by Dean Ing
"We probably won't even notice him," she agreed. "You can only fool some of the people some of the time, hm?"
"Yeah. Well, anybody on land who saw us this morning saw us heading south. But there aren't nearly as many people looking up from boats. I'm betting we can turn west in a couple of minutes, and nobody will see that."
Petra nodded, a sly smile lifting the corners of her mouth. "That's what you intended all along."
"Sure." She's still going to face interrogation sooner or later. I've got to use that against them. "We're going to Nevada while half the world's airplanes patrol the airspace between here and Cuba."
"On my say-so, if you'd had your way," she prodded.
"Partly. I've made a hell of a long detour to put that idea across." He moved the control stick and watched the readout on the compass as Black Stealth One banked westward. "Check the video now; let's see if the program is still following the IR signature of that guy." He nodded to their left where the contrail, now an intermittent scrawl, extended almost parallel to their course.
"It's still locked on him," she said presently. "Would it, if he had flown through clouds?"
"Beats me. I doubt it," he admitted.
They fell silent; he relaxed at the controls, while she watched the hypnotic motion of whitecaps far below. After a time he said, "Your question about staying locked on after clouds have passed? That's pretty sophisticated thinking. Score one for good old Brown U."
"Has it crossed your mind," she said, "that in twenty-two years I may have learned a few things you don't know, Mister Hotshot?" Her voice was as soft and cool as crushed ice.
Corbett gave her an openmouthed, studious frown, a parody of astonishment. "You know, it never has. I mean, how could I go on living with such shame?" He saw that his joke was not received well, and smiled. "Come on, Petra. You keep surprising me, that's all. Think of it as a compliment; you're not exactly the average, uh..."
"Airhead," she said. "Would it surprise you to know I've had a lover who was much older than you?"
"Damn right," he said. "Would you believe I've bedded girls as young as you?"
"Why not," she shrugged, indifferent to the idea.
"Of course that was thirty years ago," he went on, grinning, then laughing outright as she slapped his arm; but he sobered quickly. "Why would you have a lover older than fifty-three, Petra?"
"Fifty-six," she stated. "You're fifty-three? I thought you were prematurely, well, you know."
"I know you're changing the subject on me."
She folded her arms and closed her eyes, her head cradled on the headrest, and she spoke as if the topic were tiring. "He was a professor at a school I went to, a veddy posh place; great school, really, but I wanted to go to Brown and my parents wouldn't let me at first. I was eighteen, and I was full of resentment, and Lydell, well—he was there, I guess."
"Um," he said, mulling it over, sparing time to watch the contrail that slowly crossed some miles off, above and ahead of them. "Hell, that's not a jet," he said. "It's a twin prop job. Must be some cold air up there to give him such a trail. They get weird weather over the Gulf. I believe I'll tune in and see about it." He clamped his minitel over his left ear, tuning the receiver as he went on: "So tell me about good old Lydell: all tweeds and pipe smoke, looking for one last fling?"
"Pipe, yes; tweeds, no, and if he'd ever had a fling before, it sure didn't teach him much." Petra giggled, shook her head, tried to be serious. "He was married, really very sweet and tentative and shy." Another giggle: "I practically jumped his bones."
"Every time?" Corbett's lifted eyebrow said he heard more than he believed.
"There were only a few times and no, not every time. Believe it or not, some men think I have enough charm to respond to." She waited for him to reply.
Dangerous ground, he told himself, and began silently to fine-tune the radio, avoiding her gaze.
Suddenly, with a bright brittleness that tried too hard to be bantering, she asked, "Kyle Corbett, are you one of those macho men who prefer the company of other men?"
"What?"
"Are you gay, Corbett?" Her smile was wide and, he decided, altogether false.
"Not very," he said. "I tend to get subdued when I'm flying a carbon-fiber toothpick and weather builds up ahead of me." He pointed to the low blanket of gray cotton that stretched across the horizon to the west. He waited until she opened her mouth, then said, "And stop that shit, Petra. I get a hard-on for no man and, if you want the truth, not many women." He made manual adjustments, throttling back, and watched their sink rate as he added, "I'm not passion's slave. Just because I notice you have great knockers, doesn't mean I have to grab 'em."
