White Cargo by Stuart Woods Read Free Book Online Page A

that he needed the money.
    He suddenly felt ill and pulled the car over. He sat on the grass verge of the roadway, fighting nausea, trying to think of something else to do for Katie and Jinx, for some reason to go on living, and not having much luck. Suddenly, there was a loud roar overhead, and a shadow passed across the car. Cat looked up and discovered that he was parked at the end of a runway at Peachtree Dekalb Airport, a general aviation field on the outskirts of Atlanta. He watched the light airplane climb, turn, and start back toward the field.
    Cat started the car and drove around to the main entrance of the airport. Passing through the gate, he immediately saw a sign reading “PDK Flight Academy.” A few moments later he sat across a desk from a pleasant man who explained the flight-training program to him. Half an hour later he sat at the end of a runway in a Cessna 152 trainer and listened carefully to the fresh-faced young instructor seated next to him.
    “Okay,” the kid was saying, “full throttle, keep the airplane on the center line, watch your airspeed, and rotate at fifty knots.”
    Cat pushed in the throttle, and the little airplane started to roll. He steered with the rudder pedals, nervously watching the airspeed indicator. At fifty knots he pulled back on the yoke and the airplane leapt off the runway, leaving his stomach on the ground.
    “Continue straight ahead and climb to three thousand feet,” the instructor said. A few minutes later they were over Lake Lanier, forty miles to the north of the city, practicing turns. Flying was something he’d thought about off and on over the years, but he had never had the time. Now he had nothing but time. An hour later, Cat had been issued a flight manual and enrolled in the flying school.
    That night he stayed up late reading the manual. The next day he took a two-hour lesson. The day after that, another. He began flying every day the weather was decent, studying the manual and workbook whenever he was grounded. He registered in a weekend seminar to accelerate his academic training and passed the FAA written examination the following day with a perfect score. He soloed ten days after beginning his training and began flying the airplane alone on practice sessions and oncross-country flights. His concentration was total. He read every flying magazine he could get his hands on, every book he could squeeze in. He clung to the training doggedly, obsessively. It filled his life, left no room to think about anything else, and that was what he wanted.
    In the middle of his fourth week of training, his instructor met him at the airplane after a solo flight. “I’ve scheduled you for a check ride with an FAA examiner for your private pilot’s license tomorrow morning at ten o’clock,” the young man said. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Catledge, you’ve set a record around here. I’ve never seen anybody work so hard and get so much packed into so short a time. I think you’ll do just fine on your check ride.” They spent an hour filling out forms and making sure Cat’s logbook was up to date, then Cat went home, buoyed with the idea that tomorrow, after a flying test he was confident he could pass, he would be a licensed private pilot. He started thinking about training for an instrument rating.
    Back at the house, he changed into a swimsuit and went out to the pool. He dived in and began swimming slow, steady laps, balancing his kicks on each side, measuring his strokes, working every muscle. He swam twenty laps, then heaved himself onto the side of the pool, sucking in deep breaths. There was water in his eyes, and it took him a moment to realize that somebody was standing at the opposite end of the pool, staring at him. The figure was tall and slim, rather like the man he had been seeing in the mirror lately.
    “Hello, Dell,” he said, finally, to his son.
    The boy said nothing, just stood and stared blankly at him.
    “You haven’t been around,” Cat