A Different War

by Craig Thomas

  "Can we fly all the way up to Oregon from here without another refuelling?"

  "Where in Oregon, sir?"

  "Redmond."

  "Sure."

  "So, he won't have to refuel, either." His thick fingers made leaping, attacking movements on the map.

  "How much longer before we can take off?"

  "You want a change of flight plan maybe thirty minutes."

  "Cut that time in half."

  "Is he headed for Oregon?" Chris asked with due deference.

  "Kennedy will confirm that in a couple of minutes. If he is, then that's where we need to be."

  "Why Oregon?" Fraser asked.

  "How should I know the guy's running scared."

  "I don't think so, Mac. And neither do you."

  Mclntyre shrugged. Looking up at the pilot, he said: "Get that new flight plan logged. I'll confirm when I hear from Phoenix." He grinned. The schmuck is running and we're right behind him. He's an hour ahead can we make that up?"

  "We won't drop behind him. Depends what he's flying," the pilot answered from the doorway of the flight deck.

  "Vance's personal jet."

  "A Vance Executive is slower than this baby. We can maybe cut thirty minutes off his lead—"

  "OK, let's get out of here as fast as we can."

  As Chris moved away, Fraser whispered urgently:

  Think, Mac for God's sake, think. Why is Gant so interested in Oregon?

  Is Strickland in Oregon?"

  "I don't know, Fraser but Gant's on his way there, and that's who I want!"

  "Sure," Gant murmured into the receiver.

  "No, you did right to protect yourself. It's OK, I understand." I counted on it, he added to himself.

  Two hours into the flight, she had called via SELCAL. Like picking up the phone.

  Vance's personal jet had had that facility installed. Satellite phone links to the entire planet. He had wondered whether she would call and now felt a tinge of guilt that he had doubted her. She would have had to inform the FBI, and he had known they would check his flight plan it couldn't have been kept secret.

  Thanks," she murmured, as intimately as if she had been seated in the co-pilot's chair.

  "What will you do?" There was an urgent, demanding interest in her voice.

  "You don't need to know, Barbara."

  "I have to go it's difficult."

  "OK."

  "Good luck."

  "Yes."

  He closed the channel, recognising as he did so the strange intimacy of their conversation.

  Thirty thousand feet below the aircraft, northern California was beginning to lurch mountainously upwards. The peaks of the Sierra Nevada were to starboard, the Pacific too distant to port to recognise other than as an emptiness as large as the sky.

  What will you do?

  The question had plagued him for more than an hour after the draining tension of the violent take-off from Vance Aircraft. For a long time he hadn't been able to concentrate, had been incapable of making any decisions. He had turned, whole minutes after he should, on to his northern heading, passing west of Phoenix… crossing the Grand Canyon, lifting over the Sierra Nevada before the solution had come to him.

  He couldn't land at Redmond, unless he wanted the FBI to arrest him moments after touchdown. If he declared a fake Mayday and diverted, he would reveal his eventual destination as surely as if he phoned Mclntyre to tell him. He needed somewhere to land and hide the airplane… somewhere secret.

  Somewhere within driving distance of Three Sisters and Strickland.

  Mclntyre was at Albuquerque had probably taken off by now, and was maybe only an hour or so behind him. Mclntyre could land at Redmond, just fifty road minutes from Squaw Camp and Strickland… The certainty that they would be there ahead of him narrowed the perspective of choice until it was a tunnel with no light at the end of it.

  Los Angeles had been a sprawl to starboard, then the Sierra Nevada and the Coastal Range had formed the high perimeters of his flight path.

  Somewhere amid the northern straggle of LA had been Burbank, masked in a morning haze. It had been ten minutes of flying time before the hazy recollection of the Skunk Works and the secret planes he had helped test for Lockheed reminded him. The flight path he was following he had flown before, tagging on behind commercial flights or flying above and below the commercial airways in ugly black Stealth airplanes, testing their radar invisibility. North from Los Angeles towards San Francisco and Oakland, then across northern California and southern Oregon to… Warner Lakes AFB. Long closed and abandoned. One of the airforce's secret facilities, linked to test flights of machines manufactured in the Skunk Works.

