The Ransom of Black Stealth One

THIRTY-ONE

Petra stared with worried fascination at the whitecaps that sparkled and marched, rank after rank of them, ten feet below her. Corbett’s course had finally taken them west of the cloud-bank, and he had pumped the plastic fuel bladder dry before they emerged into bright early afternoon sunshine. After two hours at wavetop altitude, with its greater sensation of high speed, Petra had learned the dizzying result when she gazed straight down. Speaking around one last mouthful of canned meat, she said, “I hope there’s a good reason for this.”

“The best,” Corbett replied, checking his fuel counter and wristwatch. “It’s working.” He took a bite of cheese and a swallow of water, then handed the water bottle back. He noticed that Petra no longer bothered to drink from a separate container; one of many signs that both warmed and disturbed him. “If you’re through, stow all that stuff. I really hate a messy cockpit.”

“If that’s a straight line, I think I’ll leave it alone,” she said with a smile, and repacked their food before zipping his leather bag. She sucked her fingers before setting the IR scanner for a complete sweep. “I still don’t understand why we’re practically kissing the water or why it’s working. Something I’m not supposed to know?”

“Nope. There are two advantages to skimming the waves, Petra. One, it defeats even the kinds of radar that might pick the hellbug up, if I remember correctly. But better still, it lets us use ground effect.”

“Show me some ground, Kyle. All I see is water.”

“It works with water, too; over any flat surface, you can save a hell of a lot of fuel by skimming. It’s called ‘ground effect’; when the air’s caught between the wing and the ground surface, the wing gets extra lift. The closer the better; right now I’m throttled back so much we’re stretching our fuel nearly thirty percent. That’s an extra hundred and fifty miles for us.”

“Then we won’t even have to stop for fuel in Louisi—uh-oh,” she broke off, swinging the video monitor to give Corbett a better view. She keyed the scanner again. “I’m locking onto that guy. Okay?”

“Yep, paint us for him.” Corbett studied the fast-approaching blip and saw another faint blip approach on the same course, a few miles from the first. He had swung the hellbug’s nose a few points southward to avoid the Louisiana coastline entirely. The infrared scanner proved that this region of coastline, beyond their horizon only because they flitted so near the water, was thickly patrolled. Almost as if they knew where I’d intended to refuel. Sure, Ullmer would know what I’ve got to do; the old fart may have guessed what I’m doing now, but he can’t know which direction—can he?

Switching among military radio frequencies, he divided his attention between the crosstalk of pilots and those blips approaching at ten thousand feet, one of them nearly overhead by now. It might be any of several twin-engined types, though the radio messages seemed to emanate from many aircraft. “… a roger, Poker Three, turning on eastern leg at three-zero thousand …” No problem there; probably a flight of Air Force interceptors much too high to worry about. Then, “Red leader, try Bravo channel,” said a voice on another channel, so Corbett tried it too.

“…shadow on the water,” said a youthful male voice which Corbett recognized, “at your two o’clock low. It does cast a shadow, right?”

“Roger, Cyclops Two,” Ben Ullmer’s voice assured. “We get nothing on the scopes yet, and no visuals. He could be locking onto us. We’ll orbit at this altitude; you might sortie down for a better look.”

Corbett could see them clearly, two dark silhouettes at ten thousand feet, too low to have contrails, too slow for jets. As he watched, the most distant aircraft began to drop from the sky and he decided it must be a P2V, maybe one of the Cyclops team carrying Weston and Ullmer. “Bandit at four o’clock high, Petra, ah, over your right shoulder. I’m going for a tight pullup. You’ve got two blips; lock onto the other one but wait ‘til I tell you. And tighten your harness.”

Through the clear polymer bubble over his head, Corbett studied the unlovely lines of the P2V as it passed almost directly above. Visual sightings were always a problem directly below most aircraft, and Corbett firewalled his throttle to gain maximum level speed before he urged Black Stealth One into an abrupt climb, then turned to follow the wind. “Lock onto the other one now,” he said calmly.

And grinned to himself as he heard, “…steep climb, banking toward me. Hell’s fire, he’s disappeared! Shadow’s still there; ready munitions,” said the young commander with grim self-assurance.

For a moment, Corbett did not recognize the voice of Dar Weston. “Cyclops Two, wait for us to…”

“Munitions away,” said the pilot, barreling along at over three hundred miles an hour, flashing across the sky a thousand feet above and ahead of Black Stealth One. Corbett knew then that he had grinned too soon.

