C. E. Mason: A Short Story

“I’m trying to catch my breath,” C.E. Mason protested.

“I know.” Nevertheless, Roger Nelson persisted: “I’m not saying it cannot be done, but only that you still need more challenging pieces of discoveries to enable the brain repair from trauma to be sustainable.” Roger had pivoted back to the research.

“What the hell are you talking about? What do you know about my research?”

“Everything! You know: “There is nothing new under the sun”.” Roger lied again. He did not know many things after all. For instance, he could not read C.E. Mason’s mind and he had no first hand insight into his research. He was playing a mind reader and probing C.E. Mason for information.

“Everything!” C.E. Mason echoed. “You some kind of intellectual spy or something?”

“No. But as I said, I work for your wife and that’s why I’m here.”
“Really! Are you for real? How can you be so calm and conversational at a time like this.”
“Well, I took a page out of your book . . . ah, I’m a quick study . . . and since you were talking from the time you left the villa until we boarded this plane and thought it was be okay for me to talk a lot, too. I figured you might be pleased.”
“Okay. Touché. I walked right into that.”
But, after his escape from the villa with Roger’s help, C.E.

Mason needed no convincing about Roger’s insights. But knowledge of unpublished NSL research was troubling—especially since most of it was still taking on clarity in Dr. Alex Cord’s

mind.
The conversation between the two men terminated as soon as Mr.

John Pilotte reached cruising speed and told his two passengers that they could unfasten their seat belts and relax. Pilotte called the air traffic controllers at a Colombian military airbase with his flight plan. The C-212 was now cruising at twenty five thousand feet and about an hour away from the Colombian border. Until they crossed the border, they were not safely out of the woods.

Out of some sort of bizarre courtesy gesture, Agent Powell made the availability of the rescue plane possible. As a result, Roger felt some responsibility to Agent Powell for the successful outcome of this rescue effort. Roger called Agent Powell told him that he had retrieved their cargo and that they were safely airborne. That done, C.E. Mason felt the need to comment on something Roger raised earlier in the flight. But Roger was no longer interested, so in lieu of furthering that conversation, Roger suggested to C.E. Mason that he call his wife.

“Yeah, excellent idea. I need to call my wife and reassure her that I’m Okay and assuage her concerns about my safety.”

Roger handed C.E. Mason Margarita’s cell phone with which he dialed his wife’s number. When her phone rang, Margarita read the caller ID and assumed it was Roger. However, before she spoke, the familiar voice of the caller surprised her.

“Maggie . . .”

“C.E., is that

you?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“How are you?”
“Hmmm . . . ah . . . wet!”
“Where you are?”
“In a plane.”
“Where?”
“Whoa! First, lemme tell you. You sent a good man to get me and right now we’re in Venezuelan airspace flying to Colombia,” C.E. Mason responded, then he paused a few seconds: “You holding up well?”
“Well, but I was so worried about you, I didn’t know what happened to you.”
“I’m really very sorry I put you through this, but a bunch of low lives in Mazatlán thought they could get money out of me, I guess, and forced me into a car, and drove me for hours to I have no idea where.”
“Puerto Vallarta,” Roger Nelson whispered.
“Did you hear that, Maggie? Puerto Vallarta. That’s where they took me. But, I can’t imagine any reason other than money for what they did. I ain’t a rich person, so, picking on me must have been a random act of stupidity, and certainly a huge mistake,” C.E. Mason complained.
C.E. Mason is being true to form—wordy and talkative, Roger thought.
“I hope to see you soon,” Margarita said. “I’ll meet you in Colombia.”
“No. Don’t! This isn’t over yet. but, I have complete confidence in the man you sent, Mr. Nelson. If anyone can get me out of here safely, he can.” Then putting the palm of his hand over the mouthpiece, C.E. Mason whispered to Roger, “With all due respect.” He gave Roger a thumbs-up gesture, and then returned to his conversation with his wife. “But he is a bizarre man, who seems to know things nobody should know . . . I mean . . . about our work at NSL.”
“Yes. I know. He’s a little different,” Margarita acknowledged.
“You think. We gotta talk about this and I gotta tell you how he rescued me.”
“How did you . . . er . . . how did they treat you?”
“Not now. When I see you I’ll give you a full run down on what happened.”
“Can you put on Mr. Nelson, please C.E?”
“Just a sec.” C.E. Mason handed the phone back Roger.
“Hello, Ms. Mason.” Roger was a little surprised that Margarita wished to talk with him at this time.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, but we aren’t out of danger, yet.”
__________
The three men that Roger disabled in the Venezuelan could expect’ to face abuses by their bosses the least of which would be being yelled at and slapped around: They would be called pendejos, and hijueputas. Dumasses and sons of whores. The guards had heard the distant whine of the rotor blades of the C-212 taking off with their prisoner. They knew someone had assisted in freeing their prisoner because they had knocked them out cold. It was impossible for C.E. Mason to have accomplished release by himself, he was locked in a guarded bedroom in the house with many other guards roaming the premises outside. The most difficult thing for them to understand was not having seen anyone leaving or entering the villa through the front gate. So, how did C.E. Mason escape? It seemed that he was just not there anymore. However, after the kidnappers’ very careful rummaging of the villa premises, they found the parachute canopy that Roger tucked under the shed. But, his entry and egress from the villa was still a mystery: They didn’t find a barbequed human body draped over the wired high voltage walls, and C.E. Mason just was nowhere to be found. Eventually, they also retrieved the ladder that C.E. Mason and Roger used to scale the wall during their escape and they followed the men’s footprints in the mud and inferred where they went, namely, to the abandoned airstrip. The whining of the plane engines confirmed the escape route. The findings assisted the timeline and the logistics of what was clearly the assisted escape. Then with a great deal of trepidation, the guards contacted their drug lord bosses and their government accomplices to explain what had transpired.

