Relentless

CHAPTER 2
1

“We’ve got to go around it,” Keith Walker said.

The Major beside him said, “Negative.”

“We haven’t got oxygen. I can’t get above it-hell, it goes up forty thousand feet anyway.”

He was scowling at the wall of tumbling storm clouds dead ahead. “We can cut around north of it.”

“We haven’t got time.”

“Nuts. You’re a long time dead.”

“You can cut it,” the Major said. “It might do you some good-prove something to yourself.”

After the number of missions Walker had flown he did not need to prove anything to anybody. What he said was, “Up yours, Major.” But he was thinking, I guess I could cut it. And then: Of course pilots always have to believe that. Christ don’t let him talk you into this one. And so he said, “Just this once we’re going to do things my way, Major.”

He gave it a little aileron and a little rudder-gingerly, because he was flying on the deck, holding less than two hundred feet above the hilltops. The mountain range ran along to starboard, parallel to his course, and he. was staying below it because of the radar at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.

He came around to a heading of Three Zero Five magnetic, vectoring north of Las Vegas VOR. The storm ahead of him was a black cascade, wall-to-wall violence. Under him cool air settled into gully shadows and hot air came rising explosively from the sunwhacked hilltops, and the ground turbulence kept the twin Apache bouncing around.

He had a broad-band receiver mounted below the dashboard, designed to detect radar transmissions, and he was picking up the jiggles of the flicking Nellis scanner circuit. But the mountains above him to starboard would absorb the signals and hide him in the scanner’s ground-return. They hadn’t picked him up; if they had, he would have seen a change in the interval of the signal-it would have gone to a quicker pattern, a fast localized sweep, but it wasn’t doing that. The radar didn’t worry him. The weather did. He had never been a white-knuckle flier but he had a survivor’s respect for enemy weather and he wasn’t confident of the aging Piper’s capacity for punishment.

The Major was watching him and when Walker looked at him the Major smiled very slightly with his mouth. The opaque eyes blocked all argument and inquiry, turned all objections back, as effectively as if they had been the eyes of a dead man.

The Major said, “We don’t have enough gas to go around it.”

Walker considered that. His eyes swept the panel. The quivering flow meters, manifold pressures, temperatures. The gauges stood half-full; there had been no place to refuel since take-off this morning. With the weight of five passengers and the money she was running on rich mixtures and she didn’t have another four hundred miles in her tanks; they had the Beechcraft waiting on a dirt landing strip northwest of Reno and that was something more than three hundred miles from here in a straight line. To go around the storm would eat up another hundred and twenty miles and they just didn’t have it. The Major’s eyes didn’t miss a thing.

Walker said, “Then we won’t make it anyway. You know how much gas you eat up bucking a storm.”

“The winds are counterclockwise. Stay on the north side of the storm and you’ll have a tail wind.”

“More like a sixty-mile gale. It’ll shake this crate to pieces.”

The Major’s eyes just stood against him, like a knife blade-motionless but prepared to cut.

He had to think. Behind him in the passenger seats the others were talking loudly, keyed up, nervy. Eddie Burt was making exultant noises and Baraclough was saying in his flat nasal voice, “No need to smack your lips so loud,” but laughing off-key with excitement. The Piper 235 had seats for six, including pilot, and there were five men in it; the sixth seat held the duffel bags. Too cramped in here to count it but Baraclough had a good eye and had estimated it at a minimum of nine hundred thousand dollars. About ten cubic feet of tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds. Walker had hefted the four duffel bags when they’d put them aboard and the things weighed maybe sixty pounds each.

Baraclough was saying in a travelogue-narrator voice, “And now, happier but wearier, we bid a warm farewell to the home of the jolly green swag…”

“Jesus, will you please shut up?” Jack Hanratty was in a fever of terror. He couldn’t take heights, airplanes terrified him, and the Major was angry with him-back there in the car for a minute Walker had thought the Major was going to kill Hanratty for shotgunning the fat old Indian bank guard. The Major could have done it without working up a sweat; the Major was versed in a dozen methods of killing a man barehanded and silently and very quickly.

When somebody got killed during the commission of a felony all parties to the felony were automatically and equally guilty of first-degree murder. That was the felony-murder statute. Hanratty and his shotgun. The son of a bitch just had to carry that shotgun. Walker hadn’t even had a gun but Hanratty had made a murderer out of him. It was no wonder Hanratty was shaking: all five of them had got sucked into this mess by his nervous trigger finger.

The Major had drummed it into them time and time again while they were setting up the score. Arizona still has the death penalty. I don’t want anybody killed. I don’t even want anybody bruised. They’ll forget the money but there’s no statute of limitations on murder.

Hanratty and his fucking shotgun.

The fat old Indian guard had sneezed.

Sneezed.

It was the stupid little things that got you every time.