"Ninnies. We say ninnies in high society," she said, straight-faced.
"God, but you're a pistol," he said, chuckling.
"But not one you want to grab," she said. "I'm not being provocative, Kyle, I'm just—curious."
He nodded. Presently he said, "You have to understand how I live, Petra. I learned to get along without strong ties to other people before you were born. In some ways, a hobby can take the place of relationships. Some hobbies get to be your whole life."
"I think that's very sad," she murmured.
"Easy for you to say, but it really can plug the gap; I mean, you may be alone, but often you're having too much fun to be lonesome." He studied her keenly. "Ever wonder why your dad spent so much time racing cars?"
She returned his gaze. "But he had Mother, and—me," she said slowly. "I don't want to think about it that way."
Phil Leigh might have felt like a father, if Dar hadn't been constantly on hand to remind everybody of the facts. Maybe he did anyway, how the hell would I know? "Suit yourself. For me, airplanes plugged that gap. Let me tell you, a sortie over China in an SR-71 is just about the most fun you can have without risking AIDS."
"That's the fast one, isn't it?"
"It's a rifle bullet. The only reason the pilots aren't jerking off, up there, is that it's too much trouble in a flight suit." He laughed softly, wistfully. "Besides, you don't have to, the airplane does it for you. I guess you'd have to be there," he said, making it an apology.
Another long silence followed, penetrated only by the whirr of the engine. Corbett had almost forgotten their last exchange when Petra said, "You're telling me that hot pilots don't really crave sex, after all the stories we hear?"
"I don't know about other guys. And I knew plenty of pretty ladies, Petra. It was simply easier to avoid letting any one of them get to be a habit. I traveled a lot. Why get attached to someone when you know it can't last?" And I won't talk about the last few years in Mexico. When you can't trust the condoms, things can get pretty grim...
"It's still sad," she said, and then brightened. "You got attached to my uncle. But you're going to say that was different."
"Fuckin' A," he said, an ancient curse for an ancient memory. "Never had a pretty lady stick a time bomb in my fuel tank; now, there's one friend in a million. You will tell him, won't you? That I kept all his secrets, every one of them."
"I'll tell him," she promised. "I'm certain I'll be telling him more than you want me to decipher; but I'll tell him."
"What makes you say that?"
"You won't understand, Kyle. You've kept yourself aloof from relationships so long, you don't even realize how people can read each other. I know it's important to you that I say that to Uncle Dar. I know it's more than business. And I don't have to know what it is."
"Jesus Christ," he said.
"Now do you see why I think it's sad to alienate yourself?"
"I guess. Only, what's so great about reading people?"
"Nothing, unless you're close. Then it can be," she faltered, and he saw tears welling in her eyes. "It can be wonderful while it lasts. I don't know why I'm crying," she said, laughing as she wiped her tears away.
He intended it to be droll: "Maybe you miss old Lydell."
She refused to look at him, staring to her right,
toward the Gulf coast on the far horizon. "Maybe I do. He's the only man I ever slept with who cared about more than my—my parts."
"And you're much more than the sum of your parts," he said, studying the shadows of clouds on seawater as the aircraft sank gradually lower.
"It's not funny. It's true," she sniffled.
"I wasn't being funny, Petra. I know it's true for me."
"Imagine that: the man is human. And why are we going down below the clouds," she said as their world darkened abruptly.
He tapped his right ear. "Cloud cover is building, and I want to keep the coast in sight. I think we can make it as far as the Texas coast," he said, "with this in-flight refueling system."
"Pretty smart," she said, giving him a smile.
"Not too shabby," he winked, and when he looked back through the windshield the little parachute was there, as though it had winked into existence, and Corbett needed time to check his depth perception because it had passed his left wingtip almost before it registered in his mind, so it had to be smaller than a drogue chute, perhaps two feet across, and then he saw something else ahead, several somethings in fact, small metal canisters sliding down the sky. "Hang on," he said, but she had already gasped.
