by Dean Ing
But she was thinking along different lines. "The longer I'm with you, the less sense you make," she mused. "Once you turn this airplane over to whoever gets it, why should—well—my uncle, for example, think it's still a secret?"
"Who said I was turning it over?"
"All right, for the sake of argument I'll pretend you won't. You give me this stuff about being a man without a country, but you don't want me to give away my country's secrets. I mean, what do you care?"
Corbett took his time, switching the monitor to FLIR mode, seeing no strong aircraft emissions. Then, savagely, "Screw 'em all. The Sov spooks, everybody else's, and especially, oh yes, especially Uncle Sam's alphabet soup of agencies who have no compunctions about burning a loyal employee. They've always got their reasons; screw their reasons, it's my personal ass they tried to burn." A short, unpleasant bark of a laugh. "In my case, literally burn. God damned near did it. Just pure luck they didn't."
"In some ways you can be—halfway decent, actually," she said. "I envy the education you must have had to help design this plane. But what really gets me is that you were Uncle Dar's friend. Not one of the Old Boy net, as he calls it, but he didn't care. He doesn't make friends with bad people, Corbett."
A long sigh, as he considered telling her to shut the fuck up, maybe slapping her to drive the point home. And for some reason he found himself incapable of that. There was much that he must not tell her, but some of it? Maybe. Why the hell not? It might leak through enough offices to redden some faces, might even force one into sudden, unsought retirement. "Let me tell you a story, Petra. About two guys fishing on the Potomac."
He'd left the Company for the Snake Pit; spent years under Ben Ullmer on several special projects, he said, careful to avoid telling her things she did not need to know. He did not even hint to her of his work on new versions of the false shrubs that oriented themselves aerodynamically, falling from a Lockheed Quietship over East Germany, impaling their stems so that they would stand in plain sight within the landing pattern of a MiG and record the emissions of Soviet top-line electronic gear.
Instead, Corbett talked about his work on Black Stealth One, remembering to maintain Medina's cover. "So our retreaded ex-spook got a lot of flack from a colleague, little tinplate hotshot named Medina. Just a personality conflict, I suppose, but it sure made our man value his time off.
"So he gets a chance to spend a weekend in a flat-bottom boat with an old friend. They don't even share much shoptalk, maybe a hint that some project's becoming a real bastard, something the other guy already knows." He turned to her, his eyes smouldering. "At the very worst, a thing to get you a royal ass-chew if your best friend cops on you. Not worth blacklisting you for, much less fixing you up with a fatal accident. The truth is to this day I don't know why."
"You're certain someone did that on purpose?"
His laugh was almost a snort of derision. "You be the judge. Second morning with the boat on the Maryland side, a cooler full of Heineken, just a touch of mist on the river. Little Evinrude was cranky to start but our poor boob thinks he's a mechanic so he fiddles with it while his good buddy lugs the other stuff into the boat. Including the spare fuel can, one of those steel jobs with a screw-on cap you can get your fist into."
He saw her gaze steady on him, both of them fully aware that Corbett was the boob and Dar Weston the buddy, and she seemed scarcely to be breathing as he went on: "They'd fished this way a few times before, but this time the best buddy has a beeper on his belt. Never before, just this time. And of course ol' buddy-buddy has a 'phone in his tow car, one of those belchfire ponycars that I am sure you've seen. And the good buddy is back at his car a couple of hundred yards off, and comes back to the boat with a face a mile long. He tells our fool the bad news while snugging the fuel can down where you can reach it while you steer the boat. Very thoughtful.
"The bad news is, his beeper went off—and maybe it did, who knows? So the buddy says he called in, and maybe he did. There's some little brushfire back at Langley that requires him personally, but it won't take long. Well, hell, that's no problem. The buddy will make a quick run to Langley. Back in a couple of hours. No sweat, right?"
"No sweat," she said, prodding him on.
"The boob says sure, he'll mooch along in the boat and find where they're biting and watch for the car, but—I remember this very well—as he putters away from the landing he says don't expect all that Heineken to wait. And the buddy shouts back, 'I trust you.' Wasn't that sweet? Then he drives off.
