“Boris,” the crewman shouted.
Clyde beckoned Boris back to the locker where he had found the pipe, and dug out another. He tossed it to Boris, who was so surprised he nearly dropped it. He looked quizzically at Clyde.
“Tovarisch?” Clyde shouted.
“Da,” Boris said.
“Let’s boogie,” Clyde said, and pointed Boris forward, still not trusting him enough to go in front.
Boris flagged him down and pointed at the pen. Clyde handed it to him, and Boris proceeded to draw a little floor plan of the passenger compartment, with little boxes representing the inhabitants. “Rooski, rooski, rooski, Iraqi, rooski, Iraqi, Iraqi,” he said. Then he pointed to the last of these Iraqis and made his hand into a pistol.
“Okay, he’s mine,” Clyde said, pointing to himself. “You get these other two.”
The door in the bulkhead led to a steep metal staircase. The brilliant light of the sun filtered down from the windows of the passenger compartment above. Boris went first, creeping to the bottom of the stairway with his pipe hidden in his sleeve, and looked up. Then he beckoned Clyde forward; none of the Iraqis had heard them coming through the door.
Clyde couldn’t stand waiting anymore, so he jumped through the doorway, ran up the stairs three at a time, and burst into the passenger compartment. The leader of the Iraqis was seated farthest forward, closest to the cockpit door, so that he could keep tabs on Vitaly. He was about four strides away from Clyde, and Clyde had covered half of that distance before he had even looked up.
Clyde had spent enough time in the Barge On Inn, hitting dangerous people with nightsticks, to know that if he wound up and swung the pipe like a baseball bat, the man would see it coming and dodge it or block it. So he lunged forward, thrusting the end of the pipe at the Iraqi’s face like the point of a sword,and caught him in the temple hard enough to snap his head back against the bulkhead. That didn’t knock him out, but it did leave him stunned long enough for Clyde to go upside his head with the pipe one more time.
He turned around to see one of the Iraqi Ph.D.’s laid out in the aisle, and the other one curled up in a fetal position in his seat as Boris rained blows on him. It appeared that Boris was in a rather vindictive mood; or maybe he had decided it would be useful to demonstrate his commitment to Clyde’s side of the dispute.
Clyde confiscated the Iraqi leader’s gun and handcuffed him, then cuffed the mauled Ph.D.’s as well and let Boris worry about freeing his comrades. He opened the cockpit door and was almost knocked flat by the intensity of the sunlight coming in over Vitaly’s shoulders.
“Clyde, my good droog!” Vitaly said. “I am so happy to see you well. And I am sorry that my crew members did not keep your secret very well. But the Iraqis were suspicious about these two mysterious cigarette smugglers who came out of the blizzard, and they were very persuasive.”
Clyde knew all about people like Vitaly; he arrested them all the time, and he knew that there was no point in trying to pin him down and prove his guilt. Vitaly would have plausible excuses stacked up like jumbo jets above O’Hare Airport on a foggy Thanksgiving. “Speaking of persuasive,” Clyde said, “you can either keep flying this crate and get blown to bits pretty soon, or land it and get lots of money from my government. It’s up to you.”
Vitaly throttled the engines down and banked the Antonov into a turn. “There is a Canadian Air Force base not far away, with a beautiful runway,” he said. “Did you get all four of the Iraqis?”
“All four.”
“Good,” Vitaly said. “Let’s crank some tunes.” He reached over his head and punched a button on a car stereo that had been jury-rigged into the Antonov. It was a Jane’s Addiction CD—“Been Caught Stealing.” It came through magnificently, even over the engine noise—the Russians had converted the Antonov into the world’s largest ghetto blaster. “Have you ever tried Crimean brandy?” Vitaly shouted.
It was late afternoon now, and the sun plummeted below the horizon in the space of a few seconds as the Antonov lost altitude. Ghostly blue lights appeared in the sky around them; Vitaly identified them as the exhausts of fighter jets, which had been sent up to escort them in.