Guns [John Hardin 01] (16 page)

“That’s conditionally acceptable. If you refuse to take off, for example, I will probably need to know why in some detail.”

“Not a problem. And I accept your offer.”

Strake got up, went over to his desk, and pushed a button. “Margaret out there will help you with the necessary paperwork, sign you up for our insurance and the withholding.”

A large man came in the side door to the room. “This is Montgomery Davis,” Strake said. “He’s in charge of our security here and at my homes and elsewhere. Montgomery, this is Cowboy, our new pilot. I suggest you two meet at Teterboro Airport this afternoon. Why don’t you make it one o’clock. Montgomery will show you where the King Air is hangared, give you a set of keys, and introduce you to the maintenance people I use. You will oversee all the maintenance and routine cleaning. Run any significant modifications or upgrades past me first.

“The logs and manuals are in the plane. Take it up for a checkout flight. Within sixty days I’d like you to select a backup pilot we can put on a modest retainer and use if you’re ill or away for any reason. Give us the name and Montgomery will run a background check.

“I’d like you to wear black slacks, a white shirt with epaulets, and a black tie. A jacket will be optional except when we’re carrying somebody important, then I’d like you to wear it. Margaret will give you the name of a tailor I’ve used. You can charge your first set of clothes to my account.

“Your apartment is already close enough to the airport. Margaret will give you a beeper. Do you have objections to any of that?”

“None.”

“Shake hands with Mr. Davis, then. He’ll be along on most of our trips, sometimes with one or two of his people.”

Over the next few days Cowboy gave some thought to choosing the backup pilot. Duane Kelly was a casual acquaintance from his early training days. They had both had the same instructor for their commercial multi-engine ratings in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and had spent a night or two carousing in beach bistros. Kelly was darkly good-looking and attracted women with his good looks and cocky humor. Kelly had gone to work flying light twins for a freight hauler out of Macon and they had lost contact for several years. Then one day Kelly had called saying he had a proposition. They had met in a bar in Jacksonville, Florida, where Cowboy was flying a Super Cub towing banners along the beaches and flying an occasional charter in a Beech Duke.

Over cold beers, Kelly worked around to asking if he would be interested in a quick trip or two into Mexico. He smiled and made it sound virtually innocent.

“You’re talking about carting drugs, right?”

“Hey, a little coke. The stuff is everywhere these days, right? Nose candy for the affluent. Hell, you can’t go to a party now where there isn’t a supply in the back bedroom or right out there in the open on the damned coffee table. The trips are probably safer than you flying that old Cub for the tourists. You go down, they load you up, then you fly back low across the Gulf and land in Mississippi, or maybe Texas, depending. You get twenty-five thousand a trip, a bag full of cash. They provide the plane, probably a Baron or something like a twin Comanche. I figure if we don’t do it somebody else will, right?

“What you do is rig it so you can jettison the whole load over the water if you have to before you land. It’s weighted to sink. No evidence, no problem. You quit when you want to. No hard feelings. I’ve already made two trips without a hitch. I told the money people I’m working for I’d try to find them another good man. They’d surprise you. They’re not your typical movie image. These people are legitimate businessmen and professionals. They wouldn’t chance it if it wasn’t safe. The offer won’t last long. What do you say?”

“Duane, how the hell did you get involved in this? What if the plane turns out to be stolen? What if you’re caught on the ground in Mexico? Or on the ground back here while they’re offloading? What they’re paying won’t seem like nearly enough money if you wind up doing ten years in a federal prison. Think about it. Are these people—these money men—are they really taking any chances compared to what you’re risking? Count me out.”

“Hey, I was just asking, you know? You’re not interested, that’s cool. If you change your mind give me a call.” He wrote his number on a bar napkin.

“Be careful, Duane. Those aren’t any kind of people to ever turn your back on.”

“Hey, two or three more trips and I’ll have a real stake. Then I’m gone. Don’t you worry about me.”

A year later Cowboy heard that Duane had crashed an old DC-3 on takeoff from Amarillo but had walked away. The law had come close to charging him but he’d had a thin cover story about simply trying to ferry the old plane to a mechanic for repairs. The story had barely held up, so he had walked away from that, as well. He had showed up in Teterboro a year ago, down on his luck, contrite about his Mexican adventures, and vowing to turn his life around. He was working as a part-time charter pilot for a shoestring operation. Two days after he was hired Cowboy phoned Kelly and said, “I might have a slot for you as a backup pilot for the company I’m working for. Are you interested?”

