by Dean Ing
He knew that the fireball was diminishing because his chief visual sensation, the dazzle of that fireball, was dimming. Can’t blackout or redout or any other kind of out, now, he thought desperately as that dazzle faded. But there was still some ambient light, and still the bite of straps into his body and that thunderous vibration, so he wasn’t entirely out of it.
And then the vibration and the ferocious bite of straps abated, more quickly than he expected, and his mind was clearing at a fantastic rate. Highjump hurtled toward the west coast of Baja with less than twenty miles of altitude, and as soon as air friction slowed her enough, Rogan could extend those little wingtips and glide the sucker for many a mile.
Simultaneously he was trying to raise the DeLeon tower at La Paz, a hundred miles to the southeast. No more of that salty talk of commercial vessels on the high seas, this was strictly SOP except that landing Highjump at over two hundred knots was, by definition, a declared emergency. Rogan raised DeLeon, and declared it. It escalated to a world-class fuckup almost instantly.
They had him on DeLeon’s radar but could not believe their own readings of his approach speed. Runway One-Eight had traffic stacked with a Mexican jumbo jet on final approach, and they would need time for the straight-in approach he proposed on that same runway. It meant an S bank, which Rogan had planned to line him up, but now he was dropping fast over the Magdalena Plain and knew that he could not just hang up there forever. It was then that he spotted the light of his cellular comm link and flicked the toggle. He was already shrugging from straps, mentally reviewing the procedure to stall the bird and try to fight his way out with the chute on his chest, when the familiar voice spoke.
It was Wolf Schultheis. “Highjump base to Highjump One, over.”
Rogan presented the situation in seconds. He was dropping to twenty thousand feet, dead-stick at four hundred knots, hoping somehow to stretch that glide or luck into some impossible updraft. He was not going to risk whacking a commercial airliner and that was that.
“How’s your hydrogen?”
“Thought of that. Fifty pounds left, vents off, pressure up, but I’m too slow to light these scramjets now.” The inlet geometry of a ramjet was critical, and they all knew it, so why bug him with an impossibility?
“You could dive for that delta vee,” said the old man.
“Thought of that too. Not enough altitude left.”
The voice of Tom Schultheis: ‘ ‘Not even with your wingtips folded?”
Why not? Because he was thinking of those extended tips as his only hope, that’s why. Folded? He might push the envelope an inch beyond the possible, might wind up plowing a few miles of Mexican hardpan, but my God, how she would plummet. “Retracting,” he said, pushing the stick over, seeing the wingtips retract, watching those flat hills develop contours and distinct features as he flicked protect covers from the shotgun-start toggles. He’d had the tips extended when he maneuvered on that test hop. Well, he’d just have to be damned spry if the shotgun start failed.
Loafing at three hundred and seventy knots, Highjump began to drop like a stone, her arc steepening, and now the airspeed indicator was climbing, but not fast enough if he intended to pull this sucker up without her wingtip extensions, and then he realized that any thrust at all, no matter how inefficient, was better than none, and cracked his throttles, the pyrotechnic starters flashing sparks from beneath the scramjet nacelles.
He was still losing altitude when the machmeter took off, and hugged the stick to him, now dead level but inching downward still, whipping fronds from the tips of a line of coconut palms some idiot had planted on the outskirts of La Paz as Highjump began her shallow climb.
Glenn Rogan kept those scramjets bellowing well out over the Bay of La Paz, the simultaneous flameouts producing a deafening silence in the cockpit, and extended the wingtips again for a long and, it seemed to him, almost languorous circle beyond islands in the bay as he called in his new position. The DeLeon tower had seen and heard him, all right; Por Dios, who in all Baja del Sur had not? Rogan had done more than declare an emergency: his treetop pass near the city had caused a few . . .
Rogan touched down almost at a stall, with only a hundred feet of runway eighteen behind him and a mile and a half of rollout ahead. He used it all, running off the end at a trifling pace into sand that engulfed his landing gear. Because, as he said on his cellular comm link, if a man can cover a burning tire with sand, he isn’t obliged to piss on it.
