THE MAN WHO HUNTED HIMSELF

by Lex Lander

  ‘Hi Lindy,’ I said over my shoulder.

  Her face was pressed into Maura’s shoulder and her reply was muffled.

  ‘She says hi,’ Maura said.

  ‘Right, let’s hit the road.’

  I removed us from the scene as fast as the urban speed limit would allow. In the mirror, I watched the Lincoln, but it didn’t budge. Going through a green light as it changed to orange, I steered right into a major road. A few hundred yards along were more lights, at red.

  ‘You okay back there?’ I asked Maura.

  ‘We’re good. Are we going to the airport now?’

  ‘Not yet. Carl might be having us followed. We’re going to find a stretch of road where any tail will be visible.’

  ‘You know best.’

  ‘Where are we going, Mommy?’ Lindy chattered. She was wearing leggings under a padded red jacket with a hood. Her blonde hair was in pigtails, signed off with red ribbons.

  ‘We’re going to the airport, then we’ll be flying home to Las Vegas.’

  ‘Am I going to stay with you?’

  In the rearview, I saw Maura hug her daughter again, and it touched me to the core.

  ‘Yes, you are. And you’re never going away again.’

  All three of us hoped.

  The light turned to green, I edged forward and swung right onto a straight four-lane expressway. Several vehicles came along in our wake. I slowed to let them past, and they all obliged. Nothing in the mirror now except traffic that was already using the road when we joined it. So far we were in the clear. It was always possible Heider was going to play it straight. In view of his parting threat, this seemed unlikely, but people were unpredictable. Especially those on the wrong side of the law.

  We cruised along at a steady 50 mph, frequently overtaken. A sign announced a shopping mall at the next exit, one mile ahead. I left the highway via the off ramp. A blue car stayed with me, but when I pulled off into the parking lot of the shopping mall, it peeled away in the other direction. I parked where I could watch the entrance to the lot, and scrutinized new arrivals: a couple, a woman on her own, another woman, a car full of women, a family. Five minutes I sat there, with the engine running, clocking every car. Guys were scarce and they all went off into the mall showing no interest in the Audi.

  Eventually I was satisfied.

  ‘It looks as if Carl is letting us off the hook for now,’ I said.

  Maura was strapping Lindy into the other seat. ‘For now? You mean you think he’s planning something down the track?’

  ‘I mean we should be on the lookout for it. Until we’re in the air, I don’t think we should consider ourselves home free. Do you? You know him better than I.’

  ‘You’re right, darling,’ she said, nodding. She was holding Lindy’s hand. The little girl seemed to be taking this upheaval in her life in her stride. When I smiled at her, she smiled back without artifice.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you again, Lindy,’ I said.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you too.’ She tilted her head to look at her mother. ‘What’s his name, Mommy?’

  ‘It would be more polite to ask him not me,’ Maura chided gently. ‘But it’s André.’

  ‘Oh.’ Another smile.

  I pointed at the cuddly dog. ‘What’s your friend’s name?’

  ‘Basset. He’s not my friend, he’s my pet.’

  Stupid of me.

  ‘Will he bite me if I stroke him?’

  ‘’Course not!’ So much scorn in such a small voice. ‘He doesn’t have any teeth.’

  Here endeth my first lesson in child communion. Cut out the irony. Maura was laughing so much she couldn’t speak.

  Though I was already convinced that Heider hadn’t sent a tail after us, I insisted on hanging about the mall parking lot for a while longer, until Maura suggested we move on, as she preferred not to fly in the dark with Lindy on board.

  ‘We’re probably too late anyway,’ I said. ‘It’ll be dusk at six and we’re a good hour’s drive from the airport.’

  Maura chewed her lip. ‘Damn, I should have been watching the time.’

  ‘It was time well spent. We needed to be sure they weren’t after us. Tell you what, honey, if you really want to avoid a night flight, we could go back to the house. Angie doesn’t know where it is, so we’ll be pretty safe.’

  Maura brightened. ‘Fine by me. Let’s do it.’

