The Ransom of Black Stealth One

TWENTY-ONE

It was late afternoon when Petra saw the scrawl of multilane highway below, a broad ribbon that slashed through flat, unvarying leagues of forest leaving verges as wide as the highway itself. She welcomed this sight after watching the endless morass of Okefenokee cypress, with water gleaming up at her like hostile eyes through the rank foliage. She even welcomed the huge triple-tandem trucks that crawled along the ribbon because those nasty brutes only plied major arterials, and this one was a monster. She asked the question simply by pointing with her brows raised.

“Interstate Ten,” Corbett nodded. “We’ve nursed this crate farther than I thought we could. Another ten gallons and we could’ve made it to Key West.”

I’ll bet he’s headed for Cuba. What if I started playing with the pixel program now, she thought. Would anybody notice the buzzard that kept changing color? And if they did, would it help me? Corbett would catch on immediately. She had not forgotten the hiding he’d given her early in the morning. It all came down to, “if I do, I get a whipping” or worse, and such punishments were new to Petra Leigh. She kept her hands where they were.

The altimeter told her they were ghosting along at eleven thousand feet, and she wondered just how accurate the fuel counter was because it read under six pounds, slightly less than a gallon. No wonder Corbett was studying the terrain with such intensity. To their left, the sun glistened and winked from far distant windows in a small town. To the right at roughly the same distance was a larger town. Like it or not, Corbett had come too far to go back to that god-awful, trackless swamp. And now there were farms below, and rundown cafes and service stations at road crossings. And plenty of people. Deep in Petra’s soul, a bubble of optimism began to rise through her nagging fears.

The whisper of the rotary engine was so subdued, she did not notice when the pilot shut it down. She did realize they were losing altitude because the horizon tilted and the earth began to pivot in that dreamlike way which had frightened her so the first few times she had experienced it. How was it possible that you could grow accustomed to such things in a single day, even to— well—almost enjoy some parts of it? Someone, probably Jason in one of his Connecticut cowboy monologues, had drawled that a feller could even get to enjoy hanging if he did it long enough. By the fall term, she would be able to make the same crack about abduction. With maybe just the teensiest bit of truth in it? The hell with THAT kind of thinking, she told herself. Yes, it was exciting, in an oh-my-God sort of way; and yes, Kyle Corbett carried a kind of grizzled, overweight panache with him, the kind of man who, as Uncle Dar liked to put it, would put a feather in his cap and call it macaroni. You couldn’t help a certain grudging admiration for a high-tech thug who declared solitary war on the CIA. But the man was holding her by brute force and threats, and whatever justifications he offered, he was prosecuting his own brand of war against the United States. Or at least against some elements of it. Develop a soft spot for Corbett? Not likely!

The two-lane road seemed to leap up from the flat, wooded landscape ahead. Petra spotted a roof of corrugated tin between trees, tried to keep herself oriented to it, failed as Black Stealth One banked and jittered. Corbett brought the aircraft lower, soaring on airspeed alone, but he cursed and banked sharply away from one field below. “Damn bean poles could damage a wing,” he said curtly, restarting the engine when they were less than a thousand feet above the field. A minute or so later he set the engine idling and Petra saw the second field, an irregular polygon slashed out of the surrounding trees.

They banked lazily over the area, emulating a bird both in plumage and maneuver, moving no faster than an automobile. Corbett split his attention between high-gain infrared video and the real scene out of his bubble. “See anybody down there?”

Petra laughed in surprise. “Would I tell you if I did?”

He muttered, “Jee-zus, Kee-rist,” craning his neck around as he said it, and then brought the great bird of passage down to where Petra could see the shiny green ovals of immature melons in the field. “Cinch up; you never know,” he said, and began to manipulate throttle, stick, and pedals simultaneously.

The shadow of Black Stealth One paced them over a scatter of oak and cypress, dipped, and then the craft stalled a hundred feet above the ground in a maneuver that put Petra’s stomach just below her chin. The rush of air from waste gates steadied the craft, let its nose drop until she could see the melon patch below. Then they were settling, as broad melon leaves whipped in the battering downdraft. She felt tentative contact through her rump, another faint motion, and watched fascinated as the engine whirr dopplered down, the lovely wings relaxing until they drooped, their tips nearly touching the melon vines.

