The Sam Gunn Omnibus (21 page)

“What
do you think is going on here,” Sam asked, “that makes you need a gun?”

“You know perfectly well what’s
going on,” I said.

“Yeah,” he answered ruefully. “But
I don’t know what
you
know.”

“Who’s in the orbiter’s cockpit?” I
asked.

“Some guy the State Department
insisted on. They wanted their own people up there with
El Presidente
and his daughter.”

“Do they have parachutes?”

“Parachutes? What for?”

“They’re all going down with the
president and his daughter?”

“Whither he goest,” Sam replied.

We took off smoothly and headed out
over the Caribbean. Is this part of the Bermuda Triangle? I asked myself. Will
this fatal accident be chalked up as another mystical happening, or the work of
aliens from outer space?

“How could you let them use you
like this, Sam?” I blurted.

He glanced over his shoulder at me,
saw how miserable I felt, and quickly turned back to the plane’s controls.

“Ramona, honey, when people that
high up in the federal government want to make you jump, you really don’t have
all that much of a choice.”

“You could have said no.”

“And miss the chance of a lifetime!
No way!”

So despite all his blather about
hating bureaucracies and wanting to help ordinary people, the little guy,
against the big shots of government and industry, Sam sold out when they put
the pressure on him. He probably didn’t have much of a choice, at that. Do what
they tell you or you’re out of business. Maybe they threatened his life. I’d
heard stories about the CIA and how they worked both sides of the street. They’d
even been involved in the drug traffic, according to rumors around
headquarters.

We flew in dismal silence across a
sparkling clear sea. At least, I grew silent. Sam spent the time acquainting
Hector with the plane’s controls and particular handling characteristics.

“Gotta remember we’ve got a
ninety-nine-ton brick on our backs,” he chattered cheerfully, as if he didn’t
have a care in the world.

Hector nodded and listened,
listened and nodded. Sam jabbered away, one pilot to another, oblivious to
everything else except flying.

Me, I was starting to worry about
what was going to happen when we returned to Col6n with the orbiter still
intact and the Cuban president very much alive. Jones and her people would
probably put the best face they could on it, like that’s what they had intended
all along: a goodwill flight to help cement friendly relations between Cuba and
the U.S. But I knew that if the CIA didn’t get me, some fanatical old
anti-Castro nutcake in Miami would come after me.

And Hector, too, I realized. I’d
put his life in danger, when all he wanted was to protect me.

I
felt really miserable
about that. The poor guy was in as much danger as I was, even though none of
this was his fault.

I
studied his face
as he sat in the copilot’s chair next to Sam. Hector didn’t look worried. Or
frightened. Or even tense. He was happy as a clam, behind the controls of this monstrous
plane, five miles over the deep blue sea.

“Now comes the tricky part,” Sam
was telling him, leaning over toward Hector slightly so he could hear him
better.

Sitting on the jump seat behind
Sam, I tightened my grip on the pistol. “You’re not going to separate the
orbiter,” I said firmly.

Without even glancing back at me,
Sam broke into cackling laughter. “Couldn’t even if I wanted to, oh masked
rider of the plains. The bird’s welded on. You’d need a load of primacord to
blast ‘er loose.”

“What about the explosive bolts?” I
asked.

Sam cackled again. “That’s part of
the simulation, kiddo. There aren’t any.”

I
saw that Hector
was grinning, as if he knew something that I didn’t.

“Then how do you intend to separate
the orbiter?” I demanded.

“I don’t,” Sam replied.

“Then how ...” The question died in
my throat. I had been a fool. A stupendous fool. This wasn’t an assassination
plot; Sam was taking the president of Cuba—and his ten-year-old daughter—for a
space flight experience, just as he’d taken several hundred other tourists.

I
could feel my
face burning. Hector, his smile gentle and sweet, turned toward me and said
softly, “Maybe you should unload the gun, huh? Just to be on the safe side.”

I
clicked on the
safety, then popped the magazine out of the pistol’s grip.

I
sat in silence
for the rest of the flight. There was nothing for me to say. I had been an
idiot, jumping to conclusions and suspecting Sam of being a partner in a
heinous crime. I felt
awful.

After the regular routine over the
Caribbean, Sam turned us back to Col6n, and we landed at the airport without
incident. Sam taxied the plane to his hangar, where a throng of news reporters
and photographers were waiting.

With his daughter clinging to his
side, the president of Cuba gave a long and smiling speech in Spanish to the
news people. Sam squirmed out of his pilot’s chair and rushed down to the
hangar floor so he could stand beside the Cuban president and bask in the glow
of publicity. Naturally, he grabbed the woman who was supposed to be his
copilot and took her along with him.

I
stayed in the
cockpit with Hector, watching the whole thing. I could see Ms. Jones hovering
around the edge of the crowd, together with her people; even she was smiling.

El Presidente
put his arm around Sam’s
shoulders and spoke glowingly. It was still in Spanish, but the tone was very
warm, very friendly. Cuban-American relations soared almost as high as the
president thought he’d flown. Sam signed his autograph for the president’s
daughter. She was almost as tall as he, I noticed.

