The Ransom of Black Stealth One

TWENTY-FOUR

Corbett’s first awareness on waking was of dim light; his second, that it shouldn’t be. He ruined an armrest shoving up from it and came within an inch of stepping on the legs of Petra Leigh. She lay sleeping on the floor beside the old couch, one arm flung across the dirty linoleum, his leather jacket folded under her head. He stepped over her carefully and consulted his watch: nearly seven in the morning. Or the evening? Hard to tell. He heard the distant racketing thunder of a jet aircraft, realized that Black Stealth One lay fully exposed to anyone flying a search pattern, and bolted from the little store unsteadily, making no allowances for the early-morning twinges that time had begun to sift into his joints.

The hellbug was in costume. From his view it was easy to see, but its surfaces were mottled to match the ill-tended truck garden as seen from above. He had shut down all systems on landing, he was certain of it, but someone had energized the pixel program, probably hours ago. “Kid, you are a pistol,” he said aloud, then quietly stuck his head into the shed. Nasal masculine snores echoed softly in the little structure. Corbett returned to the store wondering why Petra had not shot the fool, yet somehow relieved. It took a lot of subtle gears to make the kid tick like that—and keep telling yourself she’s a kid, he thought. Isn’t twenty-two still a kid? Isn’t it?

She was in the bathroom. “Why can’t you just walk around like everybody else,” she said, emerging freshly scrubbed and radiantly irritated. “Scare a person to death,” she grumbled, and went straight to the upright cooler where she selected a quart of skim milk. She squatted before a wire rack then, studying the scant choices in cellophane-wrapped snacks.

Corbett shrugged and sought the bathroom himself, noting with some surprise that the pistol was still snug in his armpit. He used the throwaway razor lying at the sink, telling himself it was only to make himself feel refreshed, that it had nothing to do with Petra Leigh. Whatever her motives, she had taken charge while he slept, and he hadn’t awakened with his own gun barrel in his ear. He found that fact strangely unsettling as he returned to her.

He strode past the counter, pausing to open the cash register under the scrutiny of the implacable old Westclox. Nothing lay inside but small change. He glanced at her as he was choosing a quart of buttermilk.

“Fifty-seven dollars,” she said, patting her jeans. “Bobby owes me that much in wear and tear.”

The hum of an engine filtered in from the road, and the hum was not rising in tone but falling. Corbett heard the faint squeal of brakes and ducked down into shadows, seeing Petra squat behind the counter. They waited silently, trading silent eye contact as they heard tires on gravel. The engine stopped. A horn demanded attention it was not going to get. After an interminable thirty seconds they heard a starter, the engine’s thrumm, and then the vehicle pulled away again. Corbett eased up from the shadows, watching a Dodge van tow a flat-bottom aluminum boat out of sight. He rubbed his arms to rid himself of adrenaline and stepped over to the snack racks, swigging on buttermilk as he chose his breakfast. If she wasn’t going to mention that van, he wouldn’t either.

“Twinkies? Christ, how can you eat that stuff,” he said, wrenching open a bag of Laura Scudder’s potato chips.

“I was thinking the same thing about you.” She gave him an imp’s grin and opened another package of Twinkies.

He knew she was watching, waiting for him to start talking about important things as he nosed around, rummaging in shelves stocked for the Florida sportsman, hefting the twin of the five-gallon gas can he had bought the day before. Now she would be all right, no doubt about it. How long will she wait after I’m gone before she uses that telephone? And how much credibility will she have, especially on the Cuba ploy? Then he saw the coil of tubing with its fist-sized rubber bulb on a lower shelf, and began to chuckle as he brought it into the light. “Well I’m damned,” he said, inspecting the rubber for cracks.

Around a mouthful of junk food she replied, “What else is new?”

“A fuel siphon,” he said, elated. “I might just cobble up a—” Then he stopped. “Nothing. Petra, I don’t know why you’re still here. What’s more, I don’t want you to tell me. You’re going to have to repeat it all later today. And your Uncle Dar might not be able to help you. He might not even want to; we’re not playing high-school fuckaround games. For the record, I’ve got a gun and I’ll use it if you try to go for help. I’ve already killed a man and that should’ve scared the hell out of you, maybe so scared you didn’t dare run during the night for fear I was playing possum. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” she said, wiping an urchin’s rime of milk from her mouth. “After that scum attacked me, I was half crazy with fear.” Her eyes grew round, serious. “I really was, Kyle. I’d been trying to get their help to catch you, but they were cutting counterfeit liquor stamps at the time.” A pause, and a headshake. Then, “Were you just trying to get me back in the airplane?”

