by Dean Ing
"Of course," Dar nodded, holding out his arm, letting Petra walk into a hug. She offered him a bite of Hershey, which he declined with a smile.
Rogers made his departure with handshakes, and Petra watched him go with unfeigned satisfaction. "I hope that's the last of that," she said.
"Probably not, but I can smooth it for you," Dar replied. Intuition made him ask, "Was there more that you didn't tell him?"
She slid into a chair and he sat too, facing her, holding her small tanned hand in his big, pale one. Her face showed signs of exhaustion, but also of a lively earnestness. "Yes. Corbett wanted me to tell you something."
"Something you didn't tell Rogers or the others?"
"I gather it was personal."
He withdrew his hand, folding his arms, sliding back in his chair as if steadying himself for a blow. "Well?"
"He said to tell you he kept the secrets. All of them," she said, adding, "whatever that meant."
"That was God-damned decent of him," he said in savage sarcasm. Then she's not play-acting for me; she still doesn't know. And why didn't he tell her?
"He's not a monster, Uncle Dar," Petra said softly, quickening her pace as she added, "not that I think he's Mister Nice Guy; whatever he gets, he has coming to him. But in a way, I think he loves you. At least he did once."
Who the hell do you think you are, Kyle, to make me feel this guilty, this inferior? "Where'd you get that idea?"
"Because he couldn't hate you so much otherwise." Caught by the steadiness of her gaze, Dar Weston dared not look away. "He told me it was a fishing trip that made him do what he's done."
"Makes no sense to me," he said.
"He told so many lies about where we were going, I think I know when he was lying. I don't think he was lying about the bomb in the fuel tank. Why did you do it, Uncle Dar?"
He made a great effort to avoid swallowing, or changing the pace of his breathing. "Did you ask Rogers that question?" If she did, there will be no way I can protect her in the future.
Her glance held a trace of scorn. "Give me a break! I'd have that guy underfoot for a week if I stepped into such a can of worms. In fact, I withdraw the question. You wouldn't have done it if you didn't think it was right."
"It was a matter of crucial importance to national security, Pets," he said with soft intensity. "And unless you want to be hounded in ways I couldn't control, you're going to have to accept what I've said, and try to forget about it."
Now her look carried more compassion. "Is that what you did?"
"If only it were that easy; but my job is remembering, not forgetting. I have very few outstanding regrets about my life, but Corbett is one of them. I can't tell you any more than this: it had to be done."
"For the higher good, no doubt"
"There was no doubt at the time," he said. "Corbett was—is a man who puts no one's decisions above his own."
Petra vented a small "hunh" of wry amusement. "Tell me about it," she said, with sarcasm that implied "don't tell me about it."
"And his decisions aren't always in the country's best interest, Pets. Do you need any more proof beyond what he's done? Including the airplane, the search, and damages, he's probably cost the taxpayers a billion dollars."
"Wow." Petra stared at nothing for a moment. "That ought to make him happy. He said revenge was the last passion of old men."
"He said that, did he? The son of a bitch."
"Funny, that's just how he speaks of you," said Petra, now with an impudent smile. She must have seen his jaw twitch because she grabbed him again with that exuberant hug that he often drove hundreds of miles to experience. "But you're my son of a bitch, and I love you."
He blinked hard, hoping that she would not look up and see the tears welling in his eyes. To keep from breaking down completely, he said into her hair, playfully, "Rogers thinks I'm not the only thing you love."
He felt her stiffen. She did not look up. "I can't imagine what he meant," she said.
"Black Stealth One," said Dar. "He thinks you've fallen for a piece of machinery."
"He's very perceptive," she said, relaxing.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Within twenty-four hours of the girl's release from Brooks, a score of middle-echelon men in both CIA and NSA knew many details of the Black Stealth One fiasco. Ivan the Terrible, his nose buried in a tin of Chicken of the Sea, did not even look up from his feast as Sasha said, "You know, Ivan, I never thought I would add a name to the list of possibles."
Sasha had added Kyle Corbett to his list of possible decoys after realizing the man had broken Snake Pit security well in advance of the theft— perhaps years before. It did not matter so much where the man had been hiding since the false report of his death. What mattered most was that Corbett's record went back a long way, and he had proven himself adept at espionage.
