The Ransom of Black Stealth One

THIRTY-SIX

He had forgotten to set his watch alarm, but no matter: the dry-hinge squeal of a gull waked Corbett while the sun was little more than an exuberant promise on the eastern horizon. The sky was cloudless, still star-flecked above and to the west. Probably no cloud cover all the way to Mexico, he thought. He would have kissed the young woman who slept at his side, but chose not to wake her as he gentled his arm from hers, flexing those familiar early-morning twinges of pain from his joints as he stood.

He used his seven-dollar blanket to wipe dew and bug remains from the canopy of Black Stealth One, taking his time to avoid scratching the polymer bubble, with no intuitive concern for anything that might be building low across the sky like a metal stormline, miles away. He hefted his roll of duct tape with mild astonishment, reflecting that he had used almost the entire roll of the stuff in a trail stretching from New York to Texas. He decided he might have enough of it left to make Petra’s bonds look convincing.

She awoke as he knelt beside her to rub her arms, beginning to stretch before she opened her eyes, then opening them wide as memory and recognition flooded her face. She flung her arms around him with the hug of a small, sleek bear. Her “Good morning” was as intimate as foreplay, and as full of promise.

“Hi, little pistol,” he said, hugging her with one arm. “Ready for your morning bondage?”

She saw the roll of tape, realized that it was necessary, and grinned, pretending to misunderstand. “I’ve never tried it, but I might like it.” By the time she stood up to tuck her blouse in, Petra’s face had clouded. “I wish,” she said, and bit her lip. “You know what I wish. God, I’m starting to miss you and you’re still here! Dammit, Kyle! I just hope you leave before I start crying.”

He pulled her into an embrace, sharing a long and fervent kiss before she pushed him away. “Hey, dirty old men need love too,” he joked.

“Go on, get it over with. I intend to be absolutely furious with you before I climb down from here for help,” she said glumly.

He taped her ankles first, then unwrapped his handiwork and did it again. “I taped you up when I went for fuel last night, remember that,” he said, and read her frown correctly. “Well, logically I would’ve had to. You think they won’t analyze the stuff to see how often it’s been used? Never underestimate them,” he said, in unconscious irony.

He rewrapped her wrists too, making certain that she could reach the torn edge with her teeth, and then carried her to the ladder. “Don’t forget the dust the hellbug raises,” he said, pausing on one knee. “If you worry that tape loose before I’m gone, it’ll get all dusty and they’ll wonder about that.”

“Don’t forget to write,” she replied solemnly, and he saw that her mouth was trembling. He kissed it, longingly, gently, and then walked to the cockpit. “And for God’s sake be careful,” she added suddenly, raising her voice in virtual panic.

He gave her a high-sign, then grinned and winked as the hellbug’s engine cleared its throat.

“I hate that macho shit, I hate it! Go on,” she yelled, drumming her feet on the tank dome in a brief frenzy, but once he closed the canopy he could not hear past the hellbug’s subtle stirrings, and it might have been his imagination when he glanced at her for the last time, her eyes closed but her mouth forming, I love you, Corbett, as he lifted.

He set the hellbug’s nose directly toward Beeville, remembering that this entire region was a training ground for Air Force cadets. I’d like to paint this thing as a bird and go high, but I’d best use ground effect to save fuel, he decided, calling up the pixel program to paint his craft for highflying searchers, then checking the IR display. Five minutes later, as the sun’s first direct light hardened shadows in the cockpit, he could no longer see the oil tank. Black Stealth One wheeled southwest, in the general direction of Laredo and the Mexican border a hundred miles distant.

Corbett had not flown across this piece of country for years, but he remembered how suddenly the land changed from creek-veined arable acreage to sere, dry ranchland fit only for oil derricks and forced irrigation. “Derricks,” he said aloud. There might not be many in his way, but those few probably would not show on his scope. Hell of a note, to get wiped out against a damn abandoned derrick over a dry hole. Pull up to two hundred feet? No ground effect there, I might as well be at twelve thousand. Well, keep your bloody eyes open, he commanded himself.

He knew a reasonable chance existed that he would be seen, but at this hour most Texans would be pulling on boots about the time he crossed the border. And whatever they saw, he imagined that he would be in another country’s airspace in less than an hour. Considering the current political climate, he did not worry much about the Mexican Air Force.

He first suspected that he was not going to make it while skimming thirty feet above the lazy waters of a miles-long reservoir. The IR scanner dutifully registered the exhaust of a ferryboat—and then showed him a dotted line of pink on the horizon. The line lay directly in his path. Power line reflection? But he knew that power lines did not stretch a hundred feet above this prairie and as he watched, the dots became more distinct on his scanner though still too distant for a visual check. He banked to the west. That line still stretched to the horizon, and it was not stationary, but approaching fast.

