Guns for Smoke

The plane banks hard and I almost slide to the open cargo door. A little g force holds me to the deck as we pull it around and line up on the small dirt airstrip below us.
Jerry, our pilot, has never had a pilots license. Never needed one. He learned to fly his father’s biplane over six hundred acres of corn and never looked back. “They all have two wings and landing gear.” He would say on the rare occasion when he actually engaged you in conversation on the subject.
What we were doing out here was all so far gone that I could be flying the plane for all that it mattered. Licenses, aircraft registration, flight plans… they didn’t exist in our little world.
The plane levels off and the hard thump of the strip brings me back to the task at hand. My blood is pumping hard in my ears as we slow and the tail wheel touches down. Jerry makes quick work of the quarter mile of runway toward the dim flash of headlights that marks our unloading point. This is the part that I hate the most. Never the same people on the ground, why I don’t know. You would think they would have the same guys there as a matter of trust. But trust was why they had a different crew each time. They didn’t trust us, most likely, and the fewer times they saw the same face, the less likely you would be able to identify them. That’s my take, anyway.
Time to put on my garb, for effect. I grab the vest from the hook near the door. Jerry tells me it scares the shit out of anyone who sees it. “Give a man a grenade and he is king of the world”.
It is something from the Viet Nam era, holding four grenades and four clips for the machine gun I have slung over my neck. I don’t even know what the damn thing is, just how to load it and how to hit something when I pull the trigger. There were five grenades on this vest, but Jerry had me use one for effect three drops ago.
We roll up on the trucks, three flatbeds and a pick-up with a fifty caliber mounted in the bed. These guys are not messing around. Jerry spins the plane around so he is facing the runway for our getaway and idles down. That is the signal for the trucks to approach, and they do.
The open cargo door is now on the opposite side of the plane, so the trucks have to drive around. They think that Jerry is an idiot from what I can remember of my freshman Spanish courses. But Jerry knows what he is doing. Making them come around to the opposite side of the plane puts the plane between our unloading and the jungle, and any ambush.
The air smells heavy and damp. If Jerry were ever to shut the engines down, the sound of the jungle would be just a loud. But Jerry never shuts them down, he doesn’t even come back to help with the unload. What he does do is remain ready in the cockpit, with an M-16 trained on the unloading crew.
The trucks pull around with headlights off and the short squeal of un-maintained brakes tells me the show is about to begin.
“You are late, my friend,” the voice approaches from the darkness. A familiar face, finally. Greco, my counterpart in this operation, smiles with a toothy grill. I have downed a bottle of tequila with this man during a stay in some seedy town near the coast a month ago. We had come down to sample the local crop, to see if these guys were legit… or as legit as you can be when you are running cannabis in a cargo plane.
Greco barked a few quick orders, managing to sound quite menacing. Three men jumped in the plane with me and we slid the crates out of the cargo door. This was just an extra courtesy that we had provided Greco’s boss. These were crates of AK’s and a couple of rocket launchers that had been traded up the line for the pot we were loading back on the plane. It isn’t like the movies where there were loads cash going back and forth. That will get you killed. That money was already spent and the currency was eliminated from the transaction. It was a better way to do business, no laundering, no explaining. Just trade for what you were going to buy in the first place. Sometimes we dropped other goods, and one those totally nerve wracking transactions we would have duffels with cash, but for the most part, it was something like this.
Jerry gunned the engines. This was taking too long. I could see the glow of his cigarette in the blackness of the cockpit as he watched us. The tip of his rifle moved, a gesture to me to get this thing over with.
Greco’s boys had started to throw the bails on board. They chattered back and forth like they were tossing hay in a barn, no worries. To them it wasn’t any different than any other crop, except the part where they could be killed because of it. Didn’t seem to worry them, though.
A hand reached in to Greco and handed him a joint that must have been making the rounds outside. He took a quick draw from it and waved it at me. “Hombre…” he handed it off to me and I took a quick hit and gave it back. The engines gunned again, this time longer, more deliberate. Time to go.
“We almost done here?” I asked Greco, who peered into the darkness at the flatbed. He called out to someone and they reported back.
“Just these two and that is all my friend.” He looked at me with expectation.
I walked to the back of the plane and opened the old ice chest and pulled some icy cold Buds of a different nature and tossed them one at a time to Greco. He passed them out of the door and as the last one landed in his hands, the engines throttled up for good.
“Next time, my friend” Greco calls as he retreats from the cargo door.
The trucks back off and we start our take off roll. Jerry is wheels up half way down the dirt strip and we pull up above the jungle and bank north. The reaching dim of the truck headlights disappear beneath the jungle canopy and the landscape below is lit now only from a harvest moon.