"What a joke if the KGB has been running him all this time, Ivan," murmured Sasha, giving the cat a languid scratch on the rump. Ivan lifted his sleek hindquarters in response, but continued to pursue a morsel of tuna inside the tin. "But if the man had gone over, it's probably old Pyotr what's-his-name, Karotkin, who'd have handled him. And those people are no slouches at wringing a man dry of information." Karotkin, and the men who made his policies, would not have waited for years to make use of Corbett's intelligence; that much was certain.
"So it's most likely that Mr. Kyle Corbett is running loose with his own agenda. As you do, Ivan." Now the cat looked up. "And as I do," Sasha went on, giving the cat a scratch between the ears. "I need not care about his motive unless he's waited until now so that he could go over to the Other Side with the airplane. That would be good news and bad news, and it's certainly possible." But so long as the mysterious Corbett remained a loose cannon after his rolling rampage through U.S. security, he might still have a close connection within the intelligence community somewhere, and he might pop up almost anywhere. Sasha mulled those implications over until the cat's nose emerged from a perfectly clean tuna can.
Ivan commenced an elaborate ritual, licking a paw, then using it to remove the last traces of tuna oil from his face. "Oh, you can get clean"—Sasha smiled at the cat—"but Corbett can't. He would be a more credible Sasha than I am. And even if he is finally caught, who would believe his denials?"
The loss of Black Stealth One was already having its effect on all those who had endorsed the false ransom operation. Men at the very top would have their sacrificial victims chosen; men near the top would be wise to prepare for early retirement. And that could cut the decoy list in half. "Well, no matter," Sasha said. He had a new decoy, returned from the dead as it were, who would serve nicely. The point might well be moot; Sasha himself might never again perform a service of any great importance.
It suddenly occurred to Sasha that his own survival and that of the evasive Mr. Corbett were tightly intertwined, an irony as broad and as deep as espionage itself. Sasha began to laugh so abruptly that Ivan bolted from the table.
THIRTY-NINE
Corbett had crossed the Rio Grande at Fourteen thousand feet because a lot of armed, frustrated airmen were looking for him lower, and even though blessed with his barrel chest he could not fly higher in an unpressurized cockpit without some loss of alertness. It was barely possible that the Mexican Air Force would be waiting in their ancient T-33's, despite the political invective hurled back and forth across the border.
Living in Mexico, Corbett had watched those hostilities build. The torture and murder of a U.S. drug agent named Camarena, in Mexico, had lifted the edge from a blanket of Mexican deceit. Evidently the same government officials pledged to stop international drug traffic were, themselves, peso billionaires because of that traffic. The Mexicans had now replaced many of their top people within the federal judicial police but some of those changes seemed, to the yanquis, mostly cosmetic. And Mexican complaints of yanqui meddling into affairs of state had escalated into a national clamor against the colossus to the north. American tourists now faced a
stronger likelihood of trouble than a fleeing American skyjacker. Still, Corbett knew he could not afford to relax. He could resume skimming the surface, however, to stretch his range.
Under ideal conditions he might have reached Hidalgo del Parral without stopping for fuel. The city was more than halfway across Mexico, beyond the sun-blasted hell of western Coahuila in a region more mountainous, but also more hospitable. He knew a man there who would ask no questions about his fuel requirements as long as that man did not see the hellbug itself. Even among the shadowy folk who prospered by making themselves useful to smugglers of all kinds, Black Stealth One was worth a few questions.
But conditions were rotten, and Hidalgo del Parral was out of the question. Corbett had squandered fuel with a lunatic's abandon during his escape in Texas—though only a lunatic would have pulled half an inside loop in a ravine, and nothing less could have saved him. Some of his extra fuel had splashed around the cockpit, and the two quarts remaining in his plastic container proved a bitch to chase down with that siphon hose while flying the airplane in choppy winds. Skimming low through the state of Nuevo Leon, with the hellbug in its buzzard's plumage, he knew he had been seen at least twice. On one occasion he saw a farmer cross himself frantically, fifty yards away. On the other a goatherd who might have been ten years old waved a hefty stick to ward off this vast predator. By that time Corbett knew that his only assured source of fuel would be Torreon, on the Durango-Coahuila border.
