De la Torres listened for a moment on his phones, then passed a set to me. "This a different circuit from your aircraft radio, if you will put this on . . . . Let me know if you wish to speak to Mr. Shearing, I can patch you in. Be careful what you say, this is not a secure circuit."
"Yeah." I got his headset on, stuck on the ship's headset on the other ear, making my head look like a Mexican bandito with his ammunition belts crossed across his chest. "OK, let's have the boss," I said. At least we didn't need interphones in the ship to talk to each other. It wasn't anywhere near as loud as a car at seventy although we were going a lot faster than that.
"You are connected. Go ahead."
"Chief? Larry here," I said. "Over."
"How's it going? Over."
"Fine. We'll probably crash any minute, but I've got her fooled into thinking I can handle her right now. What comes next, over?"
"Make the best possible speed in the direction you are headed until you have visual contact, then use judgment. Sam, you may tell him whatever you think he should know. Out."
We had crossed the Santa Monica Mountains now, and the smoggy mess of the San Fernando Valley was laid out in front of us. The first thing you saw was the blue squares and curves of about a million swimming pools. I had to bring us in pretty low to be sure of following the freeway in the smog, and wondered what the air traffic control boys would say about that. The hell with FAA regulations, I wasn't about to fly this thing without seeing the ground clearly. There were a lot of cars zipping along the freeway and I didn't see how we were going to pick the right one, but as long as Sam wasn't worried I wasn't going to start. "OK, what next?" I asked him.
"They are still on this freeway headed north, several miles in front of us. Try to close with them, when we approach I will identify the car for you. It would do you no good to hear the reports I am getting from our ground people, they are in code anyway."
"OK, but after we spot them, what happens?"
"You make absolutely certain they do not see us, and follow them. We chose this airplane because no one will hear us approach with it. We must not alarm them until they reach their destination, and not even then."
"That shouldn't be too hard, unless they go too far. From the papers I've got here, this thing uses about ten gallons an hour and we have a bit over forty gallons. We use more at the speed we're going," I added.
"I think they will stay somewhere in this area," Sam told me. "We think they intend to leave this country for Mexico very soon, and they would not want to go too far north. I am surprised they are going north at all, I had expected them to go toward Mexico." He pronounced it with an "x" like Americans do.
The San Fernando Valley stretched out on both sides of us, a bowl full of smog with houses at the bottom, a blaze of red tile roofs and blue swimming pools and garages and cars, prosperity U.S.A. There's never been a rich republic that would defend itself. Sooner or later they hire it done so they can enjoy their riches. I wondered if it was our turn now, because the soldiers always end up robbing the paymaster.
Down below the freeway was clogging up, the chase cars would have problems keeping up. When I asked, Sam told me they were well behind our man but wouldn't want to be close up anyway. They still had electronic contact.
The traffic thinned out when we got to the end of the valley and into some more hills. The smog vanished, and I climbed for altitude. The map showed some reasonably high mountains ahead of us, with the highway winding along in the passes. Some miles ahead the highway would get to its highest point, about 4,000 feet, at Tejon Pass. I tried to remember where I'd heard the name before, and it finally came to me. Fort Tejon was the place where the U.S. Army used to station the Camel Corps back in the days when Secretary of War Jefferson Davis wanted the camel to replace the horse for cavalrymen in the Mojave Desert. Prospectors claim there are still wild camels out in the Mojave, but they never bring any in so it's probably the rotgut they drink.
We passed over some small cities named Newhall and Saugus, then on to more wild country and the Tejon Pass. I didn't want to risk getting low enough to see the car very often in that country, so we had to rely on whatever Sam was using from back there in his half of the cockpit. He seemed to know what he was doing. We were a good fifty miles north of Los Angeles, and there wasn't much of anyplace the people we were chasing could go. The Tehachapi Mountains and the San Gabriel Mountains run together at Tejon Pass, with nothing but the Mojave Desert to the east and the Sierra Madres to the west. I concentrated on flying the crazy ship and let Sam worry about tracking our quarry.
We'd been up a little short of two hours when we reached Tejon Pass. By then I'd throttled back to keep from passing the car below, and through the binoculars I'd had a look at it, a big dark blue car. When you get to Tejon the road starts down fast into the San Joaquin Valley, the big green kidney-shaped splash on your contour map of California. It looked about like that to us from the air, a big green and brown flat saucer ringed by mountains but stretching out beyond the horizon in front of us.
"If they're trying for Mexico they've got a hell of a strange way of getting there," I told Sam.
"It would seem that way. We have confidence in our sources, but perhaps we are wrong this time."
"Yeah. Right now they're a long way from anywhere."
"It seems clear that they have left the Los Angeles area. I will signal for Mr. Shearing and his command people to come north."