He had never even wondered how the hellbug would respond to full power to the waste gates while engaged in an inside loop, and he did not think about it as he tried it; the long string of dots that appeared from the Neptune’s belly were already becoming a train of tiny parachutes as Black Stealth One responded, the combination of forward speed and diverted thrust hauling the craft up and over within a few hundred feet, now upside down as Corbett released the waste gates. He felt the drag of inertia on his body, judging that the aircraft was straining under a four-G load, instinctively aware that he must cut back on power and roll the hellbug out of this inverted position.

His rollout completed a classic “Immelmann,” half of a loop followed by a half roll. Petra yelped as loose hardware bounced off the canopy, the leather bag landing in her lap. Corbett found the siphon hose draped across his shoulder and shoved it aside, guiding the hellbug into a downward sideslip to gain more distance from those weighted parachutes.

At the end of the maneuver, Black Stealth One was again skimming near the waves while, a hundred yards to the right, a long train of munitions began to explode as each “buckshot” pod neared the water. Several of the explosions were deafeningly near. Corbett, accelerating again, kept waiting for the sizzle and thump that would tell him a hunk of shrapnel had struck the hellbug, unaware that buckshot munitions had been designed to hurl all their slugs downward in a lethal conic spray.

As the voices in his minitel generated a kind of chaos, Corbett glanced at his passenger. “You okay?”

“A shame to lose my lunch,” she said, pale and gasping, as she shoved the leather bag behind her knees.

“Can you still work the pixel program?”

“I can try,” she said, struggling to sit straighter.

“Those fuckers are chasing our shadow; we can’t paint that, but we can sure hide it if we get low enough,” he said, watching the two Neptunes as they circled with the obvious intention of a return pass. He banked again, moving with the wind—

and with the ranks of whitecaps. “Now, do what we tried yesterday, to fool something infinitely high,” he said. “There’s no real bogey to lock on to—”

“Right, right,” she said, her fingers racing. Then she sat back, still taking long breaths to quell her nausea. “Now tell me why—and I hope you can see that damned airplane coming at us again on your left front.”

“My ten o’clock,” he nodded, throttling back. “I see him, but if he sees us we’re in deep shit. Listen, uh—now that it’s empty, the plastic fuel bag will keep you afloat a long time. We’re about thirty miles south of land but we’re headed northwest toward it. If you’re not used to keeping your bearings by the sun’s position, better start now.”

“What are you saying?” Her voice was very small.

“Just in case we wind up in the water,” he said, staring at the aircraft that approached, slowly now, so slowly that its big wing flaps slanted down as if for landing. “Now hush so I can hear what they’re up to.” He slowed as much as he dared, using the waste gates to hover at the same pace as the wavetops, now so near the waters of the Gulf that he expected to feel the slap of salt water against the fuselage.

“…wreckage on the water,” said the gruff voice of Ben Ullmer. “It’ll be gray. Wait one.” A pause. The big patrol plane droned overhead and Corbett saw what might have been the head and shoulders of a man in the nose bubble of the Neptune. Ullmer again: “Cyclops Two, we’re dropping a dye marker.” As he spoke, something fell from the Neptune’s open belly hatch into the sea in a long, steepening curve. “Navigator reports a Plexiglas bubble with two occupants in the water. They’re not moving. Could be part of the fuselage. On your pass, please drop a rescue raft, ah, five hundred yards southwest of our marker.”

“Wilco, Cyclops One.” Corbett spotted the second patrol plane again, closing from two miles off. It banked toward a stain of orange, bright against blue water, that was now spreading to the right of Black Stealth One.

Flying the hellbug so near the water that it hid its own shadow from the noonday sun, its skin a near-perfect imitation of the moving lines of whitecaps, Corbett shoved the throttle forward and cursed the clear shining Plexiglas of the canopy around him. There was not one damned thing he could do about that canopy and the glassy reflections it could provide in bright sunlight. He could only flee at top speed, and hope that the orange dye stain across the water would become the focus of the Cyclops team. He waited another few seconds and then firewalled the throttle.

These guys are too good, Corbett thought, as the airspeed indicator crawled toward a hundred and forty knots. But I wonder if Dar has just started to learn what a conflict of interest is all about? He didn’t want ‘em to drop those ‘chute bombs, that’s for sure. Can’t blame you, Dar, old buddy, you murderous bastard. I’ve had the same problem ever since your kid showed me what she’s made of. He risked an instant’s glance at Petra, noting the gleam of sunlight in her hair as she studied the video monitor with steady concentration. Reminds me of an ad for pasteurized milk; lord, she’s lovely. At a time like this, I want to kiss a college girl? One thing I don’t want to do, is tell her Dar Weston’s in one of those goddamn Neptunes.

