The Bishop's Pawn (Cotton Malone #13)(20)

“It became my fight when you tried to kill me. Get out.”

“What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

No, but I did smack the butt of the gun into the side of his head, which sent him reeling over toward the passenger seat. Violence was becoming easier for me with each attempt. While he was still stunned I grabbed his left arm and yanked him from the plane. Coleen had abandoned her post and rushed up alongside. The pilot splashed into the shallow water lapping the beach and she added to his misery with a kick to the face.

“Feel better?” I asked.

“Much. We’ve got company.”

Over her shoulder I saw Jansen and two rangers running across the wooden bridge. They were a hundred yards away, which should offer us enough time.

“Get in,” I said, climbing into the pilot’s seat and starting the engine.

It revved quickly, enough so that I could throttle up and power away from the beach out into the lagoon.

I heard gunshots.

More power and we moved farther from land.

“Give me my gun,” she said.

I handed it over.

She popped open the passenger-side door and returned fire as I turned the plane so her side faced the fort. As we continued to taxi I studied the instruments. Nothing unusual. Standard issue.

More gunfire came from shore.

She curled back inside and slammed the door. “Get us in the air.”

We were now far enough out in the bay to be safe from any bullets. Valdez’s boat sat five hundred yards away, but I wasn’t going anywhere near that, either. I turned toward the east so the breeze I’d noticed on shore would be to our back. I throttled up the engines and sent the pontoons skimming across the surface. The controls tightened and I gripped the yoke in a hard embrace. I only needed a few hundred feet before the wings caught air and the plane lifted. No rotating or climbing, just a rise, as if in an elevator. Not bad, if I did say so myself. Certainly no tougher than landing a fighter on a pitching carrier deck, at night, which I’d done several times.

I banked into a long turn, eased off on the throttle, and adjusted course toward the northeast. The sky had turned a soothing cobalt blue with only a few puffs of scattered clouds. Fort Jefferson, the Dry Tortugas, Jim Jansen, and Juan Lopez Valdez all lay behind us. I checked the fuel gauge and saw that we carried three-quarters of a tank. I’d flown many a Cessna and knew that the range on a full tank was around 850 miles. I had no intention of heading for Key West—that would be the first place Jansen would look. What I needed was to contact Stephanie Nelle and now I could do that by radioing to shore, with someone there placing a call.

Coleen was busy checking out the cabin, seeing what was behind us.

“What did the case look like that you brought up from the wreck?” she asked.

I told her.

She sat back in her seat. “We hit the jackpot. It’s sitting in the back.”

I couldn’t help but smile.

Lady Luck had finally dealt me a good hand.

I was alive, in a plane, with the case, the coin, and a radio.

All in all, not a bad first day as a special operative with the Justice Department.





Chapter Thirteen


I reached for the radio, but Coleen stopped me.

“You can’t do that,” she said. “They’ll be listening, and you do realize this plane can be tracked.”

Of course, but thanks to my fighter-piloting days I had a few ideas on how to minimize that problem. I had already decided to vector toward Florida’s western Gulf shore. The Cessna’s range was enough to get us to Tampa, but I saw no reason to fly that far north. Jansen had probably already radioed the mainland and alerted the appropriate folks, and Coleen was right: We were surely being tracked on air traffic control radar. The trick would be to land quick and then get away before they, whoever they might be, could find us on the ground. The Everglades stretched fifty-plus miles up Florida’s southwest coast. Landing anywhere along that wilderness would be easy, offering perfect isolation and plenty of places to hide, but it would also be difficult to traverse without a boat or car.

“I was thinking of heading to somewhere between Naples and Fort Myers.”

She shook her head. “Can you make it to Lake Okeechobee?”

That was miles inland, toward the center of the peninsula, a massive expanse of fresh water that drained into the Everglades.

“We can get there, but there’s a lot of land between the lake and the coast. Somebody along the way is going to want to know who we are and where we’re headed.”

South Florida was notorious for drug trafficking, and an unidentified aircraft not responding to radio requests would raise nothing but red flags The situation would only escalate if Jansen called in reinforcements. I had not, as yet, mentioned the former agent to her.

“Does the name Jim Jansen mean anything?”

She stared across at me and shook her head.

“That’s the guy who brought me in the boat, then left in the plane and tried to kill me. He was also the one shooting at you from the beach.”

She still held the gun, in a way that I noticed wasn’t casual or with any apprehension. Instead, it signaled someone familiar with firearms.

“Are you a cop?” I asked.

She nodded.

I should have been surprised, but she’d handled herself under pressure like someone with training. “Is this official?”