What were you being paid?” Juan asked bluntly. MacD gave him the number, which sounded reasonable.
“Okay, you’ll keep making that during your probationary period. After that, if things work out, you’ll become a full member of the Corporation and share in the profits.”
“Um, are y’all profitable?”
Cabrillo responded by asking, “What do you think this plane’s worth?”
Lawless looked around for just a second. “G-Five like this? About fifty million bucks.”
“Fifty-four, to be exact,” Juan told him. “We paid cash.”
* * *
THEY HANDED OVER a still-sleeping Setiawan to his tearful mother on the tarmac between the Corporation’s aircraft and a chartered Citation fitted out as a flying hospital. The grandmother too was weeping, while the grandfather watched the exchange stoically. Arrangements had already been made to have Customs and Immigration look the other way. They whisked the boy onto the idling jet, and as soon as the door was closed and sealed it began to roll.
Juan had planned to send their plane out of the country, but with the possibility of a new job soon he told the pilot to park it and find himself a hotel room in the city. They hefted their guns and equipment in nondescript nylon bags and made their way to where a row of helicopters was backed up to a Cyclone fence about fifty yards from the General Aviation terminal building. These were all civilian choppers. For the most part they were painted white with a stripe of color across their noses and along their flanks.
One, however, was a glossy black and looked as menacing as a gunship, though she carried no visible weapons. This was the Corporation’s MD 520N, a state-of-the-art helo that vented exhaust through its tail rather than relying on a secondary rotor. This NOTAR system made it the quietest jet-powered helicopter in the world.
The pilot saw the four men and one woman approaching and began hitting switches in the cockpit to fire the turbine.
It would be a tight squeeze, but the 520 had more than enough power to take them all out to the Oregon.
“Looks like it went well,” the pilot remarked when Juan opened the passenger door and shoved his equipment bag under his seat.
“Nothing to it,” Cabrillo said in typical fashion.
George “Gomez” Adams knew better. The veteran pilot could tell by their swagger when they were approaching that things had gotten dicey and that they’d handled it well. “Who’s the new guy?”
“MacD Lawless. He’s a Fortran operative who got nabbed outside of Kabul. Seemed a waste to let them behead him.”
“We keeping him?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t like guys who are better-looking than me,” Gomez said. With his gunslinger mustache and matinee idol looks, there weren’t many men in the world who qualified.
“Can’t handle a little competition,” Juan grinned.
“Exactly.” Adams looked over his shoulder and thrust out his hand to MacD. “So long as you never beat me out with the ladies, we’ll be fine.”
It was clear Lawless had no idea what to make of that statement, but he shook Adams’s hand anyway. “No problem. So long as you never crash with me aboard, we’ll be better than fine.”
“Deal.” Gomez turned his attention back to the chopper, radioing the control tower to get flight authorization.
Juan said to Lawless, “When we get to the ship, the first thing we’ll do is get you a secure link to your people. They must be going nuts, about now. Same thing with your folks, if they’ve been told.”
“I doubt Fortran would have contacted them yet. I was grabbed less than forty-eight hours ago.”
“Okay. One less thing to worry about.”