Judging by the crosstalk, Corbett realized that the Cyclops team—perhaps including Weston, who was apparently in the same aircraft—had succumbed to a seductive belief in the thing most desired: Black Stealth One shot down, with survivors. The navigator’s eyesight might be excellent, but it had registered only the clear canopy and its occupants, virtually on the water amid the image of whitecaps endlessly repeated to the horizon. But some of those whitecaps were electronic, rolling back across the skin of Black Stealth One as it whispered northwest.

Two minutes later, Corbett intercepted a rendezvous message from a Navy Grumman Hawkeye and another from a flight of Marine Broncos, all converging on that dye marker. He never saw the Hawkeye but the three Broncos, twin-engined loiter craft with prominent gun pods, passed at low altitude no more than a mile to the left of the hellbug. He held his breath over that one; any one of those close-support gunships could have churned Black Stealth One into floating fragments.

When Corbett heard the Air-Sea Rescue choppers respond en route from some place called Grand Isle, he was within sight of islands off the Louisiana coast. He pointed the hellbug westward and, to Petra’s profound relief, put five yards of safe air beneath the fuselage. “I think we’ve squeezed through,” he told her as he listened to a fruitless rescue operation on Bravo channel.

“I have never been so scared in my life,” Petra replied, “except maybe for last night. It’s really strange how safe I feel with you.”

He uttered a snort of astonishment. “Well, you weren’t. You still aren’t.”

“I know it. Maybe ‘safe’ isn’t the word.” She yawned and stretched, flexing her fingers, gazing at him reflectively. “Like just before a design competition, or a game against Yale. Very special things are going to happen but even if you take some lumps, you enjoy it; oh, I don’t know.” She shrugged, unsatisfied with her own explanation.

“Try this, from a guy who took some lumps,” he said: ” ‘I do not regret the journey. We took risks; we knew we took them. Things have come out against us. Therefore, we have no cause for complaint.’ That pretty much sum it up?”

Now her look was sidelong. “Not quite, but close. It’s beautiful, and a little scary.”

“Yeah. It was one of the last lines Captain Scott wrote as he sat freezing to death in the Antarctic.”

A long silence. Then: “You really know how to make a woman feel good, Corbett.”

“I want you to know how I feel. Of all the dumb fucking things I ever did in my life, to take you along today! Petra, you talked your way into the hellbug this morning because you thought it would be fun. I don’t think you have any clear picture of what it’s like to get yourself killed.”

“Who does, except those who die?” She began as if voicing a mild objection, but developed a strong cadence, as if marching toward an objective clearly seen. “Some of the men flying those airplanes, trying to kill us, are probably younger than I am. Don’t tell me it’s different, I won’t buy it. When a young man dies for his country, do you think he joined up to die? I’ll bet you’ve forgotten, Kyle. I’ll bet he joined thinking of the fun! Of course it’s a risk; so is riding a bike in Providence traffic.

“But you don’t think I know what it’s like to hurt. Hey, ever get kicked in the head by a soccer forward who’s a head taller than you are? I woke up with a molar missing and would have slide-tackled that bitch into the middle of next week, only the game had been over an hour when I woke up. Listen, you want to loop this fucking thing again? I might panic the first time, but I learn fast, and I’ve learned to go with the experts, so I trust you. Go ahead, try me; wring the sucker out.”

Her eyes blazed with internal light, her jaw knotted, her challenge unequivocal. Corbett decided she was the finest-looking thing he had ever seen. Not just her appearance, it’s a way of thinking. You consider the risk and then you go for broke, like Medina. Sure I do it. Dar did it a hundred times, God damn him to hell. And Petra is truly his child, and it’s no longer a matter of my turning her loose. Damn if she hasn’t captured me… “Some other time, maybe I’ll teach you aerobatics. Right now we’re conserving fuel.”

“Suit yourself,” she replied. “I’ll be ready.”

“I believe it, but it’ll have to wait. It’s still a long way to the Texas barrier islands.” He jabbed a thumb toward the monitor. “You might keep an eye on the IR scanner.”

She nodded and began to key the device, and was encouraged by the clean scope. “I meant what I said about experts, Kyle,” she said, her tone friendly again. “I’ve known you for two days, but there are some things I trust you with. And if it’s not asking too much, how on earth did you get away from those airplanes? I mean, what was the key?”

Corbett laughed aloud; shook his head, knowing there was only one honest answer. “We hid our shadow, and pulled maneuvers I didn’t know the hellbug could manage, and painted this bird just right. Now, you want a translation with the ego strained out?”

“That would be nice.”

“We had a shithouse full of luck,” he said.