He tuned for military frequencies and found two of them fully occupied, the transmissions strong and getting stronger. “…lagging, Broom Five; form on me,” urged one commanding baritone, and “Mop Bravo group, close it in,” said another, with brief acknowledgments—some of them using jargon that Corbett had almost forgotten, not Air Force but Army. The guys flying Bell “Huey” helicopters had sounded like that over the jungles of Vietnam. And judging from their terse comments, the Broom group had to be Navy or Marine, because the Air Force referred to rear-seat observers as “gibs,” guys in back. Corbett felt an instant of cold trepidation as he glanced at the scanner and saw more blips than he could easily count, forty or fifty of them, low on the horizon. And now he was too close to risk a steep climb because, as he had learned the previous day, that gleaming canopy would not remain totally invisible this close to such a far-flung set of eyes, and his rate of climb was comparatively sedate.

“Broom leader to Broom Two and Broom Seven, sortie again on present heading and reform in five minutes, over.”

“Ah, wilco, Broom leader, warn the slicks so they don’t sweep me up on my way back” was one response. “Slick” was a generic military term for a helicopter. Corbett saw a sun glint as one of the dots ahead and to his left began to rise out of formation, picking up speed. He locked the pixel program onto that dot, saw it become a bulbous, ungainly swept-wing brute as it accelerated. Evidently the other sortie craft was so far down the line that Corbett could not spot it. But he recognized the aircraft with icy dread. Oh, my God: they’ve got a squadron of Harriers!

Mop and broom; it’s a major sweep, Army “slick” choppers and those goddamn Harriers! And they’re sending a pair of Harriers ahead to see if they can flush me, he realized, slowing, dropping nearer to the hard-baked soil. He knew by now that Broom was the Harrier code word, and stayed on Broom’s frequency as he kept one eye on the blue-and-gray camouflage of what was obviously a Marine Harrier. It passed a mile to his left at four hundred knots and gave no indication of spotting him, but Corbett knew that he was more nearly invisible when motionless on the ground than while his gleaming canopy bubble skated above the surface. He planted his legs hard, employing the waste gates in an attempt to land almost instantly in one of the many broad depressions of the scrub-dotted landscape.

The line of sweepers, AV-8B Harriers interspersed with Army helicopters flying behind and even lower, was clearly visible now, a vast armada of machines all capable of hovering, and of outrunning him. Someone had worked out an unlikely but fearsome combination, the sinister Harriers flying so slowly that their thrust diverters flung mighty downdrafts of jet exhaust toward the ground. That line trailed a virtual dust storm behind it, the product of their downdrafts. Corbett did not remember until too late that, painted skin or not, the hellbug’s diverted air sent a huge spurt of dust flying as it touched down. And the dust storm raised by the searchers was probably no accident; even a pixel-covered skin might stand out as a distinct outline in such a soup of flying particles.

Corbett had hardly felt the grazing thump of hardpan when one of the Harrier pilots in a line approaching at perhaps a hundred miles an hour and so near that Corbett could see their flaps extended broke in with, “Broom leader, your ten o’clock on the deck! Canopy in a circle of dust!”

Corbett firewalled his throttle; the impeller was still revving respectably and as he cleared the ground, the sweep line was almost directly overhead, slowing in response to the sighting. But an aircraft of the Harrier’s fourteen-ton mass does not maneuver well at such low speeds, and though they were spaced over four hundred yards apart, they used precious seconds in their attempts to maneuver in midair without colliding. Meanwhile, Corbett skimmed tumbleweeds as he plunged Black Stealth One’s nose into that dust cloud.

Eighty knots would not have been enough for most light craft to crab sideways, dead-level, in a pall of dust without losing a wingtip. Corbett managed it using partial waste-gate power, virtually skidding, the right wing swinging fast until he was moving almost parallel to the dust pall. But one of the Hueys must have seen his canopy too, and Corbett knew it only when he saw the earth before him erupt as if a land mine had detonated.

If Corbett had been in doubt about the Hueys’ armament, he knew now. Though some military helicopters carried rockets and cannon, this one had loosed a burst from its chin turret, a minigun firing as many rounds as six machine guns. Corbett veered right, now moving at a hundred knots, passing under the Huey before it could swing to keep him in its sights. He saw the bulk of a Harrier swing sluggishly into place ahead of him, sinking, and no more than fifty feet above.

The tremendous downblast of the Harrier’s superheated jet exhaust, so close above, would have slammed the delicate hellbug into the ground had Corbett flown into it. Instead, he judged that the Harrier was slowing and killed most of his own forward speed by a sharp, almost vertical climb, then nosing over. He ended directly above the Harrier, slamming the waste gates open, and found himself riding a few yards above the brute, its rudder an upswept scimitar scant feet from the hellbug’s wing root.

