Lee listened to the tower through his headset as he played around with a JT3D-7 turbofan in a corner of the hangar at the airfield. After two weeks of tinkering with the same engine, he felt he knew it better than anyone at Pratt & Whitney. The Gulfstream touched down and was due for a quick turnaround before heading to Vladivostok.

That made it even more suspicious, Lee thought, since the baked-goods distributor was thought to be tied to the Russian mafia.

Feeling a bit constricted in the bulletproof vest he wore under his white jumpsuit, Lee set down his wrench and walked to the phone on the hangar wall. He felt the lopsided weight of the holstered.38 Smith & Wesson press against his left shoulder as he punched Ken's mobile number into the green phone.

"Ken," he said, "the Gulfstream just landed and is pulling up to hangar two. Meet me there."

Ken Sawara said, "Let me check it out."

"No--"

"But your Japanese is terrible, Jet--"

"Your Colombian is worse," said Lee. "See you there."

It was well before sunrise, and though the airport was not as busy as the one in Honolulu had been over six hours before, at 2:35 P.M. local time, it was busy enough as air traffic converged from the west and the east. Lee knew that many mobsters, men like Aram Vonyev and Dmitri Shovich, liked having their planes land at big public airports rather than at the small strips that government agents found easier to watch. Those two criminals especially liked having their planes come and go during the day, out in the open, where law officers and rival gangsters didn't expect to see them. In Honolulu, as in Mexico City and in Bogotá, Colombia, before that, this plane had landed and taken off in bright daylight.

The Gulfstream taxied quickly to the Yaswee Oil truck waiting near the hangar nearest to the runway. Here, as at the other fields, the Gulfstream had its own fuel trucks waiting. Though mobsters had their own reasons for moving goods somewhat out in the open like this, none was so brazen that he wanted to stay on the ground any longer than absolutely necessary.

If the plane followed the pattern-- and there was no reason it shouldn't, Lee knew-- then after less than fifty minutes on the ground in Tokyo it would be airborne again, its twin Rolls-Royce Spey Mk 511-8 turbofans carrying it to the northwest, into the dark, overcast skies. Soon it would be in Russia, just across the Sea of Japan.