The Ransom of Black Stealth One

TWENTY-SEVEN

“No, he isn’t going to make trouble. When he works his hands loose, Bobby will dump his pal in that hidey-hole with a bag of quicklime and forget about the whole thing,” said Corbett, who was heartily sick of the whole argument after a half hour in the air.

Petra, holding a sectional chart across her knees, placed her finger over a spot on the chart and leaned her forehead against the window canopy, gazing downward. “You don’t have enough appreciation for the habits of stupid people, Kyle. Someone shoots your friend; you call the police and demand justice—when you sober up,” she amended, and then began to sing: “Wayyy down upon the Swaneee River…”

When she stopped, with an expectant glance toward him, he said, “I hope you don’t expect me to sing, young lady.”

“No, I was just commemorating it. The Suwanee River; it empties into the Gulf just ahead, according to this map.”

He shook his head in mock dismay and peered past the nose of Black Stealth One. At twelve thousand feet, they could see the gradual curl of the Mexican Gulf which indented the Florida coast ahead. He glanced at her chart quickly, then back at his console. “That puts us dead on course, due south,” he said after a moment.

“Kyle, where are we headed, really?”

“Dry Tortugas, at the moment. Just run your finger straight south down the eighty-three degree line. It’s out in the Gulf, west of the Keys.”

She refolded the chart and, after a moment, said, “Aha—but what’s there?”

“I don’t know; don’t much care. I said we’re headed there, but we aren’t going there.”

She wrinkled the heavy paper in frustration. “Please don’t play these damn games with me.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I suppose I’m pretending you’re in a search plane, and I’m trying to throw you off.”

“Well, I’m not,” she said emphatically. “So talk to me.”

“You mean, you’re in this for the adventure, not the puzzle.”

“If you want to put it that way,” she sighed. “Adventure is fun, but puzzles worry me. I’ve worried enough.”

Now the green of savannah growth below had given way to the blue of the Mexican Gulf, the Florida coastline stretching away southward on their left. In the far distance overland, a condensation trail stretched across the lower edge of the stratosphere. “Let’s paint the bird for that guy, he’s heading in our general direction,” Corbett said. He kibitzed as Petra called up the pixel program, using Black Stealth One’s infrared sensors to locate the searcher’s coordinates.

When she had finished, she looked at him for approval. “Very nice,” he said. “Petra, the TV news makes it clear that we’ve been seen. We can be invisible only to a single viewpoint, and we can’t know when some guy with a fishing pole will glance up.”

“We probably won’t even notice him,” she agreed. “You can only fool some of the people some of the time, hm?”

“Yeah. Well, anybody on land who saw us this morning saw us heading south. But there aren’t nearly as many people looking up from boats. I’m betting we can turn west in a couple of minutes, and nobody will see that.”

Petra nodded, a sly smile lifting the corners of her mouth. “That’s what you intended all along.”

“Sure.” She’s still going to face interrogation sooner or later. I’ve got to use that against them. “We’re going to Nevada while half the world’s airplanes patrol the airspace between here and Cuba.”

“On my say-so, if you’d had your way,” she prodded.

“Partly. I’ve made a hell of a long detour to put that idea across.” He moved the control stick and watched the readout on the compass as Black Stealth One banked westward. “Check the video now; let’s see if the program is still following the IR signature of that guy.” He nodded to their left where the contrail, now an intermittent scrawl, extended almost parallel to their course.

“It’s still locked on him,” she said presently. “Would it, if he had flown through clouds?”

“Beats me. I doubt it,” he admitted.

They fell silent; he relaxed at the controls, while she watched the hypnotic motion of whitecaps far below. After a time he said, “Your question about staying locked on after clouds have passed? That’s pretty sophisticated thinking. Score one for good old Brown U.”

“Has it crossed your mind,” she said, “that in twenty-two years I may have learned a few things you don’t know, Mister Hotshot?” Her voice was as soft and cool as crushed ice.

Corbett gave her an openmouthed, studious frown, a parody of astonishment. “You know, it never has. I mean, how could I go on living with such shame?” He saw that his joke was not received well, and smiled. “Come on, Petra. You keep surprising me, that’s all. Think of it as a compliment; you’re not exactly the average, uh…”

“Airhead,” she said. “Would it surprise you to know I’ve had a lover who was much older than you?”

“Damn right,” he said. “Would you believe I’ve bedded girls as young as you?”

“Why not,” she shrugged, indifferent to the idea.

“Of course that was thirty years ago,” he went on, grinning, then laughing outright as she slapped his arm; but he sobered quickly. “Why would you have a lover older than fifty-three, Petra?”

“Fifty-six,” she stated. “You’re fifty-three? I thought you were prematurely, well, you know.”

“I know you’re changing the subject on me.”

She folded her arms and closed her eyes, her head cradled on the headrest, and she spoke as if the topic were tiring. “He was a professor at a school I went to, a veddy posh place; great school, really, but I wanted to go to Brown and my parents wouldn’t let me at first. I was eighteen, and I was full of resentment, and Lydell, well—he was there, I guess.”

“Um,” he said, mulling it over, sparing time to watch the contrail that slowly crossed some miles off, above and ahead of them. “Hell, that’s not a jet,” he said. “It’s a twin prop job. Must be some cold air up there to give him such a trail. They get weird weather over the Gulf. I believe I’ll tune in and see about it.” He clamped his minitel over his left ear, tuning the receiver as he went on: “So tell me about good old Lydell: all tweeds and pipe smoke, looking for one last fling?”

“Pipe, yes; tweeds, no, and if he’d ever had a fling before, it sure didn’t teach him much.” Petra giggled, shook her head, tried to be serious. “He was married, really very sweet and tentative and shy.” Another giggle: “I practically jumped his bones.”