"Ten minutes later, just noodling along against the current, the goddamn old Evinrude packs up; something I don't think was in the plan, somehow. Our boob manages to steer into shallows with cattails higher than Iowa corn. Drops anchor. The way the engine stopped, sounded like it was just starving for gas. Our guy starts to haul the gas can a little closer so he can reach the pump.
"And something thunks inside. Not loud, but when you've fiddled with mechanical stuff all your life you get attuned to certain noises. This wasn't a fuel pickup sound, or—"
"All right," she said breathlessly. "I don't want a list of what it wasn't!"
He shrugged and continued. "The cap unscrews. The can is half full of gas, but there's enough sun to shine on the bottom where there's a flat brick of something like, oh, jack cheese. It's wrapped inside a bag. It comes out nice and easy. It's got something like a ballpoint pen jabbed into it, with a screw-type plunger on top."
"Now you've lost me," she said.
"It's a pound of plastique, Petra, the most concentrated chemical explosive on earth. The chemical detonator can be set for various times with that screw adjustment. Do you have any idea of its radius of destruction with a few gallons of gasoline on a small boat?"
She gazed at him slack-jawed, as outrage grew in her face. "My uncle would never, never do such a thing! Maybe that bomb was intended for him."
"It was his boat, and his gas can, and that chemical fuse is a one-hour item at most. I sure didn't do it myself. Maybe he didn't build that booby trap, but he put it in there, all right." Corbett punched an instruction into the keyboard and added, as if to himself, "You bet he did."
"He's not a killer," she said, choking it out. "You're lying, Corbett."
"Uh-huh; yeah. Listen, it was misplaced loyalty that put me where I am. I realized that while I was staring down at a brick of C-4. Dar Weston, not a killer? He set booby traps in Greece in 1944, or so he told me. I believe it."
"God. That's true—at least my dad told me it was true." She was almost whispering, half submerged in old memories. "So what did you do?"
"I was a dead man. There was no way I could go back to the Snake Pit, for all I knew my own people had made the decision to burn me. I dumped the brick back, jumped down into chest-deep water, and flailed like hell through cattails to the shore. The highway wasn't far off, but I didn't want to get picked up all muddy and sopping wet. I skirted the shore feeling like the whole world was watching, heading upstream. Might've been another ten minutes, less than a mile from the boat, when that C-4 went up. Jesus, it made a fireball you could've seen for miles."
Petra said nothing for perhaps a minute. Then, "Why didn't I ever hear about it?"
"Why would you? Hell, it probably wasn't even in the papers. I'll bet Dar had a good story worked out, though. And I'll give you odds he was parked in that Javelin somewhere along the river, listening. Petra, when people in my line of work go belly up, sometimes it doesn't make the obituary column."
"I suppose," she said softly. "What did you do after that?"
"Doesn't matter," he said, punching again at the keyboard, looking back at the swept wing. He had told her all he could without placing Petra herself in possible jeopardy. No point in describing his pilgrimage with thumbed rides to Depew, a suburb of Buffalo; withdrawing his spooker from the post office box in Depew; outfitting himself at St. Vincent De Paul; buying a 72 Datsun in Buffalo using his spooker ID; crossing the toll bridge into Canada; then returning a week
later through Duluth on the next leg of his trip to Mexico.
Those Thai rubies, something he hadn't mentioned even to Dar, had made the difference. The interest on eighty-seven thousand dollars, added to the salary of a Mexican crop duster's mechanic, might have kept him safely dead and tinkering with airplanes for the rest of his life. He had even given up all plans for revenge—until he saw Medina's ad in Sport Aviation. A shame I can't talk about those bits, he thought. But I'd be sorry later.
"Corbett," she said earnestly, "I don't know what to believe. I suppose it might be possible that Uncle Dar might be capable of such a thing, if he thought you—look. What if, don't ask me how, but somehow, they got what they thought was absolute proof that you were a Russian spy or something?"
He saw the agonized hope in her gaze, and smiled sadly. "Or what if I really was, and they found out? Same thing. I spent sleepless nights for two years afterward, trying to explain it in a way that would take Dar off the hook. I never found a scenario that would justify it, Petra. And who better than Dar to catch me napping?"