Kelly said, “Buddy I appreciate that. I really do.”

“You’re not making any runs down over the border these days, are you?”

“No way. I can be a little dense, but that’s one lesson I’ve learned real well.”

The next day Cowboy told Strake, “I might have a backup pilot for you. A man named Duane Kelly. He and I trained at the same place years ago. You ought to know some say he hauled a few illegal loads up from Mexico, but not for at least a year now. He’s supposed to be a good twin pilot.”

Strake said, “Give the details to Davis.” Two weeks later Strake signed Kelly on for a modest retainer.

The first trip was one week later to Atlanta with Strake, Montgomery Davis, and an accountant named Chester Thurgood aboard, to evaluate a small company that made Walther pistols. The King Air was in perfect condition and the six-ton airplane handled like a much smaller docile twin, the PT6 turboprops delivering a total of 1,700 horsepower smoothly. At dawn they climbed strongly out of Teterboro at 2,300 feet per minute and 140 miles per hour in cool clear fall air.

The Newark controllers vectored them through their complex crowded airspace with rapid-fire instructions. There was a cold front angling west to east between them and Atlanta but it was dry except for some light snow well away to the west. As the King Air cruised southwest on autopilot at 26,500 feet over Virginia at 310 miles per hour, Strake came up and took the right-hand seat. He said, “Have you found anything concerning the plane that needs attention?”

Monitoring the instruments, he said, “Nothing at all right away. The maintenance people tell me we should think about tires at the next inspection. You mentioned using unimproved strips occasionally. In that case you might want to consider changing from the standard high-pressure tires to high-flotation ones. They’re wider so they would protrude from the wheel wells slightly when they’re retracted. The extra drag would cost you, for example, about four miles per hour at 16,000 feet, but the fat tires would ease operations on rough fields so the whole plane wouldn’t absorb as much stress, and they’d be better than what’s mounted on here if there’s mud or snow.

“The other thing would be a set of wing-tip landing lights. Yours are mounted on the nose gear now. The wingtip lights would let me drag a strip at night to check it out without putting the gear down, supplement the nose gear lights in certain conditions, and light us up better in traffic areas when we’re traveling at higher than gear-down speed.”

“Go ahead and have it all done. Just let me know when and how long the plane will be down for it.”

They made conversation to pass the time. Strake’s knowledge of light weapons was encyclopedic and he obviously liked to discourse on the subject. “For decades the United States was slow to adopt new weapons technology,” he mused. “And always at a cost of lives. There are many examples. Smokeless powder was developed by a Frenchman in 1884. Peter Paul Mauser was a genius and he designed a bolt-action rifle that used a cartridge with the new powder. His gun was highly accurate at long range and was rugged and reliable but the U.S. Ordnance Board ignored it and instead bought Norwegian Krag-Jorgensen rifles for the troops.

“The Krag used a black-powder cartridge, so the rifle needed frequent cleaning and every shot gave away the exact location of the shooter. So in 1898 in Cuba Spanish riflemen used their Mausers to easily pick off the smoking Yankees, breaking the assault at El Caney. At San Juan Hill it was the same, with 15,000 U.S. troops against 700 Spaniards. The famous heroic charge was really a slog through deadly Mauser sniper fire, and the Americans took ten percent casualties. They managed to rout the 700 Spaniards only with heavy Gatling gun fire. When they finally built the Springfield rifle they used a great deal of the Mauser design.

“The only thing more stupid than ignoring new technology in weapons is arming troops with known bad quality weapons. Italy has produced some trash. Their standard World War Two machine gun was the Breda Modello 30. It was heavy, just over four feet long, and was fed by twenty-round chargers. The extraction system was so bad it needed an internal oil pump to lubricate the spent casings, and the oil attracted dirt, of course, so it failed constantly. It had no carrying handles so the gunners had to wear heavy gloves to handle it hot in combat. Yet the Italians also produced the Beretta Model 1938A submachine gun. Collectors prize them today as a mechanical work of art.

