The Ransom of Black Stealth One

THIRTY-THREE

As long as they flew straight into sun dazzle, its hard brilliance was only an irritant; but after they veered southwest, keeping the endless sandy worm of Matagorda Island off their right wingtip, the sun dominated the horizon in regal splendor, imperceptibly shading to orange as it slid down the sky. Petra allowed—welcomed!—the sense of wonderment that began to steal over her as she floated between sky and sea in virtual silence. A lovely sense of power; no, of freedom, as if I might fly into the sun itself if I chose. Perhaps I’m beginning to understand this man, perhaps he has no intention of turning this magical gossamer beast over to anyone, ever. There was only one thing missing—well, perhaps two. “Kyle, would you mind if I flew it for a few minutes?” He had not spoken for a long time, restlessly checking digital readouts, using the scanner in an empty sky, tempting fate in his efforts to hug the water. “What for?”

“You were happy enough for me to do it yesterday, when you were trying to—”

“I’m not objecting, Petra,” he rumbled lazily, and from his tone she wondered if he was feeling the same magical timeless sense of peace. “Just asking why.” He pulled up to fifty-foot altitude, checking their fuel counter for the umpteenth time.

“I want to. Humor me, dammit.” She beamed when she saw him nod.

“Steady on,” he said as she pinned her control stick into place. “You’ve got a throttle there, but don’t goose it too much. We’re down to twenty pounds of fuel.”

She knew he watched with a critical eye as she eased the throttle forward but not too briskly, moving the stick, feeling the vast wings respond as Black Stealth One swung to and fro, a stately waltz for a dying sun. Then she eased back, felt the craft settle, and presently realized that if she wanted to come down any nearer to the water, she would have to cut back further on power or force the hellbug’s nose down. “This is ground effect?”

Arms folded, grinning, he nodded. “You’re good, k—uh, cadet.”

“You were going to say ‘kid,’ ” she accused, seeing him wipe the new stubble on his chin and knowing it was to hide his needless chagrin. “I don’t care, now that I know you know better.” She leaned her head back, feeling the tightness of sunburn on her face, perfectly at peace as the great orb of light sank into the Texas plains. “You can take it back now. There is no way I can possibly thank you, Kyle. Whatever happens for the rest of my days, I have flown Black Stealth One down a Texas-sized island on a warm summer evening.” She paused a long moment. “That’s FUN, “she said.

“That’s fun,” he agreed and, after another pause, added, “You were right, some kinds of fun are worth whatever risk it takes. Wup, see those lights on the horizon? Rockport, I think. That’s a risk we don’t have to take,” he added, and swung the hellbug’s nose inland to the north of the township, ignoring an airport nearby. “Paint us like a big-assed bird,” he suggested. “That should work from above or below.”

As she complied, Petra said, “I think you’ve been without much fun for so long, you want to call it something else.”

“Something more dignified,” he said, almost comically defensive, “at least when you’re risking your buns for it.”

Staring into the sliver of remaining sun as they drifted over a bay toward land, Petra murmured, “My mother’s tombstone should have ‘dignity’ on it. My father’s too, but with a little parenthesis below that says, ‘fun.’ How about yours?”

“I’d have to die—and I have other plans,” he chuckled.

“Play the game,” she urged. “Mine will say ‘fun’ in big letters, and maybe ‘usefulness’ below. Now you.”

After a long silence, ghosting across a clean beach toward another expanse of water, he said, “Vengeance. Maybe ‘fun’ below, maybe not.”

“Wonderful,” she muttered. “You’ve really picked my spirits up, Kyle. I’ve cast my lot with a man who wants to be remembered for his most negative quality.”

“Sorry. I might have a different answer next week, or next month.”

She gazed at him earnestly. “Will I be able to ask you then?”

“Probably not,” he admitted, then returned her gaze and smiled. “But anything’s possible. You never know when I might need a copilot.”

She decided then that whatever his motives, he did not intend to relinquish Black Stealth One. Unless, of course, he was carefully laying down a network of lies as he had lied previously, using her as he had tried to use her before, as an agent of misdirection. “Well, you’ll know where to find me,” she said, jiggling her eyebrows, flicking an imaginary cigar in her best Groucho imitation.

“Yeah, in a federal hoosegow if you’re not careful.” He had guided Black Stealth One higher with the gradual rise of the land, revealing a solid coastline beyond the bay with a forest of oil pumps that spread for miles, some of the pumps bobbing slowly like the heads of great birds. A few miles off, an acre-wide cylindrical tank squatted, growing monstrously large as Corbett approached it. “Nobody on the ground could spot us up there,” he chuckled, swinging wide as he approached the storage tank. Petra noticed lights both to the north and south, defining two more townships. Headlights gleamed in gathering dusk on a highway between the towns.

