by Dean Ing
“And get this: down the ravine, past Kroner’s body, they find this snap-brim hat of Kroner’s in a bush, without a blemish, sitting on a loaf of bread which has Hal Kroner’s prints all over the wrapper. Here’s the kicker: The bread loaf is hollowed out. It’s got three ounces of cocaine inside.” Reese Masefield’s hands went out in an elaborate shrug as if offering the scenario for examination.
Wes leaned back, eyes closed as if asleep, for thirty seconds while he took up the game they had played for years, ever since they began swapping paperback mysteries by the handful. Then he opened his eyes, nodding. “I got it. The director parks, runs off with the coke, and leaves his hat on it so he can find it. Then the gun toter catches him. Kroner doesn’t like staring down a gun barrel and tells the other guy where he put the dope, and the other guy’s already on something like PCP that makes him weird, so down they go toward the stash, in the nut’s car. Blooey. Do I get the cigar?”
“Well, you had to be there, I guess. I got a batch of reports and went out north of L.A. and looked around. No trouble finding the spot; there’s a naked oval on the hillside and a big hole in the middle of it. Took a hell of a lot more than a few sticks of dynamite to do that, Wes. All they found of die upper part of the driver were a few little pieces the flies found first. His lower body was - well, it took experts to be sure it had been a man.
“But it didn’t do that to Kroner. He looked like somebody had come at him with a dull scythe at a thousand miles an hour. I don’t think Hal Kroner was in the Chevy when it blew, I think he was running from it. Or toward it, maybe. And I don’t see how the driver could’ve been on angel dust or whatever, because he handled himself well enough to chase Kroner down.”
“Then it doesn’t make any sense,” Wes said.
“In a way, you’re right. It was plain crazy to drive a car down that ravine. But if he saw Kroner down there, and if he was a fruitcake bent on taking Kroner, then he might go for it.”
Wes leached for the bottle, pouring a half-inch into his glass, and saw Masefield looking curiously at the small potion. “I promised somebody,” Wes shrugged in explanation. Then, “Maybe the explosives weren’t Kroner’s. He got caught after he stashed the cocaine, tried to run for it, and the nut came down in the Chevy and set off the explosives.”
“Possibly. I told you it was a fucking mess, didn’t I? There’s not enough to hang a responsible byline on, so I let it go.” For perhaps a minute they sat and tasted the night breeze through the room. Then Masefield said, in afterthought, “The nut had to be a small-time freelancer. I just can’t believe big-time drug people would hire a man who drives down ravines and keeps explosives wired in his lap so they can go off by accident.”
“Of course not,” said Wes. “He wasn’t a druggie, either.”
Slitting his eyes, chewing his lip reflectively, Masefield regarded Wes through a slow count of ten. “Solid deduction?”
“Naw, just a guess. You say the gunman did everything like a man in control of himself, but he deliberately drove down the ravine after Kroner; practically suicide. Well, given one suicidal move . . . why not twoT'
“Namely?”
“The explosives.”
“Sonofabitch! Why didn’t I think of that?”
“You don’t read enough detective stories.”
Nodding, assembling the pieces for himself, Masefield emptied his glass and leaned back. “So maybe the guy didn’t give a good shit about Kroner’s drugs. He was a ... a frustrated actor bent on suicide. Hell, they’re all bonkers anyway. Or the twin brother of the kook who assassinated Senator Elliott with a handshake and a few pounds of plastique taped to his chest,” he went on, making an Olympian intuitive leap without much conviction, and laughed suddenly. “Oh, bullshit, I’m reaching now. This guy had a gun, too. Why not the twin brother of John Wilkes Booth?”
“Why not? Booth was a political assassin. So was that foreign student who killed Elliott. Why not your gunman?” After a thoughtful pause, Masefield reached for the bottle again. “Forget I mentioned it. It just won’t play from Kroner’s end, Wes. You never saw a less political man than Hal Kroner. He had a lot of things to say, but no bandwagons to push. Sorry.”
Neither Wes nor Masefield thought of the biggest bandwagon of all, bigger than any single politician or any political party, which Hal Kroner had pushed relentlessly all his life: the United States of America.
