To: God c/o Scribe
cc Book of Records last entry
Supreme Being: Things are beginning to move at a faster pace, so I’ll keep this post short and we can all get back to watching the mission unfold. I just wanted to reiterate my thankfulness for your allowing my personal involvement and providing me the latitude to do it my way. I am one happy camper, as they say down here. Host
To: Host. Your enthusiasm is contagious, and rightfully so. God, cc etc. etc
While the plan was coming together in Washington, the old yellow wagon was pulling up to the airport terminal in Windsor.
Not being familiar with the new parking regulations, Captain Hedges dropped Abe and Shorty off at the terminal entrance and directed them to go straight to the ticket counter. There they should tell the agent that their tickets on Eastwings Airlines were being held for them. “He or she will set you in the right direction,” Hedges said. “And don’t worry, it’s still the safest way to travel, I’m told.”
Abe offered him a hand. “We’d have a hard time thanking you enough for all you’ve done for us, Captain. It’s been a real pleasure knowing you.”
“That’s me exact feelin’s,” Shorty added. “Yer a good man, Capt’n, and I’m wishin’ ya all the best.”
Hedges smiled broadly. “It’s not often I hear things like that. Come see me when you get back.”
“I’m not too certain we’re coming back,” Abe said. “But if we do, you’ll be getting a visit, for sure. Oh, I almost forgot.” He took a small gold ring out of his pocket and handed it to Hedges. “I found this years ago. It’s been a sort of good luck piece for me. I’d like you to give it to your new niece when she’s a little older.”
Hedges looked surprised. “Are you sure?” Abe nodded.
A car horn sounded behind them, and Hedges gave them a small wave with the ring still in his hand. “Go straight to the ticket counter,” he said again, then drove slowly away.
Hedges had steered them correctly. They found the Eastwing’s booth and asked for their tickets. “May I see your I.D’s,” the ticket agent asked.
“Ya’ll just have to be takin’ me word fer it,” Shorty answered. “But Mr. Douglas has one.”
As Abe reached for his wallet, the agent glanced at the man standing at the other end of the booth. The man nodded slightly. Abe held up his ragged old driver’s license. “That’s fine,” the agent said. “You understand, we just need to make sure. We wouldn’t want anyone else getting your tickets.” He motioned to a porthole. “If you’ll just slide your luggage under the counter there, you’re on your way. You’ll be departing out of gate five.” He pointed down the concourse. “Just down that way.”
Halfway down the concourse they came to the security arches where they were asked to empty their pockets and proceed through the detectors. Abe dumped his bit of change, his wallet and his pocketknife in the tray. “Sir,” the guard said. “You can’t take the knife aboard.”
At the station next to him, Shorty emptied his pockets of coins, three packages of crackers and cheese and a sack of candy corn, and walked through the arch. It beeped so loud it scared him. The guard stepped in front of him and asked him to raise his arms. Shorty shot his hands skyward and the guard ran a wand over his body. When the wand neared the little man’s chest another beep sounded. “Sir, would you open your jacket.” Wide-eyed and mouth open, Shorty promptly obeyed. “May I?” the guard asked, reaching for the top of the leather pouch pinned to his shirt collar. “What’s this?” he demanded.
“Me purse,” Shorty answered.
The guard glared at him. “You were told to empty your pockets.”
“I did,” Shorty said. “Ya didn’t say anything about me purse.”
The guard gave him a mean squint. “Take it off and put it on the tray. You have anything else hidden in there?”
“Only me sewin’ kit.”
The guard shook his wand at the tray.
“Right,” Shorty said and dropped the little kit on top of his purse.
The guard opened the kit and shook his head. “There’s scissors in here. You can’t take these aboard.”
“What?” Shorty said, dropping his arms to his side. “I’m not one to travel without me sewin’ kit. And without me scissors it ain’t a sewin’ kit anymore, now is it?”
As Shorty was arguing his case, Abe was getting upset about his pocketknife. “That’s the only thing I’ve got left of my father’s. I’m not going to give it to you.”
“It’s either that or you don’t fly, Sir.”
Abe shrugged and stepped back out of the detector. “Then I won’t fly.”