TWENTY-SIX
As Jim Christopher banked Delta One north toward Hayward in late afternoon sun, Wes rubbed his back across the copilot’s seat to ease the residual stings of celebration and grinned ruefully while talking to Vangie Broussard on their scrambler circuit. “I’ll be sore for a week from hugs and back slaps, honey. If there was a dry eye in the hangar, it belonged to Weatherby.”
“I can imagine,” she replied. “I’m ashamed of myself, Wes; I should have spotted something of what your boffins were up to. Now I’m glad I didn’t,” she reflected. “Exotic Salvage, my Aunt Rodie! Why didn’t someone drop into San Leandro and see about that little operation?’ ’
“I left that to Tom; he said they were small but fair.” “I’ll bet he did! Oh, you want Alma Schultheis to make up a media release right away?”
“You help her with it. And stress the point that Peel Transit could never have done it without the farsighted Santa Fe, blah blah blah. We’ve gotta co-opt those folks, Vangie! We’ll be at the plant by seven, and Weatherby has some luggage to grab and a plane to catch. I’ll go with him, but I’ll be back later. Do you mind working through the evening, honey?”
- “What I do on Friday nights for love! Well, I don’t mind if I can pack a swimsuit and go to Baja with you tomorrow,” she replied, laughing. “I gather you’ll be picking up your wayward boys on the way down, tomorrow. What should I tell their wives?”
“As little as possible until we’ve got our stories together. Rogan’s camped out with our vehicle so nobody tinkers with it, and we’ll be back by Monday, God willing. That should cover it. Any calls that won’t wait?”
“No. Somebody tried to reach you a couple of times. The receptionist said you were in Delta One and wouldn’t be back before five.”
“Media, maybe?”
“I didn’t handle the calls, but they didn’t ask for a callback,” she said, adding quickly, “I’ve got a lot to do before you touch down here, my love. Got to run.”
Wes doffed his headset and moved back with Weatherby, who had spent much of the past hour dictating into O’Grady’s memocomp. “We’ll have you in your limo by seven. I, ah, hope we can count on complete discretion, Weatherby.”
The big man waved his cigar in dismissal. “Hell, why add to your troubles? You know something, Peel? If you start tooling up for those little Highjump gadgets, all those projections I’ve been looking at are up in smoke. They would’a been a big help, but not now.”
Wes tossed him a killer smile. “You mean, what can I do for you lately?”
“Well, shit, you gave me a bucket with a hole in it.” “Yeah; well, something came up,” Wes said laconically. “Turn off that memocomp and we’ll talk all the way to the limo and then to your hotel. Or do you have a radio in that rental barge?”
“I do, but I like to watch a man’s face while he diddles me,” said Weatherby, his eyes sliding sideways at O’Grady’s chuckle.
“Suits me,” Wes replied. “I know what you’re after; how Highjump will affect the NTC.”
“You got it,” Weatherby nodded, snapping the machine off.
* * * *
After Golam’s call to the plant from a nearby phone booth in early afternoon, it became clear that Farda had lost one chance as that vast delta droned away overhead. “But these new dirigibles do not bum,” Ali had said, with better than average understanding of Great Satan’s machines. “We probably would only have warned him. If he returns anytime today, our original plan will still work.”
“We h
ave squatted in the dust outside his palace long enough to be noticed,” said Nurbashi.
It was Golam Razmara who observed that they might drive miles away and wait, because that airship was simply too large to be missed as long as they had an unimpeded view of the skyline.
So the stretch limo slid up toward Castro Valley Road, where the view was adequate, and to a vendor of fish and chips for the midday meal. Nurbashi vetoed Golam’s suggestion of a nearby McDonald’s because, he said, Great Satan’s ground meat was without doubt deliberately contaminated with pork. Allah did not provoke Nurbashi to ask himself about the fat in which that fish was fried, because Allah is merciful.
But because Nurbashi was anxious, Ali made a second call in midaftemoon, verifying only that John Wesley Peel was expected after the close of the day shift, and could anyone else be of help, or would he like to leave a message. Ali’s response was a broken connection. The message, for Peel alone, sat fidgeting and sweating in the front seat of the stretch limo.
