by Dean Ing
The turbulence in his cloud, Corbett knew, could grow from gentle to lethal at any time. Merely to kiss its edges was inviting catastrophe, but he could see no better choice. He steered north by compass for what seemed an age, breaking out of the cloud again and throttling up to rise near its bulbous tops.
Presently, though he did not manage to intercept the military frequency, Corbett heard the disgust of the Cessna pilot. "It was a sailplane, Thirty-one. He's so slow he's still on final approach. I tell you flat out, that looks different from the airplane I was followin'."
Black Stealth One, meanwhile, slid into the open toward another cloud to the east. Because a cloud constantly changes shape, Corbett could see through occasional rifts that the Cessna was now bird-dogging another cloud somewhat above and westward a few miles, sniffing around the wispy perimeter, its pilot too cagy to risk plunging into that ugly gray mass.
Presently the girl looked up. "I can't concentrate. It feels like we're bouncing around."
"We are," Corbett nodded, and tapped his right ear, grinning. "The highway cop lost track of which cloud we ducked into. Maybe because prevailing winds are taking the clouds northeast, or maybe because their shapes have changed so much. Damn, I wish I could find the frequency those blue-suiters are using."
"Talk sense, Corbett."
"Air Force jocks, a pair of General Dynamics F-16's—there," he pointed suddenly toward the heavens to his right. "Look ahead of that faint contrail for the silver speck." But almost as soon as she looked up, the nearby edges of cloud cover sealed off the view. "Those guys are practically falling out of the sky, Petra; they can't fly as slow as the Cessna so they're circling the cloud at a steep angle. Pull out five thousand feet off the deck, zoom up to twenty-five thou or so, around and around the wrong cloud, waiting for us to pop out. I don't think the bird dog has much credibility left," he chuckled.
Petra merely "hmphed" and studied the video monitor again. Corbett did not add that, to use his best cloud cover, he was moving east of his course. At this rate he'd be over the Atlantic when his fuel ran out, but Corbett did not abandon his tactic until the twin-jet Thunderbolt sizzled across the sky some distance ahead, into the region circled by interceptors. Meant for close support of troops on a battlefield, the craft had the lines of an airborne tow truck. Its pilot gave no sign he had seen them.
As it happened, Petra was looking up at the time. "Boy, now that's ugly," she said.
"Good God," Corbett muttered. "This place is going to be wall-to-wall airplanes." There was nothing to be gained by telling the girl that an A-10, a Fairchild Thunderbolt, was built around a rapid-fire cannon that could obliterate a tank. Oh yes, it's an ugly bastard. And it can loiter a lot slower than a Mach two interceptor.
Black Stealth One surged on toward a series of puffy cloudlets that seemed deceptively near. Corbett chafed at his slow pace, expecting to be jumped at any moment, sliding down an imaginary line that might keep him hidden a few moments longer. He dared not approach the ground too closely because from miles above, a young pilot's sharp eye could spot a hedge-hopping aircraft more easily than the same aircraft flying somewhat higher.
"Corbett"—the girl sighed—"I just can't break in any further than the second menu in this thing. Are you sure there's a 'paint' program in here?"
He could not say, "Speedy swore that it was there," nor any similar assurance, else she might recall it later; and Medina would suffer for it. "I know it's what this airchine is all about. It had better be in there," he grumbled.
"All I've found is the main menu, and the secondary."
"Secondary?" He was damned if he'd admit, again, just how little he knew about computers. Some fine airplanes had been designed with slide rules, and Kyle Corbett had rarely used anything more sophisticated than a hand calculator. "Show me," he demanded.
"Here it is." Her fingers flew over the keys, and the screen passed from the main menu after she keyed "Subrout."
He watched the saffron text scroll down the screen, thinking idiotically that if he had a quirt he could lean out and whip the damned airplane a little faster. "'Protect Xmit,' no; 'Flir,' no; 'Fueldump,' 'Xsec,' 'Pixel.' whatever that is; 'Submun'—"
"What's a flir?"