The man who had nodded to the ticket agent earlier interrupted the commotion. “If you gentlemen will step over here for second,” he said to Abe and Shorty. The guards handed him the trays. “Please,” he asked and gave them an ushering motion to a door opposite the arches. Inside the room he said, “Evidently you haven’t flown in a while. There’s some restrictions now that you aren’t aware of, but I think I can help you.” He took the knife and the sewing kit out of the trays. “I’ll get these put into your checked cases, that way you’ll be fine. Okay?” Abe and Shorty agreed and were then allowed to pass through the detectors and find their departure area. As soon as they reached it, the man called Gerald Dodge’s office with an update. “Are you sure you’ve got the right men?” he asked Dodge. “They don’t fit any profile I’ve ever seen.”
“Are they on the plane, Patterson?” was Dodge’s only comment.
“They will be in a few minutes.” Patterson glanced at his watch. “Make that fifteen. The flight’s scheduled for ten-ten, and the agent says it’s on time.”
“Thanks, Patterson. Let me know for sure when they board.” Patterson put the telephone in its cradle then sat on a bench in the gate four waiting area where he could see without being seen until the men boarded their flight.
Gate five marked the end of the concourse. A cul-de-sac of floor to ceiling glass that provided an almost full circle view of the airport’s activities. Shorty wasn’t impressed by what he saw. “I didn’t know they still flew ‘em with propellers,” he said as they watched a turbo-prop taxi up from the runway. The name Eastwings Airlines stretched out in red letters along its silver fuselage. “Ya don’t imagine that’s the one we’ll be travelin’ on, do ya?”
“Looks like they’re going to stop right in front of us,” Abe answered while rubbing the palms of his hands on his pant-legs to dry them off. He was trembling. “You know, maybe we should’ve asked the Lord about this first, Mr. McDougal.”
“I’m thinkin’ it’s a little late fer that now,” Shorty said, nodding towards the uniformed lady just opening the door to the tarmac. “Unless yer of a mind not to go a’tall. Do ya think they’d be givin’ us back our belongin’s if we were to change our minds?”
Abe shook his head. “For all I know they might already be gone.”
“Are you gentlemen taking flight 101?” a woman’s voice asked.
They looked up to their right where the gate attendant now stood looking down at them. The other twelve passengers had already passed through the door. Abe removed his hat and handed her the tickets. “We’re going to Washington, the capital.”
“This is your flight then,” she said hurriedly. “You need to be boarding. Do you have any carry-ons?”
Abe shook his head, but Shorty answered her. “I had a sewin’ kit but they took it away already. Would ya be knowin’ if our suitcases are still here?”
The lady pointed to a small tractor just pulling a trailer away from the airplane. “They’ve just now been loaded. Don’t worry, they’ll be there when you land. You really have to get aboard now.”
“I don’t suppose I’d have time to go to the loo, would I?” Shorty said hesitantly.
“There’s one on the aircraft,” she said, showing her impatience.
 
; Abe stood and grabbed Shorty’s arm. “Oh, come on, Mr. McDougal, the Lord’ll see us through it.”
The inside of the craft seemed even smaller than it appeared on the outside. Abe had to bend his head down to walk to their seats in the very back of the plane. “Do you want to sit by the window?” he asked, and Shorty shook his head. “Your stomach, huh?” Abe guessed.
The steward interrupted them. “You need to sit down and fasten your seatbelts, gentlemen. We’re about to takeoff.”
After a quick briefing on what to do in the event the plane crashed, the pilot revved the engines. The whole machine shook and quivered as the roar and whir of the engines increased. “Oh, me everlovin mother!” Shorty breathed and clapped his hands over his eyes. Abe grabbed onto the armrests and stiffened back into the seat. The plane droned louder and moved away from the gate area, its tires thumping on the tarmac in ever increasing frequency. In a few breathless moments, the plane’s engines eased as it reached the beginning of the runway. “Are we flyin’?’ Shorty muffled.
Abe opened his mouth to answer, but the sound of his voice was destroyed in the thunder of the great propellers chopping into the morning air. Instantly they were hammered into the depths of their seats. “I want off!” Shorty yelled, as the plane screamed down the asphalt, its engines shaking the seats like an out of kilter washing machine. Then, abruptly it tilted nose-up at a drastic angle and they headed skyward.
As the thumping of the tires subsided, Abe chanced a glance through the porthole window. He saw the wing vibrating up and down in terror-raising rapidity. Suddenly he got the notion that the floor was going to open and drop out from under them. He closed his eyes. “Lord, help us,” he prayed, then turned his head to look at Shorty. “You’d better grab on to something! This thing’s not going to make it!”