“Uh-unh,” he warned as she reached for the hatch, and his right hand was a steel clamp on her wrist. “Keep your hands on the armrests.” She did, watching him release his harness, and sighed as he pulled that hated roll of tape from his bag, binding her left wrist to an armrest, ignoring her silent glare. Only then did he exit the cockpit, grunting, exercising his arms as he walked around to her side, scanning the treeline around the melon field with slow deliberation. Petra wondered why he shrugged into his old leather jacket in such muggy heat, until she realized it would hide the ugly little pistol and the shoulder holster.

When he had opened her hatch, he began to tape her other wrist down. “I know you don’t like it,” he growled as he attended to the wrist and then her ankles. The menace in his voice was unmistakable. It was as if they had not spent the entire day working together against deadly odds. “Can’t help what you like. I’m going to do a little recon circuit among the trees around this field just to make sure before I go for fuel. If I find you’re working against the tape, I’ll come back and beat the hell out of you. But I won’t tape your mouth unless that happens.” He reached behind her seat and snapped something, stepping back, lowering her hatch. “So you behave, and worse things won’t happen.”

She might as well have saved her angry “Hah!” as he withdrew the plastic fuel bag and then lowered his hatch, stepping high as he moved down a furrow and out of sight behind her. But as soon as he disappeared, Petra began to test the bonds on her left wrist. She had sweated more than once since leaving West Virginia. Rolling her wrist side to side, she hoped perspiration would be her ally.

Ten minutes later, her left shoulder and arm ached from exertion. She dared not struggle with her right arm because it would be visible through the clear polymer bubble if he were watching. The tape loop was wrinkling a bit, but she could claim that was from ordinary movement. The cockpit was a stifling little greenhouse and she was sweating again, which should have helped, but even if the adhesive gum released her skin she could not pull her hand through the loop. Very gradually, watching the treeline for telltale movement, she began to bend forward and to the left. Petra had very good teeth.

Yet she could not employ them against that damned tape. Her upper body harness normally let her move around a lot, so long as she did not jerk hard enough to engage the inertia lock. Now, however, Petra could only snarl at that tape. She realized then that Corbett had locked the inertia reel of her harness, and she ripped the air with her panted curses.

She was crying with frustration, relaxing against her headrest, when Corbett popped up from under the wing on her side, strands of his hair sweat-plastered on his forehead. Now, in addition to the plastic bag, he carried a bright red five-gallon metal fuel can, evidently bought or stolen from a gas station, and his shirt was sopping with sweat. It pleased Petra to see that his face almost matched the color of that metal canister.

He gazed in at her, looking her over, and something unreadable passed across his face as he raised her hatch. “Looks like you could use a little ventilation” was all he said as he moved around to lift the hatch bubble on his side. Petra did not respond. She knew that if she did, her voice would shake. I won’t give you the satisfaction, she told him silently.

She could hear him grunting and wheezing as he decanted a few ounces of dark liquid from one of the bottles he had warned her not to drink. Work yourself into a coronary, you old bastard, she prayed silently.

Perhaps he was talking to himself, perhaps not. “Ninety-two octane may be good enough for these folks, but we need a little boost,” he muttered. Petra could hear him slosh the fuel around but did not bother to watch. She could follow his progress well enough by hearing the filler cap release, his panting exertion, and the gurgle of fuel. As he replaced the filler cap he said, “They’re going to wonder why I keep coming back. I can claim I spilled it once, but not twice. Well, maybe I’m fueling a boat. Or maybe I just let ‘em wonder. I don’t suppose you have any ideas.”

“Only one. You don’t want to hear it,” she said, vehemence steadying her voice. “Listen, I have a back cramp. You might loosen my harness a little.”

He said, “I might, but I won’t,” and then lowered the hatch bubbles, moving off again almost silently, the big sloped shoulders suggesting a tired man.