We cruised on into the San Joaquin Valley. Along the highway it was a maze of canals and green farms, but not far on either side it trailed off into brown sagebrush. The great earth scar of the new California aqueduct system designed to bring water for even more people to crowd into Los Angeles stretched out of sight to the northwest. I could see a lot of oil derricks over to our left.
The blue car was a couple of miles in front of us, traveling exactly 65 mph, which let us track it at 60 knots indicated air speed. There wasn't much wind so our ground speed was about the same, although I could only measure that from the map.
"Hey," I called. "They've turned off the freeway." I had a look at the map. "Let's see, west onto State Highway I66. That road doesn't go anywhere much. Off to the edge of the valley, about twenty miles. If they follow it past there they could make it to the coast, but there's fifty miles of pretty rugged mountains in the way."
"We will send some people up the coast road," Sam told me. "But it is a strange way to go to the coast, even to avoid being followed. They are very careful, but I cannot imagine they would do that." He looked around him. Below there was nothing, a few fields, some ranch houses miles apart, and not much else. "It is very lonely country here."
"It sure is." I flew on past the turnoff they'd taken, got a couple of miles farther and turned left to parallel the car. The road they were on was absolutely deserted. "If you guys want to try to follow them in cars, you've got your problems," I told Sam. "All they need is one spotter anywhere on that road, the traffic density is like nil. In fact, look over there a couple of miles from the freeway, there's a car parked there. They're slowing down . . . ."
I cut back the engine and let us drift over toward them while Sam got busy with the binoculars. Nobody would ever hear us out there, and he could probably see anyone take a close look at us. We were a silent ghost floating over the deserted farmlands.
"They have exchanged cars," Sam told me. "Now the car we were following is going back toward the freeway . . . . I saw three men enter the other automobile."
"They aren't taking any chances, are they? Your electronics people are on the other side of the mountains, they won't be able to check . . . which one do we stick with?"
"The new one." He got the radio going again, with no luck, but he kept trying. In about five minutes someone answered, and Sam read off a string of numbers.
"What was that?" I asked.
"We have codes for most contingencies. It was not unexpected that they would , take a new means of transportation, and I have described
it. A brown Ford automobile going west at a high rate of speed with no new passengers so far as I can tell. I have asked them to remain interested in the blue car as well. Have you more to add to that report?"
"No. Pretty good code you've got."
"We had a lot of time to think of the possibilities. Unfortunately, while I can make voice contact with our people, the range of the transponder is not sufficient to allow us to check."
We flew on, over newly plowed farmlands, some vineyards, then into a series of low rolling hills, brown already this early in the spring, and beyond them a forest of oil derricks. There were all kinds of the things, big steel ones, the little pumps that look like a duck drinking water, even old wooden towers. If there was anybody out there to watch them I couldn't see him. There was almost no traffic on the road below, maybe one car every twenty minutes.
"They're stopping," Sam said. I was busy with the plane for a moment, found time to look ahead. The car rolled into a little lot by an isolated building at a crossroad.
"If anybody looks up, you tell me," I said. "Until they spot us the first time, we can risk getting pretty close. I'm going to get west of them so we're in the sun, it'll be almost impossible to see us anyway." We flew over our quarry at about five hundred feet and maybe that far away in horizontal distance. There was a filling station diagonally across from the building they'd stopped near, and nobody looked up at us. They wouldn't hear us. It was an eerie feeling, almost like being invisible.
"Only one man left the car," Sam said. He was watching with the binoculars. "It appears to be a store of some kind."
"Maybe they're getting beer for the desert trip," I suggested. "I'd like to have a cold beer myself." The wind blowing in through the little ventilators was hot and didn't cool us at all. Down there on the road it would be even worse. I went on a mile or so west of them, banked and circled over the hills, coming a little closer, then circling away again. We were at the very edge of the San Joaquin Valley. According to my map the town below us was Maricopa, and by the looks of it there weren't more than fifty or so houses in the whole town. In spite of all the oil fields around there weren't any swimming pools. The houses could use a coat of paint for that matter. But they had all outdoors for yards, and the sky was clear.
"He has come back out. You may be correct, he has a paper bag," Sam reported. He was quiet for a long minute. "That is an Oriental man. They have traded for someone who was in the car that met them, I think. There was no Oriental with them when they left Los Angeles."
"That's interesting . . . do you think they've traded anyone else? Like for instance Dr. Steen Hoorne, so that we're following the wrong car? Because if they did, we've lost them, Sam, and I don't think the boss is going to be very happy about it."
Chapter Seventeen
It took an hour to get an answer to that question. Sam didn't have the gear to pulse Steen's electronic tennis shoes and none of the cars were in range. We had some negative information in less time. The blue car went up into Bakersfield with Vallery and a couple of other chaps aboard, but no Hoorne. Or at least, no tennis shoes belonging to Hoorne, and no sign of him from a quick visual check at ninety miles an hour. They didn't want to close with the car for a careful look.
