The Ransom of Black Stealth One

by Dean Ing

  To his immense surprise, Dar was brought back from the Philippines only three months later. Dani welcomed him with solemn joy and with a few more pounds that, he said, bordered on the voluptuous. On their second night together, she made one confession while hiding another.

  Dani said she had originally returned to America with a secret agenda, a promise she had made to an Israeli friend after protracted talks and one very strange interview. Other Israelis had contacted her on occasion, needing small favors, nothing that even faintly smacked of espionage; she had told them she would never do that, but still-In short, Dar Weston's lover was an agent in place, a mole for the Mossad, very likely one who would never be used in any important way. Dar, quietly furious, commanded her never to speak of it again. It was the one facet of her that he would not, could not share. "You've broken their most basic rule, Dani," he said in tones that must have frightened her. "You've told someone. Only you haven't, because I didn't hear it. If you love me, I must never hear it again. Good Christ, I'm attached to the State Department myself! What if they decided to give me a polygraph?" Angry as he was, he did not call it a "flutter." That was spook jargon, and Dani did not know his true employment.

  She promised, crossing her heart, drawing a scarlet fingernail across breasts that had grown larger in the three months of his absence, and delighting in them, he did not suspect. Perhaps, he realized later, she told him one secret to lessen the internal pressures of the greater secret she carried inside her.

  His next mission involved SR-71 overflights based in Japan. The peripheral work demanded savagely long hours and took longer than it might because, so far away from Dani, Dar himself did not handle it well. Dani's letters were full of her love and joy but also, increasingly, with a shadow of something opaque which he could not identify. Her final letter to Japan, after six months, mentioned a "necessary" vacation in Canada. Dar continued to write as always, and finally returned in the summer of 1967. Dani had disappeared.

  Her last letter, posted to him through State cutouts, had been held in accord with the envelope's instruction. He still had it, could recite it verbatim.

  My love:

  You have made your position clear on marriage. Please believe that I do not complain. My choices, all of them, were and are my responsibility. Yet I am not so strong as I thought, and for reasons sufficient for me I can no longer live for you alone in this way.

  I am sure that you could find me eventually, but think hard. I beg you, do not seek me out unless you are ready for the dread rigors of the family man.

  I kiss your eyes. Dani.

  Dar spent one sleepless night before making the only decision he could live with, and immediately found an elation he had never known before. He called in some IOUs for aid in Canadian records and took emergency leave. It no longer mattered what cool disdain his family might show toward a Jewess. He could indeed balance a career and a marriage, if that marriage was with Dani.

  He traced her through her work permit and found the address in Montreal, a three-story brick apartment house. The owner, a hefty middle-aged widow with the sad eyes of a beagle, had been an old friend of the Kleins in Germany.

  She recognized Dar's name, but said that Fraulein Klein no longer lived there. She sat him down in a parlor full of knickknacks and shuffled away to make tea, which she served in ornate Austrian china.

  Dar realized immediately that the woman was testing him as she sipped and probed in her solid, direct hausfrau's way. "I think I can set you at ease about my intentions," he smiled. "I intend to marry Dani, if she'll still have me." And then he showed her the letter.

  The woman's reaction was unexpected. As silent tears began to slide down her cheeks, she said haltingly, "I show you this not because I choose. Because she chose. I hope you will walk away and leave me with—what I have of her. But kommensie," she said, and led him to a small room.

  It was a pleasant room, its windows overlooking a tiny formal garden. He recognized a scarf of Dani's, hanging from a cotton string, its gay paisley print an ever-changing mobile over the crib. In the crib, an infant of perhaps three months slept.

  "This is all we will have of Dani," said the woman, barely above a whisper. "She survived the birth only three days."

  When he could think coherently again, Dar asked for details and got them with cheap brandy in that oppressive little parlor. The one detail of which he was certain was that he intended to keep his tiny daughter, now that he had found her. Had he not chosen to seek Dani, to marry her after all his simpleminded philosophizing, he would never have known why she had been so plump in their last times together. Nor why she had warned him that his choice involved "... the dread rigors of a family man."