“The Japanese also produced at both extremes. Their Nambu Type 14 was probably the absolute worst service pistol in history. It was so poorly designed it could accidentally discharge rounds before they were fully seated in the firing chamber.

“In World War One the British had the Vickers machine gun that vented steam from the barrel water jacket, so the clouds of vapor obligingly marked the precise location of the gunners for the Germans.

“They never seem to learn from such incredible blunders. After World War Two, during the race to make fully automatic rifles, while the Russians were producing the Kalashnikov AK-47 and Fairchild was producing the .22-caliber Armalite AR-15, both excellent weapons, the Pentagon, all on its own, came up with the .30-caliber M-14, which was much heavier than the Armalite, and when it was fired on full automatic even a trained soldier couldn’t hold it steady.

“The first troops in Vietnam in 1965 carried M-14s. The Armalite AR-15 was a vastly superior weapon for Vietnam conditions because it had been designed to hose the enemy at relatively close quarters, from 30 to 200 yards, and it functioned superbly in dirty, humid conditions. The Army grudgingly recognized its merits only under extreme pressure from President Kennedy and Robert McNamara. The Pentagon still preferred its own demonstrably bad M-14. Army dogma held that a rifle should be accurate to 600 yards so before they would accept the AR-15, which became the M-16, they demanded modifications that had the effect of destroying its reliability. They insisted on a more powerful powder for more range. The powder was dirty so it fouled the rifle and it increased the rate of fire from 750 rounds a minute to over 1,000, which only aggravated the fouling and also tended to jam the mechanism, so soldiers died with rounds jammed in their M-16s. A number of unmodified AR-15s had been sent to the South Vietnamese in 1962 and they had worked flawlessly. Later in the war GIs bought those AR-15s on the Saigon black market for $600 each to replace their M-16s. When the Viet Cong won a fight they’d strip the bodies of everything and leave the M-16s as worthless.”

Cowboy said, “The same thing happened after the Battle of the Little Big Horn when the Sioux stripped Custer and his men but left their Army-issue rifles behind because a lot of them had jammed.”

Strake said, “The M-16 was eventually improved but how many men were shot while they were working to free up a jammed early model? If I had been in Vietnam I would have thrown my M-16 into the jungle and picked up an AK-47. It’s made now in more than thirty factories around the world. More than forty million have been produced. The essential moving parts are made to close tolerances but everything else is purely functional and cheap. It’s rugged, reliable, accurate, and all of its parts are completely interchangeable, whatever factory they come from. Worldwide, it is probably the most popular service rifle ever built. It’s used in some seventy countries.”

As they drew closer to Atlanta Cowboy was preoccupied with ATC communications, monitoring the aircraft systems during the long descent, and studying the layout for Dekalb-Peachtree airport in his
Flight Guide
for a final time, and Strake fell silent, looking disinterestedly out his side of the cockpit, absorbed in his thoughts.

Northeast of the sprawling city he entered a downwind leg for Dekalb-Peachtree’s runway two-zero left at 2,500 feet. Working with familiar assurance he armed the autofeather, turned off the propeller synchrophaser, selected approach flaps, reduced the torques to 1,000 foot-pounds per side, and slowed to 170 miles an hour. When he was abeam the runway numbers he turned off the yaw damper, put the gear down, pulled the power levers back to 600 foot-pounds, and banked onto the base leg and then onto final, descending, bleeding off the airspeed to 140 miles an hour, aligning with the runway centerline dashes. As the threshold drew closer he squeezed off another 200 foot-pounds, pushed the prop levers forward, and put down the final increment of flaps.

As the threshold rushed by underneath he started pulling back gently on the yoke, raising his gaze to the far end of the runway for better peripheral vision height judgment. The mains touched down with only a muffled chirp at 90 miles an hour. He let the nosewheel touch down, then pulled back on the power levers to put the props into reverse pitch, the deceleration hefty, and got on the brakes, slowing the big twin down to walking speed in well under a third of the 6,000-foot runway. He retracted the flaps, set the power levers back into forward pitch, swung off onto a taxiway, and guided the plane sedately to the Mercury Air Center, where an attendant directed him to a tiedown. Without comment Strake got up and went back into the cabin. Cowboy went back and opened the stairs.