He said, “Yes,” and saw that she did not believe him. “Why the hell else would I have landed?” She just looked at him, and then smiled the kind of smile that a younger man would fight dragons for. “God dammit, Petra, stop that! What do I have to do for a little credibility; beat up on you?”

“It wouldn’t help,” she said. “I saw you. You were so mad in that shed, you were crying.”

“I give up,” he snarled, snatching the fuel can and unlocking the store’s front door. “All I ask is, let me know before you use that phone.”

He was back in seconds, searching the place for the switch that energized the gas pumps, finding it on the wall near the cash register. He filled the gas can, feeling a humid morning breeze on his face and wondering how he might route a slender siphon hose from the cockpit of Black Stealth One to the tank. Hurrying back into the store he noticed that the “BEER” sign was lighted, and slapped the pump switch off. Relocking the front door, he saw that the lights were off again. In the ensuing silence he heard the distant drone of an aircraft. If they hadn’t spotted the hellbug yet, maybe they couldn’t. He might have plenty of time for some modifications.

As he was on his way out the back door, Petra followed. “Let me take that hose thing,” she offered.

“Don’t help me, Petra. They’ll make you sorry.” He kept walking toward the garden.

She kept pace. “I’m afraid not to,” she said, and took the siphon hose from him. “You might hurt me.” She ignored his whispered, blunt response.

Corbett needed two minutes to locate the fat polymer tube curving down from the filler neck of Black Stealth One to its tank; another five minutes with his knife to make a hole through the upper surface of the tube because he had to peel a plastic panel away behind his headrest. At last he inserted the end of the siphon hose into the hole and taped it securely with strips of his duct tape. With Petra’s help, he routed the hose so that the rubber bulb lay between the seats in easy reach, the hose’s lower end submerged in the fuel can. He tested the system by squeezing the bulb rapidly, listening to the faint sounds coming from behind his headrest. He topped off the plastic bag from the metal can and then made a preflight inspection, ignoring Petra until she walked back to the store alone. When she gets the full treatment, they’ll learn I have an extra ten gallons on board. Well, that’ll convince ‘em I can make Cuba easily, maybe Haiti. There’s going to be airplanes over Key West wingtip to wingtip when they’ve wrung this poor kid out, God help her.

When he had checked the aircraft over, he stood for a moment with folded arms staring at the thing he had helped to create. They didn’t have to change much. Battery location moved aft to counterbalance all that computer stuff; little wing strakes added. Hats off to you, Ullmer—and you too, Speedy. It was not merely the Rolls Royce of aircraft: it was the Chaparral, the Ferrari prototype, the Le Mans winner of aircraft.

He felt gooseflesh then, knowing that Black Stealth One was the sole object in all his remaining life that he would risk dying for—and that it was his. Some people felt that way about homes or cars; a few, about certain boats. It was probably those few who could sail around the world alone, visit any exotic port, who might come nearest to understanding his affection for the hellbug. For him, however, there would be no port authorities or border police to hinder his comings and goings. His could be a godlike freedom unknown to any other person on earth. That was the entire point; not to smuggle this or that, but to wish himself at a place, and know that he could go there.

He’d need to install some wing tanks for that, which implied several bases of operations. The very idea would have been solitary fantasy without the prospect of money. I don’t know where I’ll keep the hellbug, but I do know I’ll need enough money for hangars. And Speedy’s going to help me surprise some folks who are holding a bundle of that. Without that money, I can’t keep the hellbug. No choice but to take the risk. One thing sure: I’ll destroy this beauty before I let anyone else have it. It’s mine; it’s my price, they owe it to me and when this is over we’ll all be even.

Or I’ll be dead.

He stepped up into the cockpit and flicked switches, moving the throttle gently, hearing a hollow click and a sound that was almost the low growl of a big animal. “Oh, Christ,” he said, flicking the switches again.

He did not look up until she was striding through the furrows toward him, calling. “Kyle, come quick! It’s on TV.”

He shuffled back to the store and followed her to the bedroom which smelled of sour sweat, a room no Mexican peasant would have allowed into such a scabrous condition. Two empty quart bottles of Old Sunny Brook—or perhaps a local product masquerading as Old Sunny Brook—lay beside a bedside table, and a nearly full bottle sat by a snuff glass that might, once upon a time, have been clean. At the moment it looked as if bait had escaped from it. Petra leaned against one wall because it was preferable to the bed, nodding toward the big color set with its audio subdued.

“…released this morning,” said a handsome, blow-dried gentleman holding a sheaf of pages in a studio. “National Security Agency spokesmen would not comment on the skyjacker’s identity, but sources say military and state law enforcement agencies are in close cooperation in a manhunt stretching from the Canadian border to Florida. More on this story now from Ynga Lindermann in Monroe, Georgia.”