But it did. In a matter of seconds the body of the craft leveled off and the drone of the engines took on a much less labored sound. The nerve-crushing liftoff was behind them but that didn’t seem to matter. The two frightened greenhorns sat stiff in their seats, very pale and more than a little queasy. As soon as the ‘Fasten seatbelts’ sign blinked off they took turns splashing their faces with cold water in the tiny restroom.
Dodge had not intentionally been sparing with the taxpayer’s money when he had their flight booked. Had he been given a choice he would rather have put them on a non-stop flight, but that was not an available option. Eastwings, a shuttle service, was the only carrier flying out of Windsor and it ran only small capacity, no-frills, prop-jets.
“I’m thinkin’ a little somethin’ on me stomach would ease me jitters a bit,” Shorty said a half-hour into the flight. He and Abe were beginning to accept the normalcy of the plane’s bouncing and bumping around as it roared through the pockets of turbulence they never knew existed. No one else, it seemed, was concerned, and the uneasy feelings in their stomachs had eased somewhat. “Would ya care fer some?” Shorty asked as he broke out his cache of crackers and candies.
They had nearly finished the bag of candy corn when the pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom. “The seatbelt light is on, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll be approaching Cincinnati International in about fifteen minutes. The weather is a clear, sunny seventy-two degrees with a five-knot wind out of the southwest. A good day to be fishing.”
“What are we doing in Cincinnati?” Abe asked the steward, bewildered by the announcement. “I thought you were taking us to Washington.”
The steward smiled. “You’ll catch a connecting flight here,” he advised. “We don’t go all the way.” He reached over to check the tension on their seatbelts. “Can I see your tickets?” Abe handed them to him. “Uh-huh. You’ll be transferring to NationAir. That’s in the same terminal we use so it’ll be easy for you to find. Just watch the signs. Oh, I see there’s no layover. You’ll have to go straight to Nation’s desk as soon as we get there. Okay?”
“What about me suitcase,” Shorty asked. “I wouldn’t want to be losin’ it.”
“It’ll be on the same flight with you. Now,” he said, moving away, “we’ll be landing in a few minutes. Everyone be sure to keep your seatbelts on until the plane comes to a complete stop.”
“I’ll just be closin’ me eyes if ya don’t mind, Mr. Douglas,” Shorty said, tapping Abe’s arm. “I’m hopin’ to see ya on the ground.”
Abe leaned over to put his face against the window. “I’m going to watch. It got us this far. I think it’ll get us back down.” He stared out of the window for a few minutes then said over his shoulder, “Everything looks so small out there. I wonder if that’s how we look to the Lord?”
Shorty changed his mind about keeping his eyes closed. He undid his seatbelt and squeezed his face next to Abe’s. “Ya mean like a bunch of ants? That’s a highway down there! Do ya see it? And a river! Just look at it, Mr. Douglas, how it snakes and twists around. I should’ve had a look earlier.”
The steward’s voice sounded behind him. “You’re going to have to sit back in your seat, Sir. And buckle your belt.” The plane suddenly tilted sideways. The view was immediately changed to blue sky, and Shorty had to grab Abe’s jacket to keep from falling into the aisle. The steward caught him with one hand and pushed him down into the seat. “Buckle-up and stay!” he said like he was commanding a dog. Shorty obeyed then both he and Abe closed their eyes and waited for the plane to crash into the ground.
They were both fervently seeking God’s intervention when the screech of the tires and the unexpected bumps of the touchdown rattled the plane. “Mr. Douglas?” Shorty whispered.
“Mr. McDougal?” Abe returned.
“Are ya okay?”
“Uh-huh. Are you?”
Shorty opened his eyes and saw the light posts and buildings whizzing by outside. “We did it!” he yelled. “We landed!”
The engines screamed in defiance as the pilot reversed the propeller angle to slow the craft, and Abe glued his face to the cold surface of the window. “Thank God,” he said in answer to Shorty’s exhilaration. They were on the ground, but there was no recuperation time.
Still on wobbly knees and slow of foot a few minutes after landing, they filed down the loading ramp to board the plane that would take them to their final destination. This time it was a regular jet.
It seemed to Abe and Shorty that the huge NationAir jet could have swallowed two of Eastwing’s turbos and still had room for the eighty passengers that boarded with them. The sheer magnitude of its giant body and expansive wingspread renewed the panic they thought they had put behind them. But quickly enough their fears passed. The engines whirred with a reassuring whistle of power as the massive bird took to the runway and lifted off with the ease of a butterfly taking wing on a breezy day. It slanted upward and climbed effortlessly into the heavens. “It’s amazing isn’t it, Mr. McDougal?” Abe said when the plane leveled off. “Something this big riding on nothing but air.”
