SEVENTEEN

”We’re turning,” the girl said, looking up from the video monitor.

“Can’t fool you for a minute,” he said laconically, easing the stick upright again. With no power-assist for the controls, the craft needed severe steering and more muscle power than Corbett liked. Have to bitch at Medina about that, he thought idly. And he’ll tell me I’m just getting old, and we’ll both be right. He kept an eye on the contrails on his western horizon, four fast jets streaking north at medium altitude.

“Your repartee stinks, Corbett.”

“You’re just browned because you can’t find the paint program either,” he said, and saw her jaw tighten. “Look, I’m sorry; I know it’s frustrating. And we’re turning a few points southeast because there’s usually choppy air over Atlanta.”

“Uh-huh. Not to mention a few million people,” she said dryly. “I think I see it under the haze to the southwest.”

“That’s it. Plus Dobbins Air Force Base, which doesn’t thrill me. We’ve got to thread our way around a lot of military bases in these parts. I’ve spotted more contrails than I like in the past half hour or so, and they’re radioing a lot of negatives on several channels. They could be searching.”

“Then why come this way?”

“Because,” he said patiently, “Okefenokee is about two and a half hours from here.”

She gritted her teeth and swore at the video terminal, cleared the display and sat back, rubbing her forehead. Then she snapped her head around. “Is that where you’re delivering this? A Florida swamp?”

“Not delivering, just parking; and Okefenokee’s mostly in Georgia. I don’t think anybody will realize how far we can stretch a tank of avgas. We’ve saved an hour’s fuel riding Blue Ridge thermals and—let’s just say I need to get to Florida. But first I’ll need to refuel, and if I were flying search grids, the last place I’d look for this airplane is in a cypress swamp.” He delivered a solemn wink and then put his forefinger to his right ear, turning up the gain on the radio. “Oh shit,” he said softly.

He had set the second radio on a police frequency scan pattern only as an afterthought, because highway patrol aircraft flew at heights and speeds similar to his own. The good news: it had paid off. The bad: some Georgia bear in the air had spotted them.

Unlike military pilots, airborne highway patrolmen used little jargon to their home bases. “You betcha,” an educated Georgia cracker was saying, “looks just lahk your description. No insignia; scary-lookin’ thang. If it had a tail it’d look lahk a dragonfly, but it doesn’t have one. I’m patrollin’ Route Eighty-five north of Athens and he’s maybe fahv miles west of me. ‘Bout eight thousand feet headin’ south, maybe southeast, a hunderd knots or so. Over to you, Thirty-one.”

Crackle. A female dispatcher’s voice: “Wait one.” Crackle. Corbett felt centipedes of tension crawling up the back of his neck as he waited. Then the same voice: “Remain in visual contact, Eighty-three fifty-three, but do not approach. Give me exact coordinates and expect a flight of Air Force jets to take over surveillance.”

Black Stealth One was at seventy-five hundred feet, and had passed a highway arterial moments before. The little city of Athens, Georgia, lay on the southeast horizon. No question about it, the search was on and now it was becoming a chase.

“Sorry, I need the video,” he said to the girl, and swung it toward him. A yellow key labeled “AFT SCAN” lay apart from the computer keys. His first discovery on the keyboard was that one press gave him a rearview, the second press returned him to the computer—a feature he had not expected. Thanks to video scanners linked to the computer, Corbett could see around the gaping mouth of the fuselage. As he moved a tiny joystick next to that yellow key, the video scanned the skies behind. In his right ear he could hear coordinates that sounded right, and this was no time to check the chart to be sure.

“What’s happening?” The girl’s sharp glances took in every motion he made: the toylike rearview adjustment, his quick movement on the throttle, his own glances into the vast volume of air ahead with clots of gleaming cloud.

Above all, thought Corbett, I can’t have her panicky. “Change of pace. We’re going to hide out awhile in cloud cover.” The hellbug’s acceleration was gentle but firm while it climbed as if to divert around a huge, flat-bottomed cottony cumulus to the south. If I make any sudden correction right now he’ll know I’m monitoring him. Corbett switched the left-hand radio to the “guard” frequency, but heard nothing.

“Something spooked you, Corbett, I want to know what to expect,” said the girl.

“Ah, there he is,” Corbett muttered, nodding toward the video. As he twisted the tiny stick on the keyboard, a silvery spot became magnified until it became a small airplane, seen almost head-on from slightly above as it followed them. “God damn, a bird dog! Petra, there’s a Georgia state cop in an old Cessna One-seventy hanging back there. In the Air Force we called it an ‘L-Nineteen bird dog.’ I can probably outrun and outclimb him, but he’s called for help and I expect he’ll get it.”

“What do you want me to do?” Her voice was very small.