Cut to a statuesque blonde holding a cordless mike while a breeze flickered in her hair. Behind her stood a small commercial hangar. A wind sock nodded near a runway, and Corbett recognized a Schweizer sailplane in the background. “The stealth aircraft stolen from NSA near Elmira, night before last, may have landed here yesterday afternoon outside Monroe. If it did, airport manager Mel Ryder says he did not see it. Neither did any of several sailplane enthusiasts at—”

Corbett laughed aloud. “I dug a hole and buried it,” he informed the reporter.

“Shh!” Petra’s glance was formidable.

“…was positively identified eight thousand feet over Monroe by a Georgia state trooper, a sharp-eyed ‘bear in the air’ whose small Cessna could not keep pace with the supersecret military plane. Chase planes crisscrossed airspace near here for hours afterward, and at least two armed, propeller-driven assault aircraft made emergency landings for fuel at small civilian fields near Athens and Vidalia, both in Georgia.”

The photogenic blonde pointed toward her horizon, giving millions a view of her profile, and continued: “Later in the evening, another reported sighting placed the stolen aircraft in northern Florida, but a trucker who watched this sighting with a highway patrolman claimed, in his words, ‘I know a bird when I see one, and I saw one.’ Federal authorities clamped down on further details, but at this hour it’s common knowledge that airspace over the entire southeastern United States is filled with military aircraft of every possible description, including AWACS in-flight refueling tankers. Whatever they’re looking for, they do not seem to have found it. Ynga Lindermann, in Monroe, Georgia, for CBS. Back to you, Chris.”

Again, the unruffled gent in the studio: “And still no word on the identity of the hostage, pending certain identification by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In other news, talks on reduction of tensions with the Mexican government are underway, although drug-enforcement agents …”

Corbett walked out, chuckling, leaving Petra to follow. “AWACS my ass,” he chuckled. “KC one thirty-fives are for in-flight refueling, not radar surveillance. And the Feebs know who you are, for sure. Why don’t TV people get things right?”

“They got one thing right. I heard several airplanes go over in the night,” Petra said. “I went out and set the pixel program for you.”

“I know you did,” Corbett said. “It took a lot more out of the battery than I thought it would.”

“Any problem with that?” Perhaps too defensively.

“No—except that there’s not enough power to start the fucking engine.”

She gasped; put a fist to her mouth, chewing at a knuckle. Then, accusingly: “You were going to leave without—without saying good-bye?”

He put his hands out, shaking them as though holding a two-foot cocktail shaker, and burst out, “All right: good-bye! Bon voyage, adios, ciao, for God’s sake, I know you were trying to help. I’m sure you did, in fact, but pretty soon there won’t be enough juice to keep the computer program going, or some friend of the guy I shot will come poking around, and,” he caught himself, sighed, and went on more softly, “I’ve got to find some way to fire the hellbug up.”

“Can you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, if I can find a pair of car batteries. The hellbug uses twenty-eight volts, one car battery won’t do it.”

“How about the car outside?”

“That’s one, if it works. I’ll see. You could scout around, see if there’s another one anywhere on the premises.” With that, he hurried out to the rusting Pontiac and checked under its hood.

When he returned, she showed him empty hands. “Never mind, the battery’s all but dead out there,” he said.

“What if I hitched a ride and bought a pair of good ones? I’ve got fifty-seven bucks,” she said brightly.

“Of all the dumb ideas you ever had,” he began, and sighed. “You have any idea what they’d do to you for that?”

“You saved my life last night, Kyle Corbett.”

He cocked his head at her. “Is that your real reason?”

Hesitation. Then, “A lot of it, yes. Most of it.” Passionately: “Stop cross-examining me! Do you want those batteries or don’t you?”

“I’ve got to have ‘em,” he admitted, “unless— Look, I might be able to mill the impeller blades over by hand. But I’ll need somebody in the cockpit to handle the ignition and throttle. It’s a long shot.”

“Longer than waiting for batteries?”

He thought of the constant drain on the system from the energy keeping the skin camouflaged. “Maybe not.” He stood up, headed for the back door. “You want to help?”

“Yes. On one condition,” she said hesitantly.

“Hunh! Short of giving up the hellbug, it’s yours.”

“Then I’ll tell you later,” she replied.

Corbett’s small tool selection included a multiblade screwdriver, and its crosspoint tip was not quite too small for the filament-filled nylon screws securing the intake screens. He removed the screen on the passenger’s side, a huge crescent of stiff plastic mesh, then let Petra sit in the pilot’s seat while he coached her. “Remember to keep the pixel program off during startup; we need all the juice we can get,” he finished. “Yes, we could be seen from the air, but it’s a chance we have to take. If you hear an airplane, of course, give me a shout and hit the pixel program. Clear?”