  He hadn't needed the map. The topography and the distances had unrolled in his head like something on a Stealth fighter's navigational screens. It was tucked into the south-east corner of the state, amid salt lakes. It was nowhere. He had grinned, phrasing it like that.

  Some comic based there had once erected a crude road sign beside the one that declared the identity of the airforce base Fort Nowhere.

  It would take him hours by road from Warner Lakes after he had found a vehicle to hire or steal. But the Exec would be hidden and he would be lost. It was the only option even though it meant he wouldn't reach Strickland until late afternoon, and Mclntyre would be waiting for him.

  It was too late now. He had already initiated the deception. On leaving LA Centre's control boundary and before he contacted Oakland Centre, he had faked poor radio transmission. When he tried to contact Oakland, the problem appeared to have worsened.

  All he was doing was switching rapidly between the two radios, Box One and Box Two. It reduced his transmissions to interrupted phrases, broken contact. For the ground centres, it would appear that he had a real problem… one serious enough to have him diverted off the airways, drop his altitude, head for wherever they suggested he land.

  He had entered the Warner Lakes coordinates into the inertial navigation system of the Vance Exec. He opened the channel.

  "Oakland Centre Victor Bravo. Are you receiving me any clearer?" he enquired, flicking the transfer switch from one radio to the other.

  He had to disappear-The Learjet lifted into the New Mexico morning sky, swinging out over the suddenly small city below, then across the narrow blue strip of the Rio Grande. Mclntyre's fingers, like those of a miser counting coins, pudged their measured way across the map, tracing their flight path. Fraser glanced at his watch. Five past nine.

  Flying time to Redmond, two hours fifty minutes.

  Fraser was careful to conceal the smile that so insistently folded the corners of his mouth. The bribes had worked even more easily than he had promised Winterborne they would.

  A golden hello, the title of vice-president in charge of company security, the health care and pension schemes, the promises of frequent bonuses… He had agreed to everything, and had managed a stubborn, almost pained submission on his face when he'd said: OK, forty thousand down immediately… Fraser had realised, even as Mclntyre had been speaking to Gant's ex-wife, that the man knew why Gant was heading for Oregon and who he expected to find there.

  He had asked for the alias, the location, and Mclntyre had immediately held them to his chest like high cards. They had negotiated in whispers for ten minutes. The price was a great deal below what Fraser had been prepared to pay.

  Mclntyre had visited Strickland in Oregon once, years before, while he was still his CIA Case Officer. Strickland's hideout, not unlike the farmhouse in the Dordogne, was a lodge on a hillside. The place overlooked a lake Banner Lake, Mclntyre had pretended to remember with great difficulty. He eventually recalled Strickland's alias was Peter Ford.

  Firm up the offer, make it real, Mclntyre had said. Fraser had done so. End of story. They'd get Gant and Strickland together, two birds with one stone. The price made it an excellent bargain.

  Mclntyre looked up at him and Fraser adopted a warm smile.

  The Santa Fe National For
est was below them, the shining ribbon of the river gleaming amid the darkness of trees.

  Strickland and Gant… His own bonus, from a grateful Winterborne, would also be substantial. More than the forty thousand Mclntyre wanted up front, a lot more… From Warner Lakes AFB, where he had left the Exec abandoned in the shadow of a dilapidated hangar block, it had taken him two hours of walking in the morning heat to reach the few scattered dwellings of Plush, under Hart Mountain's western escarpment.

  There had been no vehicle for hire, but a young mother, with two bored and restless children in the rear of her people carrier, had offered him a ride into Lakeview. She had spoken of it as some kind of metropolis. Gant knew it slightly from his air force days when he had been flying in and out of Warner Lakes.

  It was a government agency town of maybe two and a half thousand people, dusty and bleached despite the Federal money. The Forest Service, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management all had regional headquarters in Lakeview. The town had a movie-house and no cable TV. It was the place he was born at least, the mirror-image of Clark-ville, Iowa; but he no longer hated such places.

