The Ransom of Black Stealth One

FOUR

“Jesu Maria, I think my arm’s asleep,” said Medina. He shifted his weight, his forehead pressing against the Toyota’s headrest.

“That’s not all that’s asleep,” was the reply into his right ear. Not angry, but philosophical.

He longed to tell her that if, instead of getting philosophical, she would get busy, maybe all his parts would stay awake; but he didn’t. For one thing, it had been her languid grace that attracted him a year before, and the other word for languid was lazy. Most times, that didn’t bother him but these times weren’t most times. For another thing, you didn’t get just a whole lot of mileage out of criticizing her or even hinting at criticism. For a third, it really wouldn’t have made much difference what she did, he was so chingada preoccupied with that chingada business in the Snake Pit, he was in no mood to ching.

It suddenly occurred to Raoul Medina that he was getting a cramp, suspended dickless above someone else’s wife while he silently listed good reasons why. A moment later he said, “I guess this just wasn’t the night for it, Arlene. Maybe I’m getting a cold,” he added quickly, attaching the blame to himself.

She sighed and turned her head so that she could deliver one of those long, deep, languid kisses that were easily the best things she did. “Then I’ll have it too,” she said. Arlene had a great throaty voice. She could give you a hand job over the phone.

He managed to wriggle back across the shift lever without tearing his chinos, which tended to rip because he liked to wear them tight to show off his butt, still taut and lean, especially for a man in his forties. She took his right hand and they lay silent in their reclined bucket seats for a few minutes, watching clouds drift across a bomber’s moon through the Toyota’s open sunroof. After flying RB-66 recon, then U-2’s for the Company, and now for fifteen years one of NSA’s elves, even a well-conditioned macho in his forties should know better than to play the games he’d been playing. But those games heightened his awareness, made him greet each day with a tingle. And were now beginning to steal perfectly good, serviceable erections. Well, too late to back out now.

“Peso for your thoughts,” Arlene said at last, and listened to him laugh.

Medina wasn’t laughing for the reason she thought; if women liked his latin looks, why tease him about them? He was laughing because a peso was worth a hell of a lot less than a penny, and his thoughts were worth—well—at least five million dollars’ worth of Swiss francs. Or so Dar Weston had told him, a week before when they’d made their pitch and he’d said yes. Not that CIA intended him to get anywhere near the money, much less spend any of it, but that’s the kind of price the KGB would expect him to negotiate. And Dar Weston, whose hobby was spy-catching above and beyond his normal duties, had studied a lot of spy-for-profit cases.

Why the hell had he agreed to do it? Maybe to prove he still could, including that jazzy SCUBA stuff they wanted him to use. And maybe CIA had discovered his own hidden agenda, maybe they were trying to see if he’d “go private,” the spook phrase for an employee who made himself disappear. If so, they’d be ready for it—might even have a couple of bozos staked out with a starlight scope on the Toyota right this minute. So the only sensible thing was to keep up ordinary appearances, but with this kind of pressure there was at least one thing he could not keep up. Mierda … “I was just thinking,” he improvised, “our anniversary was last week and I plain forgot.”

“You mean,” said Arlene with a nice hand squeeze, “you forgot that you didn’t forget. We celebrated me raw, darling, on the couch in your living room.” Pause. Then, genuinely mystified: “What was that thing with all the rivets in it that looked like Darth Vader’s armor? You never did say.”

He chuckled, returning the squeeze. “Now I remember. Bless that couch. The thing you call armor was a piece of ducting. Six-oh-six-one alloy.

Just something for the house,” he lied. Actually it was the new boundary-layer duct for the Mini-Imp, a single-place sportplane with the potential to outrun anything in its class and land like dandelion fluff, given the mods he’d sketched for Kyle Corbett four years ago in the Snake Pit library. Arlene had never seen the little screamer under those tarps in his garage, and would never see it until he’d towed the finished product to Ithaca and bolted the wings on for test flights. Maybe not then, either. He and Corbett had barely begun the extracurricular project, starting to cobble the whole thing together in Medina’s garage two nights a week, before Corbett’s accident.

For a long time now, Medina had wondered if it was an accident. It could’ve been an on-purpose. A deliberate bug-out. If so, it was just possible that CIA knew, meaning Weston. And now, of course, there was no way to find out what had really happened to Corbett. Long ago, he had given Medina the number of that post office box in Depew, near Buffalo, but two months after the accident Medina had driven to Depew. Through the little window Medina had seen that the only letter in that post office box had been the one he’d sent, with no return address. It had been there three months later, too. Corbett had never picked it up, so the chances were the man was dead. If only there were some way to send a message without being obvious!

Arlene sighed, a sound full of contentment. Nice girl, really, with a sharp mind that belied the impression she gave of being always half asleep. “Why don’t I come to your place again next week, Raoul? I could park in your garage,” she said. “God knows who might spot my car, everybody in Elmira knows George.”

She couldn’t know it, but there was no room in that garage for a car. “Oh, I almost forgot,” he said; “The company’s sending me down south next week, honey. Something about floppy-disk drives, pain in the ass but I’ll be back in ten days. Less, maybe.” The good people of Elmira still bought the legend that the Snake Pit manufactured components for home computers. And yes, he was going south, all right! All the way to the decommissioned strip near Regocijo, in Mexico’s state of Durango. The people in the Bulgarian trade mission, Weston had assured him, were a direct pipeline to the KGB; and of the three swap sites he would offer in Mexico, no matter which one they chose, he could get there from Regocijo in one hop. Which was why he would be flying Blue Sky Three down there as soon as she was all gussied up to masquerade as Black Stealth One. Pretty sharp thinking on somebody’s part to have the craft in place two months ahead of time, even before he had anything worked out with the so-called Bulgarians.

His flight in the hellbug to the secure hangar near Los Alamos in New Mexico would take several days, of course, slow as these birds were. Plenty of time to think this all over. Presently he sat up, yawning, and they racked the seats upright, Arlene touching up her face and hair as he drove her back to the Mart parking lot. She stroked his neck, both to tease and to remind him, but was careful not to do anything dumb as he dropped her off because, as she often said, you never knew who might be watching. Man, if she only knew!

Medina got back home before the Carson show, turning the audio up so he could hear it in the garage. The Imp was practically ready for trials, lacking only the boundary-layer ducts and it would fly fine without those, but with them it could take off at a speed hardly faster than a man could run—maybe. Staring at his handiwork from the doorway, he realized that he’d been putting off those final touches. He should rent hangar space at Ithaca or Binghamton and trailer the little sucker up there right away, clean out the garage, give Arlene a place to park.

Because when he got into this Bulgarian bullshit, sure as hell someone would be sniffing around his house. He didn’t want Ben Ullmer to know he’d been shaving the Imp’s hardware so close to outright Snake Pit specs. And it was important to remember that Ben was NSA, whatever else he might be. If Medina ever had to go private, an Imp that could take off on a dime might just be his only hole card. Keeping it here, with spooks flitting around, would be like sending them an open signal.

It was at that moment when Medina realized what he had to do. Not much time to compose the message, and it had to say exactly the right things without saying too much, and it might not be taken seriously even if it was received. It would take a while, the delay was built in, but perhaps he could force a delay in the preparation of those wet wings for the hellbug. Screw it up when the work was half done, maybe; buy a week or so that way. It would be easy enough to do, everybody pulled a fumducker now and then, even a master A and P mechanic. But there was another word for doing it deliberately, especially when CIA folks were breathing down his neck.

The word was sabotage.