“Bastard,” she cried, but he made no reply.

He had not been gone a half hour on his quest. Petra decided that either the gas station was very near, or he’d lied about making a circuit around the field. She spent several minutes trying to writhe loose from her upper torso restraint, growing sticky in the humid Florida air, and then gave it up. “Somebody he-e-elp me,” she screamed, so loudly in the confines of the cockpit that it hurt her own ears.

She screamed a few more times before giving it up. The only effect, besides half deafening herself, was on the cottontail that scampered off after her last scream, the one that hurt her throat. Then she tried to free her other wrist, without success. Finally she simply lay back and watched the sun drop toward the trees, and thought up new curses.

The first tendrils of shadow lay across the cockpit bubble when Corbett showed up again. He did not exactly pop up this time; more like an erect backbend in slow motion, moving side to side as he lowered the fuel cans and opened her hatch. Carrying something like eighty pounds, she thought, closing her eyes as she luxuriated in the faint breeze.

When she opened them again, he was arching his back, kneading at it with his hands. His mop of graying hair now looked as if he’d combed it with an eggbeater, and he breathed like a man who’d forgotten how. When he saw her looking at him, he muttered, “So much for staying in shape,” and tried to smile as he carried the fuel around to the filler opening.

He opened his hatch, perhaps to improve her ventilation—but screw his little friendly touches, she thought savagely. “You can’t stay in shape with a beer gut like that,” she said smugly.

“At my age it goes with the territory,” he said, again measuring fuel additive in.

“You’ve got more territory than Alexander the Great,” she returned, staring pointedly at his belt buckle.

“I do believe,” he said mildly, starting to pour fuel into the aircraft, “I’ll pop you one extra for that.”

“What do you mean, ‘extra’? I’m still taped up like a Christmas present,” she protested.

“A booby prize,” he corrected, coughing, turning his head to avoid fumes. “You think I’m blind? You’ve been working on that tape like a crazy woman. I warned you, kid.”

“Don’t call me ‘kid,’ ” she screamed.

He seemed almost glad of her outburst, beginning to decant the second canister as he said, “One more shout and the hatches come down, and tape goes over your big high society mouth—kid.”

Somehow, this reminder of social difference made it easy for Petra to rein her temper in. The Leigh household had many ways of demonstrating the adage that “class will tell,” and one of them was an overlay of cool disdain for the vulgar. No matter that Petra herself could play the vulgarian with the worst of them; she maintained a silence that she hoped was lofty, watching him climb into the cockpit again. I might’ve known he’d turn into a gangster again the minute we landed, she reflected.

He flicked switches, watched the fuel counter, and grunted his satisfaction before running his fingers experimentally along the tape on her left wrist. “Pretty good stuff,” he said, climbing out again, lifting that fuel bag for stowage in the cockpit. It had perhaps two gallons of fuel in it. As if to himself he said, “I don’t think I can risk another trip over there for a lousy three gallons,” nodding absently to the rear of the aircraft. A sigh: “So near and yet so far; I don’t relish falling around in those creepers again.”

Laying the bag of food and tools between their seats, he moved to her side and released her ankles, then her right wrist. “You can take the other one off,” he said. “I’m bushed.” While she stripped off the offending stuff, he circled around the cockpit and removed his jacket, cramming it behind his seat. “Time for dinner. I can whale your ass for dessert,” he promised. Not until he was climbing in did Petra, rubbing her wrists and glaring silently at him, notice that the shoulder holster was empty. She averted her gaze too quickly.

Poised halfway inside, he squinted at her, then slapped his right hand at his armpit. It put him off balance. “Oh, Christ,” he said softly, and then lost his balance, the aircraft rocking as he fell backward into the melon field.

Petra heard him hit the ground heavily, heard him cry out, and scrambled into action without taking time to think about it. Her legs seemed half asleep but that did not prevent her from dropping to the ground, rolling away. She leaped up, sidling off, remembering he had gone north each time, not daring to run until she saw that Corbett could only stand on one leg.

