The Ransom of Black Stealth One

THIRTY

Cyclops one loitered three thousand feet over Gulf waters as the big Sikorsky Sea King helicopter, two miles away and hovering just above the water, winched the last wetsuited man aboard. Dar Weston, his forehead pressed against Plexiglas, continued to scan the waves for any sign of debris that would mark, without question, the end of Black Stealth One. A badly scorched five-gallon canister and a woman’s bright blouse floating close together were, as proofs, highly suspect.

Because you don’t want to believe it, he argued silently. You’d rather believe Kyle is still alive? He knew the answer. No irony could be more complete, more against the principles he had held inviolate throughout his career, than this: better to have Corbett alive than Petra dead. So much for the man I thought I was; the man my father thought I was.

But if Black Stealth One was still aloft, it was still his job to help track and bring it down. There was a pedant’s word for that, he mused, still alert for floating wreckage he did not want to see. The word was “antinomy,” a naming of opposites; two equally valid principles locked in combat.

Dar felt the tap on his shoulder and turned. “You’re going to love this,” said Ben Ullmer, lowering his headset around his throat like a necklace. “That fuel canister had mechanic’s tools inside, and more taped under it. A piece of a burnt sock came out of it. Pretty clear evidence to me.”

“A decoy, you mean?”

“Sure.” Ben Ullmer’s face held animation, almost glee. “Corbett set it on fire and dropped it on purpose. With a little smoke and a hard IR signature, he knew there was a good chance someone would spot it. The blouse too, to make us think they’d sunk. An old submariner’s trick, setting their clothes afloat to fake a sinking.” Ullmer squinted out of the portal, gnawing his lip. “He’s still up here, Dar, somewhere. We have to believe that—not just on a personal level, but at the mission level.”

“All right.” Dar replied without vigor, lost for the moment in a waking dream. He imagined for a harrowing instant that Petra, exhausted and in shark-infested waters, lay somewhere below, seeing them, swallowing salt water as she screamed for help. “Look, we have to leave a couple of those choppers here for a while, just in case, while we take up the search again.”

“Sure we can,” said Ullmer, with a callused hand on Dar’s shoulder. Ullmer toggled the onboard communication channel and instructed the pilot, studying a coastal chart as they conferred.

When he was finished, Ullmer leaned near Dar to avoid shouting over the drone of the engines. “I know what you’re thinking. Listen, even if he’s that kind of man—and I don’t think he is—Kyle Corbett wouldn’t push the girl out, knowing we might get a closer visual sighting now. He thinks she’s his ticket out of this, but only if we can see her.”

Dar moved back to his seat and cinched his lap belt. “Even if we do,” he said, arguing against hope, “he’s not going to come down unless we knock him down.”

“He comes down when he’s out of fuel, just like anybody else,” Ullmer insisted, jabbing a forefinger into his open palm. “We can stay aloft longer than he can, even if he started out with an extra five gallons. If anyone spots him again, we know how to keep him in sight.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“He can’t fool more than one searcher at a time! If we can spot him and surround him with several widely spaced chase planes, at least one can keep him visually targeted at all times. We just follow him until he runs out of fuel.”

“And hope that doesn’t happen over open sea,” Dar said.

“He’s not nuts. Fact is, that gas can could mean he’s found a way to refuel in flight. I’ll bet he doesn’t get far from the coast the whole trip.”

Dar selected another chart, cursed, grabbed for another. “I think he will. Taking the worst case, if he wasn’t heading for Cuba it might be Nicaragua.

I’m trying to find a goddamn map,” he said, furiously refolding a chart, “that shows Central America.”

Eventually, they borrowed a North American route chart from the pilot of the P2V. It revealed the tip of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, and brought an educated guess from Ullmer. “He just might stretch it to the Yucatan, with five extra gallons. Only he didn’t have a full five, ‘cause he burned some of it for that decoy. Dirty, smart bastard,” he went on, apparently to himself. “And because he is smart, he’s got a sleeve full of aces; and he isn’t gonna start off from Florida toward New Orleans and then turn south when his fuel is iffy.” Ullmer looked up and saw Dar’s gaze. “Unless that attack panicked him.”

“He’s not the type,” Dar said, with a strong headshake. “Did you ever see his psychological profile?”

