The Ransom of Black Stealth One

THIRTEEN

Sugar Grove, West Virginia, population 56, lies sequestered between steep, heavily wooded ridges that loom like eyebrows over the townsfolk. The village harbors a fine old Appalachian dialect and a postal drop. It is possible to get kerosene there in the shadows of those steep mountain ridges, or an illegal, equally flammable product sold in Mason jars to fuel the lamps of the inner man; but not much in the way of FM broadcasting. Locals do not bother twiddling knobs on FM portables because line-of-sight transmissions do not penetrate there through rocky ridges. This natural shielding runs for some distance beyond the town, and a few miles north of Sugar Grove the casual hiker must retrace or climb a mountain because the signs make very clear that trespassing beyond that chain-link fence is a federal crime.

This isolation from stray radio frequencies is precisely why the NSA, and later the U.S. Navy, chose to build secret listening posts including a huge dish antenna fifty yards across and a submerged communications center. Now and then, NSA officials pass through Sugar Grove. Occasionally, special maintenance teams drive out to the remote antennas in a flatbed or a pickup truck to work on the Big Ear or the twin Wullenwebers which form essential parts of what is probably the world’s most sophisticated communication network. Rarely, the chop of helicopter blades echoes through the long hollow. Fuel drums of three kinds are stocked on-site by the U.S. Navy for those rare occasions, choppers being such sots for fuel.

The simplest way to appreciate all that technology hidden in a West Virginia hollow is to look straight down on it and, thanks to Soviet satellites, Sugar Grove is a popular subject for photography from orbit. The main operations building, of white cinder block, has no windows because its occupants are not supposed to be thinking about all that splendid mountainous isolation. Nor would they be likely to suspect the damnedest-looking airplane on earth touching down on grassy stubble shortly after dawn, a mile from that windowless building.

Petra’s first impression, on waking, was of the dull ache at the base of her neck. She started to reach out, and to yawn, and found that she could do neither because her wrists were tied to an immovable post—her ankles as well—and something that smelled like Wrigley’s Spearmint was pasted over her mouth. She could even hear the hiss of air through small holes that someone had cut in the tape so that she could breathe through her mouth. For an instant, as long as it took for her to whimper while her vision made sense of her surroundings, she was terrified with the nameless dread of a child. And then she remembered; not everything, but too much, enough so that she kept from wetting herself only through great effort. And that made her mad enough to quell panic.

Puffing, wrenching furiously at her bonds, she realized that she sat in the right-hand seat of some kind of grounded aircraft, perhaps a helicopter, in a narrow valley flanked by wooded heights. The left-hand hatch, functioning both as a door and a window and formed mostly of clear plastic, was raised, gleaming in the early sun like some enormous contact lens. Her hands and feet were taped to a control stick which was evidently locked, yet she could feel something give. She fought harder.

“That’s enough!” Petra swiveled her head and stopped. There were voices that had to shout to be taken seriously. This was not one of them. Its owner, Mr. John Smith, peered around the door opening. He looked like bloody hell, the crow’s-feet at his temples almost meeting the puffiness under his eyes. A middle-aged man who has missed a night’s sleep does not bubble over with pleasantries. John Smith proved it, squinting at her: “You break anything and you get broken.”

“I’ve got to go,” she said. Amazingly, the little holes in the tape let her say it, though not very loudly.

“You go where I go,” he grunted, and now she saw that he held a big floppy bag on his shoulder.

He was trying to fit its mouth into something behind the open hatch.

“I mean, I have to go,” she said louder. “To the bathroom.” It sounded like “wathroom” through the tape but she saw sudden comprehension in his gaze.

“In a minute,” he said. Petra realized that Smith was using a camper’s plastic waterbag, a squarish thing that might hold five or six gallons, to fuel the vehicle. He cursed softly, shifted the bag, then seemed satisfied. The sound of liquid splashing into some cavity behind her did not make Petra’s self-control any easier. To take her mind off her full bladder, she used a trick she had learned when facing a final exam with a mind suddenly gone blank: she thought of something worse.