“I think so; yes,” she said, straightening her shoulders, nodding herself into belief. “Clear. Wait,” she said as he began to ease himself into the intake. “Is this dangerous? For you in there, I mean.”

“No. Shut up and deal,” he growled, and resumed climbing in.

“Liar,” he heard her say, and he grinned at the big carbon-boron impeller blades.

If it starts and she pours too much coal to it, this sucker is going to literally eat me, he thought, judging the strength of rigid airfoiled struts that radiated out to the big duct, just ahead of the blades. Maybe one of these radial struts would stop me, or maybe not. Well— In the semidarkness, he wrestled his gloves on, trying to ignore the pinch of the duct where it narrowed under his hip. He grasped one of the blades near the hub, a hub at least two feet across with a bullet-shaped spinner protruding behind. It moved with relative ease.

He could reach the blades with only one hand, lying with his legs protruding from the maw of the great creature, but found that it might be enough. He heard subtle whirrs inside the fuselage skin near his chest, where the engine lay, as he grasped another blade and pulled, the impeller beginning to move fast enough to blur. That was only an illusion of high speed, he knew, because there were so many blades. He did not call out until the impeller was moving as fast as he could move it. Then: “Contact!”

He did not move away as he should have, but kept flicking his gloved hand out, trying to keep the blades moving. He heard a stutter of electric fuel pumps, then a chuff. He snatched for another blade, missed, got his knuckles rapped hard. Another chuff, and another, and then nothing but the tick-tick of fuel pumps. “Kill it,” he called, and dragged himself out backward, all but collapsing on the dry ground.

She knelt beside him, watching as he drew off the glove and flexed his bruised knuckles. She held the hand briefly, gently, then stood up. “I’m going after those batteries.”

“No! It could take hours. I have another idea,” he said, grunting to his feet, donning the glove again. He began to refit the intake screen, working steadily, attaching all the screws loosely before snugging them tight.

Petra’s voice came to him with hollow echoes because she was peering into the duct. “You crazy son of a bitch, Corbett, how did you think you could—?”

“It’s the impeller blades,” he explained, laying his tools aside, moving to the rear of the aircraft with its three-foot exhaust aperture. “They’re angled forward, so I had to reach inside to the trailing edges. But if I can get in there from the tailpipe, I can grab the trailing edges easy. No sweat.”

“Except that if it does start, it’ll blow you out of there like, like,” she waved her arms.

“Like shit through a tin horn,” he finished for her, running a hand along the polished inside of the tailpipe. “It’s smooth enough, and the exhaust is cool air. You just concentrate on keeping the rev counter below twenty percent, so you don’t blow me clean through the wall of that shed.”

“I wonder how our friend Bobby is, in there,” she said, watching him remove his shoes.

“Counting sheep, or his many sins,” Corbett replied, and began to wriggle inside. His voice reverberated through the fuselage: “Better get in, my weight’s about to tip this bird on her tail.”

He felt the gentle rocking of the craft, then eased himself forward, surprised at the roominess of the exhaust chamber. The waste gates lay flush in recesses, hiding the ducts that would yawn open when the tailpipe was closed, and he moved carefully because he could feel the duct skin flexing beneath his hands and legs. He could see, dimly, lettered decals on the big spinner that pointed bulletlike toward the rear. A good sign; it meant Ullmer intended someone to crawl in there now and then.

The impeller, over four feet in diameter, required a duct big enough to allow him to sit sideways. He noticed the engine exhaust vents, fed through curved radial vanes into the airstream, and realized he could get a lungful of fuel-rich exhaust. Finally, with stocking feet braced across the duct, he reached for an impeller blade. Here he could reach between the vanes and grab a blade near the outer tip, and with both hands. He began to breathe hard, deliberately hyperventilating, and pulled downward on a blade. He could feel it flex slightly, and shifted his fingers inward.

He grasped another blade, realizing that both hands made a huge difference, and pulled, now adjusting his fingers, now using his hands on different blades. He felt a tightening in his breast, puffed harder, spun harder.

“I hear an airplane,” Petra called.

“Forget it,” he bawled over the whine of mechanical friction, knowing that he would never have more strength than at this moment. “Now— or never; contact!”

The rattle of pumps, and a chuff; several more, and he kept clawing at the blades, turning his head to face the rear; and then a great outpouring of gray, greasy fumes that roiled around him as he went to his knees facing rearward, and a gentle push on his rump became a gale that hurled him like a cork from a long-necked bottle, turning him in a half flip, and then he was staring up from the ground into a bright morning sky, coughing so hard he could not get his breath.