They saw no lingering workers, no headlights in their immediate area, and Corbett lowered the hellbug gently until it touched down in a gauze of dust atop the curve of the tank dome. The tank, she saw, was truly awesome in size; so vast that a craft with much greater wingspread than Black Stealth One could have perched there without protruding. He checked the fuel readout one last time before snapping off the electrical power. “A little more than a gallon—and the battery reads full-charge, in case you’re interested.”

“And we’re a hundred feet in the air,” Petra reminded him. “Don’t tell me the engine will take crude oil straight from this tank.”

“I made sure there’s a ladder and no, it won’t take Texas crude or ordinary fuel either, and I’ve used up most of my additive. What I need is green,” he sighed. “One hundred, one-thirty octane avgas.” He unfolded one of his maps, holding it up at arm’s length in the dusk. “Shit,” he muttered, and produced his tiny Maglite, adjusting its beam-spread to study the map.

“You’ve still got a whole bottle of additive,” she reminded him, “and we could siphon gas from cars with your gadget.”

“Gotta keep that for later,” he replied without elaborating, still studying the map. “We’re between Refugio and Woodsboro, and there’s an airport a half hour’s walk away, right about—there,” he finished, pointing midway between the nearby towns.

“No beacon?”

“Some do, some don’t,” he said, clearly preoccupied now, and grunted as he climbed out of the cockpit taking the fuel bladder with him.

Petra scrambled out onto the metal dome, stretching, learning to walk softly because she did not enjoy the low, ghostly echoes of her footfalls from the tank below her. “God, this feels weird,” she said, laughing at her own discomfort.

The curl of a steel ladder stood in the dusk, fifty feet away. They walked to it and grasped its rails, scanning the ground several stories below. The distance to the nearest pump unit was hundreds of yards, she noted. He must have been thinking about those wide-open spaces too. “Long walk, ma’am, but you’re not coming anyhow. Does this height make you woozy?”

“Not anymore,” she said, laughing, and ran her arms around the barrel of his rib cage before she lost her nerve for it. She felt him start to pull back, hesitate, then clasp her roughly in a hug. He kissed the top of her head. “On the scalp doesn’t count,” she murmured, looking up at him. “Give me a real smack before you go.” I know you wouldn’t if I called it a kiss, she thought.

He kissed her with the tender diffidence of a boy but held her as if he meant it, then gave her shoulder a squeeze and turned, tossing the fuel bladder over the side of the tank. “Gotta go fuel up,” he muttered, and climbed over the edge.

“I’ve still got good ole Bobby’s money,” she said. “And how are you going to get twenty gallons in that plastic thing?”

“One thing I have is money,” he said, starting down. “And I’m going to improvise like hell. I’m a crop duster who’s out of gas like a damn fool; half of those guys are nuts anyhow. I’ll think of something,” he added, his voice diminishing in the faint pungent breeze.

She watched him as far as she could see him in the deepening night, reluctant to move, still savoring the kiss they had shared, even if she’d had to demand it and absorb the tingle of whiskers in the process. I’ve known freshmen who understood more about romance, she told herself, feeling the flush of sunburn on her cheeks as she smiled into the breeze. But I don’t love him with that dizzy kind of rapture I felt for the others. In fact, do I love him at all?

She noticed her first star of the evening and, feeling foolish as she did it, whispered an old formula. “…wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight. I wish—that Kyle would get beyond vengeance and find me waiting. Okay, star, that’s two wishes; if I get the first, maybe the second will follow. And as for you, Corbett, you old bastard, don’t screw up and make me waste the first unselfish wish I’ve had in years.”

It was that unselfishness that pricked her intuition. Oh yes, I’m in love with him, twit that I am, and maybe I should not be dissecting it like a problem in stress analysis. But why not? Maybe because I’ll have to admit that it isn’t all unselfish. Uncle Dar used to laugh and say that Kyle Corbett led a wild life, and he said it with plain envy, which seemed strange to me at the time because my uncle is the most sober-sided responsible man in the world. But he envied Kyle; maybe enough to kill him? I can’t accept that. And the one thing I’ll never learn from Brown University is how to live with Corbett’s kind of decisive abandon. Could I become a pro in my field and still find his kind of damn-your-eyes freedom? Could anybody?

“You’d tell me no,” she said into the night, speaking to the departed Corbett. “But you’ve done it yourself. Even though you got pushed into some of it. And then you pushed me,” she said, laughing at him, and at herself.

