The Ransom of Black Stealth One

NINETEEN

“Yeah, that’s it,” said Corbett, talking the girl through her motions, the graceful swept wings responding to her hand on the copilot’s control stick. “She’s going to want to bank to the left when I’m hanging out there; drag and weight both. You’ve got to keep ‘er on an even keel.”

Petra’s voice was tight, and held a quaver. “Just don’t fall. You know I can’t land this thing.” She had seemed willing to wrestle that plastic fuel bag from its niche, but as Corbett explained his desperate move her eyes had grown round with fear.

“We’re only doing forty miles an hour, Petra,” he grunted, turning around so that his rump nudged the instrument console, loosening his restraint harness as far as it would go. “It ought to be easy,” he said, hoping.

And it had better be damned quick, he reminded himself. Ten pounds of fuel remained in the tank; call it a gallon and a half. They were a mile high over the swampy plains of southeastern Georgia, with twenty pounds of avgas in that bag, stinking up the cockpit with fumes. Who had decided the fuel filler cap should be mounted flush in the hellbug’s skin directly behind the pilot? He couldn’t recall. All that mattered now was whether he could fight the airstream, hanging halfway out of his hatch facing aft, and feed that fuel in while trusting his own hostage to keep the aircraft steady. Too many ironies to count. Focus on hooking those straps so they loop around a thigh and an arm, he commanded himself. And don’t think about what happens if you get hung up outside and she has to ride the hellbug down with a dead engine. Time to think about that when it happens. Meanwhile, see that it doesn’t.

Corbett forced himself to grin and wink as he opened his hatch. The girl reacted silently, as if he had just made a repulsive joke, then stared ahead. Good. Now if he could just force the hatch halfway up with his right arm and shoulder—to reach out and find—that—big—filler cap. Got it. Few inches farther back than I thought, almost in the duct. Wind blast isn’t so bad but suction toward the duct gets hairy here. Snap the cap’s lever and twist. Careful; pull the cap in and drop it in the seat. He had feared that the airstream would siphon the remaining fuel out, so he had throttled back until Black Stealth One was barely controllable by a novice. “So far, so good,” he said, his head halfway out, hauling the fuel bag to the lip of the hatch. The girl did not reply.

Eighteen inches below the hatch lip lay a tiny trapdoor, a spring-loaded fairing. It had been designed as a flush-mounted step, so that a pilot could shove inward with his toes and plant his foot during entry or exit. It remained to be seen whether he could stick his heel into that niche, while facing backward toward the hellbug’s great inlet scoop. The inward curve of the skin made it fiendishly tough for a man with short, thick legs.

Facing backward, sliding his right leg over the hatch sill, Corbett found that he could not reach that foothold unless he slipped more of his other leg free of the harness; and this was not a good time for a man without a parachute to look down. Inching out, he felt his heel connect with something that yielded. He began to push down with that heel, trying to straighten his leg. Slowly, using all his strength, he began to rise, the hatch heavy across his right shoulder because of the wind load.

Corbett’s sense of balance was finely honed, and he knew that the hellbug was starting a shallow bank, just as he’d said it must. He was already fumbling the fuel bag into his arms when the girl made her correction, but she made it too fast.

The drooping left wing came up swiftly, inertia forcing his face against the fuel bag, and his heel slipped from its purchase. Instantly Corbett was hanging halfway out, his right-hand trouser leg flapping as the hellbug tried to inhale him, the harness biting into the calf muscle of his left leg, the stench of avgas thick in his lungs. Corbett could hear tiny moans of anguish from the girl, almost the same sounds some women made during sexual climax. His left arm and leg strained convulsively, dragging his gonads across the sill so hard it took his breath away.

Fighting a wave of nausea from the pain, he turned his head and saw her, glancing quickly from him to the instruments and back to him, and he tried to make it seem less than the near thing it had been. “Nice try,” he gasped.

“Don’t say that, oh God, I’m trying,” she moaned.

“Shut up. Steady as she goes,” he grated, and found the step with his heel again. Still weak with the ache that radiated from between his legs, he tried three times before he could straighten his trembling right leg. He could feel the craft trying to bank, saw control surfaces move as the girl responded. Now he had the fuel bag in both hands, the hatch lip biting into his left forearm as he fumbled with his free right hand to introduce the bag’s flaccid neck into the filler opening.

He took a deep breath and forced upward against the bag, tilting it, partly flattening it against the cabin skin. Fuel began to pour out. Most of it went into the filler neck, but a filmy mist of high-octane fuel began to stream backward, sucked directly into the hellbug’s gaping mouth. He glanced back, focusing into the huge opening, and that was a mistake because it made him think about things he did not want to consider at this moment.