The Broom channel was simply chaos. Two of the monsters had apparently collided, one of them damaged enough to force an emergency landing. A Huey circled, clearly unwilling to risk hurling a wall of lead so near a “friendly,” but Corbett could see the shining ellipses of other Huey rotor blades as the choppers converged. He wasted no time trying to reprogram the hellbug’s skin, knowing the bird plumage would be useless and too many warriors were converging from too many points to let him fool more than one.

Corbett could see the pilot below him as the man twisted in search of the hellbug, revealing his head-up display screen. The HUD might reduce a Harrier pilot’s workload, but it was little use against a fugitive hanging overhead. The Harrier pilot did not take time to consider his choice, so he did what attack pilots like to do: he began to accelerate.

Corbett grinned fiercely, though he knew he could not keep forward pace with the Harrier for more than a few seconds. Had its pilot simply landed then and there, Corbett would have been an easy target for those Huey slicks the instant he moved away at fifty miles per hour. The pilot had a definite agenda, however, with darted glances at the rearview mirror on the upper left side of his canopy. Corbett saw him try to use his rudder like a cleaver through the hellbug’s wing and rocked that wing upward, as if to bank in one direction. Then, failing to match the Harrier’s pace above a hundred knots, Corbett jinked upward and banked the other way.

The main rotor of the following Huey almost cut his wingtip off. It could not have missed the hellbug by more than an arm’s span and its tail rotor did not quite miss, ripping a chunk the size of a man’s hand from the wing trailing edge; and the hellbug’s trailing edge was tough stuff, developed from the same filament-loaded aramid polymers used in bulletproof vests. The Huey’s small tail rotor, its tips shredded unevenly, set up a hellish vibration as it began to come apart.

Corbett saw the Huey go down, spinning madly around its main rotor axis, and took the time to “check his six,” using the scanner to show him who might be closing on him from his six o’clock position, directly behind. There were three of them, a Harrier and two Hueys, and Corbett heard the Marine pilot warn the Hueys aside as he readied his rocket pods. Good, I’m more worried about them than about you, Corbett thought, and saw the two smaller blips on his rearview screen move well aside. That was when he yawed the hellbug to place himself directly between his pursuer and the Harrier he had used as a shield before. It was completing an ungainly turn ahead of him.

His pursuer loosed one salvo anyway, the pencil-slim rockets glinting harmlessly past the hellbug’s wingtip like huge needles, and Corbett was nearing top speed as he flew directly toward that turning Harrier which now approached head-on. Both of the Harrier pilots announced, one of them with short Anglo-Saxon comments, their plight: they would be firing toward each other. And while their rockets were no thicker than a man’s wrist, one of those little warheads could equal one Marine airchine. Broom leader evidently forgot which channel he was on as he demanded side passes by the Hueys.

Corbett realized that the aircraft approaching him would be more dangerous if its pilot jinked upward to catch the hellbug in his exhaust, so Corbett did it first, again using the nose diverter to help flick the nose upward so suddenly that G forces nearly dragged his head down. Then he was over and past the Harrier, darting quick glances in search of enemies, which were plentiful, and cover, which was nonexistent.

The almost silent shuddering from his left wing made his decision for him; four neat holes had punched a straight pattern between leading and trailing edges. Corbett had penciled the line that defined the main spar of Black Stealth One, and he knew where that crucial structure lay under the hellbug’s skin. One of the Huey slugs had missed it by less than six inches. Corbett rolled his aircraft onto that wing from an altitude of three hundred feet, seeing the rotors of two Hueys flash as they moved in from that side, seeing other flashes from a chin turret.

And ahead, cutting into the hardpan soil like angular fingers, lay one branch of a ravine that deepened and broadened as it stretched away to the southeast. More than one cadet had made of himself a flesh and metal marmalade by playing in these arroyos with fast, heavy airplanes. Corbett kept his left wing down, knifing toward the ground like a broad arrowhead in a long sideslip that brushed shrubs at the right-hand lip of the ravine.

Typically, the lip of a Texas ravine is an absolutely vertical cliff, abruptly becoming a slope that is not curved, but angled, toward the bottom. The wider that ravine, in general, the deeper—and the longer that vertical drop at its lip.

No airplane falling in a sideslip at nearly two hundred miles an hour could maneuver abruptly enough to avoid careening into the opposite slope of this ravine, without thrust diverters beneath its wing and nose. Among the excited voices clamoring in Corbett’s ear was one that said, “Scratch one bogey.” As Corbett let the hellbug’s diverted thrust align him, now angling his right wing down, perfectly parallel with the ravine’s left-hand slope and no more than a man’s height above jumbled stone, he knew that his abrupt disappearance must have looked like a hopeless fall into destruction.

