Headwind (2001) Read online

  “Captain, I have a very large favor to ask you,” Harris began. “I know you already raised the issue, but I didn’t know I was going to get the advice I just received.” He explained his counsel’s recommendation of Sigonella. “Are you familiar with the base?” Harris asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Craig replied.

  “And . . . you have enough fuel?”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” Craig answered, aware that Alastair had tensed in the right seat.

  The President turned to the copilot. “Alastair Chadwick, isn’t it?”

  Alastair turned, surprised his name had been remembered. “Yes, it is.”

  “You’re from the U.K., correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And while Captain Dayton here, as a U.S. Air Force officer, feels an obligation to help an ex-president, you obviously have no such allegiance, and your job is very much at stake. Is that a correct analysis?”

  “I’m very much afraid that it is, Mr. President,” Alastair replied cautiously. “I’m sorry to be thinking of myself.”

  “Nonsense. That’s responsible. However, I am in a jam here, and I would very much appreciate any help you could provide in getting me to Sigonella instead of Rome. I can tell you that the legal process waiting ahead is being misused, and while I’m rather prejudiced on the subject, I think you’d be doing international justice a substantial service by preventing what Peru is attempting. Other than that, I have no right to pressure you.”

  “I. . . understand,” Alastair replied, turning back to the forward panel.

  “Regardless of what you decide you can do, I want you to know I deeply appreciate the help you’ve already given me so selflessly. Thank you!” Harris patted Alastair’s shoulder, saluted Craig, and left the cockpit, securing the door behind him.

  “Entering holding,” Craig announced, triggering a radio call from Alastair to Rome Approach Control.

  They made the first outbound turn in silence, the racetrack-shaped pathway showing on the horizontal situation indicator screen in front of them as generated by the flight management computers. They were cleared to fly south on a heading of 170 degrees for a minute and a half before reversing course and flying a heading of 350 degrees back to an artificial point in space ten thousand feet above the Italian countryside, then were to repeat the outbound and inbound legs until cleared to leave and make their approach.

  A call chime rang softly through the cockpit and Craig toggled the interphone to answer.

  “Captain? This is Ursula in the back. We have two men back here who will miss their connections to New York if we hold very long. They insisted I call the cockpit.”

  “Tell them we’re doing the best we can.”

  “What does that mean, exactly? Jillian has briefed us why you’re holding, but these men are quite upset.”

  “It means we’ll know in a few minutes when we’re going to land, Ursula. Don’t tell them anything more.”

  “They’re not the only ones grumbling, but I’ll tell them. Elle is also being questioned.”

  He disconnected and studied the forward panel as they flew in silence for several minutes. Alastair’s fingers were drumming an insistent, nervous tattoo on the control yoke, the muscles along the side of his jaw working overtime, his mind in furious thought.

  “It’s bloody professional suicide,” Alastair said suddenly. “For both of us.”

  “I know it.”

  “We’re as good as sacked right now!”

  “I am, at least. I still say I can get them to believe I made you go along with it.”

  “Look,” Alastair continued, “I know I wouldn’t be doing anything but practicing law if you hadn’t sat in that bar in Abu Dhabi and bullied me an entire night about flying commercially someday. Of course, come to think of it, I would never have had to listen to you in the first place if you and your juvenile delinquent wingman hadn’t blown down my bleeding tent the week before with your F-15’s.”

  “Yeah. That was fun. You RAF types were being too standoffish.”

  “It was funny, I’ll grant you that. But, dammit Craig, now that I’ve got this job, I rather like it! I love flying more than the law. I’ve told you that ad nauseam. That’s why I took so long leaving the RAF, despite your harassing E-mails.”

  “Alastair, seriously, what if I ordered you to get out of the cockpit and go sit down in the back?”

  “Herr Wurtschmidt, our esteemed chief pilot, would still cashier me for not breaking down the cockpit door and clubbing you into compliance.”

  “You’re probably right,” Craig said.

  “But you are going to bloody well do this thing regardless, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know how I can do it without you, Alastair, and yet I don’t know how I could possibly land and turn him over to Peru, for God’s sake.”

  “It isn’t Peru, you know. It’s Italy. Peru will have to fight to get him. You heard that. And besides, Sigonella is Sicily, which is also Italian territory.”

  “Do I have any legal latitude?” Craig asked, turning to him. “As captain, I mean? Put on your lawyer hat and tell me.”

  Alastair Chadwick mulled over the question and turned to meet his friend’s gaze. “Actually, I think you do. I believe I was wrong earlier.”

  “You mean, when you said we’d be stealing the aircraft?”