They were still arguing scenarios, and Wes had nearly succeeded in forgetting his anxiety over an overdue phone call, when he heard the buzz of his scrambler phone. He reached it in three seconds flat. Glenn Rogan was calling from the moorage at Globe, Arizona.
ELEVEN
North of the Superstition Wilderness, in central Arizona, Lake Roosevelt lies in the lap of mountains reaching nearly eight thousand feet above sea level. Many regions in the west were just as remote, with winds equally treacherous to test the mettle of Delta One. But none of those other wild areas boasted a mountaintop site capable of firing a half-6i7/ion-watt, free-electron laser beam.
Arizona State University operated the site, built before a lackadaisical Congress castrated the Strategic Defense Initiative. Now the laser’s chief use was as an emergency standby, to energize satellite accumulators. Fed by high-tension lines that stretched upward from nearby Roosevelt Dam, the laser could gulp so much power that it could not be operated at full intensity while citizens in Phoenix, sixty miles distant, drew peak loads from the power grid. Peak load times spanned early morning and late afternoon hours. At any other time, given sufficient reason and a check to cover the costs, ASU’s ground-based laser could be used for industrial research.
The proportion of the check that paid for electricity alone was astonishingly small. No laser could use a half-billion watts for even one full minute, even with the liquid spray radiators which ASU built to cool the brute. Besides, the laser-energized rockets spread across Delta One’s underhull had their own heat problems; Tom Schultheis estimated that twenty seconds were more than enough. The thrust chambers needed no oxygen; the liquid hydrogen fuel was vaporized only too well with the ravening energy from God’s own wall plug below, focused into the chambers by Delta One’s beam catcher mirrors.
The test profile called for brief bursts of thrust, first for a tenth of a second, escalating finally to twenty seconds. After each firing, the crew waited for those thrust chambers to reach a stable temperature again. When you’re trailing an exhaust plume of incandescent hydrogen, you want to be certain you know what all those numbers mean.
Aboard Delta One with Rogan and Christopher, Boff Allington monitored hundreds of readouts between each gargantuan zap. Jim Christopher, doubling as flight engineer, climbed down past the protective armor of carbon filament and eyeballed each thrust chamber just outside the hull, because the forward face of each chamber held an almost perfectly transparent, synthetic sapphire the width of a cantaloupe. Crystal windows of this kind had been lab-synthesized for years. Until now, no one knew whether they could pass a high-energy laser and function as the front end of a big rocket chamber at the same time. Schultheis knew the old adage was often true: Scaleup equals screwup.
Glenn Rogan did not have to ask why Schultheis had ignored ordinary turbines when he chose Delta One’s high-altitude boost engines; by now, he knew. Nothing else would serve for their ultimate purpose with Highjump. For the record, those laser rockets were compact and their hydrogen exhaust became clean water vapor, reason enough to convince Wes Peel of their advantages on Delta One. Laser rockets had shown great promise, but when laboratory funds of the Strategic Defense Initiative were chopped, several promising propulsion systems went into mothballs. Two years back, Tom Schultheis had assembled a pile of unclassified papers on laser propulsion. And among the authors of those papers were a few people willing to quote numbers the way other men argued baseball statistics. Now those numbers would be checked by the engineer’s prime maxim: One test is worth a thousand expert opinions.
Navigating wit
h excellent radar, the crew needed only two nights to assure that Delta One’s Fresnel “beam-catcher” lenses and those laser rockets could boost the huge craft over a two-mile peak with room to spare. When he first saw the cost estimate, Wes had been certain someone had misplaced a decimal point. The actual cost for electricity came to less than three hundred dollars for the twenty-second burst. There was no mistake. A rocket fed by external beamed energy was incredibly cheap.
At the time Wes had thought: Bloody shame they can’t fly airplanes this way. Clean, cheap, efficient. But of course an airplane would need that power continuously for many minutes. And one of the big NASA shuttles, attempting such a far-out scheme, would need upwards of a hundred billion watts. No way, with existing technology. Merely drawing that power would have caused urban blackouts from Phoenix to Seattle.