  Had Dani suspected that she might die in childbirth? He would never know. He knew only that she had chosen to bear his child, and to raise it alone if necessary. And when the tiny child awoke, crying for her bottle, it was Dar who fed her, the good hausfrau seemingly resigned to her loss already.

  Dar took no chances on that. He called in one more favor and boarded a Company proprietary turboprop, flying straight to New Haven with Dani's daughter in his arms. Phil and Andrea Leigh met him at the airport, and Dar talked all the way to Old Lyme.

  Andrea, for once, remained speechless for an hour. She had chosen to remain childless for years and then, ironically, found that she was barren. To Phil's suggestion that they adopt a child, Andrea had always refused. She would raise a Weston and a Leigh, or she would remain childless. Now, with an abruptness that staggered her, Andrea faced a possibility she had never imagined. Dar Weston was prepared to raise the girl himself, but there was an alternative, one that would give Dani's child both a mother and a father who was no absentee.

  To her credit, Andrea Weston Leigh was indecisive on only one point: should she obtain adoption papers, or spend a year in Vermont? Phil, with a deep understanding of social nuance among Connecticut families, made that decision, determined to raise the girl as his own.

  They made only one mistake. While Andrea was dropping subtle hints about pregnancy in Old Lyme, Dar spent two weeks near Bennington, Vermont, with the tiny girl, whom Andrea had named "Petra." In that time, Dar learned how to rinse a diaper in a commode and how to test the temperature of a bottle of formula. And he learned that a man's deepest, most passionate tenderness for a woman cannot plumb the depths of his commitment as profoundly as the heartbeat of his child in his arms. By the time Andrea arrived in Vermont, Dar knew that he must somehow overcome his emotional links, become an uncle and not a father. He had sworn it, and he would do it.

  For twenty-two years he thought that he had succeeded.

  As Dar gazed blindly out of the Lear's porthole, he was roused from his reverie by Ben Ullmer, who was speaking into his headset. "Go ahead, Bumblebee, Hornet's on the circuit."

  Terry Unruh, in Elmira, sounded upbeat and crisp. "Forensics crew at Sugar Grove has identified your bandit, Hornet. Seems that high-octane fuel stripped away a little of the cement on his fingers. They got two partials and a thumb, no question about it."

  "Don't make me wait," Dar said ominously.

  "Former Snake Pit designer, reported killed in a boating accident years ago. Ex-Company too, fellow named Kyle Corbett."

  "Sonofa bitch," said Ullmer.

  Dar could only nod, his mouth suddenly dry, his breathing shallow as a wave of heat climbed the back of his neck. How could Corbett still be alive after all the evidence to the contrary? Well, he had obviously survived and if anyone could steal that God-damned airplane, it would be Corbett. It all added up; in the intimacy of their friendship while thousands of miles from home, Dar had told Corbett things he had sworn to withhold. Kyle Corbett knew about Petra, and obviously he knew a great deal about revenge.

  NINETEEN

  "Yeah, that's it," said Corbett, talking the girl through her motions, the graceful swept wings responding to her hand on the copilot's control stick. "She's going to want to bank to the left when I'm hanging out there;
drag and weight both. You've got to keep 'er on an even keel."

  Petra's voice was tight, and held a quaver. "Just don't fall. You know I can't land this thing." She had seemed willing to wrestle that plastic fuel bag from its niche, but as Corbett explained his desperate move her eyes had grown round with fear.

  "We're only doing forty miles an hour, Petra," he grunted, turning around so that his rump nudged the instrument console, loosening his restraint harness as far as it would go. "It ought to be easy," he said, hoping.

  And it had better be damned quick, he reminded himself. Ten pounds of fuel remained in the tank; call it a gallon and a half. They were a mile high over the swampy plains of southeastern Georgia, with twenty pounds of avgas in that bag, stinking up the cockpit with fumes. Who had decided the fuel filler cap should be mounted flush in the hell-bug's skin directly behind the pilot? He couldn't recall. All that mattered now was whether he could fight the airstream, hanging halfway out of his hatch facing aft, and feed that fuel in while trusting his own hostage to keep the aircraft steady. Too many ironies to count. Focus on hooking those straps so they loop around a thigh and an arm, he commanded himself. And don't think about what happens if you get hung up outside and she has to ride the hellbug down with a dead engine. Time to think about that when it happens. Meanwhile, see that it doesn't.