  “That’s right, I was wrong,” Alastair said. “The international conventions, as well as German law, all give the captain of a aircraft in international flag service complete authority to do whatever he or she thinks necessary once the flight has begun. That’s the key. We didn’t make the decision until the flight had begun.”

  “Great!”

  “But, Craig, that merely means they can’t put us in jail. We’ll still be sacked on sight by EuroAir, and I still don’t want to do this. Neither of us is going to find as good an airline job anywhere.”

  Craig sighed. “I can’t make you do this.”

  “No,” Chadwick laughed ruefully, “you bloody well can’t!”

  “Which means,” Craig continued, his words metered, “that this tremendously important and pivotal decision in the evolution of international law—the determination of whether this legal travesty happens or not—turns entirely on what you decide, as historians will undoubtedly note. They’ll probably call it ‘Chadwick’s Decision.’ ”

  “Oh, thank you so very much! You spread guilt quite effectively for a non-Catholic, you know.”

  “We’ve already started this show, Alastair. If we land in Rome, we pulled our little stunt in Athens for nothing.”

  “We? What is this ‘we’ business, Captain, sir? I seem to recall begging you not to take off.”

  “You said, and I quote, ‘Don’t leave without a clearance.’ So we got a clearance.”

  “I’m beginning to see why King George let the bleeding colonies go.”

  “Wasn’t his choice. We whipped Cornwallis.”

  “Yanks!”

  “Brits!”

  They fell silent for nearly a minute as the 737 turned once more on an outbound heading.

  “Oh, bloody hell! All right! I’ll plug in Sigonella if you’ll give me some semi-intelligent reason to give Approach Control.”

  “Thank you, Alastair. But don’t refile for Sigonella. Tell him we want to divert to Naples. We don’t want them figuring this out just yet.”

  “And what’s my reason?” Alastair asked.

  “We can’t tell them. And that’s the truth. We can’t.”

  NINE

  Laramie, Wyoming—Monday—6:50 A.M. Local

  Jay Reinhart squeezed the cell phone between his left ear and shoulder as he waited for Assistant Attorney General Alex McLaughlin to return to the line. He picked up the house phone meanwhile and pressed it to his right ear.

  “Still there?”

  Sherry Lincoln’s voice was a welcome sound. “Right here, Mr. Reinhart.”

  “Still working. Hang on,” he told her, se
tting the receiver down again by the yellow legal pad, the first two pages of which were already filled with notes.

  “Mr. Reinhart?” McLaughlin said from his Washington office.

  “Yes. Right here.” He readjusted the phone and almost dropped it, catching it with his left hand in time. “Go ahead.”

  “Well, we’re all going to have to move very fast on this. I’m glad President Harris was able to retain you so rapidly.”

  “This is rather a shock,” Jay replied, massaging his forehead.

  “State assures me the arrest will be respectful, and there will be a first-class hotel waiting, but the problem comes tomorrow morning Rome time. Peru’s counsel already has an extradition hearing scheduled for eight A.M. Now, we have no one in Rome from Justice, and even if we did, our role becomes essentially amicus curiae, friend of the court. All we need is the equivalent of a motion for continuance in civil law terms, but, as I say, Justice can only support your argument, we can’t make the motion. Does your firm have someone in Rome who can enter an appearance and do the initial argument for delay?”

  “I . . . don’t have a firm, Mr. McLaughlin.”

  There was stunned silence from the Beltway. “You don’t have a . . . you’re not part of a firm?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a sole practitioner?” McLaughlin asked in amazement.

  “Actually, right now I’m not even practicing. I teach at the University of Wyoming.”

  “I see. The law school?”

  “No. The main university.”

  More silence, and the sounds of a man completely off balance clearing his throat. “Ah, I hate to ask this, Mr. Reinhart, but you are a lawyer, I hope?”

  “Yes. I’m licensed in Texas.”

  “May I . . . may I ask your area of legal expertise?”

  “Calm down, Mr. McLaughlin. I’m an international legal scholar, and a former practitioner. I am current, even though I’ve technically been on the sidelines for a while.”

  “I see.”

  “I do understand this, and I do know as much about what to do as anyone else would at this point.”

  “Mr. Reinhart, forgive me, but this isn’t going to work. President Harris needs the immediate services of a substantial firm with offices all over Europe, where someone can get to him within the hour. I doubt very much even the U.S. Air Force could get you personally from Laramie to Rome in time.”

  “The motion for continuance is very simple under Italian law, Mr. McLaughlin,” Jay replied evenly. “I can hire local counsel in Rome from here in half an hour.”

  “Well . . . that may be true, but what’s needed is a network of long-time polished legal contacts and the ability to work with us from experience, and clerical, secretarial, and paralegal support.”