This man knows about Uncle Dar, she thought, but he is no friend of ours. Or of my country. He hasn’t taken me away for the usual reason men take women. I’m just a piece of some game to him, a pawn, and since my uncle is involved somehow, it is a huge game. Very few big games end with all the pawns alive. Abruptly, she decided to think about her bladder again, but she would not cry; damned if she would cry.

At last he lowered the empty bag, locked the tank’s cap, and moved around to lift the hatch on Petra’s side. For a moment they traded glances; hers angry, his devoid of expression. Then he said, “You can go behind those bushes, but the place is alive with rattlers so be careful. A gentleman would turn his back, but I won’t. We’re miles from water or people. If you run, I shoot you; it’s that simple.”

Seeing her nod, he unwound tape from her ankles, then her wrists, sticking one end of each tape to the smooth leather of a toolkit on his belt so that the tape hung down, ready for reuse. He made no comment as she ripped the patch from her mouth and tossed it away. He showed her how to position her feet as she exited backward, and steadied her when the entire aircraft rocked alarmingly in the process. She went where he pointed, dismayed that those bushes were hardly more than knee high, scanning the stubble for snakes.

This was not the first time Petra had shucked her jeans behind a bush, and she took a perverse pleasure in the sounds her body made, hoping it would embarrass John Smith. Leaves made a poor excuse for toilet paper but they were better than nothing. She slipped a jagged piece of stone into a hip pocket, turned away, and stood up to arrange her clothing because, as promised, he stood facing her ten yards away, arms folded, with that automatic pistol in his right hand. She had never seen a handgun quite like it. It looked like a plastic gizmo from Star Trek.

And then, for the first time, she saw the vast wingsweep of the aircraft, with no identifying marks of any kind, and realized that her mouth was hanging open. “Get back in,” he said, gesturing with the sidearm, “I’m not through fueling this thing and I won’t have you running loose.”

It was not the chill breeze that lifted gooseflesh on Petra’s arms. She had studied the human-powered aircraft of MacCready and MIT, and the pioneering Bowlus designs, in Applied Structures. This thing seemed generations beyond them all with that gaping mouth that surrounded the cockpit, and the multibladed fan half hidden inside.

And in a way, it looked frighteningly alive. She paused beside the cockpit, gripping a handhold. “Why don’t I just stay with you? I won’t run.”

“You sure won’t.” His hand on her backside was not gentle, boosting her upward. “Hold on, what the hell is that?” He dug two fingers into her hip pocket and produced the fragment of stone, then tossed it away, his hand returning in a slap that stung her rump. She lay facedown in the seat now, her right breast mashed painfully by the seat’s thigh support, and these multiple insults proved too much for the daughter of Philip and Andrea Leigh of Old Lyme, Connecticut. Petra kicked hard, felt her heel connect, and began to scream as she kicked harder.

Abruptly she felt herself lifted by the back of her belt and shirt collar, snatched upward and back as if she were some hollow store window dummy. He dropped her flat, full length, in the dust, cutting her off in mid-yell, then sat on her lower legs until he had taped her ankles again.

He then proceeded to spank her as she had not been spanked since she was six years old for using only one of the words she was using now. When she managed to grab the edge of his jacket, he merely spun her over and forced her hands together, holding them with only one of his own hands while he taped her wrists with the other.

In common with many women of gentle breeding, Petra had never fully understood the disparity of male and female upper body strength, especially when accompanied by an extra seventy pounds, until now. Humiliated, terrified, and with buttocks that burned, Petra clamped her eyes shut as if that would stop her tears. She felt herself hoisted over his shoulder, then lifted bodily into the aircraft, offering no resistance until she felt the wire circle her throat.

“Hold still unless you want to strangle,” he said, fumbling behind her head, his face so near she could feel his heat on her cheeks. “You asked for this, kid.” When he stepped back, she saw the blood at the corner of his mouth before he spat more of it onto the ground. He took a small pair of cutters from the kit clipped at his belt, snipped behind her head, and drew a coil of black anodized wire out. He cut two pieces, each a yard long, and secured her to the control stick again. “I told you before not to break anything. If you do, this whole rig can fall right out of the air—and so will you. Now behave yourself, I’ll be back soon.” And with that, he circled the cockpit to retrieve that plastic fuel bag before trudging off, parallel to a dry gully.