  Back on the road, still checking the rearview mirror but perfunctorily now. We were back at our rented property by five, and tucking into a late lunch/early supper by half past. Our eating routine was all shot, but somehow routines didn’t seem to matter a damn when Maura and I were together. Especially now that she was reunited with Lindy. It occurred to me that right here in this room, in this rented house, we had the makings of a family.

  HUNTER HUNTED

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Seneca five-mike-echo you are cleared for take-off on Runway two-five.’

  ‘Roger, Tower,’ Maura replied, and within seconds we were rolling westward along the ribbon of grey. On our left the Pacific Ocean, blue all over except where rollers hurled themselves against the shore in a white frenzy.

  This was it. When our wheels left the asphalt, it would be all over. The Heiders would become part of an unpleasant and forgettable past. They were the catalysts that brought Maura and me together, but otherwise consigned to the garbage can of history.

  The nose wheel lifted to Maura’s murmured ‘Rotation.’ The rest of the aircraft followed, unsticking from planet Earth with as much commotion as a gnat launching from a leaf.

  We were airborne.

  ‘Gear up,’ Maura chanted, checklist on her lap, a stickler for the strict protocol laid down by the FAA. The thud as the undercarriage retracted into the engine nacelles was somehow reassuring, proof that everything was working. Stuff came over the radio. It didn’t concern us.

  ‘We’re on our way,’ I said, for something to contribute, as we banked steeply to the left to bring us round to our east-by-north-easterly heading.

  ‘Mommy, mommy, I can see another plane over there.’

  Lindy in the seat immediately behind me was gesturing frantically. A light aircraft, similar to ours, was on its final approach to the airport and in our banking mode we able to look down upon it through the side window. The rising sun, still low in the sky, reflected fleetingly off its cockpit canopy, dazzling me despite my sunglasses.

  ‘Do you like flying, Lindy?’ I asked the girl.

  ‘Yes,’ she said gravely. ‘Mommy used to take me to lots of places before I went to stay with Auntie Justine.’

  ‘We’ll go to lots more places, honey,’ Maura said, her hands busy. ‘When we get home.’

  As we climbed towards Maura’s planned ceiling of three thousand feet, we ran into some turbulence, my first experience of it in this aircraft. Lindy shrieked with delight at every shudder of the airframe. I was less sanguine, being more conditioned to flying in airliners. Maura handled the ups and downs without drama, her every movement smooth and economic, her features composed. Once she caught me watching her and did that thing with her lips and eyes that conveyed more than words. I responded in kind.

  The turbulence behind us, we droned on over the hills and valleys of eastern California, the Rockies somewhere ahead, a grey smudge on the skyline. Ahead too, the Mojave Desert and Death Valley. Maura tuned into the Weather Station and we learned that near-record temperature highs for end of November of eighty-six Fahrenheit were forecast down there in the lifeless desert.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ Maura said. ‘In the summer, hundred-plus is commonplace.’

  ‘I guess the lizards must love it.’

  It wasn’t often I felt upbeat about the future. The portents were there: I had kept my promise to restore Lindy to Maura, and even managed not to kill anyone during the operation. The process of rehabilitation was underway. Now we could plan a life together, the three of us, if that was what Maura wanted. Though we had never discuss
ed it, had made no commitments, somehow I had no doubt at all that it was going to happen.

  The dark gods must have overheard me wallowing in self-congratulation and conspired to tip the balance back in their favour. The tendril of smoke that trickled out from the top edge of the oblong radio fascia was less than the emission from an abandoned cigarette. But smoke on an aircraft at three thousand feet is about the last thing you want to encounter.

  Maura and I spotted it simultaneously.

  ‘Get the extinguisher,’ she snapped. It was clipped to the side of the fuselage to the right of my foot well. I yanked it free and made sure I understood how to use it.

  The smoke was still filtering out, now thicker and yellowish but with no detectable smell.

  ‘Mommy, I can see smoke,’ Lindy yelled.

  ‘All right, honey, we’re taking care of it.’ Maura lowered her window an inch and the smoke was drawn towards the gap.

  I aimed the extinguisher. ‘Do you want me to give it a squirt?’

