“Look, Shine – ” began Sergeant Atwater with a puzzled frown.
Kelly touched the sergeant’s arm to silence him and said with his eyes meeting the pilot’s, “I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, man.”
“Shit, let’s fly,” the pilot said, lifting a zip-lock folder and his flight helmet from the shelf beside the door. “I figure I owe you one. Or I owe somebody and you’re closest.”
The aircraft being rolled from a hangar to meet them, a Pilatus Turbo-Porter, was, like the pilot, on twenty-four hour standby with its preflight check already completed. Its straight wing, exceptionally long and broad for an aircraft of the size, was fitted with slotted flaps to lower the stall speed even further.
The Porter’s undersurfaces were painted a dark blue-gray that better approximated the shade of the night sky than black would. The upper surfaces were whorls of black over brown and maroon almost as dark to keep the aircraft from having an identifiable outline from above.
Kelly knew where the Logistics Support unit in Istanbul had been flying three years before. Now that the political situation in Greece had stabilized – or reverted, depending on your bias – he was mildly surprised that an agent-transporting aircraft was still based here. Some things had their own inertia, especially when the secrecy of the operation kept it out of normal budgetary examinations. Score one for inefficiency.
Shine – his last name was Jacobs, Kelly thought, or at least it had been when he had been on the eastern border of Turkey supporting Kurdish operations – ducked through the port-side entry doors, springing off the step attached to the fuselage. The Porter was awkward to board because its fixed landing gear was mounted on long struts to take the impact of landings that closely approached vertical. Even the tail wheel was lifted by a shock absorber.
Kelly started to hand the woman up the high step, an action as reflexive for him as was her look of scorn as she entered the cabin unaided. Hell, the veteran thought, he was the one who needed help. Walking to the hangar had brought him double vision, and the two steps to enter the aircraft rang like hammers in his skull.
He’d been hurt worse before, plenty times; but he’d never been this old before, any more than he’d ever be this young again. If he didn’t start using common sense about the things he let his body in for, the aging problem was going to take care of itself real quick.
A ground crewman closed the cabin door while the starter cart whirled the Porter’s turbine engine into wailing life. Shine was forward in the cockpit, and Gisela eyed the sparse furnishings of the cabin. There was a fold-down bench of aluminum tubing and canvas on the starboard bulkhead across from the doors, and individual jumpseats of similar construction to port.
Kelly unlatched a seat, then the bench, as Shine ran the five-hundred-horse turbine up to speed. With his mouth close to Gisela’s ears, the veteran said, “You got any problem if I rack out on the bench?” He pointed. “I’m not … I mean, I think I could use a couple hours, if that’s okay.”
Gisela smiled grimly at what both of them recognized as an admission of weakness – and an apology for treating her like a girl moments earlier. “Fine,” she said, and nodded toward the cockpit. “Do you think your friend will mind if I sit next to him?”
Kelly glanced forward toward the back of Shine’s helmet, just visible over his seat back. The right-hand cockpit seat was empty. “Not unless he’s changed a hell of a lot since I last knew him,” the veteran said with a chuckle. “He’d screw a snake if somebody held it down. Of course, it’d have to be a girl snake.”
The woman laughed also and patted Kelly’s shoulder as she slid her way into the empty forward seat. He could not hear the brief exchange between Gisela and the pilot a moment before the Porter began to taxi, but the dancer’s laugh trilled again above the turbine whine.
Kelly seated himself and belted in as the aircraft waited for clearance. The belt wasn’t going to do a hell of a lot of good with a side-facing seat bolted onto the frame of a light aircraft; but it was the way he’d been trained, and his brain was running on autopilot. Christ, it felt as if each revolution of the spinning prop was shaving a little deeper through his skull.