Inside the duct was a whirling blur of motion, the big impeller blades of Black Stealth One, sucking an explosive mixture of air and fuel through, hurling it out behind. The inlet’s screen mesh, solid enough to deflect a bird, might keep him from being swallowed if he lost his purchase. But if that fine mist of avgas hit anything hot on its way through, the sudden firebloom would scatter their fragments over half of Georgia.

Corbett concentrated on flattening the bag, grateful for the wide filler neck, feeling the almost imperceptible slip of his heel from its purchase in the shallow step. A half cupful of fuel sloshed out and was swallowed in an instant by whirling impeller blades. Never again! Didn’t have to risk the kid with this prehistoric in-flight refueling, could’ve landed and taken my chances.

He was tiring; could actually feel the energy leaking from arms and legs as he hugged the hatch sill. A half gallon of fuel was visible, caught in a fold of the translucent plastic, and when his heel slipped from its tiny ledge this time, he was ready. His fitful lunge inward against the harness pulled his crotch across the sill, and he was able to maintain his grip on the bag only because it was nearly empty.

He dragged the bag inside, found the filler cap without looking, managed to reach outside and twist it into place without dropping it. And then he was inside again, struggling weakly from the harness loops that had saved him twice. He twisted in the seat, so drained that he could barely sit erect, and somehow managed to drag himself into his harness properly.

He reached for the control stick. “Good work,” he said. “I’ll take it now.”

“Your face is red as a beet,” she said in wonder, relinquishing her stick.

“Embarrassment,” he said, and gave her a sick smile.

She raised her hands aloft, making claws of her fingers. “Aaagggh, how I hate that macho man stuff! Why don’t you just admit it, Corbett? It’s okay to be scared; I was scared too.”

He nodded at the fuel gauge, then said, “You handle fear your way, I’ll handle it my way. Sure I was scared; I’ve got nicotine stains in my shorts. I’ve also got a beer gut, which is why my face is red from huffing and puffing, okay?”

“That’s honest,” she said. “And speaking of stains, I, uh, I’ve got to go again. I really do, in the worst way.”

“Go ahead. Jesus,” he exclaimed suddenly, “you didn’t know! There’s a relief slot built into each seat, Petra. This thing was designed to fly two days without landing.” He snugged back into the seat, tapped the printed legend set into the forward lip of the seat. “It’s kind of self-explanatory; works for both sexes, they tell me.”

He made a show of putting on his minitel, attending to his instruments, ignoring her as she studied the mysteries of a seat with its own small trapdoor.

After a minute or so he heard her cycling the little actuator experimentally. She muttered, “It sure isn’t the Ritz. I’ll have to shuck my jeans.”

“Or stain ‘em. Suit yourself, we’ll be up here another hour if I can stretch it that far.”

Another long moment while he consulted his charts again, making himself conspicuously busy. Then he heard her say, “Good lord, it even has tissue. Am I doing my doo-dahs on some poor farmer’s head?”

“Fluids go through. Solid waste is retained,” he said, as impersonal as he could make it while a young woman prepared to use a toilet beside him. At the moment, he was slowly gliding down from twelve thousand feet with the engine off. At five thousand he would restart and begin a gradual climb again. It was slow, and it was chancy; but it could greatly increase their range.

Because he could hear her progress he began to hum a tune, attending to the intricacies of the “pixel” program on the video monitor.

From the girl, in strained sarcasm: “Louder music.”

If she could joke about it, he could. “What would you like, Handel’s Water Music?”

A chuckle, deep as a man’s. “Better try the twenty-one-gun salute from the 1812 Overture.”

Presently she sighed in relief. Corbett paid her little attention because he had just found the “buzzard” subroutine, and punched it in while craning his neck to see the upper surface of the wing. “It works,” he breathed. “My God, how it works!”

The girl, zipping her jeans, studied the monitor. “What did you do?”

“Check the wing on your side,” he suggested.

She did, and gasped. “It’s—oh wow, we’ve got feathers, Corbett!” She laughed in sheer delight, then swapped grins with him. “Are vultures really dark brown?”

“This one is,” he said. “You notice, out near the tips, the spaces between the big pinion feather patterns are tan and olive green. That probably works for anyone looking down. Can’t see the underside, but—”

“Probably blue to fool people looking up,” she finished for him. “It’s not really perfect, from close up like this.”

“Give ‘em another five years,” Corbett replied. “Meanwhile, when they debrief you, somebody’s going to shit a brick. This is ‘eyes only’ stuff, Petra. For God’s sake, don’t even hint about it to outsiders.”

She nodded and fell silent while he rechecked their position. Their path had taken them past Athens, then southward over coils of sluggish river and marshland. He saw her studying the terrain. “The town to our left is Vidalia; river’s the Oconee,” he said.

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.”