Far beneath these surface thoughts, Wes felt in his bones that man should not intrude into Heaven. His grandmother had fed him that notion from childhood, had ingrained it so deeply in him that Wes rarely gave it much thought. Wes Peel would remake, re-form, American transportation - but he would not invade Heaven with his changes.
* * * *
When Wes answered his phone on that June night, he did not care that Reese Masefield could hear his end of the link. Faintly fuzzy from the scrambler unit, a familiar gravelly voice: “Glenn Rogan, Mr. Peel. We got a sweet ship here.”
Wes felt a wave of relief sweep through his body. “I never doubted it,” he lied. “Those college boys didn’t shoot a hole in you by mistake?”
“Nope. That’s what those little alignment lasers are for.
Damn’ good thing the thrust chambers aren’t any bigger if we’re gonna kick her in the ass like this. But man, with a three-second wallop she can put her nose up and climb shit-hot.”
Wes grinned at the pilot’s cavalier way of making a postflight report. “You think you can clear peaks in Colorado someday?”
Suddenly Rogan was the cool professional again. “Not with only a three-sec boost, and that’s as far as we took her tonight. Boff says the thermoclines across those crystal windows could do funny things after a long jolt. It may turn out that turbo packs will work better; ask me tomorrow night. Ah, you said to call you directly, but you might pass the word to Schultheis; so far, so good.”
“I’ll try to call him. Tom’s out near Barstow with the maglev; I thought you knew.”
If Rogan knew otherwise, he kept it to himself. “He’s mis-sin’ a great ride here, tell him that.” With the enthusiasm of a youth, he added, “You really ought to give this a try yourself, Mr. Peel. Hell of a ride.”
“I intend to,” Wes replied with a chuckle, then sobered. “Think you’ll run on schedule tomorrow?”
“Yep, if we don’t get a malf during the short snorts. We’re scheduled to leapfrog Aztec Peak after a long boost, sometime after twenty-two hundred hours our time. Takes a while to get her moored here at Globe but I’ll call you, soon as we’ve buttoned her down.” Pause, and a cackle of sheer high spirits before, “God damn, a rocket-powered dirigible! That’s a first in anybody’s logbook, Mr. Peel.”
“Just don’t bend it,” Wes replied with an unconscious head-shake, wondering if Rogan’s ego involvement could affect his judgment. How could the man be ruthlessly professional and still a hell-raising cowboy? It suddenly occurred to Wes that, in his racing days, he had kept the same strict compartments in his own mind. In the work compartment you focused on the job; nothing else existed for you. In the play compartment you defocused wildly because, if you didn’t, you risked stomach ulcers and neuroses. You could go from work to play with an abruptness that bewildered most people.
Rogan’s, “We’ll stick to the profile,” was professionally cautious, as near a promise as anyone could ask. The test results, he added, would be sent to the plant by modem the next morning.
Wes replaced his handset gently, feeling as though he were full of helium. “Reese, I’ve got another call to make. May take a while.” The hint was unmistakable.
“Your hours are worse than mine,” said the journalist, rising, seeking his summer-weight jacket. “Thanks for the background stuff.” He stopped at the front door as Wes was reading from his memocomp display and punching interminable numbers into the phone. “That was good news, I take it.”
“Couldn’t be better,” Wes replied, realized he had hit a wrong digit, and said a word he rarely used. Reese Masefield made an exaggerated comic pantomime of tiptoeing out, but Wes did not notice.
* * * *
Without cellular radiophone relays along Interstate 15 through the Mojave, Wes could not have made his call to the maintenance unit’s garage building near Barstow. And without forwarding modules, Tom Schultheis could not have diverted that call to a very different location ninety miles to the east.
That location was a secondhand, prefabricated shed bought cheaply by Exotic Salvage and painted the dull colors of desert rock. From the shed, Tom could have seen the moon-glint on the very tips of high-tension lines that marched across Clark Mountain on their way from Hoover Dam to Los Angeles. The maglev route followed those power lines, which dropped off their highest elevation on the mountain’s flank and proceeded due east almost to Nevada. The shed could not be seen from the maglev route. You could hide a lot of stuff in plain sight out here, but behind a nearby butte you were twice hidden.
