Free The Janson Command by Paul Garrison

after several hard years to settle a debt to an equipment-leasing outfit. AngolLease ran it until a near-fatal hard landing bent its landing gear and shoved one of the struts through the cabin floor, which had led to jury-rigging the retraction mechanism. AngolLease passed it twelve hundred miles up the coast to Port-Gentil, Gabon, into the hands of LibreLift, a service operation owned by the pilots: an anorexic Frenchman with a sun-blasted face and a nicotine-yellowed walrus mustache, and a beefy Angolan wearing a patchwork of army uniforms, who also served as the helicopter’s mechanic.
    Janson had no desire to take the panels off to confirm how worn its guts were. Judging only by loose rivets, oil streaks along its tail boom, and crazed Plexiglas, he figured he had flown in a lot worse. Jessica Kincaid had not and she mentioned as soon as they had their headsets on that she smelled a fuel leak.
    “No problem,” said the pilot.
    “You’re smelling the extra tanks in the cargo bay,” Janson explained. But the co-pilot/mechanic was quick to defend his brand-new composite tanks with crashworthy fuel cells that LibreLift would inherit after the job along with their mounting rafts. “Not auxiliary,” he assured Kincaid. “Main tank leak. No problem.”
    She looked at Janson. “Am I supposed to be relieved?”
    Janson pointed at the instrument panel. “You can relax unless you see one of these chip sensors light up.”
    “Chips of what?”
    “If they sense chips broken off the main bearings floating around the oil pan, the manual says: ‘Land while you still can.’ ”
    “Glad to hear it.” Kincaid checked their rigid inflatable boat, the RPGs they’d separated from the lobsters, and her personal weapons, then strapped in and closed her eyes. The S-76 got clearance and lifted off with a racket of loose turbine bearings. Despite the ominous sound effects, Janson and Kincaid exchanged an approving glance. The pilot had a nice smooth touch. By the time his helicopter was whining and thudding west making 130 knots at four thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean both agents had fallen asleep. They awakened simultaneously in one hour.
    “ Bateau délesteur ,” said the Frenchman, pointing down at a little gray ship plodding through the murky sea. Janson glassed her. She was rust stained and heaped with cargo, a two-hundred-foot former OSV converted to freighting up and down the African coast. The main deck was crowded with used cars, pallets of bottled water, and lumpy shapes covered in blue poly tarps. With a three-deck wheelhouse sticking up in front and a fixed cargo crane in back, it offered no place to land a helicopter.
    “Fast rope,” Janson said, and handed the glasses to Kincaid. The wheelhouse roof, the highest point on the ship, was the safe choice for the helicopter to hover while they went down the rope. But it was small, and in the middle spun a horizontal four-foot radar dish.
    Janson radioed the ship’s captain on the short-range VHF channel the Angolan had specified to avoid transmitting on the general marine channel that anyone could monitor. The captain spoke only French. Janson passed the radio to Kincaid.
    “Démonter la radar antenne, sil vous plait?”
    The radar dish stopped spinning. While seamen climbed to the roof with tools and removed it, Janson and Kincaid attached the helicopter’s cargo hook to the inflatable’s harness. Then Janson and Kincaid put on their packs and rifles and rope gloves and snap-linked the bitter end of the fast rope to a cable donut ring anchored to the helicopter floor. Janson instructed the pilot to hover twenty meters above the wheelhouse.
    The machine approached obliquely, angling in from the side. By now it was clear that the Frenchman was an exceptional pilot with light feet on his pedals, applying and reducing power smoothly. But unlike a ship captain, whose first responsibility was to his passengers, a helicopter pilot’s priorities were machine and