Thunderbird

by Susan Slater

  There was lots of work to be done around the hogan—haul water from a nearby well, keep the cooking fire going, tend the goats Pansy still kept up. It was just the moods she got in. Like she was possessed. Which always seemed to bring him full circle. He needed to inquire about a cleansing and not put it off. But didn’t he already know what was wrong? And wasn’t it possible that it could never be righted? Pansy had sold a sand painting. Guests had been curious about one they had seen and had asked how such a painting was made. She demonstrated and made a small painting for them. But its theme was sacred—holy to the Old Ones and now they had made her sick. Sometimes if he needed money, Amos would also sell a painting. But he knew how to make changes. Only exact reproductions of ancient designs invoked the anger of the deities. So he would leave out a snake, or a lightning rod or a kokopelli—usually he just put in the wrong number of feathers or changed the color scheme. But to sell a sacred sand painting, correct in every detail, robbed the Holy Ones of strength and drained power from their religion. It was a serious offense.

  Tonight was a quiet night. Pansy had gone out to bring in the small herd of sheep that she doted on. Amos waited. She was gone overly long, he thought. Sometimes their guests would trudge along—experience bringing the flock to shelter. But not tonight. Their visitors had begged off.

  Amos picked his way around the cars parked to the right of the hogan. One a black, bullet-shaped oddity like he’d never seen before; the other a rented SUV, like the hundreds he saw in Crownpoint. Both expensive. He knew that. He’d had an old truck one time. Ran until it just gave out and he’d walked home. He’d never needed another one.

  He peered into the darkness. There wasn’t anything that should be keeping Pansy. The night was warm and dear with a full moon to guide her. Yet, he worried and gathered up his bedroll to follow. It was always possible that an animal had gone lame and had to be carried.

  The going was slow, but he was only a mile from his hogan when he saw it. Well, heard it first to be more exact. But the shape he’d recognized, those swept back wings that could flutter at the tips, a beak turned toward the earth. Black, proud, swift as the eagle, and magpie-clever in its dealings with man.

  And the noise. Amos grinned. Nothing on this earth could make noise like the Thunderbird. The sound of the wind with the force of a storm behind it that made his ears tingle. He watched the bird fly overhead and paused. Should he go back and wake the visitors? This would be something they had never experienced. But what if he lost it? No, it would be better to follow.

  He saw it dip low in the distance and he struggled to keep up. Lightning skittered across the top of a mesa to his right. Yes. Male lightening. He could tell. Then the huge bird popped up on the horizon, seemed to wobble and dive toward the earth. Food. It must have swooped down to catch something. Amos hurried toward the point where he’d last seen it.

  But he had trouble finding the bird. Even in the moonlight, he was confused. Too many ravines and places for the bird to hide. He called out assuring it that he meant no harm. And he got an answer. A clucking beckoned him toward a clump of piñon some thirty feet away.

  “I greet you.” He spoke the words of his ancestor’s, sending them out and up to the tops of the scrubby piñon. He hitched up his new, board-stiff jeans and stumbled forward over the dry sand only to stub his toe on the point of a half-buried chunk of granite. He tried to imitate the sound that he’d heard by clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, but his tongue managed to slip out the hole left by the loss of an incisor and its two neighboring teeth; so, the sounds he made were little more than saliva punctuated sputters.

  He paused and waited to hear the clucking again. And there it was coming from a knoll with five small pines growing together at its top, trunks gnarled and twisted. He leaned his bedroll against a low branch and sank to his hands and knees and crawled forward. It was a good place for a bird to hide, a canopy of short thick needles overhead and a cushioned mat of dry grass underneath.

  He didn’t see the blow coming. He simply felt the wind leave his lungs as the blackness swept over him. And he lay there—a long time it seemed to him because when he awakened, there was no bird. A hundred feet to the west was a smoldering mass, wisps of black smoke lazily drifted upward before dissipating in the night sky.

