Another second or two passed. Abe could feel the wind increase. Reading from the storm-whipped pattern of the boiling ocean ahead of him, he felt he could even see the wind.
The attackers continued forwards. There was more shooting.
Abe saw a bullet hole open in the starboard wing a few feet in front of him. It was time to go: safety or death.
He hunched over the control stick. Infinitely relaxed, but with infinite authority, he raised the stick. The aircraft responded. It began to move.
123
Mostly the way planes take off is simple. They roll along a flat piece of ground, gathering speed. When the air is moving fast enough over the wings, the plane has enough lift to take off. At this point, the pilot pulls back on the stick and lets the plane fly.
But that’s the regular type of take-off. It’s not one you can use if your plane has its rear end dug into a hole and its front end stuck in a sand-filled trench.
Fortunately, however, that’s not the only type of takeoff possible. If the wind is running hard enough, then, even if the plane is stationary, there can be enough airspeed over the wings to make a take-off possible. Not a good takeoff, of course. Not a safe one. Not a controlled one. As a matter of fact, it can be the sort of take-off which sees the plane snatched into the air, only to be dashed to the ground a second later. All the same, given the circumstances, any kind of take-off would be welcome, any kind at all.
Keeping the tail held firmly down on the ground, Abe gave the engine maximum power. Angled as they were, the two pairs of wings were meeting the wind at a high angle of attack, exposing their undersurface to the buffeting force of the air.
And, in an instant, the big plane, all two tons of her, was snatched into the sky, exactly as if it had become a giant kite. There was no forward movement. There was almost no backwards or sideways movement. One second the plane was sitting on the ground, the next it was as if it had been jerked seventy feet into the air. The position, of course, was wildly unsustainable. Abe forced the nose of the aircraft down again. The wings bit into the wind at their normal angle. The big machine was no longer a giant kite; it was a plane once again.
Leaning out of the cockpit, Abe could see their recent attackers on the ground, looking up, astounded, completely beaten. A few of them had guns raised. Abe counted a few more shots, but what with the rapidly widening distance and the unpredictable ferocity of the wind, he knew they had little chance of causing damage.
But they were out of one danger and smack into another, possibly more serious, one. The storm was one of the most violent Abe had ever seen. It was possible that no pilot in history had ever flown in such weather and lived.
Still relaxed, still alert, Abe coaxed the plane into climbing. He kept her at full throttle, keeping her nose pointed into the wind, and giving her all the lift he could find.
It wasn’t a predictable ascent. The wind was still gusty, and when it dropped, it dropped suddenly and hard. As soon as it dropped, the lift on the wings died away and the big plane lurched downwards. Abe did what he could to keep her steady, but it was an unnerving journey. They’d gain two hundred feet in a few seconds, then lose half of their gain in the blink of an eye. It was like being trapped in some giant elevator, with somebody else at the controls.
Abe coaxed the plane upwards. As the seconds ticked by, he fought the plane higher and higher. Two hundred feet, four hundred, six hundred, a thousand. At present, they were still on the outskirts of the storm. They hadn’t yet reached the mountainous cloud wall that threatened to overwhelm them.
Abe was tempted to turn the aircraft and fly full-speed away, but he didn’t dare. In those tumultuous conditions, turning the plane through one hundred and eighty degrees would expose the wings to violent and uneven forces. A couple of times, he tried nudging the plane around just a few degrees, but both times, the wings told him they couldn’t stand the stress. He straightened up.
He had fifteen hundred feet beneath him now, but he needed more before attempting the manoeuvre. He wanted at least two thousand feet before risking it. He almost made it. At nineteen hundred feet, he began to relax. He adjusted position on the controls, ready to turn the aircraft, when a violent jolt of wind, the most violent yet, sprang them up three hundred feet, then threw them back almost a thousand.
Abe steadied the aircraft. There was no turning now. They were already into the grey outposts of the storm. Then, in a flash, they were inside the storm itself.
