The Ransom of Black Stealth One

FORTY-ONE

Ground-effect skimming would have been sheer suicide for a man in an ultralight aircraft crossing Mexico’s jagged spine, the Sierra Madre Occidental Range, with its violent downdrafts and uncharted wilderness where, some said, men still fired weapons with crude black powder and raised pre-Columbian crops, and sacrificed to gods that Hernan Cortez only thought he had vanquished. Corbett fell back on his other tactic for fuel economy, far older than those gods, as old as the condor itself, searching out the updrafts that skirted the ten-thousand-foot peaks, gradually working his way south down the state of Durango. But a soaring sailplane moves at a stately pace, and Black Stealth One did not reach Regocijo until after noon, though its fuel bladder was still full. No hurry, he told himself, with a control movement that sent the hellbug wheeling in an upward spiral, buoyed by a thermal current. This is why you took the risks, beyond any notion of revenge. And if you can’t come out of this mess with a king’s ransom, you won’t be able to afford the hangar and the maintenance the hellbug demands. So why not spend a day playing with your new toy? It might be the last day you’ll ever see.

Medina had said the “Bulgarian” looked like a tough, smart customer. Chances were, he wasn’t Bulgarian at all; KGB, most likely, and he wouldn’t be alone. After the old switcheroo at Regocijo, taking Blue Sky Three from there to a rigged crash near Llano Mojado, did Medina really expect them just to assume he drowned? You’ll have to get cute; check the area for signs of ambush. We’ll have to talk it over, Speedy. With only a set of map coordinates for the Llano Mojado strip and no previous landings there, Medina would need eyes in the back of his head once he waded ashore.

But Corbett cursed, those plans forgotten instantly, after he soared past Regocijo and spotted the old deactivated spook airstrip. Its hangar had been a big structure of dry old wood, now only a smear of blackened debris collapsed in on the concrete floor. Corbett, his throat dry as toast, made three successively lower passes over it, the last into the wind at a trifling speed less than fifty feet above charred timbers, before he knew that someone had died in that ruin.

His passage might have been noiseless to a man, but not to the sharper senses of vultures, and to the gaunt coyote that burst out of the wreckage and skulked off at a lope. Corbett saw three buzzards hopping across smoke-blackened concrete like gargoyles in a frantic effort to take off with full bellies, and he got a glimpse of what had drawn their attention. Sickened, he climbed a hundred yards before using the IR scanner.

The burned-out hangar showed no trace of residual heat, not even as much as the coyote which had not skulked far off. Corbett’s eye traced the outlines of something that had once been a graceful craft of wood and plastic, now ash and glistening filament, partially covered by sections of burnt roof.

He wanted to land, because a careful foray into the debris might tell him more. But, Got a bad feeling about that, he thought. Uncle Sugar sure didn’t do this, and if the Sovs did, how do you know they haven’t booby-trapped the fucking place? There’s not a soul here and that in itself is suspicious—but then, this is mańana land. Wonder whose remains those are next to the airplane. The old caretaker, probably. Shit! This means you have to ransom the hellbug itself if you want that money. And you haven’t got Medina now; nor those gas cartridges either.

With one final slow, skimming pass over the wreckage, he assured himself that the remains had been human. Whoever did this, they wouldn’t be Americans and they’ve killed somebody already. The odds are, those same people are waiting at Llano Mojado. In fact, maybe this was their way of saying, “We know about your clever switch, and this is what we think of it; we want Black Stealth One, or nothing.” Yeah, that figures.

He sent the hellbug climbing, fully aware that temporary safety lay within reach, near San Luis Potosi. The place had become his home and maybe he would simply have to trust someone to keep his secret there. And what a load of shit that is; if you believe that, you’d believe anything! Hiding near San Luis as a man with modest means and this mind-bending airplane simply isn’t an option, so put it out of your head. The question now, is whether you go on to Llano Mojado and try to flimflam the people who invented flimflam.

But by the time he reached cruise altitude he had cut through his rationalizations; knew that possession of only Black Stealth One, or only the money, would leave him forever embittered at his own failure, not the failure to win but the failure to try. The question of confronting that Sov paymaster was not, and never had been, a matter of “whether.” The only question was “how.”