Line of Succession by Brian Garfield

Author:Brian Garfield [Garfield, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com / Open Road
Published: 2012-03-26T12:59:47+00:00

7:30 A.M. North African Time The two engines made a racket in the plane like the thunder of a Second World War bomber, Fairlie thought. The fuselage vibrated a great deal. Some loose piece of metal in the cabin kept chattering.

Fingers closed on his wrist: Lady’s hand, checking his pulse again. She seemed to do it quite frequently. Perhaps they were worried about the effects of the drugs they had given him earlier on.

He wasn’t drugged now. Blindfolded, his mouth gagged with tape, his hands bound with wire. They didn’t want him throwing tantrums. They weren’t sure of him yet, they weren’t sure he wasn’t about to go berserk.

He wasn’t sure of it himself.

Lady had warned him not to struggle because he might make himself sick; vomit could make him choke to death. They had taken him ashore in a dinghy and from snatches of talk he pieced it together that they were sinking the boat. A stranger’s voice then—an unfamiliar tongue, but the voice had a husky gravel quality, a high-pitched wheezing sort of voice, as if its owner had a bad case of catarrh.

Back into the dinghy again. They’d rowed him out into a fierce chop. He had tried to keep relaxed: he wasn’t ordinarily susceptible to seasickness but the young woman’s cool warning about vomit had fixed his mind on the subject and it was almost impossible to ignore. He remembered one of McNeely’s jokes: All right, you can do anything in the world as long as you don’t think of a white hippopotamus. Then the McNeely grin: Ever tried to not think of a white hippopotamus before?

McNeely. That was in some other world.

They had lifted him, with some strugglings and mouthings of oaths, into a cramped cabin of some kind; helped him feel his way into a seat and settled him into it. Then they had wired his ankles together.

The gravel-voiced wheeze taking its leave; Fairlie had heard oarlocks squeak—evidently the wheezer rowing back to shore alone.

He had thought he was aboard a boat—the same boat or a new one—until he’d heard the engine choke and sputter and begin to roar; he realized immediately it was an airplane.

A seaplane, then.

The second engine had whined into life and there was a great deal of gunning before he felt it begin to move. Taking off seemed to be touch and go: the sea had a wicked slap to it, the cabin lurched and pitched. The epithets of Abdul the black pilot were intense. Fairlie remembered Abdul’s cool handling of the helicopter when Abdul had somehow killed the engine while pretending something had gone wrong with it; Abdul’s anger now terrified Fairlie but finally they were airborne and he felt the seat tip under him as the plane climbed steeply.

There was no accurate way to estimate the length of time they had been in the air or which way they were heading or even where they had started from, but there was enough talk for Fairlie to identify the

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