Torreon, enriched by a nearby network of canals that were the envy of many a Mexican farmer and perhaps a sign of hope in a drought-blighted nation, could be a tough town. Corbett had spent a week there overhauling a Cessna for the friend of a friend, in 'eighty-seven. Some of the hangar loungers might remember him and his German surname which had become as acceptable to him as the one he was born with. That might help, but familiarity had its drawbacks: old acquaintances, especially Mexicans in the flying business, might virtually drag him home for a small informal fiesta.
He might cope with that by claiming urgent business. His more serious problem in the Torreon vicinity was the lack of dense cover, where a man might step down from a sixty-foot bird without having to explain himself to curious strangers who could be friendly, or lethally unfriendly, but it was always the friendly ones who liked to gossip. No, he would have to make certain he arrived in darkness. If the little commercial strip outside Torreon was as he remembered it, he could land in high grass near the strip and portage his fuel as he'd done before. Unless, of course, someone had harvested the grass, or started a goddamn junkyard there, or—
The answer to all these surmises was a pass at medium altitude while watching the scanner for anyone who might be sharing his airspace. Corbett made that pass shortly after three in the afternoon to find the Torreon strip unchanged. He chose primary and alternate landing spots, then flew east again. From a dry spot in the marshes beyond Tacubaya it was only thirty miles to Torreon, and here he could wait for dusk in splendid isolation. No sensible Mexican would waste time in such a dismal place as that.
He endured mosquitoes of prodigious size and smoked his last cigarette to dissuade them. He lifted off at dusk, and in the last glow of light beyond the Sierra Madre range, he let the hellbug settle near the Torreon airstrip into wild grass so high that a man on stilts could not have seen over it, high enough to hide the canopy, the wingtips flexing downward as he cut the engine. Corbett fought his way through a grassy thicket and found himself at the edge of the runway. Ten minutes later he found that luck was with him, in the person of one Elfego Velarde. It was young Velarde who had cleaned parts on that Cessna engine, and the tale of a downed crop duster worked again. Velarde laughed at the sight of the plastic bladder, but he had seen old cerveza bottles employed for the same purpose. In Mexico, a man made do with what he had.
Best of all, Velarde could lay his hands on the keys to el patron's Volkswagen van, the kind with a truncated pickup bed behind. Roughly once a month, said the young man, they had to bring fuel to someone in Corbett's situation. That situation, Velarde implied, was often one beyond the law. Velarde even helped wrestle a half-filled drum of avgas onto the van, and accepted enough American dollars to buy himself a few hours of flight instruction. It was with some difficulty that Corbett talked Velarde out of going along to help him refuel, though he accepted a half pack of cigarettes and matches. He drove a half mile before dousing his lights and cutting across stubble toward the runway.
Without his little Maglite, Corbett would have been hopelessly lost once he stepped out of the van onto stubble, and while wondering how a man could lose a sixty-foot airplane in a few acres of grass, he bumped against a wingtip. The rusty old pump on the fuel drum had a long rotary handle that squealed like a terrified animal with each rotation, but it filled that plastic bladder in less than sixty seconds and Corbett fell only once while wallowing through the grass. In a half hour he had filled the main tank and the spare bladder and was jouncing the Volkswagen van back to Velarde. He had grass cuts on both forearms and he would have burned like a torch with the spillage on his clothes. Young Velarde aimed him toward a shower which, astonishingly, even produced hot water.
Kyle Corbett washed off a twenty-five-hundred-mile accumulation of grime outside Torreon before donning his filthy clothes again. He pressed another twenty dollars on Elfego Velarde and had to refuse the young man's offer of a ride three times.
He followed his swath to the hellbug and found some comfort with his jacket bundled behind his neck, thinking not so much about the next day's tactics as about his friends. After years of enforced isolation, focused on machines that could provide a certain sense of accomplishment, a man might convince himself that things were more important than people. Yet here's Velarde, who knows I'm a gringo but doesn't let flags obscure a casual friendship. And Medina, good ol' Speedy, who trusts me more than he does the whole spook hierarchy. God, what a copilot he'd be in Black Stealth One! If he doesn't get nailed for his part in this. He considered the possibility that Raoul Medina might go behind bars. No worse possibility occurred to him.
