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The Challenger CL-604 had been purchased fro CIA funds and outfitted with advanced electronics at a shop in Alexandria, Virginia, near Bolling Air Force Base The large Canadian-made business jet seated ten people, had a cruise speed of 487 e of 4,628 miles

The distance froinia to Paris was just over 3,800 miles, where the jet was refueled and provisions were loaded aboard The second leg of the trip, Paris to New Delhi, would cover 4,089 ht hours to co was made with a favorable tailwind and took just over seven hours Within an hour of receiving word from Cabrillo at 6 AM Macau time that the Corporation was in possession of the Golden Buddha, Overholt had left US soil Virginia tier touched down, the tiht time made it 9 AM Saturday

The trip by turboprop to Little Lhasa in northern India took just over two more hours, so it was almost exactly noon on Saturday when Overholt finally ain The revered leader of Tibet had made it clear that if there was to be a coup d’etat, it needed to take place on Easter Sunday, March 31, exactly forty-six years after his being forced into exile

That gave Overholt and the Corporation twenty-four hours to make a miracle happen

CARL Gannon had been earning his keep the last several days After procuring the truck in Thi a route into Tibet, he had received a shopping list of tasks froon As the Corporation’s head scrounger, Gannon was used to acco the impossible To obtain as required, Gannon would have to use the vast network of contacts he had carefully nurtured over the years

The funding would come from the Corporation’s bank on the island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific Ocean, and the Oregon had made it clear that time, not cost, was the object Gannon loved it when he received directives like this Using a laptop co in a stack of telephone numbers, codes and passwords from memory at seventy words a minute

Eighty Stinger ht froed to Bhutan using a South African coht Bell 212 helicopters with extra fuel pods from an Indonesian company that specialized in offshore oil work arrived to deliver the load of hout the Far East were recruited, sixteen to fly, two extras in case soot sick Fuel pods, food for all the participants, and a series of hangars uards were secretly arranged

Gannon’s last iteon wanted to know if he could procure a large but slow- plane in Vietna steel cable that could be mounted on the floor of the plane It took Gannon a couple of telephone calls, but he found a 1985 Russian-built Antonov AN-2 Colt owned by a Laotian coovernht feet, a cruise speed of only 120 miles an hour and a stall speed of 58, could best be described as a flying pickup truck The large interior was o space and she could carry nearly five thousand pounds of payload

The winch he bought new from a dealer in Ho Chi Minh City on a company credit card

After finishing the arrangements for the plane and winch, Gannon slurped the last drop froon on the satellite telephone He waited as the nunal was scrambled

“Go ahead, Carl,” Hanley said a minute later

“I’ve got the plane, Max,” he said, “but you didn’t ask for a pilot”

“One of our guys will be flying,” Hanley said

“It’s a Russian Antonov,” Gannon noted “I doubt we have someone typed in this model”

“We’ll download some manuals off the Internet,” Hanley said “That’s about all we can do”