The Big Lifters

by Dean Ing

  Weatherby mastered his chuckle to say, “Just thought of how it’d sound to give an NTC board report on this. ‘Oh, we just climbed up in one of Peel’s Shorthaulers, and spoke of God and country.’ No, I don’t think I will.”

  After a half-minute’s silence, Wes asked, “Any reason I can’t pass on the information about this Grayson professor, if I keep my source to myself?”

  “I expect you’d better, unless Peel Transit’s got more standup guys than I have,” was Weatherby’s reply. The big man reached for the door handle with die sigh of a man who has just surrendered a long-sought goal.

  Wes laid a hand on Weatherby’s arm. “Weatherby? I know I’ve been a problem. ”

  “Damn’ straight.”

  “I can - well, maybe not remove it, but I can help the NTC if you’ll let me.”

  “Wonders never cease,” said Weatherby, with new interest in the intelligent, calculating gaze.

  “With the new intermodal stuff, those got-damned tripletrailer rigs will be rare on the highways in a few years. I admit it; hell, I planned it. But the new stuff will create new jobs, and the NTC will still be needed. Maybe a trucker won’t like giving up his king-of-the-road crown to be just a prince in a .Shorthauler, or a cargomaster in a delta. But who ever promised they’d never have to learn something new? You’ll just have to stay ahead of the changes.”

  “Jesus Christ, don’t I know it! That’s why you find things slowing you down here and there, Peel. I can’t read your mind; do you blame me for putting somebody where I can see what’s in your crystal ball?”

  “Yep. Because I can show you where we’re headed. Time projections, regional gross loads, even some leaks from Boeing and LockLever; I’m not that straight an arrow. What you do about it is your business.”

  “Hell it is,” the big man rumbled. “I get a lot of mileage out of saying this country’s freight is everybody’s business. Shit. Turns out it’s true! Here’s one that’ll give you a laugh, Peel: I’m envious because those fucking Ayrabs want to pop you, and not me. Maybe I’ll make the grade - if you meant what you said about those projections.”

  Wes nodded, thinking about blocks of spare time. “How’d you like to spend a day or two at the Hayward plant? Say, anytime after Labor Day? You can bring a friend - and a chickenwire, if it suits you.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “I owe it to you,” Wes said simply.

  “No you don’t, Peel. I told you,” Re said, one side of the big man’s mouth rising in irony, “for the greater good.” Wes grinned. “No, I owe you for the best got-damn’ executive assistant in the country.”

  With a faint flush on the heavy features: “You putting me on?”

  “Putting you straight. I’m pretty fond of the lady.”

  “Well I’m a dirty - son - of - a - bitch.”

  “You ever meet a mover and shaker who wasn’t?” Laughing, they climbed down from the shorthauler. Joey Weatherby seemed satisfied that he might, in September, get as much as he had just given. The one thing Weatherby had not given Wes was the thing he did not know: Winthorp’s CCI bug sensor had told him, when he finally thought to use it, that someone was monitoring that bungalow. And a loose tail is not hard to evade when you suspect it is wagging back there in traffic.

  TWENTY-ONE

  After a bottle of Pearl with Rogan and Alma, Wes decided against six pointless hours of sleep in a Marriott bed. Instead, he made a lighthearted purchase at the DalWorth terminal and caught two hours of sleep on the coast redeye, beating the sun back to Oakland International. Vangie Broussard found him in his office, slightly bleary-eyed, when she arrived for work.

  After kissing him soundly, she also found a new life-size plaster bust on her desk.

  It didn’t look like one of her favorites, and neither its sweeping mustache nor the strong aquiline nose resembled Wes’s, but the name incised on the pediment read “JOHN WESLEY.” The last name was printed, in Wes’s neat draftsman’s hand, on tape: It said, “PEEL.” She looked from the plaster to Wes. “TTiat’s not you, my dear.”

  “It is, and it isn’t; it’s really a pun. Do what it says.”

  So she peeled the tape away. Beneath it was the last incised name: “HARDIN.” “You are impossible! Why would you imagine I’d want John Wesley Hardin leering at us all day?” “Seemed fitting,” he said. “I went to Texas and faced the badmen down with my trusty seven-shooter.” Then he told her of his unexpected rapprochement with Weatherby, and of the NTC man’s desire to visit the Hayward facility. “During the week after Labor Day,” he said. “Call him for me this morning; tell him I can put him up, whatever. He’ll take your call this time.”