“I need the video to watch for something a hell of a lot faster,” he shrugged. “Just snug your harness up.” They passed fleeting wisps of cloud that lurked like pilotfish near the huge white mass to their left, and Corbett waited until one of the larger wisps hid their view to the rear.

Then, at full throttle, he flicked the control stick hard to the left and pulled it back. The craft responded in a hard bank to the left, sweeping directly into the solid mass of cloud. The effect was exactly the same as driving very fast into a fog-bank, with the added charm of sudden bumps that alternately lifted them from their seats and pressed them downward.

As the girl gasped in terror at porpoising headlong through fog at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, Corbett throttled back and watched the altimeter, continuing to bank the gossamer craft in a turbulent upward spiral. After a long thirty seconds, they broke out of the cloud top with dramatic suddenness. Corbett applied more throttle but pressed his feet on the pedals, feeling the bite of harness as his body tried to lunge toward the windscreen.

“Nice thing about the waste gates,” he said to the girl, “is that you can put on the brakes like nobody would believe.” He began to rotate the craft without banking, one eye on the compass, and then cautiously eased downward into cloud again. At that moment, in an aircraft expressly designed for utter quiet, they heard the rasp of an air-cooled engine pass very near and diminish ahead of them. They nosed out from the southern end of the cloud then, moving very slowly on jets of diverted waste-gate air that supported them like a three-legged stool. Corbett adjusted the waste gates, seeing a flash of aluminum as the Cessna disappeared around the cloud in a gentle bank.

“We’re going sideways,” the girl exclaimed.

“I wasn’t sure it would,” Corbett admitted, and pressed a finger against his right ear.

“Must have gone into a cloud,” he heard the state trooper say. “This is bumpy stuff, Thirty-one, I’m gonna hang around and see where he comes out.”

“We copy,” said the dispatcher. “Uh, the Air Force needs your exact coordinates. Any maps in there?”

“Somewhere,” said the Cessna pilot. “Stand by.”

Inside Black Stealth One, Corbett listened and fumed. He could not loiter here forever, but the next cloud in a southerly direction lay several minutes away, and it showed signs of developing the towering hammerhead shape that warned of severe turbulence. A cloud like that could literally twist the wings from a light aircraft. He throttled back until the great swept wing barely crawled across the underbelly of the cloud, circling lazily, the right wingtip grazing vagrant wisps of white, flexing in pockets of clear turbulence.

He punched the yellow key and swung the video toward the girl. “You may as well take this, it’s not much use to me right now.”

She addressed the keyboard reluctantly, with repeated nervous glances outside. “Would you mind telling me what we’re doing now, Corbett?”

“We’re parked with the motor running,” he grunted. “They’ve got to come down under the clouds to see us, and Air Force jets gobble fuel at low altitude. Find the damned paint program, I’m busy.”

The Cessna pilot had radioed his position at eighty-three degrees, forty minutes longitude, thirty-three degrees, fifty-five minutes latitude. Directly ahead, Corbett could see a small paved runway flanked on one side by neatly aligned aircraft, two of them with the sticklike, incredibly elongated wings of sailplanes. The chart on his knee said it should be the sailplane base outside of Monroe, Georgia.

The rising, then falling rasp of a nearby engine signaled another pass by the Cessna. Corbett did not see its aluminum hide until the patrol pilot, banking abruptly to the right, dropped the nose of the bird dog and began a shallow dive toward the south. Corbett eased his own craft up into the fleecy belly of his cloud, perplexed. Why would the Cessna break off its pursuit?

The patrol pilot’s next transmission explained a lot. “Thirty-one, this is Eighty-three fifty-three, fugitive sighted southwest of me near the Monroe strip, no more’n a thousand feet off the deck. Could be in the landing pattern. Don’t see him raght now but I got a glimpse. He sure got there in a hurry. Hold your horses.”

“Your help should be onstation soon,” the dispatcher replied. “I’m dispatching units from Route Twenty to that airstrip. Standing by,” she added calmly.

Corbett eased downward into the clear, still in the shadow of the cumulus, and at that instant he saw the achingly clean lines of an Air Force F-16 as it streaked overhead in the distance, a deadly silver dart with a rakishly underslung intake duct. Before Black Stealth One nosed into its foggy haven again, Corbett had spied the second interceptor plummeting in a long arc toward the Monroe strip, its drag brakes already extended to slow its ferocious plunge.

The turbulence in his cloud, Corbett knew, could grow from gentle to lethal at any time. Merely to kiss its edges was inviting catastrophe, but he could see no better choice. He steered north by compass for what seemed an age, breaking out of the cloud again and throttling up to rise near its bulbous tops.

Presently, though he did not manage to intercept the military frequency, Corbett heard the disgust of the Cessna pilot. “It was a sailplane, Thirty-one. He’s so slow he’s still on final approach. I tell you flat out, that looks different from the airplane I was followin’.”

