The Blackbird

Twenty-Two

Grofield said, “Could they have the canisters so soon?”

“No, it’s impossible, they’re hidden. Only a few people even know where they are. And I’ve been watching, and only one man got on that plane. Not carrying anything.”

“Going back to report,” Grofield said. “Climb on the back here. It won’t be comfortable, but it’s the best I’ve got.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get the hell away from here before that plane arrives,” Grofield told her. “It’s coming this way, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

There was more light now, with the plane’s beam facing this way, and he could see the startled look that crossed her face. “Oh! Yes!” She clambered onto the pile of goods stacked on the skimobile’s rear seat, clutching Grofield’s shoulders to hold herself steady.

“You set?”

“I think so.”

He started off, heading at an angle to the left, the more quickly to get out of range of the plane’s light, and everything would probably have been all right if they hadn’t hit the bump, a jagged step caused by an old buckling of the ice. But they did hit it, hard, and the machine jolted, bouncing Grofield up and down and throwing Vivian completely away. He heard her yelp, felt her hands leave his shoulders, and when he had the skimobile under control again and looked back she was lying on the ice back there, just starting to roll over and get up.

He wheeled around, making as tight a turn as he could, and saw beyond her the plane trundling this way, coming uncomfortably fast. And how her green ski pants stood out against the surrounding darkness.

They stood out too well, in fact, because just as Grofield pulled to a stop beside her and started to help her aboard again the plane suddenly veered, bathing them in direct light.

“I’m sorry!” she shouted.

“Wrap your arms around my chest!” he yelled back. “If you go again, you’ll have to take me with you!”

She half sat and half knelt on the pile of provisions, her arms around his chest from behind, and he scooted the skimobile around in another tight turn and began to run away from the plane.

But not fast enough. He could see the light getting brighter and brighter around him, see their shadow getting shorter and shorter out in front of him. He could even hear the roar of the plane over their own noises, and he already knew it when she screamed in his ear, “They’re on top of us!”

“Hold on, for Christ’s sake!” he shouted back, and veered sharply to the left. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the lumbering wing, like the wing of a huge predatory bird, so close he nearly passed under it. For a few seconds he was heading into darkness, and then the light swung into place behind them again. But not so close as it had been before they’d swerved. So the plane was faster, but the skimobile was more maneuverable, so maybe the only question now was which of them would run out of gas first, and he had an unhappy feeling he knew the answer to that one.

Then she let him know that wasn’t the only question after all, because she yelled in his ear, “They’re shooting at us!”

“How do you know?”

“I see the flashes! They’re shooting out the window in the pilot’s compartment. A pistol, I think.”

“Make yourself small,” he suggested. “And hold on, we’re going to the right this time.”

“I’m holding.”

She was, too, almost too hard for him to breathe, but this was no time for minor adjustments. He said nothing, just veered to the right, and once again was rewarded with a few seconds of relative darkness before the light gleamed on his back once again.

But he couldn’t go on like this, dammit, being chased all over the lake by an airplane. If they ever did catch up, they’d just run him down, but in the meantime they could score a hit with one of their pistol shots, and in the long run he’d wind up out of gas. So something had to be done.

All right, what did he have? He thought about the equipment he had lashed to the back seat, and briefly considered somehow turning one of the spare cans of gasoline into a Molotov cocktail, but the acrobatics involved in getting it out from under Vivian while they zigged and zagged around the lake seemed prohibitive, so he reluctantly abandoned the idea. It would be nice, though, to blow the damn plane up.

All that was needed, actually, was to get away from it. Let it fly away, about that he didn’t care. And if somehow he could get to the shore, that would be the end of the chase. The plane could follow him around out here on this flat ballroom floor, but on the rolling hills of soft snow ashore the plane couldn’t possibly go. They’d have to take off, and at night they’d have a hell of a time finding him from the air. So the object of the game was to find a shore somewhere.