“Every time?” Corbett’s lifted eyebrow said he heard more than he believed.

“There were only a few times and no, not every time. Believe it or not, some men think I have enough charm to respond to.” She waited for him to reply.

Dangerous ground, he told himself, and began silently to fine-tune the radio, avoiding her gaze.

Suddenly, with a bright brittleness that tried too hard to be bantering, she asked, “Kyle Corbett, are you one of those macho men who prefer the company of other men?”

“What?”

“Are you gay, Corbett?” Her smile was wide and, he decided, altogether false.

“Not very,” he said. “I tend to get subdued when I’m flying a carbon-fiber toothpick and weather builds up ahead of me.” He pointed to the low blanket of gray cotton that stretched across the horizon to the west. He waited until she opened her mouth, then said, “And stop that shit, Petra. I get a hard-on for no man and, if you want the truth, not many women.” He made manual adjustments, throttling back, and watched their sink rate as he added, “I’m not passion’s slave. Just because I notice you have great knockers, doesn’t mean I have to grab ‘em.”

“Ninnies. We say ninnies in high society,” she said, straight-faced.

“God, but you’re a pistol,” he said, chuckling.

“But not one you want to grab,” she said. “I’m not being provocative, Kyle, I’m just—curious.”

He nodded. Presently he said, “You have to understand how I live, Petra. I learned to get along without strong ties to other people before you were born. In some ways, a hobby can take the place of relationships. Some hobbies get to be your whole life.”

“I think that’s very sad,” she murmured.

“Easy for you to say, but it really can plug the gap; I mean, you may be alone, but often you’re having too much fun to be lonesome.” He studied her keenly. “Ever wonder why your dad spent so much time racing cars?”

She returned his gaze. “But he had Mother, and—me,” she said slowly. “I don’t want to think about it that way.”

Phil Leigh might have felt like a father, if Dar hadn’t been constantly on hand to remind everybody of the facts. Maybe he did anyway, how the hell would I know? “Suit yourself. For me, airplanes plugged that gap. Let me tell you, a sortie over China in an SR-71 is just about the most fun you can have without risking AIDS.”

“That’s the fast one, isn’t it?”

“It’s a rifle bullet. The only reason the pilots aren’t jerking off, up there, is that it’s too much trouble in a flight suit.” He laughed softly, wistfully. “Besides, you don’t have to, the airplane does it for you. I guess you’d have to be there,” he said, making it an apology.

Another long silence followed, penetrated only by the whirr of the engine. Corbett had almost forgotten their last exchange when Petra said, “You’re telling me that hot pilots don’t really crave sex, after all the stories we hear?”

“I don’t know about other guys. And I knew plenty of pretty ladies, Petra. It was simply easier to avoid letting any one of them get to be a habit. I traveled a lot. Why get attached to someone when you know it can’t last?” And I won’t talk about the last few years in Mexico. When you can’t trust the condoms, things can get pretty grim…

“It’s still sad,” she said, and then brightened. “You got attached to my uncle. But you’re going to say that was different.”

“Fuckin’ A,” he said, an ancient curse for an ancient memory. “Never had a pretty lady stick a time bomb in my fuel tank; now, there’s one friend in a million. You will tell him, won’t you? That I kept all his secrets, every one of them.”

“I’ll tell him,” she promised. “I’m certain I’ll be telling him more than you want me to decipher; but I’ll tell him.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You won’t understand, Kyle. You’ve kept yourself aloof from relationships so long, you don’t even realize how people can read each other. I know it’s important to you that I say that to Uncle Dar. I know it’s more than business. And I don’t have to know what it is.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Now do you see why I think it’s sad to alienate yourself?”

“I guess. Only, what’s so great about reading people?”

“Nothing, unless you’re close. Then it can be,” she faltered, and he saw tears welling in her eyes. “It can be wonderful while it lasts. I don’t know why I’m crying,” she said, laughing as she wiped her tears away.

He intended it to be droll: “Maybe you miss old Lydell.”

She refused to look at him, staring to her right, toward the Gulf coast on the far horizon. “Maybe I do. He’s the only man I ever slept with who cared about more than my—my parts.”

“And you’re much more than the sum of your parts,” he said, studying the shadows of clouds on seawater as the aircraft sank gradually lower.

“It’s not funny. It’s true,” she sniffled.

“I wasn’t being funny, Petra. I know it’s true for me.”

“Imagine that: the man is human. And why are we going down below the clouds,” she said as their world darkened abruptly.

He tapped his right ear. “Cloud cover is building, and I want to keep the coast in sight. I think we can make it as far as the Texas coast,” he said, “with this in-flight refueling system.”

“Pretty smart,” she said, giving him a smile.

“Not too shabby,” he winked, and when he looked back through the windshield the little parachute was there, as though it had winked into existence, and Corbett needed time to check his depth perception because it had passed his left wingtip almost before it registered in his mind, so it had to be smaller than a drogue chute, perhaps two feet across, and then he saw something else ahead, several somethings in fact, small metal canisters sliding down the sky. “Hang on,” he said, but she had already gasped.

It takes time to deflect a huge moving mass of air, and before he had moved the nose waste gate for reverse thrust they had passed so near to one of the tiny canisters that Corbett saw the thin trailing wire as it fell. Farther to their left, the damned things were fairly raining from the clouds. The one that they hit came down to the right of the cockpit, and the wire might have slid along the wing’s backswept leading edge to release them if Corbett had not tried to bank away. The right elevon, the hinged rearmost portion of the wing, responded to his movement on the stick and his forward speed was still too great.

The wire whipped back across the wing, slid into the crevice between the wing and its canted elevon. Corbett thought, Somebody else is getting smarter than I am, as Black Stealth One bucked and fought its tether, sliding toward the water.