John Nance: Headwind

Copyright © 2001 by John J. Nance

“Captain, I think you’d better get back here!” the chief flight attendant said as she burst into the cockpit.

Captain Craig Dayton snapped his head around and began reaching for his seat belt as soon as he saw the worried expression on Jillian Walz’s face.

“What’s the matter?” Dayton asked, aware that his copilot had shifted around in the right seat to look at her as well.

Jillian shut the door and stood in the tiny space aft of the center console, breathing hard and signaling him to wait. She watched a police car pull up on the ramp of the newly opened airport and stop in front of their Boeing 737, its blue lights flashing. Dayton followed her gaze and spotted the patrol car.

“We’re about to get in the middle of a diplomatic crisis,” Jillian said. “The gate agent…”

A voice on the overhead speakers cut her short. “Flight forty-two, operations.”

The copilot lifted his handheld microphone. “Go ahead, ops.”

“We will have to hold you at the gate for a while, forty-two.”

“Why?” the copilot asked sharply, noting the arrival of a second police car on the ramp.

“Forty-two, there is an official order… ah… wait, please…”

The microphone in the operations office remained on while urgent voices conferred in the background. “Ah… we will have to remove some of your passengers.”

Jillian nodded rapidly, her words tumbling out. “Craig, they’re here to arrest President Harris!”

Craig Dayton clasped Jillian’s right elbow as he searched her eyes. “Slow down, Jillian, and tell me precisely what you’re talking about.”

The day had started in Istanbul with the exciting news that a former President of the United States would be riding with them in first class through Athens to Rome. Fresh from delivering a speech to an international conference on hunger, President John B. Harris had come aboard with an attractive young female aide and an appropriately dour Secret Service agent, greeting the crew warmly at the door and even sticking his head into the cockpit to say hello. Impeccably groomed, and wearing a well-tailored dark business suit that made him seem taller than his five-foot-ten height, Harris had proven to be as friendly and gracious as the Washington press corps had always described him during his almost legendary single term in office.

“Our agent… gate agent… I know her,” Jillian was saying. “She came down the jetway all upset and said the Greek government has a warrant for his arrest.”

“Why? What for?”

She shook her head, creating a moving blur of chestnut hair. “She didn’t know.”

First Officer Alastair Chadwick whistled and inclined his head toward the ramp, where a third and fourth police car had parked, all with their top lights flashing frantically. “Something’s definitely up, mate.”

“This is a foreign-flagged airliner,” Dayton said. “No one’s removing any passenger without my permission.” He motioned to Jillian to reopen the cockpit door as he moved the captain’s seat back on its tracks and prepared to get up, filling the air with the aroma of peanuts as the contents of an opened snack pouch scattered on the metal floor.

“Damn.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Jillian said.

The copilot caught his arm.

“Craig, you remember I’m a solicitor in my other life in England, right?”

“Yes, I know,” Craig said, his eyes on Jillian as she stepped out.

“A little free legal advice, okay? You’re an American national with a European work visa, you’re the master of a German-flagged airliner, and that airliner is currently sitting on Greek concrete. You’re not the U.S. ambassador. They could arrest you for getting in the way.”

The captain shook his head impatiently. “This is Greece, Alastair. They’ve been civilized for at least a few years now. About two or three thousand, in fact.”

“Craig?” Chadwick tightened his grip on the captain’s arm, and Dayton responded with irritation.

“WHAT?”

“Be careful, okay? I know he’s your President, but you can’t protect him.”

“No?” There was a flurry of movement as Craig Dayton resumed the process of hauling himself out of the seat. “Just watch me!”

The Presidential Suite of the Metropole Hotel in the center of Rome was designed for kings and presidents and captains of industry, but despite the opulence of its decor, the most valuable feature to its occupant was a portable phone and plenty of floor to pace.

“Dammit, man, where are they? You are still in Athens, are you not?”

Sir William Stuart Campbell, a Scot by birth and a knight of the British Empire by deft political maneuvering, reversed direction without warning and strode briskly toward the ten-foot-high windows opening onto an ornate balcony overlooking the Via Veneto. The doors to the balcony stood aside as a warm breeze flowed in, redolent with the essence of fresh flowers and the fragrance of a busy nearby bakery, but leavened with a hint of exhaust fumes from the midday traffic – all of it lost to the intensity of Campbell’s concentration.

“ Mister Kostombrodis!” Campbell barked, his polished accent worthy of an Oxford don, which he had been at one time in his endlessly distinguished legal career. “My dear sir, I was under the distinct, but apparently misguided impression that we had retained you to keep track of them moment by moment, and that was to include the moment they left the court and headed for the airport. Is it really so difficult to follow instructions?”

A conservatively dressed young woman wearing a sexless gray suit and a worried expression entered the room, her eyes tracking the imposing hulk of the six-foot-four international lawyer with the wariness of a jackal. She calculated his next trajectory across the forty-foot expanse of the vaulted room and waited.

“You are virtually certain, are you not,” Campbell was saying into the phone, “that they have a certified copy of the Interpol warrant in their possession?”

Campbell turned and caught sight of the secretary, who signaled him with a nod of her head. He nodded in return and raised an index finger in a wait gesture.

“Yes. Yes. I understand. The second you’re certain they have him physically off that aircraft, ring me back. Is that perfectly clear? Whether he’s arrested in Athens or here in Rome is a small matter, but having up-to-the-second information on what is happening is a very large matter. Yes. See that you do.”

He punched off the phone and collapsed the small antenna in a controlled gesture of disdain, rolling his eyes as he looked at the woman and smiled. “Yes, Isabel?”

“The foreign minister has arrived, sir.”

“Show him in, please,” Campbell said, gesturing toward the door as his distinctive features melted into a broad smile, the effect similar to opening a curtain on a sunny day.

A short, rotund man in a dark suit scurried through the ten-foot-high double doors at the far end of the room and moved across the eighty-year-old Persian carpet as Campbell came to greet him, clasping his right hand and clapping him on the shoulder in a seamless gesture only a larger man could use with such practiced grace.