And meantime, the plane was getting closer again. He shouted, “Hold on!” and veered to the right once more. But this time, instead of just going off at a forty-five degree angle, he kept around in a tight U-turn, knowing he could turn well inside the plane’s turning radius. He saw the distant red smudge that was the fire at the lodge, and kept turning, shouting to Vivian, “Let me know when the fire’s directly behind us!”

“All right!”

He could see the plane’s tail assembly to his right now, the plane being very cumbersome at this business of turning a complete circle. He clenched his teeth and leaned into the curve and kept going around.

“Behind us!”

He nodded briskly and straightened out, and shot away, leaving the plane barely more than halfway around its own turn.

“Oh good good good!” she was yelling. “Oh they’re way back! Oh you’re beautiful beautiful beautiful!”

“Stop hitting me on the head!” he yelled. “Hold on or you’ll fall off again!”

So she held on, and Grofield leaned over the handlebars, and when at last the plane’s light picked them up again it was no more than a gray smudge. Grofield smiled into the rushing darkness, knowing he’d found the slingshot for this Goliath. The bigger they are, they harder they turn. The plane might catch up with them again, but he’d just pull the same stunt and be on his way again. And sooner or later he’d have to find this goddamn lake’s farther shore. After all, every lake in the world has a farther shore. Even oceans have farther shores.

“It’s getting closer again!” she hollered.

“I know! I can see the light!”

He let it get very close this time, he could hear the roaring down the back of his neck, and then he made the sharp turn again, this time going under the wingtip as he curved around. He leaned into it, feeling good, knowing he’d outfoxed them, and then she yelled, “They aren’t coming after us!”

He risked a look, almost losing his balance, and she was right. The plane was still trundling on in the same direction, hurrying away from them now, picking up speed.

“They gave up!” she yelled, and pummeled his shoulders.

“They did not! Hold on!”

He knew what they were up to now, the bastards. Why wouldn’t they accept defeat? Spoilsports. Rotters. What if Goliath had gotten up and taken two Excedrin and gone back into the fight? What then?

He made the turn so tight this time they nearly flipped over, and then he chased after the plane, straightening out onto his former course just in time to see the plane lifting into the air, far away, and its light still not illuminating anything that looked like a farther shore.

Was this the goddamn ocean? Was he on his way to Iceland? For God’s sake, enough was enough.

He hunched over, urging the little machine on, and Vivian clung to his torso, her head against his head, the fur fringe of her hat tickling his cheek. She shouted, “What are they going to do?”

“Wait and see!”

The plane was up now, circling into the sky, no longer awkward and bulky and cumbersome. It was in its own element now, and had become fast and lethal. Grofield, taking quick glances up as he raced now into unrelieved black darkness, saw the plane climb and climb, circling, and knew it would only be a few seconds before it started its run. He shouted, “Let me know when it starts down!”

“Are they going to land on us?”

“Only if they don’t have anything in there to drop, honey.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that, but a few seconds later she cried, “Here they come!”

“Hold on!” he yelled, and began swerving the machine back and forth.

“They’re shooting!”

Grofield concentrated on his driving, seeing the spotlight giving him a shadow again, seeing it get brighter. He kept swerving out of it, but it kept picking him up again, and when it seemed to him the last possible instant he made a hard left and the plane roared by no more than twenty feet in the air and something blew up on his old route.

“Wonderful!” he yelled. “They’ve got hand grenades in there!” He swerved back to the right, and kept going.

She yelled, “What can we do?”

“Pray for shore!”

“They’re coming around again! Give me your machine gun, I’ll shoot them down!”

“Without falling off? Forget it!”

“They’re going to kill us!”

“Don’t you believe it!”

“Here they come! Oh here they come!”

The blackness ahead of him turned gray, paler, brighter, the long black shadow of their shape grew shorter, and abruptly he slammed on the brake, and she almost flipped over his head. He pushed back against her, to keep her aboard, and the plane growled by just over their heads, and there were two explosions, ahead of them, one to the left and one to the right. If he’d repeated the same maneuver as last time he would have run directly into one of those grenades.