Petra could open her hands enough to grasp the control stick, but stretching her fingers toward that cruel wire only tightened the loop around her throat. She wanted to sob, but that hurt too. It was hell when she could not even abandon herself to justified self-pity.

Well, what could she do? Think, dammit; that’s what, she decided. One thing sure, she had heard Smith’s voice before all this began and he or one of his cronies knew Uncle Dar well enough to fake that note. Somehow, her kidnap and the CIA were connected. Those damned spooks had lots of ways to knock you out for hours and, in fact, the sun said it was nearing midmorning. She could see the pilot’s console, with only a few small instruments instead of the massive array in most aircraft she had seen. Not even a clock, though it had a swiveling video screen with a keyboard. All the lettering was in English, but that didn’t mean much; she’d heard a prof say that the international language of flight was English too, though the language of spaceflight would probably be Russian.

Everything around her was stripped to bare essentials, the few interior panels not even painted, and she guessed correctly that they were made of filament and polymers, exotic stuff with an unfinished look. She had seen no sign of a hangar, so Smith had already flown here to refuel. Where from, and where to? Perhaps he would tell her, but not if she continued to fight him. She would escape this brute, no question about that; and the best way to do it was first to convince him of her obedience.

She thought about Smith for a while. Medium height, hard face, not young; old enough to be her father, with a gut that protruded a bit over his belt buckle and heavy sloping shoulders beneath that old leather jacket. His hand and arm strength were incredible, and he made every move with the coordination of a card-sharp. And I know him from somewhere, she thought with increasing certainty.

She heard him before she saw him, shuffling in a slow trot with that bag over his shoulder, head down like a coolie as he approached through the scrub. She lay back, eyes closed as if asleep, and felt great satisfaction at his heavy breathing as he began topping off the tank. Presently she heard the cap snap into place, and a moment later he stuffed that plastic bag, still sloshing with fuel, behind her own seat. Petra did not enjoy the aromatic odor, though it reminded her of the blends she used to smell in the pits with her father. Gasoline, then, not jet fuel.

She eyed him silently as he sealed her hatch, and noted the care he took when climbing in, seeing her horizon dip and sway as this unbelievably flimsy vehicle flexed with his entry. Then he reached down and retrieved the wire from her ankles, then her wrists. They were still taped, but no longer to the control stick between her knees. Grunting, he managed to reach behind her headrest to untwist the last wire, and she felt the tension across her throat release as he spoke, coiling the wire neatly without looking at it. “There might be some buffeting at takeoff, kid, so you’ll want to harness up. If you force me to, I can always wire your neck up again. I won’t like it if you make me do that, and you’ll like it a damn sight less.”

She might have handled it differently if she had read any sign of pity or friendliness in his face, but all she saw there were determination and maybe a touch of anxiety. She nodded and watched him thrust a metal link through the loops of his own shoulder harness, so that all harness ends terminated with a fitting across his lap. She tried to link her harness the same way as he brought the strange craft alive, but when the engine’s soft whisper steadied and he tested the controls, she was still fumbling hopelessly.

“Ah, shit,” he muttered, “I liked you better asleep,” but he reached across to help. Not to do it all, only to give minimal assistance. A vagrant shred of memory, of a man who had treated her that way many years before, tugged at Petra but she would deal with it later. Right now, she wanted to be strapped in tight because if the motions she felt through the seat were any indication, this gigantic paper airplane was going to start flapping its wings any second.

Before the pilot moved the throttle beyond idle, he did a curious thing with his feet, pressing on two pedals that she took at first to be brake and steering pedals. But the exhaust rush, hardly noticeable until now, suddenly took on a different note with muted whistles in it. The pilot throttled up, watching his instruments carefully, and then something began to tremble under Petra’s backside. She looked over her right shoulder, seeing the sudden dust storm below the wing. The wing’s backward sweep was such that she could barely see it, but it was no longer sagging downward. It was sloping up, flexing as it tilted, but by the time Petra decided the wings did flap, she saw the brown earth dropping away.

