The Ransom of Black Stealth One

ELEVEN

Gary Macallister didn’t mind the Snake Pit graveyard shift, not even when he drew gate duty. There was so little to do, he could pull a paperback from his lunchbox and read maybe six chapters of Stephen King before first light. When a car did come through after midnight it was usually Ullmer’s old Volvo. Not this time, though.

Gary laid the book facedown under the counter as he spotted lights heading his way, and stepped outside standing tall, tugging at his guard uniform coat. Wickham, the shift captain, had long ago pointed out that when anybody came onto the grounds this late, it was most likely NSA brass on some level. Not this time, though.

The black Ford flicked its lights as if waving for attention, turning aside instead of stopping with its nose at the gate so that Gary had to walk around the corner of the guard shack. Wickham had also said, though it did not yet occur to Gary, that this maneuver kept the video monitor, steadily swiveling to scan the gate area, from seeing past the shack. Gary sighed; probably the driver was lost. It had happened before. Not this time…

Gary saw a girl asleep in the front seat but, as he strode around the front of the car, did not see the driver clearly until he emerged, and thanks to the lingering spell of Stephen King, Gary nearly fainted. Above a worn, zippered leather jacket the driver’s face was the face of a monster, puffed and grotesquely flat, and then Gary realized the man was wearing pantyhose stretched over his head. Gary would have pulled his sidearm but the man had beaten him to it, pointing what might have been a Glock automatic pistol at belt-buckle height.

“Hands on your hips,” said the gravelly voice, not a voice he recalled and not one he enjoyed hearing. Gary complied and swallowed hard. The man glanced quickly at the shack, perhaps judging the location of the video camera. Then he gestured with the pistol. “Turn around and sit down. Give me your coat and hat.”

Gary did it, knowing he had to stay calm enough to memorize the car’s license number and a hell of a lot of other things, having trouble because he was trembling with a rage that was tempered by fear. He felt the muzzle of the handgun behind his ear as he dropped his coat on macadam. “Behave and you’ll be okay. Get cute and I blow your head off. Understood?”

Gary managed to say, “Yeah,” on his second try. He felt his sidearm slide from its holster, heard the rattle and click of its ammunition falling into the man’s hand, knew the weapon was useless as it was thrust back into place. He clasped his hands behind him on command and heard a zipper whine, then felt wide tape binding his hands tighter. At another command he lay prone, wondering if he should try kicking as the tape circled his ankles, knowing damned well he wouldn’t, realizing as his legs were forced back with tape connecting his belt to his ankles that he couldn’t even crawl, now.

“You’re doing fine,” said the voice he couldn’t see, but he doubted it because the last silver strip of duct tape went across his mouth. Gary figured then that the man intended to kill him.

But maybe not yet. From the tail of his eye, Gary saw the man drop the old leather jacket, then don the uniform coat and hat, backing around the edge of the shack now, facing Gary and waving cheerfully as he disappeared toward the shack’s door. And Christ, but it was cold lying there at one o’clock in the morning! A moment later, just as Gary began to test his bonds, the man was back, hatless, cutting the tape from Gary’s belt and ankles with a clasp knife that could have been used for shaving.

The man’s arms were short and thick, and hauled Gary upright as if he weighed nothing. “Open the gate,” he demanded, and Gary had a flash of hope as he rounded the shack with his captor on his heels until he saw his own hat hanging from the video monitor. Wickham might still get curious about that, if he was watching the monitors. Or he might not.

That pantyhosed son of a bitch was sure good with tape, Gary thought, feeling fresh tape link his left wrist to the back of his belt before the clasp knife freed his right hand. Another flash of desire, this time to use the alarm signal, until the man said, “By the way, the woman is a hostage. I want to see something in there, that’s all; then I leave. Punch the wrong access code or get me into a gunfight and she dies. But not before you do.”

Gary flexed his hand carefully, and then punched the code in, and the gate began to slide open. He felt himself propelled outside; watched the man toss his old jacket into the car; then he was made to lie across the Ford’s sloping hood, holding on with one hand, as the man drove the car slowly around and through the opening. He almost fell off as the car stopped, the driver still armed and watching as he stepped back to the shack to retrieve the hat with a flick of his hand. Gary knew the monitor at Wickham’s station would not show the edge of the open gate; its field of view was limited to things outside the gate. You weren’t supposed to have to worry much about what went on inside.

The man parked near the lowered doors of Blue Hangar, which had been partitioned off a week before so that even the guards could not see what was in half of it. The Ford stood where perimeter arc lights permitted a slice of shadow, before the guy got out and whipped the tape from Gary’s mouth. Gary began to wonder how much the bastard already knew about the place. Evidently quite a bit: “Who’s your shift captain, and how many others on this shift?”