“Will you warn me?” she bleated.

“No time. Hold on.” And he accelerated again.

And this time, before the plane lifted, he saw in its light an unevenness ahead, a rising ragged slope of snow. The shore, at long long last.

Then the plane had lifted, was turning away, and there was no longer any light to see by. Grofield yelled, “We’re going to hit the shore in a minute! For God’s sake hold on!”

“I will!”

“Do you see the other machine gun tied on back there?”

“See it? It’s been raping me for the last ten minutes!”

“When we stop, grab it and run to the left, and if the plane makes a try for us shoot the hell out of it.”

“You bet I will!”

“Try to get... ”

The machine hit something. It bounced into the air, Grofield lost the handlebars, Vivian’s arms were torn away from around his chest, and he found himself flying through space with his feet somehow entangled with the machinery. He landed badly in soft snow, lunged off to the right, and the skimobile rolled over his feet and went on its own way.

Grofield struggled with the machine gun strapped to his shoulder, finally got hold of it, and light was starting again. He didn’t know where Vivian was, he wanted to yell to her to shoot at the light, but he didn’t know if she’d managed to get the other gun or not. He didn’t even know if she was still conscious.

But here it came. He lifted up, and saw nothing but that glaring white spotlight screaming directly at him out of the black sky. An actor he might be, but he felt absolutely no urge to take a bow. He aimed the machine gun and began firing and the light shrieked closer, and suddenly it went out.

Grofield rolled into a tight ball, knowing retribution was coming. He shoved himself as deeply as possible into the snow, but when the blast did come it was damn close, and it shoved him even deeper. For the second time tonight the wind was knocked out of him, and for a few awful seconds he lay there with his mouth open, mouth and nose full of snow, finding himself absolutely incapable of taking a breath.

Breath came back slowly, with an agonizing pain in the chest, but it did come back. And the plane didn’t. When he could move, Grofield rolled over onto his back, brushed the snow out of his eyes, and looked up. At first he saw nothing, but then he made out the receding red tail assembly light, high in the sky, going away, as though no longer interested in such petty problems as Alan Grofield.

He sat up, stiff and aching and bruised all over. He called, “Vivian?”

Somebody groaned.

He got to hands and knees. “Groan again,” he called.

She groaned again.

He crawled in that direction, and touched wet cloth. He slid his hand along the cloth and said, “Vivian?”

A weak voice said, “Watch that hand, there.”

“Why? What have I got?”

“So far, leg.”

He patted it. “You sound like you’re all right,” he said. “Do you think you can stand on this?”

“In a day or two.”

“We don’t have a day or two.”

“You’re right.” She grunted, and then her shoulder bumped into his face. “Sorry. I was sitting up.”

“That’s okay.” He put a hand on her shoulder, slid it down her arm to her gloved hand. Then he got stiffly to his feet, and pulled her up.

She leaned against him briefly. “That was exhausting,” she said.

“We have to find the skimobile,” he said.

“I know.” She stepped away, but still held his hand. “I have a flashlight,” she said. “Do we dare use it?”

“Definitely. They’ve gone.”

“I didn’t get a chance at the machine gun,” she said. “I’m sorry, it all happened so fast.”

“It worked out.”

Light, a narrow flashlight beam shining on churned-up snow. They were no more than six feet from the edge of the lake, and about a dozen feet in the other direction was the skimobile, tilted to the right, with a spray of blankets and canned goods all around it.

She was still holding Grofield’s hand, and he saw her looking at him in the reflected glow from the flashlight. He said, “Let’s go check out the damage.”

“Sure,” she said, but when he started forward she stood there, and kept holding his hand. He glanced back at her, puzzled, and she said, “Thank you.”

“I was taking care of me, too,” Grofield reminded her.

“You didn’t have to take a passenger,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Grofield said.