Pronouncing it correctly as she had, to rhyme with "cheer," made him smile. He enunciated each letter for her. "Forward-looking infrared," he explained. "Good to have it but that's not what we're looking for. Or are we?" He'd used FLIR in its primitive days and, if he knew Ben Ullmer, this version would be state-of-the-art stuff. Maybe good enough to spot a distant aircraft before it could spot the hellbug. "Try it, Petra."
She did, watching the golden scroll, lifting her brows in unspoken question.
He read the basic instructions, ignoring the thin scrawl of a fresh contrail that arrowed far above them, concentrating on the illustration which depicted the screen and keyboard. Evidently, once he pressed the "execute" key, the tiny keyboard stick could be twisted to adjust the FLIR gain. By moving the stick he could scan in all directions, including rearward.
Corbett hit the key. "Now you're talkin'," he breathed. The image had false color, painting a pink tinge to the image of the cloud ahead where it reflected bright sunlight. He twisted the stick; the cloud grew red, even better defined than with the naked eye. He diminished the gain and saw the cloud fade to a faint pink. A hard pinpoint of scarlet inched slowly across the bottom of the screen.
Petra pointed at the scarlet dot. "What's moving?"
"It's not, we are. Somebody burning trash, I guess; see the smoke?"
He reduced the hellbug's power as they neared their target, a somewhat smaller cloud with fuzzily defined edges. Skirting the thing, Corbett moved the tiny stick for a rearview, which caused a dizzying shift on the screen. "This is more like it," he said. A full half-dozen crimson dots moved across the screen, growing larger and smaller, winking off and on, in a mesmerizing dance. "Those guys are thirty miles away," he said. "Infrared won't penetrate clouds much, that's why their emissions keep disappearing in the center of our screen."
Petra's engineering curiosity seemed to be growing stronger than her fears. "Those are jet exhausts, aren't they? I count eight—nine," she said as he aimed their canopy toward another cloud to the northeast. "That patrol guy sure has a swarm of help for somebody who lacks credibility."
"I hope they have a nine-way pileup—ah, no I don't really," he admitted. "I just want to see 'em dwindle to nothing."
"Some of 'em are just a single pixel already," she observed. "Fading to pink."
"Okay," he said, adjusting the screen to show the view ahead, "I'll bite. What's a pixel?"
She stared at him with disbelief that infuriated him because it held amusement. "A pixel," she said, "is the basic dot that makes up everything on a video screen. You really didn't know?"
"Screw you, kid." He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then said with less asperity, "You mean, whatever you see on that screen, words or pictures, it all comes down to a pattern of pixels."
"Sure," she said.
Each staring into the other's face, they said it simultaneously: "PIXEL!"
Corbett tapped gentle fingers against her wrist as she reached for the keyboard. "Not yet, Petra. For all we know, it'll start out by turning us into a goddamn billboard. First let's snug up under that next pile of cumulus and let the IR do its thing."
She smiled and nodded, settling back, the pleasure still evident in her face even though he was not yet certain they had located the paint program. Lordy but that's a great smile, he thought. I wish she wouldn't do it. What kind of man does it take to drag a kid with a smile like that into a sky full of young bucks trying to whack us out of it? He knew what kind of man it took, no matter what the stakes. He could take no comfort in knowing that only the ultimate betrayal could have made him into such a man.
Lurking beneath the flat gray bottom of the cloud, using his waste gates at half throttle, Corbett slowed the hellbug to scarcely over thirty knots. Far to the
south, the screen revealed a dozen tiny reddish dots that waxed and waned like fireflies on some distant planet. From due north, a faint pink dot grew into a tiny, short-tailed comet, but its color did not intensify.
Corbett found it easy to translate the screen's coordinates into the real world; he saw the silvery gleam of the little executive jet when it was still fifteen miles away, banking toward them. Easing the throttle forward, he adjusted the waste gates and let the hellbug levitate straight up until it penetrated a few yards into the murk of the cloud. Hovering in the gloom, with virtually no forward speed, Corbett could still feel soft bumps and hear subtle creaks in the structure of Black Stealth One.
"Thanks to my computer expert," he said, "I knew this guy was heading our way before I could see him. You've got to understand, I'm a few years behind the times. Not by choice."