Gary swallowed. “Too many. Look, face it, buddy, you better quit while—”

That was as far as he got before the man backhanded him, grabbing him by the collar, leading him to the passenger’s side of the Ford where the woman still slept. “You face this,” said the man. “I succeed: I leave the woman with you and we all live. I fail: we all die, no ifs, ands, or buts. That’s a promise. It means you and I are on the same side. Which do we do, live or die?”

“Shit,” Gary muttered. “Shift captain is Cully Wickham, he’s probably at the comm center. Gabe Trotti’s the other man. Makes his rounds on a weird schedule the comm center gives us.”

“Stays with the shift captain between rounds?”

“How’d you know?” asked Gary, but got no answer.

His captor was silent for a moment, then said, “You know where the monitors are, so you know the best way for us to get to the comm center. We wait for Trotti to make his rounds and follow him back, and we all get to live. Or you screw up,” he added grimly, “and we don’t.”

Gary nodded. “I better have my hat and coat if this is going to work,” he said, wondering again if the guy was going to slip up because if he did for even an instant, by God, Gary would be on him like a coat of paint.

But the man was very careful, shifting hands as he shrugged out of the coat, keeping that evil little weapon pointed where it would give a man a new navel, roughly thirty-eight caliber. He tossed the coat, then the hat, to Gary and followed as Gary moved off toward the hangar’s air-conditioning plant. Gary pulled his ID card and slipped it into the slot, then moved inside the welcoming blackness and waited, crouching. This was it, the moment when he had an advantage because he could see out but no one could see in.

A beam of light speared him, narrowing quickly; one of those little pocket Maglites, naturally, and he was caught crouching with his hands open. “I can just kill you now if this is how it’s going to be,” said the gunman. Gary tried to grin but failed, and flicked on the room lights knowing he’d used up all the hero in him.

Gary led the way to the stairs, hearing the tiny creaks of the metal as he moved upward to the upstairs door, the one that unlocked automatically with the fire alarm circuit but, as only the guards and Ben Ullmer knew, would also open with a guard’s ID card. It had been installed as an internal fire escape for personnel in the Snake Pit library. “I’m gonna turn the lights off now,” Gary said.

“Not ‘til you tell me why.”

“You can see light through a little crack under this door,” Gary explained. “The library night lights aren’t bright, but when we make our rounds we snap on the overheads for a looksee. We’ll know when Trotti goes by.”

“And wait a half hour or more?”

“Sometimes,” Gary agreed.

“I’m double-parked,” the gunman said wryly. “We go in now and take our chances.”

“Yeah, what’s it to you if I get killed,” Gary muttered, but he inserted his card, took a deep breath, and pushed through into the big, dimly-lit room with its steel shelves, holding the very apex of a century’s flight technology, that towered to the ceiling. They moved quickly to the main door with its wire-embedded window, and only a blind man would have missed the sudden flare of light from the hallway outside. Footsteps. A door open down the hall.

“Does he come in here?”

“Always, to hit the lights. He’s supposed to,” Gary said, as if justifying what was about to happen.

The man stepped back, hauling the roll of tape from his jacket fast enough to make Gary flinch again, and Gary might have just possibly had time for his move as the tape ripped, but then that instant was gone forever and the tape went across his mouth. It smelled like chewing gum.

“Lie flat against the wall here,” the man ordered, barely above a whisper, and Gary followed orders again, now more frightened for Trotti than for himself. They weren’t close friends, didn’t even have the same politics; but it was almost worse watching this happen to a colleague you trusted, and who trusted you, than to get it yourself. Almost. Should he kick against the wall? Don’t even think about it…

Another door opened nearer, and soon closed, and then Gary heard the distinct click-step, click-step of Trotti’s shoes with those damned taps he wore to keep his heels from wearing.

Then the swish of an ID card, a faint clack, and the nearside door opened because as always Trotti walked two paces to the main light switch, and with his chin on the tiles, Gary saw the door swing shut but Trotti did not look around at the gunman standing fully in the open behind him, the automatic now in his left hand.

When Trotti did turn, the man hit him a terrible blow just below the sternum, his right fist coming from thigh height and plunging deep into poor Gabe Trotti’s soft gut, and if the gunman hadn’t snatched at Trotti’s coat lapel, Gabe would have sprawled across a row of chairs. Gabe’s feet turned inward, almost dancing really, as he bent double with both hands clutching his belly, hat falling to the floor, Gabe’s bald spot comically and pathetically revealed.

