The Ransom of Black Stealth One

THIRTY-NINE

Corbett had crossed the Rio Grande at Fourteen thousand feet because a lot of armed, frustrated airmen were looking for him lower, and even though blessed with his barrel chest he could not fly higher in an unpressurized cockpit without some loss of alertness. It was barely possible that the Mexican Air Force would be waiting in their ancient T-33’s, despite the political invective hurled back and forth across the border.

Living in Mexico, Corbett had watched those hostilities build. The torture and murder of a U.S. drug agent named Camarena, in Mexico, had lifted the edge from a blanket of Mexican deceit. Evidently the same government officials pledged to stop international drug traffic were, themselves, peso billionaires because of that traffic. The Mexicans had now replaced many of their top people within the federal judicial police but some of those changes seemed, to the yanquis, mostly cosmetic. And Mexican complaints of yanqui meddling into affairs of state had escalated into a national clamor against the colossus to the north. American tourists now faced a stronger likelihood of trouble than a fleeing American skyjacker. Still, Corbett knew he could not afford to relax. He could resume skimming the surface, however, to stretch his range.

Under ideal conditions he might have reached Hidalgo del Parral without stopping for fuel. The city was more than halfway across Mexico, beyond the sun-blasted hell of western Coahuila in a region more mountainous, but also more hospitable. He knew a man there who would ask no questions about his fuel requirements as long as that man did not see the hellbug itself. Even among the shadowy folk who prospered by making themselves useful to smugglers of all kinds, Black Stealth One was worth a few questions.

But conditions were rotten, and Hidalgo del Parral was out of the question. Corbett had squandered fuel with a lunatic’s abandon during his escape in Texas—though only a lunatic would have pulled half an inside loop in a ravine, and nothing less could have saved him. Some of his extra fuel had splashed around the cockpit, and the two quarts remaining in his plastic container proved a bitch to chase down with that siphon hose while flying the airplane in choppy winds. Skimming low through the state of Nuevo Leon, with the hellbug in its buzzard’s plumage, he knew he had been seen at least twice. On one occasion he saw a farmer cross himself frantically, fifty yards away. On the other a goatherd who might have been ten years old waved a hefty stick to ward off this vast predator. By that time Corbett knew that his only assured source of fuel would be Torreon, on the Durango-Coahuila border.

Torreon, enriched by a nearby network of canals that were the envy of many a Mexican farmer and perhaps a sign of hope in a drought-blighted nation, could be a tough town. Corbett had spent a week there overhauling a Cessna for the friend of a friend, in ‘eighty-seven. Some of the hangar loungers might remember him and his German surname which had become as acceptable to him as the one he was born with. That might help, but familiarity had its drawbacks: old acquaintances, especially Mexicans in the flying business, might virtually drag him home for a small informal fiesta.

He might cope with that by claiming urgent business. His more serious problem in the Torreon vicinity was the lack of dense cover, where a man might step down from a sixty-foot bird without having to explain himself to curious strangers who could be friendly, or lethally unfriendly, but it was always the friendly ones who liked to gossip. No, he would have to make certain he arrived in darkness. If the little commercial strip outside Torreon was as he remembered it, he could land in high grass near the strip and portage his fuel as he’d done before. Unless, of course, someone had harvested the grass, or started a goddamn junkyard there, or—

The answer to all these surmises was a pass at medium altitude while watching the scanner for anyone who might be sharing his airspace. Corbett made that pass shortly after three in the afternoon to find the Torreon strip unchanged. He chose primary and alternate landing spots, then flew east again. From a dry spot in the marshes beyond Tacubaya it was only thirty miles to Torreon, and here he could wait for dusk in splendid isolation. No sensible Mexican would waste time in such a dismal place as that.

He endured mosquitoes of prodigious size and smoked his last cigarette to dissuade them. He lifted off at dusk, and in the last glow of light beyond the Sierra Madre range, he let the hellbug settle near the Torreon airstrip into wild grass so high that a man on stilts could not have seen over it, high enough to hide the canopy, the wingtips flexing downward as he cut the engine. Corbett fought his way through a grassy thicket and found himself at the edge of the runway. Ten minutes later he found that luck was with him, in the person of one Elfego Velarde. It was young Velarde who had cleaned parts on that Cessna engine, and the tale of a downed crop duster worked again. Velarde laughed at the sight of the plastic bladder, but he had seen old cerveza bottles employed for the same purpose. In Mexico, a man made do with what he had.

Best of all, Velarde could lay his hands on the keys to el patron’s Volkswagen van, the kind with a truncated pickup bed behind. Roughly once a month, said the young man, they had to bring fuel to someone in Corbett’s situation. That situation, Velarde implied, was often one beyond the law. Velarde even helped wrestle a half-filled drum of avgas onto the van, and accepted enough American dollars to buy himself a few hours of flight instruction. It was with some difficulty that Corbett talked Velarde out of going along to help him refuel, though he accepted a half pack of cigarettes and matches. He drove a half mile before dousing his lights and cutting across stubble toward the runway.

Without his little Maglite, Corbett would have been hopelessly lost once he stepped out of the van onto stubble, and while wondering how a man could lose a sixty-foot airplane in a few acres of grass, he bumped against a wingtip. The rusty old pump on the fuel drum had a long rotary handle that squealed like a terrified animal with each rotation, but it filled that plastic bladder in less than sixty seconds and Corbett fell only once while wallowing through the grass. In a half hour he had filled the main tank and the spare bladder and was jouncing the Volkswagen van back to Velarde. He had grass cuts on both forearms and he would have burned like a torch with the spillage on his clothes. Young Velarde aimed him toward a shower which, astonishingly, even produced hot water.

Kyle Corbett washed off a twenty-five-hundred-mile accumulation of grime outside Torreon before donning his filthy clothes again. He pressed another twenty dollars on Elfego Velarde and had to refuse the young man’s offer of a ride three times.

He followed his swath to the hellbug and found some comfort with his jacket bundled behind his neck, thinking not so much about the next day’s tactics as about his friends. After years of enforced isolation, focused on machines that could provide a certain sense of accomplishment, a man might convince himself that things were more important than people. Yet here’s Velarde, who knows I’m a gringo but doesn’t let flags obscure a casual friendship. And Medina, good ol’ Speedy, who trusts me more than he does the whole spook hierarchy. God, what a copilot he’d be in Black Stealth One! If he doesn’t get nailed for his part in this. He considered the possibility that Raoul Medina might go behind bars. No worse possibility occurred to him.

And then there’s Petra. If she had any sense, she’d stick with a nice safe life and design New England bridges, but Petra doesn’t run on what they call good sense, she runs on a passion for living and learning. To hell with what “they” call it. What could be more sensible than that?

He chuckled in the darkness. She says I’ll be Methuselah when she’s forty, and she’s right. If I have any sense I’ll write this little episode off. Only I have more passion than sense too, and not just for revenge. There’s got to be something in genetics because she has the best of Dar Weston, the things I loved him for, the son of a bitch. And she might turn against me the same way.

And it might be worth it, he decided, with a smile that lingered as he began to snore.