  Corbett forced himself to grin and wink as he opened his hatch. The girl reacted silently, as if he had just made a repulsive joke, then stared ahead. Good. Now if he could just force the hatch halfway up with his right arm and shoulder—to reach out and find—that—big—filler cap. Got it. Few inches farther back than I thought, almost in the duct. Wind blast isn't so bad but suction toward the duct gets hairy here. Snap the cap's lever and twist. Careful; pull the cap in and drop it in the seat. He had feared that the airstream would siphon the remaining fuel out, so he had throttled back until Black Stealth One was barely controllable by a novice. "So far, so good," he said, his head halfway out, hauling the fuel bag to the lip of the hatch. The girl did not reply.

  Eighteen inches below the hatch lip lay a tiny trapdoor, a spring-loaded fairing. It had been designed as a flush-mounted step, so that a pilot could shove inward with his toes and plant his foot during entry or exit. It remained to be seen whether he could stick his heel into that niche, while facing backward toward the hellbug's great inlet scoop. The inward curve of the skin made it fiendishly tough for a man with short, thick legs.

  Facing backward, sliding his right leg over the hatch sill, Corbett found that he could not reach that foothold unless he slipped more of his other leg free of the harness; and this was not a good time for a man without a parachute to look down. Inching out, he felt his heel connect with something that yielded. He began to push down with that heel, trying to straighten his leg. Slowly, using all his strength, he began to rise, the hatch heavy across his right shoulder because of the wind load.

  Corbett's sense of balance was finely honed, and he knew that the hellbug was starting a shallow bank, just as he'd said it must. He was already fumbling the fuel bag into his arms when the girl made her correction, but she made it too fast.

  The drooping left wing came up swiftly, inertia forcing his face against the fuel bag, and his heel slipped from its purchase. Instantly Corbett was hanging halfway out, his right-hand trouser leg flapping as the hellbug tried to inhale him, the harness biting into the calf muscle of his left leg, the stench of avgas thick in his lungs. Corbett could hear tiny moans of anguish from the girl, almost the same sounds some women made during sexual climax. His left arm and leg strained convulsively, dragging his gonads across the sill so hard it took his breath away.

  Fighting a wave of nausea from the pain, he turned his head and saw her, glancing quickly from him to the instruments and back to him, and he tried to make it seem less than the near thing it had been. "Nice try," he gasped.

  "Don't say that, oh God, I'm trying," she moaned.

  "Shut up. Steady as she goes," he grated, and found the step with his heel again. Still weak with the ache that radiated from between his legs, he tried three times before he could straighten his trembling right leg. He could feel the craft trying to bank, saw control surfaces move as the girl responded. Now he had the fuel bag in both hands, the hatch lip biting into his left forearm as he fumbled with his free right hand to introduce the bag's flaccid neck into the filler opening.

  He took a deep breath and forced upward against the bag, tilting it, partly flattening it against the cabin skin. Fuel began to pour out. Most of it went into the filler neck, but a filmy mist of high-octane fuel began to stream backward, sucked directly into the hellbug's gaping mouth. He glanced back, focusing into the huge opening, and that was a mistake because it made him think about things he did not want to consider at this moment.

  Inside the duct was a whirling blur of motion, the big impeller blades of Black Stealth One, sucking an explosive mixture of air and fuel through, hurling it out behind. The inlet's screen mesh, solid enough to deflect a bird, might keep him from being swallowed if he lost his purchase. But if that fine mist of avgas hit anything hot on its way through, the sudden firebloom would scatter their fragments over half of Georgia.

  Corbett concentrated on flattening the bag, grateful for the wide filler neck, feeling the almost imperceptible slip of his heel from its purchase in the shallow step. A half cupful of fuel sloshed out and was swallowed in an instant by whirling impeller blades. Never again! Didn't have to risk the kid with this prehistoric in-flight refueling, could've landed and taken my chances.