“Down,” said the gunman, and kicked Trotti’s ankle, keeping him from a loud fall by that pitiless lapel grip. Trotti went down on one side in a fetal position, trying to breathe with a diaphragm that was almost totally paralyzed. Gary, who had two older brothers, knew that you didn’t die from a hard right to the gizzard. You just felt like you were going to, and you could no more call for help than you could fart Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

With a quick, hard look toward Gary, the gunman stood over his new victim and tore off strips of tape while Trotti began to gasp a little air, sticking one edge of each strip neatly to the edge of the nearest reading table. That little detail was the thing that made Gary Macallister hate him the most, the way he did everything as if he’d thought it out coldly, maybe done it a thousand times before.

Then he knelt, shifting his gaze to Gary now and then, but talking to Gabe Trotti. “Make one noise and you’ll never make another,” he said, the pistol aligned along Trotti’s big Italian beak. “Breathe through your nose, now,” he added, and fitted the tape cruelly over Trotti’s little mustache.

Trotti’s hands came up, but weakly, and though it was a struggle for a moment with that tape flicking and sticking while Trotti tried to ward it off, it was never much of a contest and soon his wrists were bound behind him. The ankles went even faster but at least, Gary thought, poor old Gabe was breathing well enough to get his color back. His face was a deep red, in fact, as the gunman trussed his ankles to his belt.

By now, the big roll of silver tape was smaller than it had been, and as the gunman looked at the roll, Gary thought that monstrous face would be smiling without the pantyhose. After a practiced glance at the table legs, the man eased two chairs away, dragging Trotti on his belly so that the table legs exactly flanked Trotti’s bent elbows.

It took a moment for Gary to see the logic of it, but when tape linked each elbow to a table leg, and with his knees bent back, there was no way Gabe Trotti could go anywhere, not even bang his feet. Of course a man could bang his nose against the tile, if he were so inclined.

“Now you,” said the man, gesturing with the automatic toward Gary. “But first give me your ID card. And remember if I have to kill any of you, every one of you gets it.”

At least Gary didn’t have to lie facing Gabe’s furious gaze. With his elbows taped to the legs of another table, he wondered what the rustling signified until he managed to turn his head as the gunman stepped into the hall. His shoes stuck out of his hip pockets and he wore Gabe Trotti’s brogans, unlaced, their heels tapping a false message as they moved off.

Gary kept expecting gunfire, hearing only his and Trotti’s breathing, until two sets of footsteps echoed in the corridor a few minutes later. The gunman knew how to use an ID card, shoving an enraged Cully Wickham through the door ahead of him. Gary saw, as the gunman forced Cully to lie prone beside a third table, that the shift captain’s wrists and mouth were already taped.

Wickham’s mistake was trying to kick as the tape circled his ankles. The man knelt on Wickham’s back, bouncing his forehead off the floor with his free hand. “Suit yourself, if you want more of this,” he said, ignoring Cully’s groans. Gary had often wished he could give Wickham a whack like that. Now that somebody had, Gary could only feel helpless rage over it.

Moments later, Cully Wickham lay secured under the heavy table, facing away from the others. Gary could not see the gunman now, but watched as Trotti’s shoes dropped to the floor. He did see the man as he stopped in the corridor doorway.

The guy must’ve been on a tight schedule because he was checking his wristwatch as he spoke. “I’ll be back now and then to check. The man who has managed to get even one arm loose will get a slug through his kneecap. Think about it,” he added darkly, and Gary heard his pace quicken in the corridor.

It was so quiet after that, Gary knew when the phone rang downstairs fifteen minutes later. It stopped, then began again and went on ringing for a long time, the loneliest sound Gary Macallister had ever heard. Shortly afterward, the gunman ducked into the library again, said, “You three just may make it,” and left on the run.

It must have been another ten minutes before Gary heard the soft thrumm of a big motor and creakings of metal. It sounded like hangar doors opening but that didn’t figure, unless the guy was driving his Ford inside Blue Hangar to hide it. For sure, he couldn’t tow those long-winged aircraft away through the gate, and rumor had it that nobody on earth really knew how to fly them.

The two-tone hoots of sirens were so faint at first that Gary thought he was imagining them. But the sounds grew fast, so fast that the chuffing that abruptly started to reverberate from the hangar was soon drowned out, and when he heard tires squalling outside Gary expected to see the gunman burst into the library, back to his hostages. Maybe, Gary thought as feet pounded up the corridor stairs, the guy would be content with the girl in the black Ford.

In the ferocious tumult of the next two hours, Gary Macallister kept asking if the gunman had gone over the fence. It was two hours before someone told him exactly how the guy had gone over it.