The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (41 page)

We still had four engines, but they were laboring to keep us above the wave tops. When things settled down a little, Frick sent word to me to come up and relieve Ray while he went back aft to check on the injured crew members, of which there were several. Meanwhile, I had to figure out how to fly this chopped and channeled bird and get us back home. We stayed under 500 feet, avoiding the worst of the weather, and there turned out to be exactly one speed where I could hold altitude: 170 knots.”

“Y’all are lucky nobody got killed! How bad were the injuries?”

“Not as bad as they could’ve been; two or three broken bones and a mild concussion. We still had to get the poor old bird, and ourselves, on the ground in one piece. Commander Frick replaced me in the left seat, Ray returned to the right seat, and I got in the jump seat to help with the landing checklist. We requested a GCA- ground controlled approach- so the controller could monitor our glide slope. Since the hydraulic system had taken damage, we went in with the flaps up. And unbelievably, the landing gear dropped into place just as though nothing had happened.”

Lulu exhaled as though she’d been holding their breath the entire time Jack had spoken. “Phew! And so ends another run-of-the-mill day at work for the Hurricane Hunters. Think that plane’ll ever fly again?”

“I wouldn’t bet on it, sweetie,” he said as he got to his feet and extended a hand to her. “Brunch at the Bundy Bar?”

Lulu stretched, hands above her head. “First, come back to bed and still my palpitatin’ heart, Smilin’ Jack.”

27 TIME & PLACE

“Jack.”

“Jack.”

“JACK!”

Rolling onto his stomach, Jack groped beside the bed for one of his ankle-high “boondocker” flight shoes. He swung it in a sort of hook-shot, over his head and behind him, at the offending voice. It returned in a split-second, striking the left cheek of his ass as though inhabited by a foot.

“Ow!”  Jack scrambled to his feet, shoe in hand, and saw Nick sitting on the foot of the bed. Exhaling, he sat down beside him. “Oh. What?”

“Sorry to roust you on Sunday morning, bub, but time is the essence of this wake-up call. I waited until Lulu was in the shower.”

“ ’S OK. Anyone who doesn’t say “time is of the essence” gets my immediate attention. What’s up?”

“Linda and Pete’ve been shanghaied to fly a pickup out of
Dallas
next month. It’s gonna be hairy, and they’ll definitely need your help back at home base. Bisque, that is. Put in for a couple weeks’ leave, beginning on Sunday the 17th. If for any reason you run into a problem with those dates, let me know and I’ll change whomever’s mind needs changing. You flying tomorrow?”

“Nope.”

“Drive over to Luquillo for lunch. Park at the beach. I’ll give you the details then, but get that leave request in first thing in the morning.”  Looking over Jack’s shoulder, he said, “Here comes Lulu; looks like she wants you to dry her off. See you tomorrow, Studley.”

Jack pulled out of the parking lot just past
11:30, not because he expected any sort of crowd at the beach in late October. Native Puerto Ricans observe the seasons of the higher latitudes, a quirk Jack guessed might be due to the native Europeaness of Catholicism, which had a supernatural stranglehold on the majority of them. Stopping at the first lechón asado wagon on the right side of the highway, he bought a pound of roast pork, cut while he waited from the loin of the spitted hog inside the wagon’s glass windows. That, plus two cylindrical rolls of fresh-baked bread and three frosty
India
beers drawn from the corrugated steel tub that sat beside the wagon, went into a Kraft-paper bag that Jack sat carefully down in the Cunningham’s passenger-side foot well. Extracting one of the
Indias
from the bag, he opened it with the small “church key” on his key chain and took a first sip before climbing back under the wheel. Thus fortified, he settled down for the remainder of the thirty-mile run to Playa de Luquillo.