The brown Ford we were chasing went on up State Highway 33, through a medium-sized town called Taft. A couple of teen-agers spotted us from below and stood on the sidewalks pointing up at us, but the Ford had already gone by. We followed it north into a low stretch of hills, a finger of the Temblor range that borders the west edge of the San Joaquin Valley, watched him until they came down through a one-store town called McKittrick, burning along the highway at about seventy. There wasn't much traffic on that lonely road, but what there was passed that Ford like it was standing still. People out there seem to think of a hundred as a nice cruising speed.
Just about ten miles north of McKittrick they turned left onto a blacktop road, and not long after turned left again onto a dirt track into the oil fields, went along that for another couple of miles, and stopped at a clump of sheet metal buildings out in the middle of nowhere. I didn't approach very close, circled far to the west to keep in the sun, and we watched them park the car in a shed and go into one of the buildings. We hadn't been close enough to make out any faces with the binoculars.
A half hour later, with us still circling over the hills west of them, a panel truck drove past on the highway and a few seconds later we got our answer. Steen's shoes, hopefully with Steen in them, were in the abandoned drillers' shacks.
"That's great," I told Sam. "Now what? I hate to point this out, but we're going to run out of gas if we stay up much longer. Can somebody take over the watch from the ground?"
"Possibly. Follow that panel truck until we are out of radio range from our target."
"Glad to." We cruised on up the road. Even at max speed the crazy plane didn't make enough noise to disturb the jackrabbits and coyotes we could see down on the desert. The country was completely empty, nothing but sagebrush and oil rigs, with a lot of space between oil rigs. When we got far enough away, Sam used his radio to call the truck.
They were the first of the caravan, the others were being routed differently so they wouldn't pass the oil camp, we were told. "The boss wants you to keep a check on them until we can get the rest of the troops in position," they added. I didn't recognize the voice. "Another half hour to an hour. And make a good terrain check."
"In an hour I'll be running on fumes," I told him. "Maybe I can find a thermal and play sailplane games, but we're too overloaded for it. Where do I bring it when I can't keep it up any longer?" It would have been possible to land on the desert, but I wouldn't want to try it unless I had to. Schweizer sailplanes do it, but they don't have a thousand or so pounds of motor and other extraneous weight. The crazy plane had a low stall speed and glided beautifully, but still . . .
"Map shows a field right up ahead at the next crossroads. Place called Blackwell's Corners. We'll get set for you to land there, OK?"
"OK. I guess." The idea of a field I'd never seen was a little more intriguing than the sagebrush, but not much. We cruised back, throttled way down, to float over the oil fields and hills. There wasn't a sign of movement at the enemy camp, but we didn't want to get too close. Sam kept looking at the derricks, finally spotted a guard who seemed to be mostly interested in watching the road a couple of miles east of him. After that I stayed even farther away.
They didn't have much of a camp. There were two sheds and the larger enclosed corrugated-metal building with windows they'd all gone in, plus three abandoned derrick towers. The dirt road leading to the place was graded wide and flat, straight as an arrow like all roads out here. There wasn't any point in making curves in them, you didn't have anything to go around, a road engineer's paradise. With nothing to watch it was as silly a way to waste half an hour as I've ever spent, and finally I cut it off, heading for the landing field before we really did get low on fuel.
It wasn't much of a field. Somebody had graded out a straight patch of desert, stuck up a worn old windsock, there was a ranch house with the roof caved in, and a couple of miles off in another direction was a colony of big house trailers, presumably for oil drillers who didn't like the delights of Taft or McKittrick. The panel truck, a car, and a big camper were parked at the end of the runway, our welcoming committee.
Whoever had laid out the field knew the prevailing winds. The runway, if the dirt patch without tumble-weeds on it could be called one, faced directly into what wind there was. It seemed to be long enough, and I've landed Schweizer sailplanes crosswinds on the sandbars along the Columbia River banks, so I couldn't really complain. Our bird weighed a lot more and wasn't as responsive, but I didn't think I'd have much trouble.
I took a long glide in across the highway, dropped quickly after we crossed the transmission lines somebody'd put in the approach path, and skimmed her along the runway until I thought I was a couple of feet over it. When everything felt right I pulled on
the spoiler lever. Unfortunately the control was on my left and so was the throttle. I didn't have enough hands to give her more juice and compensate for the loss of lift, and we were about four feet off the ground instead of the foot or so I'd thought. We dropped like a rock, bounced off, hit again, yawing hard while I fought with that big barndoor rudder, overcompensated, and turned her sharp the other way.
"Hold on!" I shouted. I was still fighting with her, and somehow kept her upright although I wouldn't want to say how. We fishtailed down the runway, losing speed, with me never quite getting back in control until we finally swung all the way around, a complete horizontal ground loop.
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