Black Stealth One, meanwhile, slid into the open toward another cloud to the east. Because a cloud constantly changes shape, Corbett could see through occasional rifts that the Cessna was now bird-dogging another cloud somewhat above and westward a few miles, sniffing around the wispy perimeter, its pilot too cagy to risk plunging into that ugly gray mass.

Presently the girl looked up. “I can’t concentrate. It feels like we’re bouncing around.”

“We are,” Corbett nodded, and tapped his right ear, grinning. “The highway cop lost track of which cloud we ducked into. Maybe because prevailing winds are taking the clouds northeast, or maybe because their shapes have changed so much. Damn, I wish I could find the frequency those blue-suiters are using.”

“Talk sense, Corbett.”

“Air Force jocks, a pair of General Dynamics F-16’s—there,” he pointed suddenly toward the heavens to his right. “Look ahead of that faint contrail for the silver speck.” But almost as soon as she looked up, the nearby edges of cloud cover sealed off the view. “Those guys are practically falling out of the sky, Petra; they can’t fly as slow as the Cessna so they’re circling the cloud at a steep angle. Pull out five thousand feet off the deck, zoom up to twenty-five thou or so, around and around the wrong cloud, waiting for us to pop out. I don’t think the bird dog has much credibility left,” he chuckled.

Petra merely “hmphed” and studied the video monitor again. Corbett did not add that, to use his best cloud cover, he was moving east of his course. At this rate he’d be over the Atlantic when his fuel ran out, but Corbett did not abandon his tactic until the twin-jet Thunderbolt sizzled across the sky some distance ahead, into the region circled by interceptors. Meant for close support of troops on a battlefield, the craft had the lines of an airborne tow truck. Its pilot gave no sign he had seen them.

As it happened, Petra was looking up at the time. “Boy, now that’s ugly,” she said.

“Good God,” Corbett muttered. “This place is going to be wall-to-wall airplanes.” There was nothing to be gained by telling the girl that an A-10, a Fairchild Thunderbolt, was built around a rapid-fire cannon that could obliterate a tank. Oh yes, it’s an ugly bastard. And it can loiter a lot slower than a Mach two interceptor.

Black Stealth One surged on toward a series of puffy cloudlets that seemed deceptively near. Corbett chafed at his slow pace, expecting to be jumped at any moment, sliding down an imaginary line that might keep him hidden a few moments longer. He dared not approach the ground too closely because from miles above, a young pilot’s sharp eye could spot a hedge-hopping aircraft more easily than the same aircraft flying somewhat higher.

“Corbett”—the girl sighed—“I just can’t break in any further than the second menu in this thing. Are you sure there’s a ‘paint’ program in here?”

He could not say, “Speedy swore that it was there,” nor any similar assurance, else she might recall it later; and Medina would suffer for it. “I know it’s what this airchine is all about. It had better be in there,” he grumbled.

“All I’ve found is the main menu, and the secondary.”

“Secondary?” He was damned if he’d admit, again, just how little he knew about computers. Some fine airplanes had been designed with slide rules, and Kyle Corbett had rarely used anything more sophisticated than a hand calculator. “Show me,” he demanded.

“Here it is.” Her fingers flew over the keys, and the screen passed from the main menu after she keyed “Subrout.”

He watched the saffron text scroll down the screen, thinking idiotically that if he had a quirt he could lean out and whip the damned airplane a little faster. “‘Protect Xmit,’ no; ‘Flir,’ no; ‘Fueldump,’ ‘Xsec,’ ‘Pixel.’ whatever that is; ‘Submun’—”

“What’s a flir?”

Pronouncing it correctly as she had, to rhyme with “cheer,” made him smile. He enunciated each letter for her. “Forward-looking infrared,” he explained. “Good to have it but that’s not what we’re looking for. Or are we?” He’d used FLIR in its primitive days and, if he knew Ben Ullmer, this version would be state-of-the-art stuff. Maybe good enough to spot a distant aircraft before it could spot the hellbug. “Try it, Petra.”

She did, watching the golden scroll, lifting her brows in unspoken question.

He read the basic instructions, ignoring the thin scrawl of a fresh contrail that arrowed far above them, concentrating on the illustration which depicted the screen and keyboard. Evidently, once he pressed the “execute” key, the tiny keyboard stick could be twisted to adjust the FLIR gain. By moving the stick he could scan in all directions, including rearward.

Corbett hit the key. “Now you’re talkin’,” he breathed. The image had false color, painting a pink tinge to the image of the cloud ahead where it reflected bright sunlight. He twisted the stick; the cloud grew red, even better defined than with the naked eye. He diminished the gain and saw the cloud fade to a faint pink. A hard pinpoint of scarlet inched slowly across the bottom of the screen.