Cameras clicked and whirred,
vidcams buzzed away, reporters shouted questions in English and Spanish. It was
a field day—for everybody but me.

Hector shook his head and gave me a
rueful grin. “I guess we were a little wrong about all this,” he said, almost
in a whisper.

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I got you
into this.”

“Don’t look so sad. Everything came
out okay. Sam’s a hero.”

All
I wanted to do was to stay in that cockpit and hide forever.

At
last
El Presidente
and his daughter made their way
back to their limousine. The fleet of limos departed and the crowd of media
people broke up. Even the American State Department people started to leave.
That’s what they were, I reluctantly admitted to myself. Jones and her people
really were from the State Department, not the CIA.

Finally
Sam came strolling the length of the 747’s cabin and climbed up the spiral
staircase to the cockpit, whistling horribly off-key every step of the way.

He
popped his head through the hatch, grinning like a Jack-o’-lantern. “You want me
to send some pizzas up here or are you gonna come out and have dinner with me?”

Hector
took me by the hand, gently, and got to his feet. He had to bend over slightly
in the low-ceilinged cockpit, a problem that Sam didn’t have to worry about.

“We’re
coming out,” he said. I let him lead me, like a docile little lamb.

We
went straight to Sam’s favorite restaurant, the waterfront shack that served
such good fish. Jones was already there, sipping at a deadly-looking rum
concoction and smiling happily.

“I
ought to be angry with you two,” she said, once we sat at the little round
table with her.

“It’s
my fault,” I said immediately. “I’m the one to blame.”

Hector
started to say something, but Jones shushed him with a gesture of her long,
graceful hand. “No harm, no foul. The flight went
beautifully,
and
I’m not going to screw up my report by even mentioning your names.”

Sam
was aglow. He ordered drinks for all of us, and as the waiter left our table,
he looked over at the bar.

“Lookit
that!” Sam said, pointing to the TV over the joint’s fake-bamboo bar.

We
saw the president of Cuba smiling toothily, his daughter on one side of him and
Sam Gunn on the other.

“Worldwide
publicity!” Sam crowed. “I’m a made man!”

Hector
shook his head. “If anybody ever finds out that your orbiter never left the
747, Sam, the publicity won’t be so good.”

For
Hector, that was a marathon speech.

Sam
grinned at him. “Now who’s going to tell on me? The Department of State?”

Jones
shook her head. “Not us.” “NASA?” Sam asked rhetorically. “You think some
rocket expert in NASA’s gonna stand up and declare that you can’t remate the
orbiter with its carrier plane once it’s been separated?”

Before
any of us could reply, Sam answered his own question. “In a pig’s eye! The word’s
going through the agency now, from top to bottom: no comment on Space Adventure
Tours. Zip. Nada. Zilch. The lid is on and it’s on tight.”

“What
about you two?” Jones asked, arching a perfect brow.

Hector
glanced at me, then shrugged. “I’m in the Air Force. If I’m ordered to keep
quiet, I’ll keep quiet.”

“And
you, Ms. Perkins?” Jones asked me.

I
focused on Sam. “You promised to end this bogus
business, Sam.”

“Yeah,
that’s right, I did.”

“Did
you tell the president of Cuba that all he got was a simulation?” I asked.

Sam
screwed up his face and admitted, “Not exactly.”

“What
happens to Cuban-American relations when he finds out?”

Jones’s
smile had evaporated. “Which brings us back to the vital question: are you
going to try to blow the whistle?”

I
didn’t like the sound of that
try to.

“No,
she’s not,” Sam said. “Ramona’s a good American citizen and this is a matter of
international relations now.”

The
gall of the man! He had elevated his scam into an integral part of the State
Department’s efforts to end the generations-old split between Cuba and the U.S.
I wondered who in Washington had been crazy enough to hang our foreign policy
on Sam Gunn’s trickery and deceit. Probably the same kind of deskbound
lunkheads who had once dickered with the Mafia to assassinate Castro with a
poisoned cigar.

“I
want to hear what you have to say, Ms. Perkins,” Jones said, her voice low but
hard as steel.

What
could I say? What did I
want
to say? I really didn’t
know.

But
I heard my own voice tell them, “Sam promised to close down Space Adventure
Tours in two more months. I think that would be a good idea.”

Sam
nodded slowly. “Sure. By that time I oughtta be able to raise enough capital to
buy a Clippership and take tourists into orbit for real.”

Jones
looked from me to Sam and back again.

Sam
added, “Of course, it would help if the State Department ponied up some funding
for me.”

She
snapped her attention to Sam. “Now wait a minute ..

“Not
a lot,” Sam said. “Ten or twenty million, that’s all.”

Jones’s
mouth dropped open. Then she yelped, “That’s extortion!”

Sam
placed both hands on his flowered shirt in a gesture of aggrieved innocence. “Extortion?
Me?”

“AND THAT’S JUST
about the whole story, Uncle
Griff,” Ramona said to me.

I
leaned back in my desk chair and stared at her. “That
business with the president of Cuba happened two months ago. What kept you down
there in Panama until now?”