  The young woman her name was Betty and she had been unfailingly cheerful in the face of his own taciturnity dropped him in the town and headed with an aura of delighted anticipation, towards the market. He had thanked her, and hefted Alan Vance's rifle in its hunting case on to his shoulder and pulled his rucksack from the rear of the vehicle.

  As he did so, one of the children, the boy, had stuck out his tongue at him.

  Another hour had gotten him a four-wheel drive, a sheaf of maps, supplies and a rancher's soft hat against the day's glare and heat. He left Lakeview, diminishing in the driving mirror as if it was slowly drowning in the pale, oceanic air, and headed north on US 395, towards Riley and the junction with US 20, which would take him north-west to Bend and Three Sisters. As the town disappeared behind him, it was eleven in the morning. He had almost two hundred and fifty miles between himself and Strickland. Mclntyre would be no more than an hour away from his quarry.

  He accelerated, making the rear-view mirror blind with dust, even though there was no possibility he could reach Strickland before Mclntyre.

  It was difficult, almost as if he had regressed to early childhood, to make meaning from the hands of the big, white-faced clock high on the wall of the hospital corridor. Nine-fifteen…? Yes, a quarter past nine on the evening following the night Campbell had been killed in a car accident at the junction of the Avenue de la Reine and the Rue Marie-Christine. The night Marian had almost been killed Aubrey paused in his futile meandering beside the immobile, carved figure of Giles Pyott. His liver-spotted hand ceased its movement towards his friend's slumped shoulder, then regained the comfort of its companion. His hands clasped each other behind his back, as if he were posed to inspect the hospital. Two passing nuns, one carrying a bedpan under a white cloth as carefully as a relic, moved away down the corridor as if mounted on castors, their habits rustling, the faint click of rosary beads excited by their movement.

  That Marian was alive, even though sedated, seemed to mean little to either of them. Their mutual terrors for her had exhausted both old men, from the first telephone calls to the taxis, Heathrow, the Belgian taxis, the warmth of the hospital. They had passed most of the day there, without eating, drinking coffee only occasionally, without much conversation. The X-rays and the soothing, accented English of the doctor had fallen heavy as blows, but on numbed senses.

  A policeman a senior officer very evidently aware of their mutual, past authority had described what his people understood of the accident. Of which there was no doubt, of course… Marian had not been wearing her seatbelt as the truck had ploughed into the driver's side of the BMW into Campbell, buckling him even more easily than the door pillar, shattering him more easily than the side windows. At the moment of impact, Marian had been attempting to open her door and get out of the car. A white van had torn aside the door like a flimsy curtain and flung Marian over its bonnet, bull-like, towards the pavement… And shift-workers on their way home had crowded round her still form in a panicked, shocked instant — and had saved her life, Aubrey had no doubt whatever.

  Neither of the drivers involved had fled the scene. With supreme confidence and great innocence, their stunned recollections agreed with one another. Campbell had jumped the lights, making the collision unavoidable. The pedestrians had been unaware until the noise and the moment of impact, they could not say, m'sieur it is true the lights had only just changed, and people do not notice until their attention is attracted… you understand?

  Aubrey had given up at that point; quietened an enraged Giles and allowed the senior policeman to go his way. Four witnesses, the two drivers and two people in a car, had sworn it was nothing but a tragic accident, and they had not been contradicted. It would remain an accident. A young man from the British embassy had appeared some time in the early afternoon, but the enquiry he bore was unsolicitous and prompted by Central Office and the Party Chairman.

  Would Marian have recovered sufficiently to vote in the House next week under a three-line Whip? Giles dismissal of the man would have abashed any of his old RSMs. After which outburst, his friend had sunk into a lethargy that would have suggested the numbness of bereavement to anyone passing him in the corridor.

  Aubrey realised how much Marian was loved. Her accident, however traumatic for himself, had been as appalling as her death to Giles.

  Aubrey cleared his throat softly. His mouth was dry. A small, pert Madonna observed him from a wall-niche. She might have aided Giles, had Marian died Giles' faith was cloudy but persistent but not himself.