An hour later she was sitting at the ladder with one leg through a steel rung, nibbling a Hi Ho and enjoying the breeze, when she saw headlights swing in her direction a mile away. She moved back and hunkered down. A night watchman? Please, God, let him keep going! But the old pickup truck stopped near the ladder. A moment later she heard scrapings and soft echoes in the tank, and realized that someone was climbing the ladder.

Heart beating wildly, she made her decision and swung onto the ladder. “Don’t shoot, I’m coming down,” she called.

“What the hell for?” he called back. Corbett!

She scrambled back up and did not wait for him to reach the top. “My God, I thought you were a watchman or something,” she said, laughing, placing a hand over her hammering heart.

He swung over the top, puffing with exertion. “Then why give yourself away, dummy?”

With some heat she said, “So he wouldn’t come up here and see the hellbug, dummy.”

Starlight was a poor guide, but he must have seen her fairly well because, after he laughed, he kissed her. It was a frustrating moment for Petra because she had no time to gear herself for a really promising response. “Don’t worry,” he said with a kind of manic elation, throwing an arm over her shoulder, “I kiss all my copilots. Well, I finally had something go right; a guy was pulling an overhaul at Rooke Field. He offered to loan me his pickup when he heard my sad story. You know, I’m dusting crops and run out of fuel but I land okay, and I’m gonna get fired if I don’t get this leased AgriCat back, and I’d rather not have to show my ID to this guy or tell him where I put the duster down if that’s okay with him.

“And he’s your typical small-town Texan who’ll give you the bandanna off his neck if you don’t sneer at him, or talk about the size of Alaska.” Petra wondered if he had been drinking, because this expansive yarn-spinner was not the Kyle Corbett she knew. He was a Corbett flushed with quick success; and she found that she liked him even better this way as he continued, “Only there’s no spare tank around, and it’s against the law to put avgas into a car, so the guy keeps filling my plastic tank, helping all he can without actually breaking a law, and I go around the edge of the hangar and pour it into the pickup’s tank, which was nearly empty but I promised to bring it back full of unleaded because he wouldn’t take the pair of twenties I tried to give him. And here I am,” he said.

During this spiel he had led her to the looming bulk of Black Stealth One, and now he crawled in. “C’mon, I’m gonna take it down below and do the siphon routine,” he said, patting the copilot’s seat.

She started to comply and then stopped. “I’ll go down the ladder,” she told him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing; but I’ve never actually seen this airplane fly when I wasn’t in it. It’s not something I want to miss.”

He flicked switches, and began to spool the big impeller over. “You won’t see much tonight either, honey.”

Her heart leaped. Honey! But that’s just high spirits talking, she thought. “I’ll cope. You go on.” She gave him plenty of room, squinting as dust teased her eyes, and watched him levitate the craft, seeing him faintly limned by reflection from instruments as he lifted like a creature of fantasy. It’s a UFO, she realized with a thrill of gooseflesh, a real one to everybody but us, probably the only one in this corner of our galaxy. How long before I can help build newer ones?

She watched its progress as much by its occlusion of stars as by direct light, and was ravished again by the graceful sweep of its wings. Presently she moved to the ladder, refusing to think about the distance. She counted over eighty rungs before she reached the ground and realized only when she brushed his shoulder with her rump that Corbett was patiently waiting there, perhaps to break her fall if she had slipped.

She found other purchases in the pickup’s bed: the plastic bag was full of ordinary gasoline, and the same Exxon station had boasted the kind of cheap tasseled blankets only a tourist, desperate for mementoes, would crave. Wrapped in each of the two thin blankets were cans of Classic Coke. After he backed the pickup into place, they made the fuel transfer directly using the siphon and pressure bulb. He pumped the pickup dry, topped off the tank of Black Stealth One with ordinary fuel, then poured one of the two remaining two gallons of ordinary gasoline into the pickup.

“You’re really going to drive the guy’s pickup back?” she asked.

“A deal’s a deal. Besides, I don’t want him calling the cops,” Corbett replied. “One thing about a cover story, Petra: you can’t just give it, you’ve got to live it.”

He stowed the almost empty plastic bladder into the hellbug and, with Petra beside him, had soon settled the craft in its aerie atop the huge oil tank. “You can make our pallets,” he said, heading for the ladder by starlight. “Mosquitoes shouldn’t be bad up here.”

“I wish I could go with you,” she said wistfully as he swung onto the ladder.

“So do I. Don’t wait dinner, this’ll take a while,” he said, and left her. She watched the pickup’s lights until they faded from sight.