  And the smell. So acrid that his eyes were burning. Had lightning struck something—brush stacked and waiting for someone to claim it before winter? But that didn’t explain the smell. Maybe an old sofa or tires. All kinds of things were dumped out here. But still … Amos didn’t have a good feeling about what had happened. He thought about looking for the Thunderbird, but concluded that wasn’t a good idea. Hadn’t the great bird thumped him a good one when he’d gotten too close? It was obvious that the bird hadn’t been calling to him. He stood, but wobbled when he took a step. Then the first coughing spasm rocked him, and he grabbed a branch to keep from falling while he spat and sputtered trying to clear his throat. His lungs ached. The air was unhealthy. He couldn’t even smell the fragrant piñon with his nose an inch from the branch. His head seemed clogged and it was difficult to think.

  CHAPTER THREE

  10:30 p.m., September 14

  The night was perfect. He chuckled when he thought that he might be mistaken for the chindi. If someone saw him in his black cape, running close to the ground, twisting erratically, sometimes tripping over the suede booties that engulfed his shoes, and then looked for prints in the morning, they’d find none. He was thorough. He never left a trail. But he didn’t venture onto the reservation often. Tonight there would be multiple incidents. That’s what the paper would call them incidents. As good as anything because they wouldn’t have a clue.

  His bag of instruments jangled unnervingly. He didn’t have time to stop and repack the scalpels and hemostat, wrap them in the yards of gauze neatly tucked into his pockets.

  He needed to make good time. In and out in under an hour. That was almost a motto. It’d worked over the years. No one suspected. And he’d profited handsomely from the hoax.

  Yet, tonight he was vaguely bothered by something—something he couldn’t name. Just a prickly feeling, some sixth sense warning that shivered up his spine. He slowed to a walk and then stopped. The air felt different, close, deadly calm. He never carried a flashlight, didn’t want to tempt himself to use it. He relied on moonlight and the cover of darkness to protect him. But what he wouldn’t give at this moment to scan the brush, pierce that curtain of dusk that masked the road and all that loomed around him in shadowy outlines.

  A skyward whine pricked the silence, the sound intensifying as a dark triangle screamed overhead.

  “Whoa.”

  Low, circling, obviously a Stealth on some kind of maneuver. This was interesting. Perhaps, he should investigate and get to his work later.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  2:25 a.m., September 15

  Colonel Hap Anderson eased off the gas and felt his lips pull across his teeth in an involuntary smile. Give ‘em a thrill. Wasn’t that his motto? A muffler would steal this pleasure, bridle the roar of the engine, six in a row, dual overhead cam … he swung the D-type Jag into the lane leading to the entrance of Kirtland AFB. A briefing at three o’clock in the morning and he’d been summoned to take part. But it was big. Not something he could ignore. The phone message had used the emergency code—on the cell devoted to business, the one he slept with.

  The salute was snappy but the eyes of the young guard at the gate roamed over the sleekness of the black bullet-nosed front end and open cockpit of the antique racecar, stopping for a moment on the black fin that protruded in back of the driver. …

  Right-hand drive was always a stopper, too. “How are things in Gotham City, Colonel?”

  The young man looked pleased with his own humor. Hap had heard that one before, the Jag compared to a Batmobile, but didn’t steal the thunder from the youngster. Let him think he was original.

  “Just dandy, son, thanks for inquirin
g.” He grinned, then returned the dismissive salute and gunned the engine. The rumbling response was music to his soul. He didn’t drive the car much. But nights like tonight when he had an excuse to be out on the back roads … well, it just didn’t get any better than this.

  He made an arc in the parking lot in front of the two-story brick building that housed the “war room” on a secured floor entirely below ground. Precautions. His whole life had been one of playing the game and being careful. And now he was close to retirement. Forced retirement. And he didn’t have one bat’s eyelash of an idea what that meant. He was scheduled to start transitioning sessions at the end of the summer. Three months and all this would be history.