  “I know all that.”

  “Mr. Reinhart, I do not want to demean your expertise, sir, but this is not a job for a sole practitioner.”

  “The President hired me, Mr. McLaughlin. You are speaking to his lead counsel. Let’s get to the substance of this matter so I can make the necessary calls.”

  “Are you familiar with our embassy staff in Rome?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know the American ambassador?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know our liaison to the World Court

  at The Hague, or the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and his staff?”

  “No.”

  “Then how in hell, Mr. Reinhart,” McLaughlin said, his voice hardening and his volume increasing, “can you possibly hope to defend not only President Harris’s right to remain a free man, but also the broader interests of the United States of America in a very critical and immediate matter from the MIDDLE OF FRIGGIN’ WYOMING?”

  “By phone, by fax, by logic, by training, and by virtue of the fact that I am his lawyer! How much time are we going to waste on this debate? The man’s hovering over Rome as we speak, he’s at the mercy of two commercial pilots, and I’ll bet you your limousine privileges there’s a Peruvian jet of some sort sitting at the next gate to their’s at Da Vinci Airport as part of a quiet little plot to whisk him away on arrival while the local police look the other way. I seriously doubt that John Harris would ever make it to the hotel in Rome, let alone that hearing tomorrow. He’ll be over the Atlantic on the way to a show trial in Lima.”

  “How did you know about that plane? Our intelligence sources just told me.”

  “Logic, Mr. Assistant Attorney General. That’s how I’d do it if I were Sir William Stuart Campbell.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yes. Do you?” Jay asked, permitting a little sarcasm into his tone.

  “No. Only by reputation.”

  “Well, sir, I know him all too well. I’m handicapped by distance, but not by experience.”

  “Are you aware of some plot to, as you say, whisk President Harris away?”

  “I’m telling you what they may try. I could be wrong, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “That would be a form of kidnapping, not extradition. Italy would never permit that, and Peru could be held accountable!”

  “You want to go argue that with Presidente Miraflores while President Harris is rotting in a Lima prison cell? I’d rather keep him out of their hands.”

  “Well, of course, so would we. Excuse me a second . . .”

  Jay could hear the sound of voices in the background as McLaughlin conferred with someone. He heard the sound of paper being sorted or pages being turned, and a barely disguised grunt of amazement. When the Assistant Attorney General returned to the line, his voice had taken on a coldness Jay recognized immediately.

  “Mr. Reinhart, you say you’re from Texas?”

  “That’s right. And yes, I was, at one time, District Judge Jay Reinhart of Dallas County, and I’ll make this easy for you. The suspension was up last month. Now, for God’s sake, let’s talk about substance and what we’re going to do while I’ve still got an open line to the aircraft, because there’s one major thing you don’t know.”

  “And that would be?”

  “He’s not going to land in Rome, and we’re going to have as much of a diplomatic fight ahead of us as a legal one.”

  “If not Rome, where, in fact, is he going to land? And how do you know?” McLaughlin asked, his tone sarcastic and exasperated.

  “I can’t tell you until he’s safely on the ground. Attorney client privilege.”

  “I see.”

  “And, I’m talking to you on a nonsecure analog cell phone anyone could listen to.”

  “Oh,” McLaughlin replied. “Well, at least that makes sense.”

  “I’m guessing he will land in about forty-five minutes. In the meantime, I need you to be ready to tell me exactly what, if anything, the U.S. military can do for President Harris. I’ll call you back.”

  When Alex McLaughlin had agreed and disconnected, Jay folded the cell phone and sat down on his only kitchen stool, his hands shaking and his mouth cotton-dry.

  God Almighty! I just beat up an Assistant Attorney General of the United States!

  He sat for a few seconds, trying to think through the next moves, and the people he would need to talk with, if not command: the State Department, the White House, perhaps the Chief of Staff and the sitting President, the government of Italy, maybe officials of other nations as well, not to mention the entire infrastructure of the international and European legal community.

  And here he sat in the middle of “friggin’ ” Wyoming, as McLaughlin had said, with a single line, a cell phone, and no staff.

  Jay realized his stomach felt queasy. McLaughlin was right. There’s no way I can pull this off!

  He picked up the receiver to the house phone, wondering if the connection to the 737 was still good. “Ah, Ms. Lincoln? Are you still there?”

  “This is John Harris, Jay. Where are we?”

  “John, I’m sorry. I’m ethically bound to step aside. I can’t do this.”

  T
EN

  EuroAir 42, in Flight, Holding South of Rome, Italy—Monday—2:50 P.M.

  “EuroAir Forty-Two, your requested clearance is denied. Your destination must be Rome, sir.”