124
Henry Geddes, driving his own car, met Roeder off the train from New York. The two men knew each other, disliked each other, and used their acquaintance as an excuse to avoid courtesy.
‘News?’ asked Roeder.
‘They didn’t get her. Neither her nor the pilot nor the mechanic.’
‘And the documents?’
‘She has them. They’re missing from the bank anyway. The only good part of it is the weather. They took off in the worst storm this year. For all we know, they’ve already smashed up.’
Roeder said nothing, just watched the road ahead. Geddes drove a big-engined Studebaker and he drove it fast, but somehow effetely. His hands were dressed in tan leather driving gloves and they slid around the rim of the steering wheel instead of gripping it and releasing it like a man.
Roeder half-closed his eyes. His attitude of relaxation wasn’t a pose, it was for real. And why wouldn’t it be? Despite the setbacks, the situation was under control. Rockwell and the Hamilton girl didn’t know it, but their escape from Florida was meaningless. The stolen ledgers were already worthless, the two runaway pilots already dead.
The Firm would win, as the Firm would always win.
PART FIVE
Height and Speed
To most people, there are only two things about airplanes that scare them: height and speed. To pilots, however, there are only two things that make a plane safe enough to get into: height and speed.
Speed means air moving fast over the airplane’s wings. Speed means lift. It means no risk of falling from the sky. It means the pilot has plenty to play with. It means the pilot can climb, dive, turn, manoeuvre, all without risk.
And height.
Just suppose the worst happens. Suppose the engine cuts out or a control wire snaps, the fuel pump jams. Where’s the safest place to be when that happens? The answer’s obvious. High up is the only safe place to be. At two, three, even five thousand feet, the world is a blanket spread out beneath the sky. The pilot can begin to glide, nose angled a little down, slowly circling as alternative landing sites offer themselves. To land safely, a biplane only needs a largish field. All a pilot needs to do is to pick a site, then wait. Why hurry? The view’s great, there’s no need to rush. When the field finally rises close enough to land on, the pilot simply glides in to land. Fields can be a little bumpier than a regular airfield, but who cares about bumps?
Of course, things don’t always go so well.
Sod’s law says that problems never happen when you’re ready for them. Problems happen when you’re flying low, close to the ground, when the engine’s stuttering, when your airspeed’s low.
Not enough speed. Not enough height. No room to manoeuvre and a loss of power. The pilot’s nightmare. A recipe for death.
125
The intensity of the storm was literally stunning. Light left them. It wasn’t pitch black, but the suddenness of the darkness was terrifying all the same. The ground below disappeared. The cloud was so thick that Pen couldn’t see clear to the ends of the wingtips. Ahead of her, the flashing disc of the propeller was only barely visible in the tearing fog.
And the rain! The rain struck with the force of hailstones. Pen had found her flying clothes in the cockpit and struggled into them as soon as she could. But even so, her flying suit left the bottom half of her face unprotected and the exposed skin was instantly stinging and sore. Aircraft were designed for clear weather. They could take a little rain, but weren’t designed to take much. Over the sound of the s
torm and engine combined, Pen could hear the wings sounding a new note under the driving rain.
Lightning flashed around them. Up there inside the thunderclouds, lightning wasn’t as simple as a bolt or a flash. It was a change in the entire sky. One second there was blackness. The next moment Pen’s entire field of view was completely filled with an awful yellowish glare that lasted an instant before vanishing again. In that chaos of sky, Pen kept her eyes fastened on the instrument panel. Like many planes of its type, the DH-4 had a dual set of controls so that it could be operated from the front or rear cockpits. The instrument panel was replicated in both cockpits. Pen read off the vital measurements.
Altitude: altering violently, but never less than two and a half thousand feet. Good.
Fuel: a three-quarters full tank. Abe must have been absolutely full before he’d left Marion. Good again.