No, the wings did not flap, but they seemed to be filled with helium. Without helicopter blades or rockets, the vehicle was rising straight up, then nosing forward, dipping a little, almost skimming the brush as it began to pick up forward speed in a whispering rush that changed as the pilot moved those pedals. Only one American military airplane did that, and no light planes at all. But I don’t know what the Soviets have, she thought.

Petra knew an airspeed indicator when she saw one. Before it registered thirty knots, a little over thirty miles an hour, Smith had the control stick tilted to the left. The great bird responded sluggishly, and the gust of breeze that struck them before they had risen a hundred feet became a near disaster. The pilot’s hand slapped the throttle hard, his feet mashing those pedals, and Petra saw scrubby trees rushing up at them as the aircraft heeled over, pivoting so that the nearside wing missed the upsloping terrain by a foot or so. Then the craft was rising again with a sickening lurch, headed toward the narrow end of the little valley. And even when the tachometer needle strayed toward the red, the engine sounds were muffled.

They circled twice in a tight climbing spiral before rising above the ridgeline, at a pace so lazy as to seem in slow motion, and only then did Petra see the great electronic ears spread out in the distance below. Not far from their takeoff point lay a concrete pad with painted legends and a low shed nearby. “Where are we, Canada?”

“West Virginia,” he said, throttling back now, the aircraft still climbing although the antenna complex now slid from sight behind a ridge. “It’s a spook listening post, one of the biggest. And this is a spook airplane. Appropriate, huh?”

She ignored the grin that went with his last comment, swallowing to keep her stomach where it belonged. “You’re not one of my uncle’s people,” she said.

“Nope.” He tilted the video screen so that it faced him, and began to finger its keyboard. “I’m not anybody’s people, Petra Leigh. For that you can thank your uncle’s people, the whole miserable lot of them.” He swore at the screen, scanned the horizon, then tried the keyboard again. And swore again. “If only that dumb schmuck weren’t so cute with passwords,” he added.

Petra made it light, airy. “What schmuck?”

“No you don’t, kid. Get this through your head: if we don’t get shot down or forced down or just plain fall down, sooner or later you’ll have a lot of people asking questions. I’ve spent a long time working this out alone, but some of my enemies used to act like my friends. I know how they think—or at least you’d better pray that I do,” he added, punching at the keyboard again. His disgusted grimace suggested another failure.

“When do we get to eat, Mr. Smith?”

“I’ve got water, cheese, sausage, raisins. Sorry, no eggs Benedict,” he said, rummaging with his left hand behind his seat.

That was the instant when she knew him; not the whole picture, but the essential bits. A friend of Uncle Dar’s from long ago, one who had learned her breakfast favorite at Old Lyme, but a friend no longer. If she kept cudgeling her memory, she might remember his name. She tried to keep the light of this small triumph from her eyes, accepting the old suede bag as he swung it toward her. He’d put his repair kit back in the bag, which seemed to be full of duct tape, tools, and bottles. She held a bottle up and looked at him.

“Don’t drink that, it’s full of tetraethyl lead,” he said quickly. “Food’s at the bottom. And be careful with those cardboard tubes. They’re dangerous.”

She took inventory, trying to remember it all, even the flimsy bag, model cement, and the tubes of epoxy. The water was in a pair of two-liter plastic Seven-Up bottles. She opened the pound box of Sun Maid raisins as well, and took a handful, pretending not to study the instrument panel. The magnetic compass and the sun agreed that they were climbing almost due south.

While she was chewing, he loosened his shoulder straps for more comfort. “The Cherry Seven-Up bottle is yours,” he said. “The diet bottle’s mine.

Can’t fill ‘em again ‘til we land, and you keep your hands off mine.”

“Oh boy, but you are one tough guy,” she said acidly.