It takes time to deflect a huge moving mass of air, and before he had moved the nose waste gate for reverse thrust they had passed so near to one of the tiny canisters that Corbett saw the thin trailing wire as it fell. Farther to their left, the damned things were fairly raining from the clouds. The one that they hit came down to the right of the cockpit, and the wire might have slid along the wing's backswept leading edge to release them if Corbett had not tried to bank away. The right elevon, the hinged rearmost portion of the wing, responded to his movement on the stick and his forward speed was still too great.
The wire whipped back across the wing, slid into the crevice between the wing and its canted elevon. Corbett thought, Somebody else is getting smarter than I am, as Black Stealth One bucked and fought its tether, sliding toward the water.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Oar Weston found himself shaking as he watched the radar operator, who seemed continually unsatisfied with the yellowish clutter on his scope inside the droning old Neptune. Probably that strong coffee, he told himself, thankful that the borrowed flight suit over his civvies made him too bulky for those shakes to be obvious to the radar operator beside him. Across the narrow aisle from them were the duty stations for the radioman and Ben Ullmer. The electronic consoles inside the craft appeared to be the latest equipment, though the interior smells were strictly World War II.
Ullmer's flight suit enveloped him comically but there was nothing funny about the chill inside the aircraft. Ullmer blew on his fingers, refusing his gloves because they impeded his use of his own console with its special frequencies.
Dar felt a tug on his sleeve and saw Ullmer motioning toward his headset, which boasted ovoids the size of earmuffs. To be heard over the steady roar of the Wright Cyclone radials, which made the entire airframe buzz with vibration, Ullmer raised his voice. "Elmira on the horn."
Dar snugged his earpieces tighter. It was Unruh, calling on their special mission frequency. When Dar and Ullmer had both responded, Unruh proceeded, sounding as brisk and fresh as if he had stolen a full night's sleep though Dar knew better. "FBI just called in from a general store near Lake City, Florida. They've got a body and a drunk, and evidence that Black Stealth One was sitting in a garden plot exactly as that F-5 pilot reported, even though the pilot retracted his claim when he came down for a low pass a minute later. It was there, all right, he just couldn't see it anymore. Indentations of landing casters, and positive makes on prints of both the perpetrator and the hostage inside the store. Those guys are working fast, and—"
"Whose body?" Dar rapped out, his entire body suddenly cold with apprehension.
"Forgive me, Hornet." Unruh's voice said he had just realized his gaffe. "White male adult, name Lyndon Baines Beacham. His friend the drunk wasn't too drunk to reach a telephone operator, but they say he is now; he's the store owner, name Bobby Clegg. According to him, a regular gorilla of a man tore a door down and shot Beacham dead. Feebs won't be sure of the details until Bobby sobers up, so they're shooting him full of B vitamins. Bobby's idea seems to be that Corbett shot Beacham and tied Bobby up. But the Feebs say Beacham and Clegg were engaged in certain felonious activities. Beacham died of gunshot wounds at close range, probably over twelve hours ago."
"So Corbett stayed there all night?" Dar clamped down on his visions of Petra in the hands of a vengeful murderer, at night in an isolated store.
"From the F-5 pilot's sighting, he must have, Hornet. We show an envelope here that could put him below Tampa, possibly nearing the Everglades by now. Isn't that roughly your position?"
"That's a roger," said Ullmer, "crossing from Vero Beach to Sarasota at twenty-three thousand feet. Our other X-Band aircraft is patrolling the Gulf between Tampa and Tallahassee, as, uh, Killer Bee wanted," he added, invoking Sheppard's code name. "We'll orbit farther south until we're over the Keys, and hope Corbett won't be able to sneak through all the pickets we have flying around there now."
"Stand by," Unruh said. After a moment he went on: "Killer Bee wants to know how the aircraft got from West Virginia to Lake City without refueling."
"Probably did refuel somewhere," Ullmer replied.
Dar: "See if you can get an open line so you can tape the drunk—Bobby?—when the Feebs interrogate him again. You never know what you might hear. Pentothal might help."
"Roger, Hornet. Don't get your hopes up, the word on Bobby is that if IQ were octane, he couldn't run a lawnmower."
"Do what you can; I have all confidence in you,"
Dar replied, noticing the radioman's bid for attention. "Stand by."