Turn indicator and banking indicator: moving all the time, but shifting so fast and so unpredictably that they were hard to read. But as Pen kept her eye on the controls, she felt that perhaps – yes, quite likely – some kind of turn seemed indicated.
Pen swept her gaze across to the compass. When she’d learned to fly, she’d been taught to think of the compass ball itself as stationary, the needle always fixed on north. If the compass needle seemed to move, that wasn’t because the needle was moving but because the plane was. Right now, the compass was seeming to swing clockwise, which meant that the plane was turning anti-clockwise. Slowly, slowly, Abe was bringing the plane around to head north-west. On that course, it would ride the curve of the storm inland – and hope at some stage to outrun the winds.
She didn’t possess Abe’s sense of hyper-alertness, but she too felt very calm. She was in a vastly dangerous situation, but she had long accustomed herself to the possibility of dying in a plane crash. The thought of being gunned down by one of Marion’s thugs had been obnoxious beyond description. And there was Abe. She knew that perhaps no pilot in the world was better qualified to fly in these conditions than the man in the cockpit ahead of her. As the airplane surged and struggled, she felt only infinite trust, a kind of loving glow that connected her to him.
She barely glanced now at the destructive violence outside the cockpit. There was nothing to see there except swirling cloud. For all that the view out could tell her, the plane could be travelling north or south, east or west, it could be right-side up or upside down. It could be travelling dead straight for open sky, or dead straight for the ground below. In the giddy lurching of the airplane, Pen knew that she had to stop trusting the senses of her body. The human body tends to interpret any strong pull as gravitational. But there were too many other forces which confused things. Acceleration, deceleration, centripetal force all felt exactly the same as gravity. So did the shocking lifts and drops that were caused by sudden updrafts and downdrafts in the air. Any of those forces could be stronger than gravity, could simply cancel it out.
Pen ignored the blood pulsing in her head and concentrated. The altitude reading was good. Whatever other problems they had, there was plenty of empty sky beneath. Airspeed was worse. The gusting wind meant that the plane’s speed was hard to control. There were moments when the wind suddenly betrayed the airplane, speed dropped away, the plane began to drop. Abe was doing a mighty job, but conditions were abominable.
Then the plane suddenly seemed to drop off a cliff. Pen experienced something like a little tremor running through the plane. The machine lost a thousand feet of altitude in a matter of seconds. Pen gulped – belched – and found herself vomiting that day’s meal, seeing the solids flash over her shoulder and into the thick cloud behind. She wiped off her mouth, then her goggles. Some of the fog around had been from the spray of burned castor oil on her goggles. But there had been vomit there too, and something else, something red.
She put her hand to her head again and wiped carefully. Her hand came away with more red, little spatters of blood. And with the blood, little chips of red stone. She remembered the tremor that had hit the aircraft. Had she been struck by something? She kneaded her scalp. But her aviator’s brain had already switched its attention to something else. The altitude needle was still dropping, not so fast now, but still inching down. They had less than eight hundred feet of height now. In normal cirumstances, that was plenty, but right now they were in extreme danger. They’d just lost a thousand feet in a downdraft. If they did the same now, they’d smash into earth or ocean and be destroyed for sure.
A huge sheet of lightning filled the sky. The plane felt as though it was flying in the middle of the sheet. Lightning can’t harm a plane, but the experience was eerie.
The altitude needle was still dropping. Six hundred feet.
‘Abe? Abe?’
Pen yelled, knowing that Abe could never hear her. But even as she yelled, she guessed what had happened. It hadn’t been her blood she’d found, but Abe’s. Blood and stone that had spattered backwards from the front cockpit. Some heavy object must have been torn loose by the storm and must have struck Abe. Was he conscious or not? Dead or alive? There was no way to know, but one thing was certain, the plane was no longer under his control.
Pen swept into action. The rudder bar passed freely under her feet, but what she needed now wasn’t the rudder, but the stick. The socket was right there in front of her, but the stick itself had been moved out of the way, strapped to the side of the cockpit. Pen fought the tight canvas straps. Arnie Hueffer was the world’s best mechanic, but he was a man, and had a man’s completely unreasonable view of how tight to make a strap. Pen fought the buckle.
