“Very good, Captain,” the man with the Uzi said.
Not quite two hours after they left Luanda, the man with the Uzi said, “Begin a thousand-feet-a-minute descent on our present heading, Captain.”
MacIlhenny nodded his understanding, adjusted the trim, retarded the throttles, and then said, “We are in a thousand-feet -a-minute descent. May I ask where we are going?”
“We are going to take on fuel at an airfield not far from Kisangani,” he said. “Once known as Stanleyville. Kisangani has a radar and I want to get under it, so level off at twenty- five hundred feet.”
“Yes, sir.”
MacIlhenny checked his fuel. His tanks were a little under half full.
Kisangani is in the northeast Congo, not far from the border of Sudan.
We could have made it to Khartoum—almost anywhere in Sudan—with available fuel. Sudan has a reputation for loose borders, and for not liking Americans. So why didn’t we go there?
If we keep on this northeasterly flight path, we’ll overfly Sudan. And on this heading, what’s next is Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.
The Americans are all over Saudi Arabia and Israel with AWAC aircraft.
They’re sure to see this one.
For that matter, it’s surprising that there hasn’t been a fighter—or three or four fighters—off my wingtip already.
You can’t just steal an airplane and fly it a thousand miles without somebody finding you.
Where the hell are we going?
Lease-Aire 9021 had been flying at twenty-five hundred feet at four hundred knots for about fifteen minutes when the copilot adjusted the radio frequency to 116.5 and then called somebody.
Somebody called back. With no headset, MacIlhenny of course had no idea what anybody said. But a moment after his brief radio conversation, the copilot punched in a frequency on the radio direction finder and then pointed to the cathode display.
“Change to that heading?” MacIlhenny asked, politely.
“Correct,” the man with the Uzi said. “We should be no more than 150 miles from our refuel point.”
Twenty minutes later, MacIlhenny saw, almost directly ahead, a brown scar on the vast blanket of green Congolese jungle beneath him.
The copilot got on the radio again, held a brief conversation with someone, and then turned to MacIlhenny.
“The winds are negligible,” he said. “If you want to, you can make a direct approach.”
“How much runway do we have?”
“Fifty-eight hundred feet,” the copilot said. “Don’t worry. This will not be the first 727 to land here.”
MacIlhenny brought the 727 in at the end of the runway. He could see some buildings, but they seemed deserted, and he didn’t see any people, or vehicles, or other signs of life.
He touched down smoothly and slowed the aircraft down to taxi speed with a third of the runway still in front of him.
“Continue to the end of the runway, Captain,” the man with the Uzi said.
MacIlhenny taxied as slowly as he could without arousing the suspicion of his copilot or the man with the Uzi. He saw no other signs of life or occupancy, except what could be recent truck tire marks
in the mud on the side of the macadam runway.
“Turn it around, Captain, and put the brakes on. But don’t shut it down until we have a look at the refueling facilities.”
"Yes, sir,” MacIlhenny said and complied.