“God damn you, don’t you try to run from me,” he shouted in sudden fury, hobbling toward her, falling again, stifling another cry of pain.

Petra turned her back on him then and sprinted, stepping high, scanning the shadowed furrows because she could easily slide off one of those hard melons and break an ankle herself. She did not look back until she plunged into the trees, ducking past vines the size of hawsers. By that time Corbett was dragging himself into the cockpit of Black Stealth One.

She simply could not take the time to be frightened of this damp and shadowed jungle, ducking vines, scrambling on hands and knees when necessary. Her first thought was to put as much distance as possible between herself and Corbett; but then, as she burst into a clearing, she realized the predicament Corbett must be facing. She trotted up the perimeter road which was hardly more than a pair of ruts, and thrust both arms aloft, howling her triumph: “Allll riiiight!”

To engage the waste gates for vertical takeoff, Corbett needed two good ankles. And even if he got the hellbug aloft, he could not menace her without his pistol. With any luck she could find help fast enough to catch this overaged spy still trying to take off. “My turn now,” she exulted, trotting steadily up the ruts toward a broad break in the trees. “Let’s see who whales the hell out of who, asshole!”

Petra took care to pace herself as she would on a bike tour, easing off to catch her breath and to scan the gathering dusk for any sight of the hellbug. She felt like capering in circles to demonstrate her freedom, but every second counted if Corbett was to be taken while he was this vulnerable.

She trotted past a low ditch and found the blacktop road. Barely visible in the dusk to her left, less than a mile distant, winks of light throbbed among the trees lining the road. Petra ran a hundred steps, walked another hundred, ran again. Gradually the little store came into view. A dented yellow pickup truck stood near the two gas pumps, and from behind the edge of the white clapboard store protruded the prow of something dark that looked like a Firebird. Just below the roof corrugations and over a screen door stretched a weathered sign announcing “Olustee Gas, Grocery & Bait.” All of it defied the gathering gloom with the help of a smaller sign, “BEER,” surrounded by winking, low-wattage bulbs. The bulbs winked their last when Petra was still a quarter of a mile away.

She quickened her pace. When the driver of the pickup climbed into its cab, she shouted and waved her arms, hoping the vehicle would turn in her direction. Instead, it picked up momentum with the stately pace of a dowager and thrummed away.

She strode onto limestone gravel and up to the door of the place, breathing easily but deeply. Those little bulbs had given the place an air of cheer, of welcome. She heard no welcome in the scrunch of her shoes through gravel, and no response to her knock. The screen door was latched; the half-windowed wooden door behind it sported bars hammered from reinforcing rod. Squinting through screen and glass, she saw a single hooded overhead light above a wooden counter, a pendulum that moved less as she watched. Minutes before, someone had been inside. “Damn,” she said aloud. Could the driver of that pickup have been the owner?

Somewhere near, but not near enough to be felt, a breeze hushed its way through the trees. Petra knocked again, harder, then walked back to stand on the blacktop. She might try breaking in; a telephone line swung down from a nearby pole to the roof. Or she might wait for the next car. Surely she would not need to wait long. As she stood on the cooling blacktop, listening to the self-pity of a whippoorwill and wishing for lights to appear in the distance, she heard something else. An animal noise, a clean tone rising and then falling, yet somehow familiar, and she knew it had been made by a human voice.

Petra held her breath. Presently she heard it again, and laughed aloud. It had to be a radio somewhere behind the store, playing that stupid “Oooooh, new Moxie” soft drink commercial. The Moxie people must have lured Yma Sumac out of retirement, she decided, just for that dumb commercial. She picked her way through the shadows, stepping over a stripped engine block, calling twice more. Nothing—except that now she could hear that radio a little better. It was playing some rockabilly ballad. Playing it loudly, she realized as she emerged behind the store.

The shed was no bigger than a one-car garage, separated from the store with only a rickety roof to connect them. Petra’s hopes fell because she could see no light from the shed. Her optimism swelled again as she moved nearer, because now she could hear another voice faintly, under the ballad, and it was not singing but talking. Now two voices.