  She “hmphed” in a way that told him she was secretly pleased, lugged the plaster head to a blueprint cabinet, and stuck her tongue out at it before returning to her work.

  He was checking his appointment calendar when he realized she stood before him, arms akimbo. “May I suggest your first call this morning?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Make it to the Treasury Department. The sooner they know about this Middle East connection, the sooner you and I can get away from prying eyes.”

  Wes agreed. Thirty seconds into his telephone call, the Treasury man stopped him with, “This isn’t a secure line, Mr. Peel. Ah, you recall the time you called me about the gent watching you eat dinner? Hold it; calling up my notes. Yeah, that place serves lunch, too. If you have the time ...”

  Wes took the time, driving to the place near Foothill Boulevard, and found the Treasury man keeping company with a rangy, freckled blond specimen in a suit entirely too neat to belong to anybody but a fashion model or a fed. The man spoke in the twang of an Oregon farmer, using the phrases of an attorney. He was Agent Royston Kimmel from the Oakland Resident Agency of the FBI.

  Kimmel’s handshake was as cool and dry as Wes’s lunch martini, and he asked questions in an unhurried, detached way over salads and luncheon steaks, clearing a place for his memocomp next to his iced tea. Why couldn’t Mr. Peel tell them a little more about his source? Did Mr. Peel realize how much tax money it took to find answers Peel himself could furnish? Grayson U. was well-known but what, exactly, was the spelling of Bruce Hassan Winthorp, and did Peel realize that this inquiry might wind up as a joint endeavor, a Federal task force that went a lot farther than the San Francisco Field Office?

  The Treasury man seemed satisfied to take a secondary role in the meeting. Kimmel’s statements were as pointed and, in a few cases, as ciyptic as his questions. The Oakland RA would pass a message on the suspect to Cleveland by teletype. No, it was definitely not the teletype of yore, but that’s what they called it, and it was as secure as a battleship anchor. The Treasury Department handled explosions and such but terrorist groups on U. S. soil were the province of the Justice Department. Until now, no one had more than tentatively considered the idea that widely spaced suicide bombings of a few Americans in apparently unconnected walks of life were, in fact, pieces of one specific international conspiracy. You couldn’t ram a task force down the pike on such slender evidence as Peel offered, not yet. But you could learn more about Winthorp than his own proctologist knew, and then maybe that joint endeavor could be mounted.

  And by the way, the Treasury man put in, not a word of any of this must reach Reese Masefield or anybody else, but especially not the press. And had Peel decided not to carry a piece? It sure wasn’t tucked into his waist or armpit.

  Wes told them about the Walther on his ankle and earned something like approval only because he swore he was practicing.

  “I’m not all that sanguine about your piece,” Kimmel admitted, “because you don’t always know who your friends are. I’ll put it this way: Never draw it until you see a target who is trying to put you down. And don’t brandish it.” He followed this with a faintly disgusted look toward the Treasury man. Federal agents, Wes decided, did not always agree on advice to the innocent.

  They strolled into a warm overcast after Wes re
fused again to divulge the source of his information. “The man knows he exercised more than the legal amount of, ah, patriotic zeal,” was all Wes would admit.

  “One man’s patriot is another man’s terrorist,” Kimmel replied drily.

  Wes thought of Joey Weatherby and the massive NTC muscle that rolled in tandem rigs across the breadth of the nation, and smiled. “There’s something to that,” he said, offering his hand and his thanks with it, then heading back to his Chevy Blazer that loomed, the playground bully, over other vehicles in the parking lot.

  * * * *

  Only a man who personally ran his empire, or thought he did, would hold a staff meeting while inspecting a delta dirigible. Wes kept the audio tape running on his memocomp that afternoon as he mounted the unfinished cargo platform of Delta Two. Now and then, Kaplan or Schultheis punched notations into their memocomps as the three men reached decisions. Vast as it was, that assembly hangar would have to be expanded before Peel Transit could start turning out those big lifters at

  the rate of one a month. And the first order was already in. “Or better still, duplicate this hangar,” Wes went on; “run parallel assembly operations. Sometimes smaller is better.” “I’ll remind you that you said that, one of these days,” Kaplan murmured, drawing a grim glance from Schultheis. “Smaller and better” were the heart, liver and lungs of the Highjump concept.