Petra pointed at the scarlet dot. “What’s moving?”

“It’s not, we are. Somebody burning trash, I guess; see the smoke?”

He reduced the hellbug’s power as they neared their target, a somewhat smaller cloud with fuzzily defined edges. Skirting the thing, Corbett moved the tiny stick for a rearview, which caused a dizzying shift on the screen. “This is more like it,” he said. A full half-dozen crimson dots moved across the screen, growing larger and smaller, winking off and on, in a mesmerizing dance. “Those guys are thirty miles away,” he said. “Infrared won’t penetrate clouds much, that’s why their emissions keep disappearing in the center of our screen.”

Petra’s engineering curiosity seemed to be growing stronger than her fears. “Those are jet exhausts, aren’t they? I count eight—nine,” she said as he aimed their canopy toward another cloud to the northeast. “That patrol guy sure has a swarm of help for somebody who lacks credibility.”

“I hope they have a nine-way pileup—ah, no I don’t really,” he admitted. “I just want to see ‘em dwindle to nothing.”

“Some of ‘em are just a single pixel already,” she observed. “Fading to pink.”

“Okay,” he said, adjusting the screen to show the view ahead, “I’ll bite. What’s a pixel?”

She stared at him with disbelief that infuriated him because it held amusement. “A pixel,” she said, “is the basic dot that makes up everything on a video screen. You really didn’t know?”

“Screw you, kid.” He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then said with less asperity, “You mean, whatever you see on that screen, words or pictures, it all comes down to a pattern of pixels.”

“Sure,” she said.

Each staring into the other’s face, they said it simultaneously: “PIXEL!”

Corbett tapped gentle fingers against her wrist as she reached for the keyboard. “Not yet, Petra. For all we know, it’ll start out by turning us into a goddamn billboard. First let’s snug up under that next pile of cumulus and let the IR do its thing.”

She smiled and nodded, settling back, the pleasure still evident in her face even though he was not yet certain they had located the paint program. Lordy but that’s a great smile, he thought. I wish she wouldn’t do it. What kind of man does it take to drag a kid with a smile like that into a sky full of young bucks trying to whack us out of it? He knew what kind of man it took, no matter what the stakes. He could take no comfort in knowing that only the ultimate betrayal could have made him into such a man.

Lurking beneath the flat gray bottom of the cloud, using his waste gates at half throttle, Corbett slowed the hellbug to scarcely over thirty knots. Far to the south, the screen revealed a dozen tiny reddish dots that waxed and waned like fireflies on some distant planet. From due north, a faint pink dot grew into a tiny, short-tailed comet, but its color did not intensify.

Corbett found it easy to translate the screen’s coordinates into the real world; he saw the silvery gleam of the little executive jet when it was still fifteen miles away, banking toward them. Easing the throttle forward, he adjusted the waste gates and let the hellbug levitate straight up until it penetrated a few yards into the murk of the cloud. Hovering in the gloom, with virtually no forward speed, Corbett could still feel soft bumps and hear subtle creaks in the structure of Black Stealth One.

“Thanks to my computer expert,” he said, “I knew this guy was heading our way before I could see him. You’ve got to understand, I’m a few years behind the times. Not by choice.”

She shrugged and said nothing, watching the screen. Because of the cloud’s absorption of infrared light, the screen was now featureless. Then a keening whistle dopplered up, became lost in a white-noise roar, and faded into the distance. “I guess the good guys don’t like to go through clouds,” Petra said wryly.

“Good practice to avoid ‘em,” Corbett replied, letting the hellbug drop slowly out of the cloud, using his waste gates to pivot the entire ship. “Even for a Citation.”

“Doesn’t sound macho enough to be military,” she said.

“Nope, an executive jet,” he said, adjusting the screen to locate the aircraft again. He saw it then, racing away to the south, and noted the distinctive high horizontal tail. “Only it’s not a Citation, it’s a Learjet.”

“Okay to try the pixel program?”

He could have kissed her for that. In spite of everything she seemed anxious only to solve a high-tech riddle, even though the solution would shorten the odds against her captor. “Have at it. Just don’t let me catch you printing your name across the wings.”

“Could it really do that?” She was already keying into the secondary menu.

“I don’t know. I’m the guy who didn’t know what a pixel was, remember?”

She giggled, perhaps at the self-disgust in his tone, and then she found the paint program. Corbett thought it fitting that the program would be camouflaged under a word he could not recognize without the help of a college girl.

And every passing minute took them farther to the south, but used up more precious fuel. Corbett found enough thermals to stretch his time aloft, but that fuel gage inexorably counted down the pounds of fuel left in his single tank. By the time the girl executed their first chameleon attempt with the pixel skin, less than four gallons of fuel remained in the tank of Black Stealth One.

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