And inside the shed, beneath its reflective mylar blanket, Highjump was thrice hidden, on the off chance that some desert prospector might wander by when the shed was unlocked. Dave Kaplan, bleary-eyed with fatigue, blinked at the phone’s buzz. “Who could it be at this hour?”
“Only one person,” said Schultheis, and tossed him a bag of fasteners while hurrying to the wall telephone.
“Shut off that damn’ power plant before you answer,’ Kaplan called, and saw his friend slap the kill-switch. The muffled engine wheezed into silence and, as a battery relay clicked, the shed’s fluorescents flickered. Kaplan tore open the hardware packet and cursed as he wriggled back into the innards of Highjump. He could hear Schultheis easily across a shed that was no larger than a small aircraft hangar.
“Maintenance building,” was the first lie as Schultheis picked up the handset. It would not be his last. “Hello, Wes, it’s Tom.” Pause. “Nobody but me. I was just going over some spec sheets. What’s the good word?”
A longer pause, so long that Dave Kaplan began removing flathead titanium screws from a bracket while he listened. Highjump had a lot of brackets, and Kaplan had installed eveiy last one with screws a quarter of an inch longer than necessary. That meant roughly two pounds more mass than Highjump needed, and Kaplan had no choice but to undo his mistake. This was one delta craft that could not afford an extra ounce.
Schultheis again, “That’s great. I’ll tell Dave; he was worried about those sapphire ports. . . . What? Well, we’ll be done here by Friday, but there’s a certain stress analyst who thinks he’s a trout fisherman. . . . No, the Kern River over in Tulare County somewhere. ’ ’ After the next pause, a great show of patience. “Wes, if anything goes wrong, it’ll happen before the weekend and we’ll fly back as soon as we know. I’ll be back in my office Monday, okay?”
He returned muttering and then, taking up a powered screwdriver, “Wes just heard from Delta One. They’re right on track; going to try the Aztec Peak profile tomorrow night.” Wedged beneath an insulated sphere that nestled between sturdy diagonal braces, Kaplan jerked his head around. “What does Wes know about the profile?”
“Only that they’ll boost over Aztec peak. The crystal ports look okay, and they have the readouts.”
As usual, Schultheis avoided even mentioning the name “Rogan” when he could. Kaplan groaned as he shifted toward another set of brackets. “Jesus, my eyes won’t even focus anymore. How am I going to help you with that plasma coating?’ ’ “Your brain won’t focus either; we aren’t scheduled to spray that leading edge coat until this weekend while we’re supposed to be fishing. You’
ll be okay by then.”
A grunt, and several deep breaths while Kaplan wormed his way further into the bowels of the little craft, now brushing against the cockpit module that would house Glenn Rogan one day soon. “You know what I just realized?”
“Don’t make me guess,” said Schultheis, who was just as bone weary as Dave Kaplan midway through their second night without sleep. He tried not to think of the next morning, when they would have to show up back at Barstow for another full workday.
“Monday, we’ve got to face Wes looking like we’ve been relaxing on the Kern River all weekend; and I don’t know how I’m going to manage that.”
But Dave Kaplan was spared that problem. Within twenty-four hours he would be on a chartered plane headed toward Globe, Arizona, to investigate the failure of Delta One.
TWELVE
Wes was at home the following night, with a special weekend guest, when that second call came, as brief and as stunning as a lightning strike. Wes made fast decisions and three phone calls.
For Kaplan and Schultheis, the next few hours were one long peal of thunder: the conspirators driving back to Barstow, groggy from lack of sleep; speculating fruitlessly why a Delta One thrust chamber had exploded in flight; flying to meet Wes in Las Vegas with a faster aircraft; and finally a kind of nirvana after climbing into the twin Piper behind Wes and the charter pilot.
Sunrise was creeping into Arizona’s parched interior as the Piper banked into its final approach leg. Wes felt the pilot’s hand on his shoulder, tentative at first, then more insistent. He jerked upright from a fitful dream to a worse reality. “I’m awake,” he said over the hissing of turboprops.