The altitude was still dropping – and the compass was swinging around and around. Too fast. The lightning had probably disabled the compass. She looked at the turn and banking indicators, which seemed to indicate a tilt – not that she was sure she could trust the instruments under the current circumstances.
Pen looked up from the controls. Instinctively, she knew the problem. They were in a spin. Out of control and circling down.
Four hundred feet.
Somehow, she didn’t know how, Pen freed the control stick. She jammed it in the socket. There was a bolt to thread in, a split pin to make it fast, but Pen had no time for that. Four hundred feet was an ugly enough height to attempt a spin recovery under any circumstances, but it was close to a death sentence when the control stick was out of position and the pilot was flying blind.
She reacted by instinct, by years of training.
She gave the plane a little forward stick to add airspeed, then gave the plane starboard rudder, opposite to the direction of spin. The big craft eased out of its deathly circle, but was continuing to race towards the ground. For one split second, Pen let the plane settle on its course, before pulling back on the stick. There was no view ahead. The altitude needle was so close to zero, that according to the needle she could have been driving along the highway. She pulled back harder, the big plane wrestling her for control. She could still see nothing, nothing but cloud.
And then she could.
Trees. Black topped trees, lashing furiously in the wind. Trees which would kill her if she touched them. She gave the plane full back stick, hoping and praying that it would respond.
126
Geddes had taken Roeder not to the Firm’s K Street offices, but to the offices of the Inland Revenue Service. Senator Paulet had met them in the lobby, pacing up and down and smoking, flicking cigarette ash into the potted palms. Geddes had made the briefest possible introduction before the three men had walked unannounced into Jim Carpenter’s fifth-floor office.
The conversation hadn’t lasted long.
‘We want McBride,’ said Roeder. ‘McBride and Bosse.’
‘Mr Geddes, Senator,’ said Carpenter, half-rising. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t –’
‘McBride. Where is he?’
‘Fourth floor, I’ll call downstairs. Now listen, gentlemen, why not –?’
‘He’s not at his desk. He hasn’t been in the office all day,’ s
aid Geddes. ‘Nor Bosse.’
‘Really? They ought to be here. I don’t know where else they could be.’
‘Why not?’
It was Roeder who spoke. At times like this, he had a habit of speaking very softly. So quietly, you could hardly catch his words. That meant people had to bend forwards, listen up, even quiet the sounds of their own breath if they wanted to hear him. Roeder’s habit was a way of pointing up who had the power and who didn’t. And Roeder did, not Carpenter.
‘Sorry? What? Why not?’ Carpenter licked his lips. He didn’t know who Roeder was, but Senator Paulet was clearly minded to pay Roeder a lot of attention and Carpenter wasn’t inclined to argue. ‘I don’t know why not. They ought to be here.’
‘They report directly to you?’
‘Yes, McBride does.’
‘He’s working on a major case? One that is coming close to completion?’
‘Yes.’
‘What case? Who is the target?’
‘Hey, now. This investigation is confidential. I can’t…’
Roeder pulled back with a flick of irritation. Paulet turned away from the window and towards Carpenter. ‘You better believe you can, Carpenter. You want to hold on to your job, you better cooperate with a Senate investigation.’
‘Mr Roeder, you mean? He works – you work – on behalf of the Senate?’ Carpenter had turned to Roeder, but Paulet answered instead.
‘I’m a Senator, aren’t I? This is an investigation, isn’t it?’
‘Sure…’ Carpenter’s gaze wavered between the two men. There was something strange in the power structure. Paulet was the Senator, but it wasn’t him calling the shots. ‘Sure, OK.’
‘Well?’
‘The target of investigation? Right. Well, the fact is, McBride has played his cards pretty close to his chest. I’ve always insisted on confidentiality.’
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