"I never thought a reason like that would justify murder in my own country," she said.
"Me, neither," he replied, refolding a nav chart, watching the altimeter as Black Stealth One descended to a few thousand feet above a broken, creek-veined plain. "But it won't hurt my feelings if you report every damn word of this to your favorite uncle, next time you see him. You can tell him I kept the secrets, all of 'em. The son of a bitch," he finished under his breath.
She turned her puzzled frown from him to the terrain below. "Are we out of fuel?"
"Not yet. But jet interceptors don't fool around much, this low, and now I don't think they'll spot us from above. See the wing?"
She twisted, studying the wing surface. He had finally learned the trick of using the video monitor to give the computer a viewpoint, a point from which a viewer must be fooled. If that viewpoint were infinitely far away above, the computer would look below and "paint" the skin with a replica of the terrain as they passed over it, perfect camouflage against a viewer high above. As they passed the fenceline from a fallow field of rich dark soil to a field green with cotton, a shadow of green swept across the upper wing skin to replace the rich brown of a moment before.
She saw a man standing next to a pickup truck on a dirt access road. The man did not look up but, "Could people on the ground see us now?" she asked.
"I don't know. Most likely our belly's blue. I could go outside and see."
"You go to hell, is where you go."
"Not far off the truth," he said, restarting the engine. "The middle of the Okefenokee might be hell at night, so we're going to see if I can stretch a glide to its southern edge. And that's over the line into Florida."
TWENTY
Yevgeni Melnik, whose taste for vodka had faded after his first glass of Kentucky sourmash, was scribbling in a small spiral-bound notebook when he saw two familiar faces in the mirror behind the bar. He put away his pencil slowly, took a slower sip of Jack Daniel's, and slipped the notebook into his coat pocket. "Fallon, Hendrick," he said, turning toward the men with a welcoming smile. "Have we all made the same good guess, or the same bad one?"
Tom Fallon, of the Post, had the thick shoulders and flattened nose of a mediocre club fighter twenty years after leaving the ring. He recognized the rumpled little Russian first and made a comical face of surprise to Hendrick, the roly-poly veteran Times reporter. "Jeez, they'll let almost anybody drink in Atlanta," Fallon said, but slid onto the stool next to Melnik and clapped him on the shoulder as Hendrick took the next stool. "I've noticed you're a good guesser, Melnik. But are we guessing about the same thing?" He caught the bartender's eye. "Whatever he's having," he added, nodding at Melnik's glass.
"Sounds right to me," Hendrick added to the bartender in his lazy Midwest twang. "In the spirit of glasnost, Melnik: you guess first."
Melnik truly enjoyed the byplay of such men, all of them a bit jaded, all slightly cynical about human affairs—perhaps because he had become one of them. After a few years, hardened professional newsmen learned how to balance their natural love of competition against the virtues of shared information. If they had not both flown into Atlanta International on the trail of Black Stealth One, their editors would doubtless divert them to the story before long. If they had come for that, probably they had already done a bit of sharing. "I would guess," Melnik said, "that you are both trailing a lead about a stolen airplane, as I am. And because Delta and American have hubs in Atlanta, we will find it easier to catch other flights to—wherever rumor leads," he finished with an expansive wave.
Quickly, from Fallon: "Why not, say, Dallas?"
"A flip of the coin," Melnik shrugged charmingly. "You?"
Fallon glanced at Hendrick. "You, uh, probably have some pretty special sources. So do I; so does Hendrick. A quid pro quo might help us all. Sound good?"
"Why not?" Melnik's openhanded gesture seemed to invite a body search, but it was he who asked the next question. "What do you have so far?"
Fallon hesitated, but glasnost worked both ways and the little Sov had already admitted he was on the Spookplane story. Accepting his drink, Fallon sipped, blew a richly scented exhalation, and said, "There's a place called Monroe about forty miles east of here that's popular with glider nuts."
"Sailplane," Hendrick put in, without lowering his glass. "High performance glider's a sailplane." While he tended to ramble in writing a story, Hendrick seemed to make up for it with telegraphic speech.
"Ah," Melnik said as though it was important.