She shrugged and said nothing, watching the screen. Because of the cloud's absorption of infrared light, the screen was now featureless. Then a keening whistle dopplered up, became lost in a white-noise roar, and faded into the distance. "I guess the good guys don't like to go through clouds," Petra said wryly.
"Good practice to avoid 'em," Corbett replied, letting the hellbug drop slowly out of the cloud, using his waste gates to pivot the entire ship. "Even for a Citation."
"Doesn't sound macho enough to be military," she said.
"Nope, an executive jet," he said, adjusting the screen to locate the aircraft again. He saw it then, racing away to the south, and noted the distinctive high horizontal tail. "Only it's not a Citation, it's a Learjet."
"Okay to try the pixel program?"
He could have kissed her for that. In spite of everything she seemed anxious only to solve a high-tech riddle, even though the solution would shorten the odds against her captor. "Have at it. Just don't let me catch you printing your name across the wings."
"Could it really do that?" She was already keying into the secondary menu.
"I don't know. I'm the guy who didn't know what a pixel was, remember?"
She giggled, perhaps at the self-disgust in his tone, and then she found the paint program. Corbett thought it fitting that the program would be camouflaged under a word he could not recognize without the help of a college girl.
And every passing minute took them farther to the south, but used up more precious fuel. Corbett found enough thermals to stretch his time aloft, but that fuel gage inexorably counted down the pounds of fuel left in his single tank. By the time the girl executed their first chameleon attempt with the pixel skin, less than four gallons of fuel remained in the tank of Black Stealth One.
EIGHTEEN
"If you're gonna keep moving around," said Ullmer, "better put on your helmet. Could get bumpy up ahead."
Dar had been peering from portholes of the Learjet's cabin, an upholstered tube scarcely wider than a man's reach, shifting sides every time his anxiety demanded it. The Lear banked gracefully, giving wide berth to a lump of cumulus, and turned west at over five hundred miles an hour. Dar squinted at the brilliant multiple halo surrounding the cloud, let his gaze roam ahead toward the region where their first definite sighting had been reported. For an instant, something in the north face of the nearby cloud brushed the edge of his vision, a glimpse so fleeting that it did not register as anything more than a faint dark line. To Dar Weston, it registered as a tiny portion of the horizon seen through cloud. It was the wing-tip of Black Stealth One, protruding from cloud-wisp forty miles from its reported position. "Pretty smooth so far," Dar said, but buckled himself into the seat across from Ullmer.
"Some cloud cover building to the south." Ullmer nodded out his porthole. "Not much for us, but it might be rough on the hellbug." He had patched in his headset to the NSA console that took up most of the partition separating the cabin from the Lear's pilot. Long ago, Ben Ullmer had found that he could listen to three designers argue simultaneously. It was even easier to monitor three channels, a feat he found possible on the NSA console. Its video display, similar to Corbett's, began to show moving pink pixels that brightened as he watched. The exhaust of Black Stealth One had not registered because Ben himself had supervised the routing of its exhaust for maximum cooling inside the central duct.
Dar, plugging his headset in, heard his own pilot say, "Blue leader, Lear three-two-eight entering your airspace, speed five-zero-zero knots at one-zero thousand five hundred, bearing two-seven-five magnetic, with Wasp and Hornet, over."
With frequent scrambled voice communication to Elmira, Dar had known for two hours that Terry Unruh had coded him as "Hornet," Ullmer as "Wasp." Mindful that the pilot of Black Stealth One might be monitoring any available frequency, Unruh had also passed certain instructions to military air commands by land line—a channel not available to the hellbug. The men combing the enormous volume of space near Athens, Georgia, knew far more than they were supposed to say on any radio channel. They knew, for example, that they could engage that tailless wraith only as directed by Hornet or Wasp.
A young, hard voice responded, "Roger, Lear three-two-eight, I have you on scope but no bandit to report on radar, IR, or visual. That initial sighting may have been in error unless bandit can hover in a cloud indefinitely."
"Wasp here, Blue leader," Ullmer cut in. "That's a possible affirmative depending on how good he is, over."