  ‘Not yet. Use that stuff on the instrument panel and we’ll lose everything. In any case we need real flames to put out.’

  Wait for flames. That was a reassuring thought.

  The radio fascia sat proud of the panel, but I couldn’t detect any visible means of removing it.

  ‘Is there a toolkit in here,’ I asked Maura.

  ‘Under your seat.’

  ‘If I can get behind it I can try and localize the source.’

  I drew out the plastic box from under my seat and rummaged inside for a flat-bladed screwdriver. Even as I found one a sound like the opening of a drinks can came from behind the radio. The blue digital displays went blank, also the orange and yellow readings directly below. The smoke thickened anew in flow and density. It also began to smell like heated metal.

  ‘Cover your face with your sweater, Lindy,’ Maura said sharply, mother first, pilot second.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Do as I say, goddammit! You mustn’t breathe the smoke.’

  I turned my head to look over my shoulder and made sure Lindy pulled her sweater up over her nose, leaving just her blue eyes peeping over the hem. She was clutching Basset to her, deriving comfort from the toy, as I supposed kids tend to do in a crisis.

  With the screwdriver I tried to lever the complete radio stack away from the panel. It would barely budge. This wasn’t a job for an in-flight DIY kit.

  Then the port engine packed up. Just like that, no preamble. I felt the plane lurch to the right, then come back on an even keel as Maura trimmed for the loss of power. Her reactions were super-fast. If anything bad came out of this, it wouldn’t be because of her lack of skill and aplomb.

  She did some swift juggling of the controls to feather the prop. The three blades rotated slowly, now driven only by the wind.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  Even the fatuity of my question didn’t make her lose her cool.

  ‘I don’t ... oh, shit!’

  Bad language from Maura was so unprecedented that I knew at once it was serious.

  ‘We’re out of fuel. But we can’t be! I tanked up in Vegas and we were more than half full when we took off.’

  ‘Must be a leak,’ I said, fanning away the smoke, which, thankfully was no worse. ‘What’s happening, Mommy?’ Lindy’s voice was muffled by her sweater.

  Then the other engine coughed, caught again, coughed again and finally gave up. Maura feathered the props and stated, without emotion, ‘We’ve been sabotaged.’

  No discussion was necessary on who was responsible.

  ‘Shouldn’t we send out a mayday call or something?’

  ‘Radio’s out.’ She indicated the blank screen. ‘That was sabotaged too, for sure.’

  Her face was grim. Still no trace of panic, but both of us knew we were in deep mire. No power, no radio. Every pilot’s nightmare. Not to mention every passenger’s.

  In the cockpit, the only sound was the wind over the wings and the air rushing through the gap in the window. Now I knew how it felt to be in a glider.

  ‘How long can we stay up?’ I asked.

  ‘Ten, fifteen minutes. We don’t have that much altitude.’ She looked out of her window. Down below was the most desolate tract of land in the whole of the USA. A limitless expanse of salt flats, dunes, and mountains. The GPS was uninformative. The plane was banking slightly to the right, the artificial horizon showing fifteen degrees.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘More or less.’ She dug out a map, spread it over her knees. ‘About there.’

  I leaned across to study it. ‘About there’ was meaningless. It was just wilderness.

  ‘What’s this place?’

  She followed my tapping finger. ‘Fort Irwin. A small town, I guess. I’ve never been there, or flown over it. We’re heading that way.’

  ‘Can we land close to it?’

  ‘Not close enough. We’re down to less than a hundred knots. Stalling speed is sixty-one with full flap, so we’ll be forced to land in the next five minutes. In that time we’ll have travelled about five miles from where we are now. We’ll still be short of Fort Irwin by twenty miles at least.’

  I couldn’t see the problem. ‘Twenty miles? We can walk that in a day.’

  ‘In ninety degrees of heat? With almost no water? Carrying Lindy most of the way?’

  ‘Two days then.’

  She made a dismissive sound. ‘Without water we won’t last two days, Drew. There are two half-litre bottles on board, and that’s it. We would need ten times that amount for the three of us.’