Pulling into the broad, well-kept public beach’s almost-deserted parking lot, Jack parked the car in a front-ranked spot that offered a nice view of the beach. He’d just pulled the lunch bag out of its footwell niche when Nick appeared, his Bermuda shorts complemented by an off-white guayabera that looked like raw silk. Jack pried open an
India
and handed it to him. “Thanks,” he said. “Go ahead and make a sandwich while I bring you up to speed.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Jack said, a note of grimness in his voice. “After what you told me yesterday, I didn’t get to sleep until sometime after three this morning, and woke up too late to get breakfast. But I did get the leave request in.”  Splitting a roll with his Case knife as he spoke, he squeezed mustard from four small foil packages on the bread, then piled on a generous half of the aromatic sliced pork. Taking an immediate large bite, he turned slightly to look more directly at Nick. “So what manner of derring-do’s been foisted on our pals this time? Up to now, seems like they’ve been pretty ready to volunteer.” Taking a second large chunk out of his sandwich, Jack looked speculatively at Nick, whose grave expression belied his tourist togs.

“Couple of classic adrenaline junkies,” Nick agreed. “This time, though, it’s different. They’re being pulled into the crime of the millennium, something heretofore unheard of and deservedly infamous. It’s still studied by scholars in my time, though any residual mystery about it’s long been put to rest. I’ll give you some background while you finish your sandwich. To begin with, let’s touch on Howard Hughes for a minute. You know a thing or two about him, don’t you?”

Jack laughed. “You kidding? I, the movie maven? Rich beyond belief, connoisseur of women, creator of Jane Russell’s cantilever bra for The Outlaw, producer of Wings, aviator extraordinaire and the mastermind behind the bird I fly? Yeah, a little.”

“Well, the reason I asked you corresponds to your first descriptive term, i.e. ‘Rich beyond belief.’ You’ve had occasion to experience the difference between the lives of people of limited means and those of people with a few million in the bank, like you. I daresay that you wouldn’t like to revert to your pre-inheritance status.”

“Who the hell would?”  asked Jack, chewing.

“No one in his right mind, unless there were some mighty unusual circumstances involved. So imagine people like Howard Hughes, not just multi-millionaires but multi-billionaires, might feel about just losing a fraction of their net worth.”

Just before pushing the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth, Jack shook his head. “They’d be pissed, even at the thought.”

“They would indeed,” Nick agreed, “and that’s not the half of it. Now, do you know anything about the basis for Howard Hughes’s fortune?”

“Sump’m about oil drilling, wasn’t it?”

“A very important ‘something.’ A two-cone rotary drill bit that penetrates rock with ten times the speed of any former bit. It revolutionized oil well drilling. The patents for that bit, and the royalties and license fees Hughes Tool Company received from virtually every company in the oil drilling business for the last 50 years or so, are the golden egg-laying goose. But even after they paid their royalties and license fees, lots of people made lots of money drilling for, and refining, crude oil, a lot of them in
Texas. You’ve run across some of their names-  Byrd, Hunt, Richardson- they, and others like them, virtually made the state of
Texas
as it is today. And one of the main reasons they were able to do it was by getting a federal law passed in 1926, establishing something called the oil depletion allowance. I’ll spare you the details; what it amounted to was letting oil companies deduct 27.5% of their profits from the sale of crude oil, on the theory that the companies had invested heavily in a commodity that would, at one time or another, disappear.”

“Makes sense,” Jack allowed, “if the numbers back it up.”

“Exactly. But by the time Kennedy was elected, the prevailing opinion, in Democratic party circles at least, was that the numbers didn’t back it up, and never had. They’d been trying to wipe it out since
Roosevelt’s day, with no success. Texas Congressman Sam Rayburn, as Speaker of the House, never let any aspirant who wouldn’t swear to support the depletion allowance join the Ways and Means Committee. A simple but effective means of keeping the lid on; if a bill can’t get out of committee onto the House floor for a vote, it won’t become law. But Kennedy, with a two to one membership advantage in the House, has a good chance of making it happen, and it’s one of his major objectives. But it’s not just that he’s earned the enmity of
Texas
oilmen; there are two other major factions in American society who don’t want him in the White House.”

“And they are...” Jack interposed.