And then there's Petra. If she had any sense, she'd stick with a nice safe life and design New England bridges, but Petra doesn't run on what they call good sense, she runs on a passion for living and learning. To hell with what "they" call it. What could be more sensible than that?
He chuckled in the darkness. She says I'll be Methuselah when she's forty, and she's right. If I have any sense I'll write this little episode off. Only I have more passion than sense too, and not just for revenge. There's got to be something in genetics because she has the best of Dar Weston, the things I loved him for, the son of a bitch. And she might turn against me the same way.
And it might be worth it, he decided, with a smile that lingered as he began to snore.
FORTY
Mateo Carranza leaned against a corner post of the sheet-tin shed to escape midmorning sun. Karel Vins thought that he seemed more comfortable lolling in dirt than sitting in one of the two Ford Escort rentals that were parked under the salt-corroded metal roof. "I might as well be on garrison duty," Mateo muttered.
Vins, leaning against the blue Ford Escort, lowered his newspaper and leveled an emotionless gaze on the man. And you were always troublesome when idle in a garrison, he thought. "If you were, I would have you cleaning the trash out of here."
Mateo turned his idle gaze toward the empty oil cans, the faded and torn cardboard boxes, the ancient fragments of doped fabric that men had discarded during emergency repairs, perhaps years before. "The next contrabandistas who use this miserable hovel will only leave more," he said, yawning.
Vins knew that it was true. Corrugated cardboard remnants lay pressed between the noses of their Fords and the decayed sheet-tin siding. In another few years the accumulation of trash would make it impossible even to park a small car inside, let alone a damaged aircraft. The amazing thing was that the shed had lasted this long, eaten by salt air, sandblasted by storms, its corner po
sts sunk into dirt that was itself half sand. Most likely, he thought, the roof will meet the garbage halfway. "You need not keep me company, Mateo. Our cover is as fishermen," he said. "You might consider actually fishing, as Jorge does. We will soon grow tired of canned food, and we bought more fishing tackle than three men will need."
Mateo pushed up the bill on his baseball cap and stared indolently toward the salt marsh, half a kilometer distant. "Have you ever eaten a marsh fish, lobo? They are not called bonefish for nothing."
"For all I know there may be none of those here on the Pacific side," Vins replied, folding the paper. "And I do not intend any of us to leave this miserable excuse for an airstrip, for food or anything else, until our man arrives. You may crave fresh fish soon, if he is delayed." He tapped a third-page headline on his day-old Mazatlan newspaper.
Mateo, whose taste in reading ran to a particularly virulent sort of comic book, leaned back and tilted the bill of his cap over his eyes again. "What does it say?"
"That his hostage has been recovered in Texas, and also it implies that Señor Medina falsified his identity very nicely before stealing the airplane. The yanquis believe him to be some other man. Or so they say; who believes the news anymore?" I believe this: Medina and his airplane must be true boyevaya to escape the kind of gauntlet the Americans seem to have put in the air. Aloud, but softly as befitted a hunter near the end of a stalk: "We must not underestimate a man of Medina's determination, Mateo."
Mateo stood up abruptly, brushed dirt from his trousers, and walked outside to relieve himself, urinating onto the sandy soil. Over his shoulder he remarked, "What I do not understand is how this Medina expects to simply disappear afoot from here with fifteen kilos of money."
That had bothered Karel Vins too. They had covered several square kilometers nearby, the latinos afoot and he in one of their rented cars, searching for—a hidden car, motorbike, boat, anything. Aside from the ancient Chevrolet rusting into debris near the road, they had found nothing. I would have sunk a small boat in the shallows somewhere, not readily found by accident and not too near this primitive dirt landing strip or its sheet-tin shed. And if I were Raoul Medina, I would arrive at sundown. Or I would radio confederates who could show up in a most unlikely way. Perhaps by air, thought Vins, and certainly armed.