  “You two generally think farther ahead than this,” Wes complained, pausing on an internal catwalk to study Delta Two’s huge, filament-wound helium recovery sphere. “Our expansion this year is only the beginning.”

  The other two shared a glance, and Kaplan passed it off with, “That usually means an ending of something else.” Schultheis: “I think Dave feels what I do; we’re leaving a phase that was a lot of fun, Wes.” He laid a hand on Wes’s arm and said, a little sadly, “Sometimes, moving ahead can hurt.”

  Kaplan, quickly: “I vote we take it out on some Kern River trout while there’s still a bit of summer left. I’ll be worn down to five-foot-three if I don’t get that vacation pretty soon, Wes. ’ ’ “Well, we’re pretty much between phases,” Wes mused, moving forward toward the cabin of Delta Two, his voice echoing through the great envelope surrounding them. “Just say when, so long as you’re both here for the Santa Fe’s inaugural runs.”

  Schultheis consulted his memocomp’s calendar file as though he had not committed it to memory. “That means, oh, say the week after Labor Day. That way,” he said, “we take Labor Day weekend and the next one too. Ten days.”

  “On the Kern,” Kaplan added. “You’ll just have to learn to get along without us, Wes.”

  “I’ll manage,” said Wes, thinking of a mere week without his boffins, missing the faint ring of apology and of permanence in Kaplan’s voice. “Labor Day week it is. I’ve got half a mind to sneak off with you. ” He did not see Schultheis look toward

  Heaven for help, but recalled something as he entered the delta’s cabin. Some of its console systems were already in place, identical to Delta One’s. A memocomp’s intercom function worked poorly through the hangar walls, but, “If the comm system’s in, I can patch Vangie in from here. Wait one,” he added, flicking switches. By now, Wes knew his delta consoles well enough to pilot one of the great brutes in decent weather.

  Vangie answered. Yes, invoking Wes’s name she’d got through to the NTC, and was Wes alone?

  “Tom and Dave are here,” he told her.

  “A man who wants to be registered as Lou Boyle says he’ll take care of his bookings. He’ll be here with a Mr. O’Grady for a tour on Wednesday to Friday, September six through eight, as agreed. I said you’d confirm. Problem?”

  He said he didn’t know, thanked her, and flicked off the set. He turned to find Kaplan and Schultheis leaning against seats in the broad aisle, looking around them with something akin to longing. It was the gaze of Oppenheimer, men who had created wonders but whose decisions could make those same wonders forbidden to them, perhaps forever.

  Wes imagined that they were worrying about a fishing trip. “Just when you two want to be off somewhere falling in cold water, we’ve got a . . ” No, got-damnit, I won’t ask them to postpone it again for Joey Weatherby. That’s not why Weatherby’s coming anyhow. And these two would be arguing over every damn’ projection I made. Wes sighed and stood up. “The hell with it, gentlemen. Enjoy your trout. We’ve got a visit from an NTC man scheduled while you’re gone, and if you can live without him, he can live without you.”

  The two seemed almost faint-headed with . . . pleasure? relief? ... as they passed from the cabin and back into the superstructure of the big lifter. Delta Two would be flight-tested before November if the Bay Area weather held. The bare keel members of Delta Three were almost ready in an assembly shed.

  Schultheis passed also to what seemed a casual mention of the maglev canard tests. True to their words, they had injected a special filament-loaded foam into those canards. And, unknown to Wes, they had used the same equipment to apply a thin spray-coating to ceramic tiles of Highjump’s forward surfaces. “Wes, whoever the NTC guy is, promise me one thing,” Schultheis pleaded. “Don’t haul him down to see those canard tests Rogan will be doing with Boff. I don’t see what could go wrong but it’s not over ’til it’s over, and if there’s any problem with the system, you don’t want some outsider blatting it out to the world. Okay?”

  “Makes sense,” Wes agreed. I hadn’t thought about it, but yeah, that’s probably what I’d have done. And they’re right. “You two know me too well,” he grinned. “Okay; no visiting firemen at Barstow ’til you sign off for the mods.”