“Organized crime and defense contractors. Both with the money to make things happen. JFK’s turned his brother loose on Marcello, Giancana, Hoffa and numerous smaller fry, this after Giancana assured his election by swinging sufficient votes in
Chicago
to guarantee him victory in
Illinois. He also intends to pull all
US
troops out of
Vietnam, which will put a major crimp in the revenues, and in some cases endanger the existence of, defense contractors who’re counting on billions of government dollars from years of fighting out there. So where would you imagine that these groups want to see JFK?”

“Out of office, naturally.”

“But can you imagine them waiting until ’64, and counting on the electorate to vote their way, after losing in 1960? These people aren’t crap shooters, buddy; they want him out, really out, and now.”

“Uh-oh. Nick, you’re not suggesting...”

“Nope. I’m telling you. JFK’ll draw his last breath next month.”

Looking at Nick in disbelief, Jack said, “You’re telling me that these people you’re talking about are going to have him killed?”

“Bingo.”

“In
Dallas.”

“Doctor IQ awards 14 silver dollars and a box of Mars Bars to the young man in the balcony! You were listening yesterday.”

Jack’s face darkened. “Don’t play with me, Nick. This is serious shit we’re talking about, even if Linda and Pete weren’t involved in it. You’re telling me that the President of the
United States
is going to be assassinated, and nothing can be done about it?”

Nick’s ironic smile faded. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you, Jackie. Absolutely nothing. That’s the reality that’ll first be hinted at early in the 21st century, arising out of work done in
Geneva
on a massive particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider. When the universe got started, things went from zero to infinity pretty damn quickly, including all of human experience. Inhuman, too, for that matter. Everything’s in the spacetime envelope; said another way, buddy, life’s a cosmic surfboard. Some call it determinism. Our fate’s not up to us. It just is.”

Jack pondered Nick’s words for several seconds. “Then why the hell are you telling me that we have to help Linda and Pete, if everything’s just gonna happen?”

“Because it’s part of what’s gonna happen. Try to get comfortable with that thought. Just think how much more enjoyable life’ll be without having to allocate brain cycles to that nonexistent entity, ‘free will.’”

Jack focused closely on him, his eyes narrowing. “Wait a minute. Did you just say what I think you said?”

“I think so.”

Jack threw up his hands in frustration, distributing the remaining lechón throughout the Cunningham’s cockpit. “Goddammit! Free will’s what makes us human!”

“Guess again,” Nick said, fighting to contain his mirth. “Don’t make Dr. IQ take back the Mars Bars. Seriously, after you’ve lived with the thought for a few days, you won’t know the difference. Think about it this way; if all of time wasn’t permanently in place, how could we travel in it?”

A deep sigh rose up from the center of Jack’s being. “OK,” he said, avoiding Nick’s eyes as he picked pork fragments from the car’s dashboard and tossed them out the window. “What’s the deal with Linda and Pete?”

“They’ll be returning to
Miami
from
Dallas, VFR, no flight plan, when Pete decides to set a course for Bisque instead. They pick you up there and immediately take off, no refueling necessary. Then you’ll go with them for two or three days to a nearby landing site that I’ve arranged.”

“And JFK’s dead at this point.”

“Right. As of
1 p.m.
Friday, November 22.”

“Did they catch any of the people who did it?”

“Nope. They got a guy, Oswald, who didn’t do it and charged him with two murders, of JFK and a Dallas policeman, a guy named Tippit, who was part of the crew that was responsible for getting Oswald out of the country, then doing away with him and getting rid of the body. He’d have been The Assassin Who Got Away, acting on the orders of Fidel Castro.”

“But something’ll happen on Pete’s and Linda’s flight, too, won’t it? He wouldn’t just decide on a whim to come back to dear old Bisque.”

“That’s right. He’ll be coming to Bisque to get you. I’ll put that idea in his head. He’ll expect you to be there. Your part in this is to get your uncle to keep the airport open for the air taxi flight that you’ve arranged. No refueling necessary. Pete taxies up the ramp, I open the Albatross’s hatch, you hop in and you’re off, with effusive thanks to Gene Debs, to
Miami.”