A shrug. “Those are the rules. They could get tougher,” he reminded her, dividing his attention between the keyboard and the mottled terrain that stretched away below, a rumpled coverlet with long parallel ridges made more flat and featureless as the aircraft continued to climb. He smiled to himself, tilting the control stick to the right, her own stick following suit.

The great bird banked obediently, almost silently, to the right, sliding down invisible corridors of air. Petra took a swallow of water and recapped the bottle. “Changed your mind already, Mr. Smith?”

“A piece of it,” he said, and pointed to the right, far ahead. “See that high ridge? Should be some nice thermal air above it, and we can throttle back. If I trusted this sucker for an in-flight restart, I could shut ‘er off for hours and let the ridge take us where we’re going.”

“And where would that be?” It did not occur to Petra until too late that her purring tone was one she generally employed on much younger men.

“You’re about as subtle as a tire-iron, kid. South, actually southwest for the moment, as any freshman engineering student should know by now. And you’re almost a senior. If I were fool enough, I could show you Roanoke or Asheville on the way but until I get chummier with the brains of this thing I intend to stay well clear of big towns.

“It’s been a long time since I was bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by a kid with a cute ass, so save it. We’re going to be together for a few days; don’t make me hurt you and don’t act empty-headed because that would piss me off. When I’m pissed off, I don’t care how bad you hurt. For that matter, you could just step out that side right now and things would be easier for me. All that matters is that people think you’re in here.”

Petra watched distant clouds drag shadows over ridgelines below, her ears popping as the aircraft began to descend with the tachometer needle at idle, and she swallowed hard. “What people? I’ve been kidnapped, I’m scared, and I don’t know what this is all about. Surely you can tell me something. You owe me that much.”

His glance held cynical amusement. “I owe you zip. All the same, when you’re scared enough you can do something stupid that’ll get us both killed.” Their descent, now, was carrying them parallel to a series of ridges that seemed to stretch toward the southwest like a single mountain as far as she could see, with vast popcorn bulges of cloud-hugging ridges here and there.

A thin, silver line scrawled a curving “Z” into the nearest ridge and a tiny, squarish black dot traversed it faithfully on tinier wheels. Petra could see the boundaries of farms as geometric shapes, the farm buildings as tiny rectangles, some with sheet metal roofs that glimmered in the sun. In the far distance lay two small towns. She realized now that the pilot was, as he had promised, keeping his distance from population centers.

A series of faint, buffeting pressures shook the craft lightly, and the pilot seemed to be hunting in the clear air for something elusive. As he searched, he said, “You’ll learn some things anyhow. I stole this thing from a spook hangar near Elmira, New York. I took you along and left your ID in the Ford so they’ll think twice before they shoot us down, assuming they find us. You can pray that they don’t find us. And heeere we go,” he said, nodding. “We’ve got some thermal air under us now. I’ve never flown this thing before last night, so I’ve still got my training wheels on.”

Petra loosened her harness as she had seen him do, sitting up straighter, beginning now to almost enjoy a ride she could tell her grandchildren about—if she survived it. “It looks easy enough,” she said.

“It’s a tipsy bitch, but it’s got no power assists outside of tabs the autopilot can operate for straight-and-level flight. Even have to operate the waste-gate ducts by leg power. It’s a lot tougher than it looked on the prints, but your legs are your strongest muscles.”

“I’m a cyclist,” Petra said.

“I know. I followed you from the campus yesterday.”

“How long have you people been planning this, Smith?”

A faint smile as he shook his head. “One people. Me. I figure they owe it to me—shit,” he finished, slamming the stick hard to the left.

Without warning, some invisible demon of clear air had thrust the craft upward, but not on an even keel. The left wing flexed in an impossible bow, not folding but tilting the entire aircraft so that Petra’s right-hand horizon lofted until it seemed that the wings must be as vertical as a telephone pole and Petra was staring straight down through her hatch window. Caught by surprise without snug restraints, her shoulders sliding past the straps, she slammed her right arm outward for support, striking the flimsy plastic hatch hard near its lower latch. An instant later the hatch lay ajar, Petra falling out as far as her torso, the sudden battering of wind on her face forcing her eyes shut, her taped wrists preventing her from helping herself. She could scream, though, as she felt her hips sliding from the loosened lap belt.