Ravines do not simply quit. They issue either into flat lower plains or bigger ravines. In his haste and bedeviled by G forces, Corbett punched a wrong instruction, erased it, then punched the right one into the pixel program while keeping the hellbug’s belly mere yards above the slope that was leading him downward toward a blind bend. Virtually the only real curve associated with such a ravine is the graceful bend that changes its horizontal direction. If he could only reach that bend ahead, and bank tightly around it before one of them saw him, he could…

“Bogey in the ravine, Broom leader,” called the only voice that did not sound perplexed. “Still taking evasive action but that canopy sparkles like a diamond ring. Broom nine pursuing,” it went on, and Corbett cursed. I had to polish the goddamn-canopy, didn’t I? Should’ve left it dirty. A fragment of his mind said it would not have mattered. They would have borne him down like this anyway, sheer numbers overwhelming Black Stealth One’s bag of tricks.

Corbett was already committed to a tightly curved bank to negotiate the bend but, as he swept through it, saw that the ravine was only an arm of a broader depression. Eastward, to his left, the glitter of whirling blades peeled over the ravine’s lip a mile distant. Almost immediately he saw the Huey crabbing toward him, winks of light almost a steady gleam from its chin turret. Corbett dropped lower, following the slope contour, and saw what appeared to be a small volcanic eruption halfway up the slope across from him. It was a small area of ravine disintegrating in a solid hail of minigun fire, and the pattern seemed to be moving only up and down slightly, as if some huge beast were writhing just beneath the rocks.

The bastard doesn’t see me, he’s just keeping up a curtain of fire, Corbett realized. But he locked the scanner onto that Huey anyway and hoped that his canopy would not give him away again until he had flashed below that steady withering blast. Corbett actually heard the ricochets humming like bees in hell as he passed two hundred yards from that disintegrating rubble, beneath the line of gunfire.

He found himself pointed toward the mouth of another ravine, shadowed in early light, and swung into it even though he knew it would become shallower, not deeper, as he flew up its gullet. Another voice, then two, announced that he had been seen before his canopy ducked into the ravine’s shadow. Twenty seconds later, as he climbed over the lip and dropped near the brushy plain again, a series of small explosions flung debris into the air three hundred yards ahead. He jinked upward to miss any stray hunks of rock that might still be raining down; he had not even noticed the rocket salvo, but it had missed by a fair margin.

Then, before darting down to ground level again, he saw the next ravine, less than a mile ahead. If his eyes were still perfect, it was a wide one—therefore probably deep. If his parallax perception was off, he could soon be a smear mixed with plastic. Two big, strong blips on his rearview were closing hard, and patiently settling into that ravine ahead to wait, four Hueys dipped below Corbett’s sight.

Boxed. Trailing those two Harriers on his tail were other blips, flying higher as cover and, in a final, almost certainly suicidal ploy, Corbett prepared an appropriate exit. How do you get out of a box? Same way you got in. Or not at all, he decided, taking five precious seconds to tighten his harness and reset the pixel program. Not to fool anyone watching his upper surfaces: to fool anyone watching the hellbug’s belly.

He could not see those waiting Hueys until he had nosed over at the ravine lip, and they were there, all right, blasting away as he judged the depth of the ravine and risked tearing the waste-gate controls loose. He hauled the stick into his gut, pouring full emergency power into the nose diverter, and started the first part of a loop. This time it would not become an Immelmann.

He had judged himself no more than five seconds ahead of the pursuing Harriers, but he was wrong: they were still approaching the ravine lip as the hellbug swept up above the ravine, upside down, and he leveled off that way. Inverted, ten feet above the plain at full tilt, Kyle Corbett flew out of the ravine and almost directly below the Marine craft. His pixel program painted not the top, but the bottom of Corbett’s aircraft, and his canopy was completely hidden as he arrowed away, still inverted.

He took another risk, yawing slightly to change course, switching to the Huey channel. One of them had seen his maneuver and was bellowing it out as hard as he could, giving chase although, the Huey pilot admitted a moment later, he had “—no joy.” He too had lost sight of Black Stealth One, and hanging upside down while gasoline trickled from his plastic bag into the cockpit, Corbett set the scanner to show him where the rest of his enemies were.

Coughing, eyes streaming with gasoline fumes, Corbett passed beneath the last of the covering Hueys without provoking a shout of recognition. He could not remember how long that experimental rotary engine behind him was supposed to run inverted, but the hell with it, he had enough velocity now to gain a little altitude and roll rightside up, if his engine seized. He kept waiting for signs of engine trouble, and blinking gasoline fumes from his eyes for a five-minute eternity as he streaked toward the border near Laredo. And he listened with joy to the Mop and Broom channels for even longer than that, until he had righted the hellbug and cracked his canopy door to flush the worst of the fumes out.