  He heard a door open, but it was not Marian's room. His chest seemed to slump lethargically once more.

  Giles had not stirred.

  Marian had sustained a broken arm, a broken pelvis and leg. A wound in her side had bled copiously, she had lost a great deal of blood before it was staunched in the ambulance. Three cracked ribs, bruising to most of her body, severe trauma.

  Scalp wounds, other serious abrasions. A brain scan had been carried out.

  Thankfully, there seemed nothing other than the concussion. Aubrey suppressed a shudder… a damned close-run thing. Too close-The tired anger was dismissed by the door of Marian's room opening. Giles at once looked up as the diminutive nun who was the hospital's chief surgeon came towards them, her habit rustling like a drift of leaves.

  Giles stood up stiffly, towering over the doctor's slightness. His face remained ashen. The proud, bluff widower did not live his life through his child; she was, however, as much his life as she was her own.

  "You will try, as her father and her friend not to disturb my patient."

  It was not a question. Giles still appeared as if he were about to be asked to accompany the sister to the hospital mortuary.

  "You may stay with her for five' something in his expression touched her 'no more than ten minutes. I insist. She must not be agitated—"

  Giles' voice broke through his numbness like a thaw.

  "She she will be alright, now? You have no reason to change your earlier assessment?"

  The doctor shook her head. A small, serious face framed by her wimple.

  "No. Her recovery will take a great deal of time. She must not be pressured into denying the seriousness of her accident." The young man from the embassy had sought reassurance that Marian's was a very temporary indisposition. The surgeon had banished his insouciance as witheringly as if by excommunication.

  "We understand, Doctor," Aubrey murmured, smiling.

  "May we—?" She nodded.

  He took Giles' elbow and steered him towards the door, as if through a tight crowd of people. The doctor accompanied them, then allowed them to falter across the threshold.

  Her head was bandaged. Her face was the colour of putty in places, raw liver in others Her arm was in plaster, a tent of raised bedclothes was over her lower body. Her eyes were preter-naturally brig
ht.

  Aubrey's smile faltered like an old bulb, then flickered on once more.

  He gently thrust Giles towards the bed, on her free hand's side. It was lightly bandaged, badly scuffed like a worn shoe.

  "Daddy—" she muttered thickly, as if her tongue had swollen.

  "Oh, Tig-r Aubrey moved to the slatted blinds across the single window of the small, bright, warm room. The noise of tears did not distress him. It was politeness that moved him, the priorities of intimacy between father and daughter.

  In a few moments, sniffing loudly, she said:

  "Hello, Kenneth. Brought any grapes?"

  He turned, chuckling, his eyes pricking. He shook his head. The shops were closed."

  She winced as she blew out her cheeks in exaggerated, comic relief.

  Giles blew his nose unselfconsciously loud. His eyes were damp and fierce, his mouth and jaw quivering with reaction.

  "Are you alright, dear?" he asked.

  "Hurts like hell everywhere," she replied. Her eyes glazed, perhaps remembering Campbell.

  "God…" she breathed.

  Giles' old hand lay on hers, still twice its size, even though Marion's was padded with gauze. It was the light, careful grip of a boy who had caught a butterfly.

  "He—" she began, then: Tape recorder… You'll need that, Kenneth—"

  She was tiring already, and he saw Giles resented his presence. He came between Giles' relief and a desired innocence. Accident without design. It would remove her from further danger.

  Aubrey took from his pocket the list of Marian's personal effects that had been given him by the senior police officer. A second list described the contents of the car, Campbell's possessions. He scanned them, sensing his own lack of breathing, his utter stillness in the warm room. Eventually he nodded, then crossed towards the utilitarian cabinet in a corner of the room.

  "Ben' Marian swallowed painfully 'confessed. The fraud — David's part in it."

  Almost at once, she was half-asleep.

  Aubrey rummaged in the black plastic bag in which Marian's possessions had been returned to her. Pulled out the tiny tape recorder and turned to Giles in triumph.