"You've got us curious to see him, Wasp. Want someone to try flushing him out? We have an A-ten on the deck, and Navy at three-zero thousand. A pair of Broncos stationed at five thousand, they claim they can loiter in pea soup."
"Don't do that," Dar exclaimed, forgetting what radio protocols he knew. Ullmer's glance was surprised but not hostile. Flushing slightly, Dar went on, "Uh, Hornet here, Blue leader. Be advised the pilot is not alone, over." You could kill my daughter, you callous idiot, he raged inwardly.
"Wilco, Hornet," said the F-16 pilot, in the bored, "no-sweat" tones cultivated by fighter pilots. "We can widen our pattern. I've got four-zero minutes fuel left. Red flight is on alert and can take up our station, over."
Ullmer saw Dar's hopeful nod. F-16's were less than ideal for this work, and Ben had offered little hope that they would succeed. Still, "Wasp to Blue leader," he said. "Understand your offer. If the Broncos hold the tight pattern, we'll circle higher while you widen your pattern. We'd appreciate your replacements."
"Wilco, Wasp. Blue leader out."
Dar leaned back, pinching the bridge of his nose as if to squash the pain building between his eyes. A hell of a time for eye strain when I'm so near recovering my only child, he thought. Dar was not what others would call a believer in fate, but as he pressed his face to the porthole again he wondered if this might be some kind of retribution for choosing to place his country ahead of his family.
He had recognized the choice in 'fifty-three, while engaged to the willowy, elegant Helen Long-worth. Her father, CIA deputy Creighton Long-worth, had made his approval plain and the match had seemed natural, even inevitable. The whole arrangement had toppled when Helen made her demand. She had grown up without her absentee father, she said, and did not intend to marry a man who spent years at overseas posts where wives were not permitted.
Helen had assumed that her father could simply adjust Dar's work, as a marketing executive might adjust the travels of a salesman. She met their explanations head-on, and eventually returned Dar's ring. Creighton Longworth observed to Dar that every parent is a Frankenstein who creates his own monsters, and continued to champion Dar in the Company. It took Dar over a year to realize that the failure had been his own: he would never consider marrying unless the woman needed him. Yet she might not see him for years at a stretch. Helen had been wise.
After that, Dar settled for alliances with women who needed him for the short term, and honorably admitted to each that he would never marry. He made certain that Creighton Longworth knew their names. He took pains to avoid any entanglement that might jeopardize his work. Until Dani Klein.
Stationed at Langley after his Nea
r East posting, Dar made long trips to the Philippines but met Dani at a Washington soiree during a three-month stateside respite in 1964. Small and blond, Dani Klein had been born to German Jewish refugees in wartime Baltimore. The girl had gone to Europe when her parents repatriated but remained an American citizen, returning to America at age twenty-four, fluent in four languages and lively as a sparrow. A blue-eyed, freckled blonde, Dani Klein shattered Dar's stereotype of the German Jew.
He was surprised to find she thought him endearingly awkward. She was amazed to learn he thought her sexy. Perhaps, he said, it was that hint of an exotic accent in her voice. Old Longworth saw no reason why Dar should avoid a young State Department translator, leaving her Jewish background undiscussed in the Old Boy network because, of course, Dar Weston never intended to marry.
In 1966, while sharing a weekend suite at a Vermont country inn with Dani, Dar told her he would soon be leaving again. He said nothing about the Philippines or spy aircraft; only that he understood why she could not wait for him.
Dani, sitting nude and cross-legged in artless glory on sheets damp from their lovemaking, stopped him with a forefinger over his lips. "You understand nothing, my love. Why should I not wait, so long as you will come back?"
"Time moves slowly when you're young," he said. "I could be gone six months, maybe more. It's not fair to ask that."
"Find me a fair world; I will emigrate," she replied, her gray eyes serious. "In the meantime, like you, I have my work. Even if you left me, I would have that."
He drew her into his arms, kissing her closed eyes, feeling her small perfect breasts against his body, and swore that he would never leave her by choice. They made love more frequently and more tenderly that weekend than ever before, or ever after.