Toward the end of the Friday afternoon rush, Golam finally saw it, leaning from his open window and squinting toward the southern skyline. “There! It must be he, that thing is far too huge to be anything else. ’ ’ And Ali saw and agreed, putting the limo into motion, bullying his way through traffic toward the valley floor and Hesperian Boulevard.
Waiting for the last traffic light, watching Delta One sink behind buildings of the Peel plant, Ali looked over and saw Golam drumming his fingers on the windowsill. “There is no reason for anxiety,” Ali said with some anxiety, wondering if that light would ever change. “You shall be on the spot appointed to you before he is, brother Golam.”
The appointed martyr smiled, his eyes now alight, and then he said a curious thing. “You remember the route, brother, from Foothill to the Five-Eighty Freeway?”
“Perfectly,” Ali replied. It struck Ali as curious because, by the time Ali had the limo speeding out of Hayward, Golam Razmara would be eating peeled grapes in paradise. Ali wondered if he, too, would care that much about the mullah’s welfare when Ali himself was moments from martyrdom. Then Ali sent the limo spurting ahead, and asked for one of the Uzi weapons, just in case. Peel, he explained, might not be alone and they did not want witnesses.
* * * *
Royston Kimmel checked his watch and sighed, tooling his unmarked brown Ford around to the main entrance of the Peel plant. The Oakland office couldn’t afford several agents for surveillance around the plant perimeter, not on something as nebulous as the Peel case; but one good man on the job was infinitely better than none. Kimmel had agreed to pick up the slack for his relief man, who had something going with his lady in The City on this Friday night. He hadn’t figured on Peel staying this long at the plant. Maybe Peel was in that walloping great airship that had ghosted down to its hangar a few minutes back. Kimmel had chosen not to put in a call to find out earlier because it was poor practice to keep reminding a man that he was watched, even by friends.
From long expertise, Kimmel took note of the swing shift cars in those parking lots; the patterns they made, the singletons that liked to park off by themselves like that twit who had his red ’Vette straddling two parking places so no one would chip the pinstriping on his three-thousand-pound red plastic cock. Sometimes, when it was a van off by itself, somebody was humping somebody inside. And sometimes somebody was just waiting with a clear field of fire, waiting to hump somebody good. This evening, as Kimmel cruised toward the exec building to reassure himself that Peel’s Blazer was still out front, he saw no suspicious loners.
But he did see a stretch Caddie limo with smoked glass, gliding along like a rubber-tired locomotive as it approached the building’s front. Only three vehicles squatted in the line of exec spaces: Peel’s Blazer, his assistant’s little Fiero, and twenty yards from Peel’s boxy machine, that other Caddie limo with the visitor’s sticker. The black stretch trundled past, too distant for Kimmel to make those plates, disappearing between ranks of swing shift cars. Kimmel had seen two thousand cars that day, a thousand of them parked around Peel’s plant, but only one black stretch limo with smoked glass. He had seen it cruising past the plant’s front entrance about lunchtime. Kimmel saw no good reason why anyone who rode around in a beast like that would do much of it in Peel’s lot. But there could be a bad reason, and as Kimmel turned the Ford around, he made a fateful decision and reached for the hand mike at the dash, glancing into his rearview toward die front doors of the exec building.
He saw a big duffer emerge, the door held for him by a younger, husky redhead, and the last man out the door was tall and blond, hurrying enough to limp. That had to be Peel, and then something in the edge of Kimmel’s vision made him look straight ahead, and now that stretch limo was squalling around in the big lot heading in his direction but with a line of cars between, and Kimmel made the connection without even thinking about it. He dropped the mike, crammed the lever into reverse, and burned rubber as he shot backward.
Wes, carrying enough papers to keep him busy half the night, stopped at his Blazer and unlocked it long enough to toss his armload inside. “Start it up, O’Grady,” he called as the others moved toward the rental nearby. “I’ll be right with - ”
He stopped, seeing a brown Ford sedan careening backward from the nearby parking lot, suddenly furious that one of his swing shift people was hot-dogging it in his parking lot, for God’s sake, and Wes moved into the open waving one fist and shaking the other.