  They shook on it, then completed their tour through the vast empty spaces of Delta Two, which would soon have her helium cells installed. The delta was slightly ahead of schedule, and that pleased them all. Highjump was slightly behind schedule because the liquid hydrogen storage tanks, during their cleanup in the warehouse of Exotic Salvage in San Leandro, were not easy items to secure on the flatbed of an old C-2 wrecker.

  * * * *

  On Friday night preceding Labor Day, Wes sat propped on pillows in his big bed trying to watch old Benny Hill reruns. He was having trouble concentrating because he could see Vangie, counting slow brush strokes through that long mane of hers, as she donated occasional glances at him in the floor-to-ceiling bedroom mirror. When their glances finally locked, he grinned. “Did you know I had an X-rated mirror?”

  “It’s all in your mind, suh,” she purred, shaking her tresses out, then paused, cocking her head. Two faint pops, no louder than backfires, echoed nearby. In the late summer evening, half of the windows in the house were open because Wes preferred honest-to-God breeze over air-conditioning. Somewhere in the near distance, tires were squealing and an engine rasped in a rising note.

  “He’s gonna blow that little engine,” Wes remarked as the sounds faded down Crow Canyon. “Fool kids . . .”

  He fumbled for the video controls, disintegrated Benny Hill in mid-innuendo, and flung a comer of his sheet back in invitation as Vangie stood, head flung back, hair swinging as she smiled back at him.

  She was sliding into bed as they heard footsteps pounding up the front walk. “Wonderful,” Vangie groaned, over the chime and the hammering at the front door.

  With a curse, Wes heaved himself from the bed; grabbed a robe on his way, then paused to pull the Walther from its holster which hung at his shoe rack. “Keep your shirt on,” he called, because the chime kept sounding and someone with the world’s worst case of asthma kept trying to shout.

  Wes, snapping on his porch lights, could not recall seeing the man before. He fought for breath, eyes tightly shut, tears streaming as he leaned against a planter box. ‘ ‘ID - coat pocket,” he said, coughing, then, agonized, “Mace - gotta wash.” Wes could smell the acidic tang of something that made his own eyes water. “I’m armed,” he said, still cautious of this stranger, and helped the man tear his light windbreaker off as they lurched into the living room.


  Wes managed a staggering procession to the guest bath, then got the man into its shower, fully clothed. The stranger seemed in danger of total collapse until, after five minutes sitting in the shower stall under a tepid spray, he could make himself understood, blue eyes still streaming. By then, Wes had seen the Treasury Department shield, had tossed the windbreaker into his washer while Vangie busied herself brewing coffee.

  Twenty-five minutes later, their familiar Treasury agent stood at the front door. “Got two men covering the grounds,” he said without preamble, striding inside, then saw the stakeout man nursing coffee at the kitchen pass-through, enfolded in a spare bathrobe while his clothes tumble-dried. “Mister, are you ever out of uniform,” he remarked drily, and then heard the stakeout’s story.

  The little pop-top van had pulled off the road at ten past eleven, a hundred yards from Wes’s front gate, at an elevation that looked down toward the rear of the Peel home. The stakeout man had hauled his infrared video camera to his cheek and recorded a young woman as she raised the van’s hood before returning inside again with no lights showing. “I’ve seen that van pass before, but so what,” said the stakeout. “Point is, I swear I’ve seen it cruise Peel’s plant, too. So I walk over to offer assistance, getting a shot of the license plate, stashing the IR rig in the bushes.

  “She answers my hail; foreign accent, says everything’s okay. I move back and identify myself, ask her to please turn on her headlights and step outside. She hits the lights, I come to the edge of the beams. It’s one of those iffy situations; I don’t know who else is in there but I don’t want to give her cardiac arrest if she’s clean. She comes out with a cigarette and a lighter, very nervous, drops the hood, asks to see my ID. She’s a great-looking little number, by the way. So I’ve got one hand at my holster and one hand on my wallet when she brings up that lighter, and it’s a Mace canister the size of a roll of dimes, not worth spit at twenty feet but I was closer than that. I failed a routine precaution, it was that simple.”