His throat seared from fumes, he managed to lurch up, grabbing his shoes, ducking under the wing, calling to Petra. “The pixel! Paint her,” he gasped, and fell on his knees.

Petra did it, the dull gleam of gunmetal gray changing magically to mottled green and brown as he watched. He stood up, hawking and spitting, and leaned in to see the instrument cluster.

Petra, misjudging his reason, leaned down and clasped her hands onto his shoulders, and he felt a resounding kiss atop his head. “Nineteen percent on the tach,” she said proudly. The skin of Black Stealth One purred softly as Corbett leaned against it and nodded. “Go to twenty-five,” he said, gulping clean air. “Gotta build up the battery awhile.”

He wished, watching her as she handled the throttle, that some woman, just once, had fondled his body the way Petra Leigh caressed those controls.

They left the craft with its engine idling, and Corbett did not understand at first why Petra wanted to cut their captive loose, or at least drag him to the road. They walked slowly toward the store until he asked, “Look, why can’t you just point the guy out when the cops get here?”

“Because,” she said firmly, “I’m going with you.”

“You’re—I’llbegod-damned if you are,” he blurted, and stopped.

“And you’re going to take me at gunpoint,” she added.

“To fucking Cuba?”

“You’re not going to Cuba. You let me go so that I’d send them off in the wrong direction.” Not in questioning tones, but a flat declaration.

“Also,” he said, “so you won’t get killed if I make a mistake. I’ve made a few, you know.”

“And what I know, they’ll soon find out. Because I’ll damned well tell them, Kyle, I’ll tell them everything I can think of if you break your promise now!” She was almost shouting as she finished, eyes blazing, breast heaving wonderfully, he thought.

“What promise?”

“I said I’d help you on one condition. You said yes. The condition is that you take me as far as I want to go.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. I thought about it a lot last night.” She folded her arms.

“Would you mind telling me why?”

She hesitated, looking from him to the softly purring aircraft, back to him again. “I can’t. Too many reasons. I—well, if I’m in trouble, after last night I can’t make it any worse by another day. Are you really going to turn that incredible machine over to someone else?”

“And what if I do?”

“You’re crazy. I wouldn’t. Whatever you get for it, it couldn’t be better than keeping it.” She saw something in his face, perhaps a recognition of sorts, and added, “You know what I fantasize, while I’m on a damn bridge design project? That it’s my spaceship. I can land it on the moon, or the asteroid Vesta. Don’t laugh, it’s a feeling that just fills me up to bursting, something that could lift me away from everyday things, of, of—”

“Freedom,” he supplied.

“Yes! I know I’m taking awful risks, maybe freedom is always risky. But dammit, I’ve been secure for twenty-two years, and I know what I want. I know you have it, and you owe me a little piece of it without treating me like a Goddamned juvenile delinquent. At least for another day or so. Please, Kyle?”

He saw that she was fighting back tears. “I’m giving you the freedom to get yourself seriously killed; you know that.”

“I’m of age, Kyle! If I wanted to drive a race car like my dad did, nobody could stop me.”

“Why don’t you?”

She thought about it a moment, wiped her eyes, and grinned. “Too many rules,” she replied.

“Shit,” he murmured.

“What’s wrong?”

“I was born thirty years too soon,” he said, and cocked his head. “Don’t move,” he cautioned. “Here it comes.”

The next moment her eyes grew wide because she could hear its approach but she stood there immovable as the little Northrup F-5 howled overhead at perhaps two thousand feet, banking as it passed. Corbett looked up and waved for the few seconds it was in sight. “Don’t worry,” he said as his hands came down. “He’d need a mile of freeway to land that thing. We’ve got a few minutes, but if he takes up orbit over us, believe me, you don’t want to go.”

“And if he doesn’t, what do we do with lover-boy?”

“I’ll cut him loose and—no, he’d see the hellbug and his testimony might hurt you.”

“I won’t let you kill him, Kyle, I don’t know why but—”

“I didn’t intend to. Wait: in that bedroom there’s a bottle of booze. I want you to stuff everything in the hellbug and wait for me. Don’t forget toilet paper. And bring that damned old alarm clock near the cash register. I’m probably going to need it.” He saw the elation in her face, tried to avoid thinking how that face would look after falling a mile, or taking a fifty-caliber incendiary slug.

As they separated inside the store she asked, “What are you going to do to Bobby?”

“I’m going to have a little drink with him. And he’s going to have a big, big drink with me.”