"Whatever," Fallon said. "The Georgia state cops came down on that little field at Monroe like acid rain on pantyhose a few hours ago. They practically ringed it with patrol cars, turned the police channels to mush arguing over what the hell they were after, and snagged a couple of guys out of a glider—awright, sailplane—that had just landed. The sailplane was clean, but it turns out that the cops had got a tip about a hush-hush government plane that'd been stolen up north and positively identified near Monroe by a flying cop. When somebody used the word, 'stealth,' the Post got wind of it and pulled me off something else I was bird-dogging in Nashville. When I got on the next flight to Atlanta, guess who was already on it." He jerked a thumb toward Hendrick.
"Times jerked me off a piece in Memphis, sent me here," Hendrick said.
"They're always jerkin' him off," Fallon put in. "He loves it." Sip; sidelong look at Hendrick.
Melnik frowned for a moment, searching his mental file of American idioms, then smiled. "There has to be more to it," he urged.
"Governors of several states are loaning air guard planes to the feds," Hendrick went on, unfazed. "Flying search patterns for a stealth plane spotted near here, and the sky's full of everything they can muster. Plane's not a Lockheed stealth fighter, or the Northrop stealth bomber; a sailplane, like. May be a hostage onboard." He saw Melnik's face change and added, "May be, I said. Times has some people schmoozing weekend warriors in the guard to see what we can learn. But if it's a sailplane, it's slow. Could still be someplace near." He cocked his head, thought about it, then shrugged and sipped. "Now you."
Melnik saw no reason to explain how his sources might have certain very special information. The American newsmen had been in the business much too long to be naive about Soviet satellites and listening devices. Nevertheless, Yevgeni Melnik lowered his voice and studied his glass, speaking as if to himself. "Your military air arms are searching for an aircraft stolen from the National Security Agency," he began.
"NSA doesn't fly spook airplanes," Fallon objected, sensing a mistake. "They just massage the data from military and CIA."
"They have been flying this one," Melnik went on quietly, nodding at his sourmash. Then, quieter still: "They built it."
"Holy shit," Hendrick blurted. "A different kind of stealth plane, then. For CIA?"
Melnik remained silent for a moment, then shook his head. "I think you would call it interservice rivalry," h
e said, and finished his drink. He saw Fallon's hand move toward his jacket, then jerk down. You fear I shall quit talking as soon as your pencils come out. And I might, to strengthen my credibility.
"Bartender, hit us again," Hendrick said, and leaned both elbows on the bar. "This is heavy shit, Yevgeni."
Fallon, tapping his fingers with newly minted energy: "My God, you don't suppose the CIA stole it? Nah." He squinted in a fresh surmise. "More likely your guys, Melnik, I mean, wouldn't that figure?"
Melnik used his newest Americanism: "Cut me some slack, tovarisch. Why would I be following the story if I already knew the details?"
"Doesn't mean they didn't snatch it," said Hendrick. "Only means they didn't tell you."
"Possible," Melnik agreed equitably. "It would not be the first time I have had a story rewritten. And I have said too much out of friendship. Do not source me, I beg you."
"I hear you," Fallon grumbled. "Listen, we've got more than one story here, you know that?"
"Not yet we haven't," said Hendrick, "unless you're into filing on something this big with a single, unattributable source." Still, the Times man was already selecting a quarter from a palmful of change. "I'd better call in, see which way I chase the wild goose next."
And send others scurrying to ask acutely embarrassing questions of CIA, not to mention NSA, Melnik thought. Long after the stealth aircraft has been forgotten, American spymasters will be busy trying to patch the shreds of their careers. That is the real story—and my real value. Melnik only raised a hand like a Hollywood Indian.
"Yeah, me too. Hold the fort for us, Yevgeni," said Fallon, in an implied promise of return.
Melnik watched Fallon shuffle away, digging for change in his pocket as he followed Hendrick to the telephones. "Oh yes, you will return to the fort," Melnik muttered to himself in Russian. Those two were both solid professionals who would want confirmation of every detail by more than one source. But Western news media were strange entities, willing to go far beyond mere glasnost, openness, in search of a story. Fallon and Hendrick were picking, like Pandora, at the lock which would release an administration's most secret problems.