“Why would I? NSA doesn’t rely as much on that crap as you people do,” Ullmer said with some pride.

“Touché,” Dar said, unsmiling. “Well, the Company does, and I defend it. Kyle Corbett used to get some sticky missions back in the sixties because he’s the kind that doesn’t know how to panic. I’ve seen him after missions that might as well have been designed for panic responses.” Shaking and sobbing off in a corner somewhere, where no one but me could see him, and then a cold shower and after that enough alcohol to bank his fires again, and no one but me the wiser.

Ullmer was waiting. “Yeah?”

Dar shook his head. “A little subdued after the mission,” he said, “but no panic under pressure that I ever heard of. And I used to listen to his voice tapes. It was my job.” And I hated it, because I admired Corbett, perhaps loved him as we are taught to love our heroes. But I listened to the tapes of that man in mortal danger in the name of national security, the same flag I spread over myself when I had to kill him, all for the higher good. And see what all my high-flown motives have brought me…. “No, Ben, he wouldn’t panic.”

“He’s not heading for the Yucatan,” Ullmer said with sudden conviction. “And he never was.”

Dar stared blindly down at the charts, remembering the kind of man Corbett was, the way he thought, the kind of counsel he had given in more innocent days. At last he began to nod, looking up at Ullmer. “He never was,” Dar echoed. “I think he intended us to know he was in Florida, else he’d have taken more care to avoid leaving prints in that store.”

“Which means that right-angle turn toward New Orleans was a planned maneuver.” Ullmer saw another slow nod from Dar, chose and unfolded a long sectional chart, then moved forward in the narrow passageway to talk with the P2V’s youthful navigator.

He returned presently, lurching as the big airplane began to bank in another of its endless—and thus far, fruitless—sweeps. “We’re out here, south of Pascagoula, Mississippi,” Ullmer said while making a circle with his finger. He moved that finger to the left, toward mauve and yellow markings that represented navigation beacons and townships. “When last seen, Corbett was heading toward, oh, roughly New Orleans.”

He flipped the chart over and spread his fingers across a spatter of irregular shapes that sported little mauve and less yellow. “This is bayou and island country, south of New Orleans,” Ullmer went on. “It’s beginning to look like Corbett does not have fuel dumps waiting. He’s taking it as it comes.”

“Implying that he doesn’t have any big organization working with him,” Dar said, carefully noncommittal.

“Uh, yeah, I guess it does. We’ll run all this past Elmira pretty soon but right now—if he can pick anyplace he wants to get fuel, there must be a thousand mom and pop gas stations here in Cajun country. He’s done it once already and left a corpse, maybe to make sure we knew it.”

“Why wouldn’t he keep going to Texas? He used to like the place, learned to fly there.”

“Because the son of a bitch may know how to stretch a gallon of fuel but he’s not God almighty. Even with twenty-five gallons, he couldn’t get there. No mountains in the Gulf to soar off of, and no onboard oxygen to let him fly high enough to catch a jetstream, even if there was one. The hellbug’s engine isn’t carbureted for it anyway. Nope; he can’t get to Texas on twenty-five gallons.”

“What if he had thirty gallons?”

“Shit, make it fifty,” Ullmer exclaimed angrily. “If you change the rules enough he could fly straight to Nicaragua!”

“You’re right,” Dar said, rubbing his temples. “So what do you suggest we recommend?”

“That we pour on the coal to both these Neptunes, get ahead of the hellbug, and set up a new picket line along the Louisiana coastal islands. Even if he were trying to reach Texas we might pick him up on his way; we’ll probably pass him. Hell, if we’re fanned out, say, fifteen miles apart he can’t use that chameleon mode against everybody at once.”

“Sounds good,” Dar replied with cautious optimism. “And if we’re to rely on visual sightings, why not bring more aircraft with us instead of all this interservice chaos? We could be spaced five miles apart and at several altitudes.”

“There’s something to be said for chaos, but I agree. He seems to like flying between eight and ten thousand feet, so we’ll do it too. We commit to the best gamble and cross our fingers.”

“All right,” Dar said briskly. “Call Elmira, and you carry the ball. Sheppard will like it more from you, Ben.”

“If it works, he will,” Ullmer said, with one of his rare grins. “Don’t you go shy on endorsing the idea.”

Dar’s gaze went flat for an instant. “You call him. I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”