“I would be very surprised if we got half what it’s worth, but if I can get that in cash . . .”
“Start a one-airplane airline all over again in the States?” Jack asked. “Will there be enough for that?”
“There might be,” Captain Portet said. “Let me tell you what’s happened. . . .”
“And if the CIA deal falls through?” Jack asked when he had finished.
“Then I guess I start looking for a couple of old DC-4s in which I can fly freight around the Caribbean,” Captain Portet said. “I’m putting all my chips on what Felter said.”
“What?”
“That they’re looking for someone just like me,” Captain Portet said.
“Did you tell Hanni?”
“This just happened. I haven’t had the opportunity. So don’t say anything to her before I do.”
Jack nodded.
“And with me in the goddamned army, I won’t be of much help, will I?”
“I think I’m just as annoyed with your friends and neighbors as you are,” Captain Portet said.
The letter Jack had received from the U.S. government just over a year before had told him “your friends and neighbors have selected you for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States.”
He had said then what he said now:
“Friends, my ass!”
Captain Portet laughed.
“On the other hand, no draft notice, no Fort Rucker, no Marjorie, ” he said.
“Is that that goddamned silver lining people are always talking about?”
“That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?” his father said.
“You could always go back to Sabena,” Jack said. “Couldn’t you?”
Jean-Phillipe Portet had been a captain in Sabena, the Belgian national airline, before he had been offered the position of chief pilot of Air Congo, in which Sabena was a major investor. At the time, he had been offered the opportunity to return to Sabena if things didn’t work out.
“I don’t think that would work out,” Captain Portet said flatly, and Jack understood that his father had decided that option either was no longer valid, or that he didn’t want to do it.
He smiled at his son.
“If I hadn’t decided to land this thing in Léopoldville,” he said, “I would now have a very stiff drink.”
And once my poppa has made up his mind to do something, he does it. And he’s apparently made up his mind to shoot his roll on this CIA deal.
“Well, since I’m not flying,” Jack said, and then saw something on his father’s face. “Do you want me in the right seat when we get to Léopoldville?” he asked.
“That’s up to you, Jacques.”
They looked at each other.
“Hand me another Coke, Pop, will you, please?” Jack asked.
[ SIX ]
Léopoldville, Republic of the Congo
2305 14 January 1965
Captain Portet greased the 707 in, with a long, low, right-by-the -book approach, with the wheels hitting just past the stripes at the end of the runway, followed by a gentle deceleration in the landing roll.
He almost always greases it in, Jack thought as they turned off the runway and began to taxi to the terminal. He’s that kind of a pilot.
His finesse reminded Jack—painfully—of his carelessness in not checking for himself the weight and balance.
When he’d finished shutting it down, Captain Portet signed the logbook and then handed it to Jack for his signature.
They left the aircraft through the passenger compartment rather than down the ladder that had been wheeled up to the cockpit door. Jack wondered about that, but decided it was because they had boarded the airplane as passengers, not crew.
It was hot on the tarmac; it always was. Captain Portet stopped to light a cigar inside the terminal, but Jack suspected the purpose was more in seeing what happened when Colonel Felter and Father Lunsford and Mr. Finton passed through Immigration and Customs than in satisfying a craving for nicotine.
The three passed through Immigration and Customs without making a ripple, probably because, Jack thought, his father had told them to make a little present—really a little present; about two dollars’ worth of Dutch guilders—to each of the Customs officers.
But when Jack and his father had gone through the AIR CREW line and had their passports stamped, however, they were nowhere in sight in the terminal.
“Look around outside,” Captain Portet ordered. “I’ll check in here.”
Outside the terminal, Noki, the “head boy” of the Portet household, who somehow always knew when either one of them was aboard an Air Simba or Air Congo aircraft, was waiting for them with the air-conditioning running in their Ford station wagon.