  She was right about that. In ninety degrees, with no protection from the sun, we would dehydrate fast

  We were now flying level again, the sun high on our left, which meant we were pointing roughly south. The feathered props were rotating lazily and uselessly. Only the airflow on our wings was keeping us aloft and as we slowed the amount of support it provided would diminish. At some point, the wings would no longer be able to do their job.

  ‘What’s happening, Mommy?’ Lindy asked again.

  ‘We have to land, sweetheart. It’ll be a bit bumpy but everything will be all right, don’t worry.’

  ‘I’ll sit next to her,’ I said, unstrapped my belt and proceeded to climb over the back of my seat. Lindy looked a bit scared for a moment, but when I sat next to her and patted Basset on the nose, she relaxed, and even grinned at me. Her mouth was hidden in the sweater but her eyes said enough.

  ‘It’s okay, honey,’ Maura soothed, ‘Drew’s going to take care of you for the landing.’

  ‘Okay.’ Supremely trusting in her mother to make it turn out all right.

  The smoke had largely dissipated by now and I told Lindy she could roll her sweater down. In my Secret Services days, when I trained in handling explosives, I recalled an acid based corrosive that would eat through copper wiring without causing fire or an explosion. I wondered if that was the method used to knock out the radio. Not that explanations for the loss of our radio mattered much anymore, with an impending crash landing to survive.

  I could tell that our rate of descent had accelerated. With our speed bleeding away, I knew enough about stalls to appreciate the danger of going into one with no power.

  ‘You putting the wheels down?’ I said.

  ‘No, we’re going to belly flop,’ Maura replied. ‘If we landed on sand with wheels lowered we would just go head over heels.’

  ‘That would be a scary ride, all right,’ I said, making a joke of it, even in my disquiet.

  Lindy’s seat belt was a bit slack. I secured it, and demonstrated to her how to put her head down between her knees for the landing.

  ‘Thanks, darling,’ Maura said over her shoulder. ‘I love you both.’

  I hadn’t been thinking about love very much since our crisis erupted. Her reminder was a welcome distraction.

  ‘I love you both too,’ I responded, and touched her shoulder with my fingertips.

  The ground was
coming up fast now. I was seeing it at an acute angle, as if it were a GPS display. It was mostly dunes. It seemed to me it was the best of the available possibilities. Softer than rock, though not as flat as salt pans. If Maura judged the touchdown correctly we would slide up or down a slope and be gradually halted by the resistance of the sand. We might slew round, but strapped in we shouldn’t be thrown about much.

  The illusion was of increasing speed, but that was just the proximity of the ground and our last seconds in the air before we made contact.

  ‘Any moment now!’ Maura warned.

  I pushed Lindy’s shoulders down so her forehead was on the edge of the seat, then assumed a similar position, though my greater height meant that my head was somewhere near my ankles. I took her hand in mine. Hers was hot, mine was sweaty.

  For a long moment, all sensation of motion was absent. Even the rush of wind seem to die away, leaving us suspended in a vacuum of space. From the underside of the fuselage came a scraping sensation, like fingernails drawn across a chalkboard. It terminated in a thump and a jarring and shuddering that went on and on. The plane was tilted upwards, defying gravity in its ascent. Lindy gave a little scream and her hand was wrenched from mine as we bounced, leaving the ground altogether. A metallic crunch, then another, then the tormented screech of metal against metal. Now we were slewing, anti-clockwise, and I was crushed against the side of the cabin. The nose tipped down, plunging like a crash-diving submarine. A bang shook the plane with such violence that I thought the fuel tank had ignited. Our fuel was gone, but I knew the fumes could be just as deadly. Maura cried out, whether in pain or fear, I couldn’t tell which. When I lifted my head to see, she was still upright at the wheel, seemingly in control. It was an illusion, of course. Nobody and nothing was in control. We were at the mercy of kinetics and G-forces.

  At last, an impression of slowing. Lindy’s hand was back in mine, hotter than ever. A final slew, clockwise now, describing a semi-circle, and we came to rest facing upwards again. The sun was now on my left, telling me that the nose was pointing to the north.