  He was tiring; could actually feel the energy leaking from arms and legs as he hugged the hatch sill. A half gallon of fuel was visible, caught in a fold of the translucent plastic, and when his heel slipped from its tiny ledge this time, he was ready. His fitful lunge inward against the harness pulled his crotch across the sill, and he was able to maintain his grip on the bag only because it was nearly empty.

  He dragged the bag inside, found the filler cap without looking, managed to reach outside and twist it into place without dropping it. And then he was inside again, struggling weakly from the harness loops that had saved him twice. He twisted in the seat, so drained that he could barely sit erect, and somehow managed to drag himself into his harness properly.

  He reached for the control stick. "Good work," he said. "I'll take it now."

  "Your face is red as a beet," she said in wonder, relinquishing her stick.

  "Embarrassment," he said, and gave her a sick smile.

  She raised her hands aloft, making claws of her fingers. "Aaagggh, how I hate that macho man stuff! Why don't you just admit it, Corbett? It's okay to be scared; I was scared too."

  He nodded at the fuel gauge, then said, "You handle fear your way, I'll handle it my way. Sure I was scared; I've got nicotine stains in my shorts. I've also got a beer gut, which is why my face is red from huffing and puffing, okay?"

  "That's honest," she said. "And speaking of stains, I, uh, I've got to go again. I really do, in the worst way."

  "Go ahead. Jesus," he exclaimed suddenly, "you didn't know! There's a relief slot built into each seat, Petra. This thing was designed to fly two days without landing." He snugged back into the seat, tapped the printed legend set into the forward lip of the seat. "It's kind of self-explanatory; works for both sexes, they tell me."

  He made a show of putting on his minitel, attending to his instruments, ignoring her as she studied the mysteries of a seat with its own small trapdoor.

  After a minute or so he heard her cycling the little actuator experimentally. She muttered, "It sure isn't the Ritz. I'll have to shuck my jeans."

  "Or stain 'em. Suit yourself, we'll be up here another hour if I can stretch it that far."

  Another long moment while he consulted his charts again, making himself conspicuously busy. Then he heard her say, "Good lord, it even has tissue. Am I doing my doo-dahs on some poor farmer's head?"

  "Fluids go through. Solid waste is retained," h
e said, as impersonal as he could make it while a young woman prepared to use a toilet beside him. At the moment, he was slowly gliding down from twelve thousand feet with the engine off. At five thousand he would restart and begin a gradual climb again. It was slow, and it was chancy; but it could greatly increase their range.

  Because he could hear her progress he began to hum a tune, attending to the intricacies of the "pixel" program on the video monitor.

  From the girl, in strained sarcasm: "Louder music."

  If she could joke about it, he could. "What would you like, Handel's Water Music?"

  A chuckle, deep as a man's. "Better try the twenty-one-gun salute from the 1812 Overture."

  Presently she sighed in relief. Corbett paid her little attention because he had just found the "buzzard" subroutine, and punched it in while craning his neck to see the upper surface of the wing. "It works," he breathed. "My God, how it works!"

  The girl, zipping her jeans, studied the monitor. "What did you do?"

  "Check the wing on your side," he suggested.

  She did, and gasped. "It's—oh wow, we've got feathers, Corbett!" She laughed in sheer delight, then swapped grins with him. "Are vultures really dark brown?"

  "This one is," he said. "You notice, out near the tips, the spaces between the big pinion feather patterns are tan and olive green. That probably works for anyone looking down. Can't see the underside, but—"

  "Probably blue to fool people looking up," she finished for him. "It's not really perfect, from close up like this."

  "Give 'em another five years," Corbett replied. "Meanwhile, when they debrief you, somebody's going to shit a brick. This is 'eyes only' stuff, Petra. For God's sake, don't even hint about it to outsiders."

  She nodded and fell silent while he rechecked their position. Their path had taken them past Athens, then southward over coils of sluggish river and marshland. He saw her studying the terrain. "The town to our left is Vidalia; river's the Oconee," he said.