  He eased into the parking space with his name on it. His wife had stenciled a similar sign on the wall of the garage at home. Just a little something to duplicate what he’d been used to, to assure him some things didn’t have to change. But he hadn’t appreciated the gesture and let her know. It was painted over the next day.

  There was going to be a star on the old epaulets before he hung it up. But fat chance now. And all because of some yahoos who took their oxygen masks off, donned cloth caps forty thousand feet above ground at five hundred miles an hour and posed for the pilot of a jet flying nearby—and then, of course, lost control of their own aircraft.

  Stupid, stupid youth. It had cost the lives of two young men and surely, finally capped his own stellar thirty-year career. The Air Force was changing. There had been a time when the powers who be would look the other way. There wouldn’t have even been a wrist-slapping. But the Air Force’s chief civilian safety officer got a hair up his ass and told everyone who’d listen that the kids had disrobed and bared their buttocks for the other pilot. Mooning at forty thou sand feet. Hap had made damn sure that those boys—what was left of them—had been found in their flight suits and damn sure that everyone heard the story about the snapshots.

  But the damage had been done. Terms like “incompetent” and “poor leadership” floated around. The safety officer smelled blood and ranted and raved about the military repeatedly failing to punish senior officers whose supervision, or lack thereof, managed to cost the taxpayers millions of dollars—not to mention human life. Hap had been admonished to “lay low” for awhile and let it blow over, but it had been three years. The handwriting was on the wall. He was a has-been, passed over, ignored when his expertise could have been beneficial—no, he had to get out. The sooner the better.

  “Got any idea what this is all about?” A man leaned out the window of the car parked next to him. He had to yell above the Jag’s engine.

  Hap shook his head. He resisted the urge to gun the Jag just a teensy bit and simply shut the engine off. He hoisted himself out of the rounded, egg-shaped opening and paused to pull off his helmet and the stocking cap he wore underneath. Now he had “helmet hair.” At least that’s what his fifteen-year-old son would say. And if he could trust his expression, it had to be worse than just plain “hat hair.”

  He ran his hands through the short, graying, brown curls on top of his head, coaxing them to separate and stand upright. Then he dragged his palms over the close-shorn sides above his ears. He still had his hair and a thirty-four inch waist on a six foot one frame and could get it up twice a week whether he needed to or not. If all that was any consolation, and maybe it was at fifty-eight.

  “You got any fix at all on what’s going on? You hear anything over at the lab?” The man asked stepping out of a 911 Turbo 4 Porsche. Hap’s eye skipped over the sleek contour of the car. One hundred thousand dollars’ worth—maybe then some. And he’d been waiting on Hap, hadn’t gone in until he made sure Hap saw the new baby in “arrest me red.”

  “Nope. Thought someone like you’d have the skinny.” Hap couldn’t ignore the man any longer, but he could ignore the intent of the comment about the lab. He turned his back and busied himself pulling a briefcase from under the passenger seat. Hap had been “loaned” to Sandia National Laboratory since the incident. Just routine, act as a consultant—the title that covered a multitude of sins. He’d been detailed to a group that worked on frequency jamming devices and more recently had been tasked with trying to figure out why the Stealth Bomber couldn’t tell a mountain from a gathering of cumulus clouds. Interesting work.

  And he meant that. It had put him on the cutting edge, exposed him to technology that the man on the street wouldn’t believe existed. The lab had teamed with Lockheed Martin and the Air Force to bring the F-22 to reality—a fighter so agile and fast and electronically sophisticated that it ran the risk of outsmarting the pilot.

  Now a scant year from production, simulated flight decks had yielded to the real thing. And a prototype featuring this latest technology was currently being tested in fighters. But the fine print in his contract screamed “don’t rock the boat; float this one right out the door.” He still had a child to get through college. One of the back-east schools wouldn’t be cheap.

  “You coming?”