The Ford’s front wheels cocked sharply, whirling its rump end so that it projected across the mouth of the next lane, and then Wes saw the chrome and black of the stretch limo barrel into that opening, and the limo’s front bumper slammed the rear of the Ford so hard the smaller car spun, walloping the limo which was now turning left toward Wes, fifty yards away. The one-two punch of that grinding collision echoed shockingly loud off the front of the exec building, and Wes flinched from it, and when he opened his eyes a second later, one hell of a lot of new things were corking off.
At his right, on the edge of his vision, Wes saw .O’Grady’s head and shoulders pop from Weatherby’s limo. The Ford driver was still trying to peel rubber to prevent that limo from proceeding, the limo now making a T with the Ford and not making much headway, and the front passenger door of the limo was open and someone was sprinting like hell toward Wes as if running for eternal life. Then the limo stopped with a sharp dip of its prow, and the driver’s door flew open, and a rattling burst of gunfire erupted from inside, shattering glass into the passenger’s side of the Ford.
Wes went down, impeded by his bad hip, fumbling for the Walther on his ankle. Someone was shouting, “Stay down, Mr. Peel,” and as Wes brought the Walther up, several reports issued from O’Grady’s direction. The fellow sprinting toward Wes was still twenty yards away, and at the third of those rapid-pace shots from O’Grady the runner’s right leg flew outward as if jerked by an invisible wire, spinning him hard onto his left shoulder against macadam.
Then the limo driver, a tall swarthy man, burst from the limo, whipping the short wooden stock of a weapon to his shoulder as he leaned toward O’Grady. Wes’s first round holed the driver’s door as the driver loosed a half-dozen rounds; his second, after a careful adjustment of sight, slapped the man’s weapon sideways and sent splinters flying into die face of the gunner, but not before the man had fired another rapid burst. O’Grady shouted like a boy on a playground and fell against the far side of Weatherby’s limo, and as the limo driver dived back into his vehicle, Wes starred the windshield exactly where a driver’s head ought to be.
And then Wes saw that the felled runner had come to his feet, staggering toward Wes with one hand fumbling into a bulky vest and the other arm out as if to embrace Wes himself, and Golam Razmara saw pity wash across Peel’s face, and knew that the American would not prevent his coming nearer, and Golam offered a brief prayer of thanks as he forced himself forward against the pain in his right leg.
The injured runner, whose hands
held no weapon, was yelling something in a language Wes did not understand but it looked like that limo might run the poor guy down, and Wes moved forward fast to drag the man out of the limo’s path. But the limo shot backward as the wounded man staggered within a fishing pole’s reach of Wes, and Wes thought those next shots were intended for the limo driver until he saw the right side of the injured man’s face shatter into a blossom of pink and gray.
Golam Razmara, with his forefinger on the button in his vest, had one final instant of awareness. So this is what an exploding vest feels like, he thought, believing that the brutal shock of a nine-millimeter hollow point was the result of his detonator. He fell like a bag of shot, face up, arms flung wide.
By the time Wes rounded the rear of Weatherby’s limo, the big man was on his knees on macadam, trying to lift a gasping Grover O’Grady whose eyes were open as his mouth worked almost silently. “Nailed him, Joey,” he said, and tried to smile.
“I love you for it, kid,” Weatherby managed to choke out, letting Wes help as they heaved the hideously gut-shot O’Grady to his feet. “We’ll get you fixed up.”
Incredibly, the driver of the brown Ford was again in control of his savaged vehicle, accelerating forward down the two-lane entry to the Peel plant with eight-foot chain link fence on each side, narrowing the gap between himself and the stretch limo just ahead.
Wes snapped, “My Blazer’s got blankets and room for him to lie down, and I know where the hospital is. Let’s go!” He saw O’Grady’s face as they rolled him into the rear of the Blazer, ashen, eyes shut, his lower lip bleeding between his teeth.
The distant concussion of brown Ford against black Caddie, as the limo tried to make its left turn onto Hesperian, sounded like a tower of garbage cans collapsing. “I got. the license number,” said Joey Weatherby over his shoulder as he lumbered toward his limo. “What hospital?”