“It’s amazin’ that I’m on it,” Shorty said. “And just between us, I’m thinkin’ I’ve had enough to last me the rest of me life. When we leave Washington, let’s be travelin’ by a more conventional means.”
“A train?” Abe questioned.
“That’d do,” Shorty answered with a brisk nod.
“Okay by me, but I suppose a lot depends on what the Lord wants us to do.”
“Well, if ya recall, Mr. Douglas, it wasn’t His idea that put us up here. It was yers. So, maybe the next time you oughtta be askin’ Him first.”
“I don’t remember you saying anything about that before we got started.”
Shorty lowered his eyes and fidgeted his fingers together. “I know,” he said.
The flight attendant saved him from completing his apology. He handed them each a package of smoked almonds from his cart. “Something to drink?” he asked pleasantly. “Coffee, tea, cola or lemon-lime?”
For the duration of the flight they sipped the
ir colas and munched on the almonds, taking turns looking out of the window at the clouds and the landscape as it slid by twenty thousand feet below them.
Agents Chamberlain and Hart met them at the airport just inside the waiting area of their arrival gate. The two men, a bit rugged in facial appearance and dressed in dark suits, seemed amiable enough as they approached. “Mr. Douglas? Mr. McDougal?” Chamberlain asked, giving them each time to acknowledge him. “Richard Chamberlain. This is Darrel Hart. Mr. Hail sent us to welcome you.” They shook hands. “Mr. Hail’s looking forward to meeting you both. Let’s pick up your luggage and we’ll be on our way.”
“How was the flight?” Hart asked, making small talk as they walked towards the baggage carousel.
“It was an experience,” Abe answered noncommittally.
“That it was,” Shorty said. “Ya know this is me first time to Washington.”
“Really?” Chamberlain said. “Well, we’ll try to make sure it’s one you’ll remember.” Abe caught the clandestine wink he gave Hart.
“That’s awful kind of ya,” Shorty said. “Isn’t it, Mr. Douglas?”
Abe nodded. “Uh-huh, real kind.” He pointed to a man on the opposite side of the carousel. “I think that’s our cases he just picked up,” he said, and speeded up his step.
“That’s okay,” Chamberlain said. “He’s one of ours. I mean he’s getting them for us.” Abe slowed and let his words sink in. Something about the men didn’t ring true with him.
“I’ll get them,” Hart said and sprinted ahead to intercept the other man and take control of the suitcases. He was on his way back when Abe met him and reached for his case. “That’s all right,” Hart said. “I’ll carry them to the car for you. You guys just take it easy.”
Outside, both Hart and Chamberlain stopped to put their sunglasses on. With this new look about them, Abe became even more suspicious. They sorely reminded him of the five tough guys in Midvale. Shorty, on the other hand, was busy taking in all the newness and not paying any attention to the underlying subtleties. “Yes, Sir, it’s a fine city ya live in,” he was saying as they reached the waiting car. It sat empty at the check-in curb with its engine idling. Chamberlain opened the trunk and Hart hefted a case at a time into it. When he picked up the second case, the front of his coat flared revealing the butt-end of his service pistol.
Abe quickly looked away and followed Shorty into the back seat of the car. “Didn’t you need to use the restroom?” he said to the slack-jawed little man.
“No,” Shorty answered. Abe moved a foot over and pushed it down hard on one of his tennis shoes. “On second thought, I suppose I should,” the Irishman said in a hurry.
“Me too. We’ll be right back,” he said to Chamberlain, who was now in the front seat waiting for Hart to get into the driver’s side.
Chamberlain opened his door. “I’ll go with you and show you where it is.”
“We can find it,” Abe said, getting back out of the car. He was anxious to let Shorty know that the mobsters were still after them but Chamberlain wasn’t going to cooperate.
“No, that’s all right,” Chamberlain said. “It’s no trouble, and now that you mention it, I could stand to go myself.”
Not wanting to show his suspicions, Abe nodded, and the three of them headed back into the terminal. The restroom was just inside the baggage area. It would have been impossible for them not to find it had they gone alone.
With his bathroom ploy summarily quashed and Shorty being so wrapped up in his own excitement, Abe resolved himself to the notion that instead of running away from trouble they were headed into a disaster. Everything in his mind seemed to point to the fact that another group of mobsters were behind their being in Washington. And it didn’t look like he was going to find the opportunity to share his worries with McDougal.