“Sir, I wish I could help you. But that information is at the other end of a two-hour flight,” Lady said. He held up his own radio. “What shall I tell the pilot, sir? He is waiting to take off.”

If the kid had wiggled the radio, the attorney would have turned around and left. But he did not. He was respectful. And he had effectively called Coffey’s bluff.

The American turned to Penny.

“It looks like I’ll be taking a two-hour flight,” he said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have some idea what’s going on.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Penny said.

“I do,” Coffey said. “I just hope this isn’t an elaborate Ellsworth plot to keep me from giving a speech.”

“He’s a duck-shover,” she said, “but if that turns out to be the case, just E-mail me the speech. I’ll read it for you.”

Coffey thanked her and indicated for Petty Officer Lady to lead him to the plane.

“Duck-shover?” he said, turning back to Penny.

“My dad drove a taxi,” the woman shouted ahead. “That’s what they used to call drivers who cut other taxis off or muscled them out of the way.”

“I love it!” Coffey called back, waving as he headed toward the back of the hangar and the door that led to the field.

The Lockheed P-3C was a big, gray, cigar-shaped four-engine prop plane. It was 116 feet in length with a wing-span of nearly 100 feet. Coffey had only been in a prop plane once before, when he traveled with the regional Op-Center mobile office to the Middle East. He had not liked the noise and vibration then. He did not think he would like it now.

Because this was a transport mission, not travel to a combat zone, the P-3C had gone out without a tactical coordinator. The TACCO’s station was located in the rear of the aircraft. After Petty Officer Lady turned Coffey over to the crew, the captain gave him the coordinator’s seat. According to the pilot, it was the warmest, most comfortable place in the plane. The plane was taxiing before Coffey had even buckled himself in to the threadbare red seat.

The attorney faced the port side as the aircraft rumbled its way into the air. He was sitting in a cubicle shaped like half a pentagon. The sun-faded blue metal walls were covered with displays, buttons, and old-fashioned switches and dials. Coffey sat with his back to the open window as the sun burned across his neck and the equipment. An hour ago, if Coffey had to guess all the places he could conceivably have found himself this morning, the rear end of a Royal Australian Navy patrol craft would have been nowhere on the list.