The rough hand at her belt jerked her inside so hard she yelped as the hatch edge scraped past her ear, and then she was holding tight to the seat with her bound hands between her thighs. Instead of sobbing, Petra lay back and gasped, shaky inhalations that continued long after the aircraft had returned to normal flight. Only when she looked at him, her teeth bared ferociously, did he let go of her belt.

“Secure that hatch, it’s not broken. And don’t ever do that again,” he said, as if someone were shaking him while he spoke.

She had already levered the latch tight again, needing to turn sideways because her wrists were bound, when she realized all of what he’d said. “Me? You’re flying this goddamn thing, you crazy old bastard!” She began to tighten her harness again as well as she could, now almost crying in a reaction her close friends could have predicted: rage. “Tie my hands and feet,” she snarled, and, “let me loosen these things,” she accused with a sob, and, “turn this rinkydink cardboard contraption on end, and—and blame it on me,” she howled, watching him through slitted eyes as she regained her self-control. More quietly, and with the sweetness of ant paste: “But I promise to do better, Mr. Smith, really I do.”

He looked away, and when a sudden nudge of turbulence made him look ahead, Petra saw a blush fading under the tan on his craggy features. “Okay. You’re right, kid. I was just—fuck it, you’re right.” He stared off, clearing his throat, and Petra realized that he was trying to keep his voice steady. Then he turned back toward her, gesturing with his free hand. “I’ll pull that tape off your wrists. You couldn’t be dumb enough to try anything up here.” She watched his hand unwind the tape, seeing the black hairs still standing erect, realizing that he, too, had been badly frightened.

If there was truth in wine, there was more of it in fear. The first question that occurred to her was, “If you didn’t care, why didn’t you just let me fall?”

“I don’t know. Probably should’ve, thanks for bringing it up. Maybe next time I will.”

“You need me alive for something, don’t you?”

“Not in any way you’d believe,” he said, “and I don’t want to talk about it. You got lucky. We’re both lucky, in fact. See that?” He pointed to the altimeter, recording their rise although the engine was idling. “I’m going to try something.”

With that, he thumbed a detent on the throttle and flicked off a switch. The whisper of the engine ceased, but before Petra could speak, he released a grin that was utterly and innocently boyish. “We’re still climbing. There’s a lot of skin and a lot of drag on the hellbug, but she’s soaring. Hot damn!”

“Is that what it’s called?”

“Sure, why not,” he mused aloud. “Its name is Black Stealth One, Petra. Some guys on the project called it the hellbug.” He compensated for a gust, looking far off; perhaps, she thought, far into the past. “Some people who make policy in this country decided they needed this thing because they didn’t trust other guys who make policy. Then some other squeaky clean policy maker decided they didn’t trust me, either.”

“When did this happen?”

“Long time back; doesn’t matter. I got burned like you’d burn a match, used and tossed out. They thought I was dead.” As if to himself, softly: “They tried, God damn them, they gave it a real good shot.” His sudden glance at her was quietly fierce. “I was straight, you understand, this wasn’t punishment. Just policy on somebody’s part. Happens all the time. I’ve been dead for years, kid.” Into her questioning frown he grinned again. “But now I’m burning ‘em back, the whole bloody-minded bunch of ‘em. And you know what? By God, I feel alive again.”

“You’re a phoenix,” she said. “You know, flying up from—”

“You don’t have to explain it,” he cut in. “Jesus! College kids think they know it all…”

“I know more than you think,” she said softly.

“If you don’t, I fear for the future of engineering.”

“You helped build this airplane, maybe even designed it. That’s the only way you would’ve seen blueprints a long time back, or worried about control forces. And that’s not all I know.”

His reaction was an exaggeratedly slow movement of his head until he was staring directly at her. “Well, I’m a dirty bastard,” he said.

“At least we can agree on something, Mr. Corbett,” she nodded.