Tang’s face remained expressionless. “Perhaps what I have to tell you is of no importance. I do not wish to alarm you.” He paused. “This trip was arranged several months ago?”
Biff and his father nodded their heads.
“And there has been no attempt to keep it secret?”
“There was no need to,” Thomas Brewster stated.
“I wonder. Was the boy’s trip not arranged when my good friend Charles Keene visited here last?”
“Yes. But I don’t see—” Biff began.
“Your Uncle Charles had just returned from Cape Canaveral, had he not?”
Biff nodded his head. Uncle Charlie had been in the Navy for several years. He was a pilot in the squadron of planes assigned to tracking missiles fired from the Cape into the South Atlantic. It was the squadron’s task to recover the instrument-loaded nose cones dropped from the powerful rockets.
Uncle Charlie had bounced around the world quite a bit. He had flown a fighter plane during the Korean conflict and had traveled as much as he could about the Orient on his furlough time. He remained in the Navy following Korea, and was delighted when he was assigned to Canaveral. But after two years there, his traveling feet told him, “I want out.” So he had resigned his commission to join an old pilot friend establishing a fleet of planes for Explorations Unlimited, in Burma. Charles Keene wanted badly to get back to the Orient. He was fascinated by the eastern countries so different from his own.
“I’m interested in the money, too,” he told the Brewster family on his visit. “There’re plenty of American businesses building up in the Orient. Flying for this outfit in Burma is real opportunity and big money. I want some of both before I’m too old.”