Of course; couple of mechanics putting in overtime with the damned radio on so loud they wouldn’t hear it if somebody dragged the store away on skids, she told herself. She walked up to the door and banged on it with the heel of her hand, shouting, “Hey,” as loud as she could. And then the cardboard slid crazily down from the inside of the door and she could see through the small panes very clearly.

Two young men were in the process of dropping out of sight behind a heavy worktable, lit by a bank of overhead fluorescents. On the table was a printer’s paper shear, and near it lay a sheaf of paper pages, each sheet containing rows of some delicate imprint in red. Petra’s shout was imperious: “Come on, it’s important!”

She figured they must have pulled the radio’s plug, the way it fell silent. “Hurry,” she insisted, banging on the door again.

“You go first,” she heard a querulous voice say.

“And don’t blame me if there’s black widders down there.”

“Shut up, Bobby,” came the reply in a deeper voice, and a sound of wood dragging on wood. “That’s a woman.”

“Ah seen her. What you waitin’ for?”

“They don’t use women, use your fuckin’ head. Or go on throo the hole if you’d ruther.”

Petra, almost dancing in her impatience, hit the door again. “Please hurry,” she began, and then thought of a phrase that might galvanize them, “it’s a matter of national security!”

“Bullshit,” said the deep voice as its owner stood up. He was in his thirties, thickset with dark curly hair, in dirty overalls and T-shirt, and he stared hard at Petra as he moved quickly toward the door. His show of teeth at her as he twisted the door’s lock was probably intended as a welcome, but he stepped past her, peering around. If he had washed recently, he had forgotten to include those overalls.

“I need a telephone right away,” Petra explained.

“Who you with, little lady?” The stocky man showed his teeth again like a robot, still looking around, holding the door open for her.

“Nobody, I mean there’s a man who kidnapped me but I got away,” she said breathlessly, stepping inside, her eyes darting in search of a telephone. “He’s in a stolen airplane and—look, can I please use a phone?” It occurred to her that some people might find her story hard to believe, and that she had stumbled onto a couple of those people.

Now another young man was standing behind the table, very tall and slender in tan work clothes, blinking sheepishly at her through cornshuck hair as he gathered the imprinted papers and turned them over. “Hey, Elbee, why not?” He did not seem to know what to do with his hands, and Petra saw that they were shaking. He looked at her, looked away. “Let ‘er in front. No problem. Raght?” His tone was hopeful.

“C’mere, Bobby,” said Elbee, clarifying it by waving two hairy fingers toward himself as he stepped inside and shut the door. To Petra he said, “You just stay raght there, little lady, everthang’s gonna be oooh-kay.” He spoke softly, soothingly, the way one might speak to a skittish horse.

“You’re wasting time,” said Petra, starting around Elbee toward the door without knowing exactly why.

“Raght there,” he repeated, gripping her upper arm, shoving her back roughly, reacting to her stare of disbelief with still another display of dental work, though he did not really have the teeth for it. He watched Bobby approach, moving only his eyes until both men stood between Petra and the one door. Then Elbee said, “Bobby, she says she’s by her lonesome. You better hope so. Now you stay here whal ah take a looksee. She don’t get out, Bobby. She seen us.”

“What the hell is this?” Petra put hands on hips and stared Elbee down. “Sure I see you, so what? You’re not supposed to be here? Go away then, but I’ve got to get to a telephone! I swear to you, it’s government business.”

“Ah bet it is,” Elbee said, and nodded. “She seen us, Bobby. Now keep her here, ah’ll be back.”

With that, Elbee slid out the door. The interior lock was a good one, a heavy side-mounted brass fixture at chin height, and it latched with a click of terrifying finality. Petra waited for a count of ten, trading stares with Bobby who might have been her own age and was clearly unhappy with his role. In most circumstances, she decided, probably shy. “You don’t want to get in trouble, Bobby,” she said at last, and walked toward the door bearing a load of false confidence.

It was the wrong thing to say. “Durn raght,” said Bobby, putting his back against the door. “And you seen us.”