  Hap sighed and fell in step. He disliked Rolland “Rolly” Bertrand, another “full-bird” equal in rank but someone who hadn’t screwed up. This was a man who could still revel in his “fair-haired boy” status—someone who was on base and hadn’t been loaned out … but someone who had lost his hair and had added a few inches to his waistline nevertheless. And someone who had to be one-up at whatever cost all the time. The Porsche was a good example. But Hap would be damned if he’d comment on the car.

  “I think we lost one.” Rolly leaned conspiratorially close slicing through Hap’s reverie.

  “You know that for sure?” Hap felt a quickening of his pulse. The “one” he was talking about was an F-117A, the Nighthawk Stealth Fighter. Forty-six million dollars’ worth of aircraft and carrying another fifty million in prototype electronics.

  “Not one-hundred percent. But this was the night of the test.” Both men walked crisply toward the building in front of them.

  “I hope you’re wrong. Maybe it’s good news—gather us all around for a little ‘job well done,’ a few slaps on the back,” Hap offered.

  “You’re a dreamer. Nothing good happens after midnight unless it’s got its legs around your neck. I learned that a long time ago.” Hearty laughter, then Rolly pushed the door open after he carded it and held his badge to the scanner. “No, trust me on this one; we got problems.”

  The war room was bunker-safe and fortified, down one flight of stairs from the main floor. Divided into two levels, the upper deck was a sitting area with work tables and chairs surrounded by a pipe railing, a mezzanine of sorts that might lack something in esthetics, but made up for it in sturdiness. The walls of the room contained maps, a viewing screen descended from the ceiling to Hap’s right and all of the lighting was fluorescent and dimly yellow. The paint was rose-beige, walls matched railings, and white acoustical tile overhead deadened any sound that might escape. Not exactly a party atmosphere, but Hap was used to it. He’d held meetings in worse places. He wasn’t knee-deep in mud in some god-forsaken jungle.

  A couple majors and a captain snapped to when Hap and Rolly walked in, then went back to their computers on the lower level. Hap poured a cup of coffee at a portable cart just inside the door and tapped a full packet of powdered creamer into it, stirred, then added a second. The damned stuff was brackish. Which supported his guess that some of these people had been there for a couple hours already.

  “Let’s get this show on the road.” The master of ceremonies was a one-star general, Alex Stromburg, a man in his sixties, fair, but one not known to mince words. “We’ve got a lot of material to cover.”

  Hap followed Rolly up the short set of stairs, nodded his “hellos” to the assortment of brass already gathered and took a seat at a table in back. This had the feeling of something big, all right; there was a manila envelope of materials in front of him, the red Top Secret stamp almost jumped off the paper.

  “Page one should be a map. I’d like you to have that in front of
you.” General Stromburg waited until the shuffling of the six-man audience died down. A copy of the same map was now visible on the overhead screen. “I’ll get right to the point. We have been notified that an F-117A has gone down somewhere here.” The pointer stabbed at an area of northwest New Mexico then trailed a tight circle just this side of the Continental Divide. “We believe that the crash occurred at approximately twenty-three hundred hours. At this time we do not anticipate finding any survivors.”

  “But you haven’t had a ground crew in there yet?” Hap asked.

  “Not a crew exactly. At this time we’re operating mainly off of film shot by a TV news team who just happened to be in the area. We estimate that these photos were taken some fifteen minutes after the crash.”

  “I don’t want to be no dummy, but why are we still waiting to send in a ground crew some three and a half hours later?” Hap didn’t try to conceal the edge to his voice. One thing about being a short-timer, he had nothing to lose. But if General Stromburg was pained by the interruptions, he didn’t show it, Hap thought. And the question was a good one; one he’d bet half the room wanted to ask.

  “This area … “ General Stromburg turned again to the overhead screen and now traced a larger circle with the pointer. “All this is Indian land which has slowed our investigation—”

  Now Hap’s anger spilled over. “It’s a goddamned part of the United States, isn’t it? Let’s get in there, make something happen. It isn’t like they’re going to ambush us with bows and arrows.” He had a short fuse lately when it came to incompetence—someone else’s screw up.