Chapter 9

The voice in the headphone told John Pilotte that an aircraft was on his tail. The warning came from the U.S. Las Tres Esquinas Air Force Base installation in Caquetá, Colombia from where the C-212 had lifted off earlier. The air traffic controllers had been monitoring the C-212 since it took off from the Venezuelan road (abandoned airstrip). They informed John Pilotte that the plane looked like a Su-30 aircraft: a twine-engine, two-seater military assault plane made by the Sukhoi Corporation in Moscow. John Pilotte knew Su-30 had a 30mm caliber gun, and laser guided missiles, but the Americans could not be sure the Sukhoi had seen the C-212 and was in pursuit.
“Gentlemen,” the pilot calmly said, “we might have company.”
“What’s happening?” C.E. Mason was alarmed.
“There’s an aircraft, maybe a Sukhoi, behind us at twenty five thousand five hundred feet, and closing in fast.”
“Speed up!” C.E. Mason shouted.
“Stay the course and maintain your speed but descend a hundred feet,” Roger Nelson ordered. “The Su-30 is military assault aircraft, popular with dictators around the world. The Venezuelan government purchased about thirty of them. It has a chock-full arsenal of deadly weapons, including missiles. The plane can do Mach 2—maximum speed of thirteen hundred and twenty miles per hour. Trust me, we can’t out run it.”
It didn’t take the Venezuela military long to mobilize its air force to chase down the C-212. But Roger had his doubts they could locate them as easily as it appeared they had. Something wasn’t kosher. It was unlikely the pilot of the Su-30 could have spotted the C-212 as it was coated in a light absorbing paint and with the cockpit lights out, the C-212 was invisible against black sky, and only acceleration might draw attention to them, and that was why Roger ordered John Pilotte not to change his speed.
Since the Sukhoi craft was at about twenty-five thousand five-hundred feet and the C-212 had descended to twenty-five thousand four hundred feet altitude, if that same profile were maintained for a few more minutes, Roger would soon know if they had been spotted.
As they waited, there was tension in the plane caused by the possibilities of two equally disastrous outcomes from their present predicament. First, the unwary Sukhoi might descend one hundred feet, and plow into the rear of the C-212, which was an unlikely scenario, of course. The second scenario: the Sukhoi could detect the presence of the C-212, and open fire on it. Either scenario would doom the C-212 and its passengers.
“A Sukhoi is just over you,” the Tres Esquinas AB people radioed Mr. Pilotte. And the three men in the C-212 held their breath and peered through the windows, and sure enough, ahead of them a Sukhoi, with lights on the tips of its wings, streaking through the blackness. The sight of the plane alarmed them. But the plane flew past them and was out of sight . The plane was gone. This elicited a group sigh of relief from a feeling that they were out of danger, and a sense of confidence the Sukhoi hadn’t seen them.
“We lucked out!” C.E. Mason announced flippantly, with glee in his voice, exploiting his coping mechanism of gabbing .