The Ransom of Black Stealth One

EIGHTEEN

“If you’re gonna keep moving around,” said Ullmer, “better put on your helmet. Could get bumpy up ahead.”

Dar had been peering from portholes of the Learjet’s cabin, an upholstered tube scarcely wider than a man’s reach, shifting sides every time his anxiety demanded it. The Lear banked gracefully, giving wide berth to a lump of cumulus, and turned west at over five hundred miles an hour. Dar squinted at the brilliant multiple halo surrounding the cloud, let his gaze roam ahead toward the region where their first definite sighting had been reported. For an instant, something in the north face of the nearby cloud brushed the edge of his vision, a glimpse so fleeting that it did not register as anything more than a faint dark line. To Dar Weston, it registered as a tiny portion of the horizon seen through cloud. It was the wingtip of Black Stealth One, protruding from cloud-wisp forty miles from its reported position. “Pretty smooth so far,” Dar said, but buckled himself into the seat across from Ullmer.

“Some cloud cover building to the south.” Ullmer nodded out his porthole. “Not much for us, but it might be rough on the hellbug.” He had patched in his headset to the NSA console that took up most of the partition separating the cabin from the Lear’s pilot. Long ago, Ben Ullmer had found that he could listen to three designers argue simultaneously. It was even easier to monitor three channels, a feat he found possible on the NSA console. Its video display, similar to Corbett’s, began to show moving pink pixels that brightened as he watched. The exhaust of Black Stealth One had not registered because Ben himself had supervised the routing of its exhaust for maximum cooling inside the central duct.

Dar, plugging his headset in, heard his own pilot say, “Blue leader, Lear three-two-eight entering your airspace, speed five-zero-zero knots at one-zero thousand five hundred, bearing two-seven-five magnetic, with Wasp and Hornet, over.”

With frequent scrambled voice communication to Elmira, Dar had known for two hours that Terry Unruh had coded him as “Hornet,” Ullmer as “Wasp.” Mindful that the pilot of Black Stealth One might be monitoring any available frequency, Unruh had also passed certain instructions to military air commands by land line—a channel not available to the hellbug. The men combing the enormous volume of space near Athens, Georgia, knew far more than they were supposed to say on any radio channel. They knew, for example, that they could engage that tailless wraith only as directed by Hornet or Wasp.

A young, hard voice responded, “Roger, Lear three-two-eight, I have you on scope but no bandit to report on radar, IR, or visual. That initial sighting may have been in error unless bandit can hover in a cloud indefinitely.”

“Wasp here, Blue leader,” Ullmer cut in. “That’s a possible affirmative depending on how good he is, over.”

“You’ve got us curious to see him, Wasp. Want someone to try flushing him out? We have an A-ten on the deck, and Navy at three-zero thousand. A pair of Broncos stationed at five thousand, they claim they can loiter in pea soup.”

“Don’t do that,” Dar exclaimed, forgetting what radio protocols he knew. Ullmer’s glance was surprised but not hostile. Flushing slightly, Dar went on, “Uh, Hornet here, Blue leader. Be advised the pilot is not alone, over.” You could kill my daughter, you callous idiot, he raged inwardly.

“Wilco, Hornet,” said the F-16 pilot, in the bored, “no-sweat” tones cultivated by fighter pilots. “We can widen our pattern. I’ve got four-zero minutes fuel left. Red flight is on alert and can take up our station, over.”

Ullmer saw Dar’s hopeful nod. F-16’s were less than ideal for this work, and Ben had offered little hope that they would succeed. Still, “Wasp to Blue leader,” he said. “Understand your offer. If the Broncos hold the tight pattern, we’ll circle higher while you widen your pattern. We’d appreciate your replacements.”

“Wilco, Wasp. Blue leader out.”

Dar leaned back, pinching the bridge of his nose as if to squash the pain building between his eyes. A hell of a time for eye strain when I’m so near recovering my only child, he thought. Dar was not what others would call a believer in fate, but as he pressed his face to the porthole again he wondered if this might be some kind of retribution for choosing to place his country ahead of his family.

He had recognized the choice in ‘fifty-three, while engaged to the willowy, elegant Helen Longworth. Her father, CIA deputy Creighton Longworth, had made his approval plain and the match had seemed natural, even inevitable. The whole arrangement had toppled when Helen made her demand. She had grown up without her absentee father, she said, and did not intend to marry a man who spent years at overseas posts where wives were not permitted.

Helen had assumed that her father could simply adjust Dar’s work, as a marketing executive might adjust the travels of a salesman. She met their explanations head-on, and eventually returned Dar’s ring. Creighton Longworth observed to Dar that every parent is a Frankenstein who creates his own monsters, and continued to champion Dar in the Company. It took Dar over a year to realize that the failure had been his own: he would never consider marrying unless the woman needed him. Yet she might not see him for years at a stretch. Helen had been wise.

After that, Dar settled for alliances with women who needed him for the short term, and honorably admitted to each that he would never marry. He made certain that Creighton Longworth knew their names. He took pains to avoid any entanglement that might jeopardize his work. Until Dani Klein.

Stationed at Langley after his Near East posting, Dar made long trips to the Philippines but met Dani at a Washington soiree during a three-month stateside respite in 1964. Small and blond, Dani Klein had been born to German Jewish refugees in wartime Baltimore. The girl had gone to Europe when her parents repatriated but remained an American citizen, returning to America at age twenty-four, fluent in four languages and lively as a sparrow. A blue-eyed, freckled blonde, Dani Klein shattered Dar’s stereotype of the German Jew.

He was surprised to find she thought him endearingly awkward. She was amazed to learn he thought her sexy. Perhaps, he said, it was that hint of an exotic accent in her voice. Old Longworth saw no reason why Dar should avoid a young State Department translator, leaving her Jewish background undiscussed in the Old Boy network because, of course, Dar Weston never intended to marry.

In 1966, while sharing a weekend suite at a Vermont country inn with Dani, Dar told her he would soon be leaving again. He said nothing about the Philippines or spy aircraft; only that he understood why she could not wait for him.

Dani, sitting nude and cross-legged in artless glory on sheets damp from their lovemaking, stopped him with a forefinger over his lips. “You understand nothing, my love. Why should I not wait, so long as you will come back?”

“Time moves slowly when you’re young,” he said. “I could be gone six months, maybe more. It’s not fair to ask that.”

“Find me a fair world; I will emigrate,” she replied, her gray eyes serious. “In the meantime, like you, I have my work. Even if you left me, I would have that.”

He drew her into his arms, kissing her closed eyes, feeling her small perfect breasts against his body, and swore that he would never leave her by choice. They made love more frequently and more tenderly that weekend than ever before, or ever after.

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.

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 Goddamned 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.