The radioman's signal, crossing two fingers followed by those fingers upraised and separated, meant an incoming call from their sister aircraft, dubbed "Cyclops Two" for the mission. With only one set of the special NSA frequency hardware in Ullmer's possession for Cyclops One, they had decided to use standard frequencies between the two aircraft, although Dar and Ben Ullmer could also talk directly to Elmira.
Ullmer switched, and Dar heard the Neptune pilot acknowledge its sister ship to the northwest. "Go ahead, Cyclops Two," Ullmer said tightly.
"We have a blip proceeding due west at eighty-four degrees fifty minutes by twenty-nine degrees twenty minutes," said the pilot in carefully noncommittal tones, "but no visual sighting. And we should have one unless it's invisible. Our magician says it's a big blip, but not a dense one."
"Try to duck into clouds if you have any," said Ullmer. "He may know how to lock his IR scanner onto you, but that should unlock him."
"Negative, Cyclops One, it's CAVU here but there's a mass of low stuff to the west. I'll nip over there without making any sharp course corrections and make a return run."
"How fast is your blip?" Ullmer asked.
"Hundred knots or so. Too big to be invisible to the eye, but it is."
"Stand by," said Ullmer, and looked toward Dar. "Why would he come this far south and then turn toward New Orleans?" he asked.
"Maybe all the sorties have done it," Dar said, groping, "or maybe that F-5 changed his mind. Maybe he's low on fuel."
Ullmer switched channels. "Elmira, do the Feebs at that store know whether Corbett was able to refuel?"
"Damn, I should've asked," said Terry Unruh. "I've got an open line; wait one."
Dar, to Ullmer: "Aircraft fuel at a grocery store?"
Ullmer: "Just covering all the bases."
Unruh came back on-line with, "They sell gas there. He might have refueled, if he could use ordinary gas."
"Fucking Corbett," Ullmer snarled. "I'll bet you my gout pills he's carrying additives; it's what I'd do. Have 'em check the pump for prints, and get back to—"
"Excuse me, Wasp," said Unruh. "FBI chopper has spotted a metal gas can in a field less than a mile from the store. The
y'll check that out, too."
"Let us know," said Ullmer. "Wasp out." He switched channels again. "Cyclops One to Cyclops Two, we have reason to believe the aircraft may be fully fueled, so there's less reason to think your blip is the one we're after. If you can—"
"Cyclops Two to Cyclops One, I have our ghost blip on visual," said the voice, no longer dry or bored. "And he's for real. Dropping toward low cloud cover but it's a flying wing, all right. Short fuselage bulge, big intake scoops, paint job like ocean waves. That's really something for the books; he's still hard to see."
Dar and Ben Ullmer shared a half-second stare. "Turn this thing around," Dar shouted, letting protocol go to hell, and snatched at the wrinkled chart that lay clipped to a writing surface near him.
"That's him," said Ullmer into his microphone. "You know what to do, Cyclops Two. But listen: don't drop your live rounds until you've tried to snare him with the others. You know you've got a hostage there."
"Wilco, Cyclops One, banking now for a run. He's trying to get under cloud cover but he hasn't made a course deviation since we picked him up. We'll try to snag him."
"They could wait for us," Dar said, his face tortured.
"No they can't," Ben Ullmer replied, suddenly looking very old, "and we both know it."
The lurch of the big Neptune as it banked was a heavy drag at Dar's shoulders. "Ben, put the word out," he said. "We'll want all those picket aircraft pulled back toward Tallahassee."
"I'm going to alert Air-Sea Rescue too," said Ullmer. "The hellbug should float like a cork, Dar. There's still hope for the girl."
Ullmer was redirecting the aerial armada off the tip of Florida when the radioman, monitoring the standard frequencies, called it out for all to hear: "Commander Openshaw in Cyclops Two reports munitions away!"
TWENTY-NINE
They had lost hundreds of feet in altitude before Corbett found the cure for the downward spiral: he brought the aircraft to a stop with the waste gates, steering with the nose jet, and hovered. "Okay, I've got it," he said, hoping to calm Petra. "I can't see your wingtip, but something's fouling that elevon. Can you describe it?"