Petra turned on a smile that should have warmed the brass lock behind him. “Anybody can see anybody,” she said. “What’s the harm in that, Bobby?”

“Them fake revenue stamps,” he explained.

She glanced over to the table, mystified. “Stamps?”

Bobby said, “They go on whiskey bottles; lordy, you don’t know much. They get you on that, you ain’t got a good lawyer, send you over to Gainesville fahv years or so.”

God, I’ve done it again. “Bobby, I don’t care about that, I didn’t even see what you were doing.” She took a deep breath and moved near him, making her face tragic, gazing gently up into his face. “I’ve been kidnapped by a man who is stealing a secret airplane. If you help me catch him, you can be a hero.”

“A hero,” he said, his eyes roaming her face.

I must look like hell but he doesn’t seem to care. “To the whole country. And to me, too,” she added. Got him. You’re such a bitch, she told herself smugly.

“You go with me to the phone, so you can listen,” she said, keeping the flow mellow as she brushed against him, reaching for the lock, nodding and smiling as he moved aside. “Come on, it’s all right, you’ll see,” she said, and stepped outside. And heard the angry bellow of Elbee, saw him pounding toward her from the semidarkness, and then she gave in to her fear and ran.

The open plot behind the shed was only an acre of clearing with spindly corn and less identifiable plants fighting for survival. She pelted toward the darker gloom at the treeline, knowing that once into that ferocious tangle she was as good as gone, but she could hear other steps behind her, and other breath whistling close, and then she was screaming in the grasp of Bobby’s long arms, flailing with her nails and feet, and she might have made it if not for Elbee, who jerked her upright and cuffed her half unconscious with his open hand.

It was Elbee who carried her over his shoulder to the shed, dropping her onto a cane-bottomed chair with no back.

“She was alone, awraght,” Elbee said, puffing, wiping sweat from his face, and the look he turned on Petra made prickly heat slide up the nape of her neck. “Now ah don’t know about you, Bobby, but ah cain’t see lettin’ this little lady loose, all this goop about guvment work, who knows what she’s up to, not you and not me. Least that’ll happen is strange folks with ties and forty-dollar shoes hangin’ round here. You wanta sell out, move? Who’d buy the place?”

“We could be heroes,” Bobby said, as if testing the sound of it.

“Who said that? Her? Shit for brains, she’d promise to suck your cock. Maybe she did.” Elbee looked from Bobby to Petra and this time his slow smile was genuine, and chilling. “Maybe she will, ‘fore this naght is out.”

Petra stood up and began backing toward the opposite end of the shed, feeling rough shelves against her arm, trying to identify something, anything, that she could swing as a weapon. Crossing his arms, the smile broadening, Elbee followed.

“Ah don’t lahk it,” Bobby said, rubbing a red welt across his forehead. “Ah got a sister her age, Elbee.”

“So do ah,” Elbee said.

“Ah know what you done to her, too,” Bobby insisted.

“Well shit, so did you,” Elbee said, watching Petra, leaping forward as she grabbed for the scissors that lay on the table. “Look at her blush, Bobby. Wonder which one of us she’d ruther have git ‘er first.”

Petra struggled, speechless, nearly overcome by the stench of the man who hugged her face against those coveralls.

Bobby moved nearer. “You thought about what she’s gonna say later?”

“She ain’t gonna say nuthin’, Bobby. That’s why you can do whatever you want.” He held Petra away, his hands gripping her arms, smiling at her. “Get it? Now then: why don’t you go first? Raght up on the table, whal ah hold her.”

“Ah don’t know,” Bobby said, but he moved nearer, indecision in his voice, and Petra quit trying to control her stomach, trying instead to provoke the vomiting that seemed so near. She remembered that some women claimed they had stopped a rapist by vomiting, fouling themselves in any way they could. She tried, but nothing in her past had ever trained her to urinate while struggling against two strong males, and when she felt the thick pitiless grasp of Elbee’s hands holding her ankles apart, and when Bobby at last got one of her hands forced behind her back, she began the wordless, mindless screaming.