The Ransom of Black Stealth One

SIX

On a late spring afternoon in the mile-high altitude of San Luis Potosi, the Mexican sun is fierce enough to fade paint, and the windburned man in stained coveralls found a triangular blotch of shadow near Morales’s rickety hangar. He fingered a pack of Alas from a breast pocket and lit one, idly watching the tail of a Mexicana jet shimmer as it taxied to the distant terminal. The yanqui tourists on that plane were only a mile away. And a world apart. He had almost ceased envying them.

The Mexican youth finished buttoning the cowl on the AgriCat, still one of the best craft around for crop dusting, and shuffled toward that triangle of shade. The older man, whose dark hair was sun-blotched and graying, wished he had some of the kid’s Indio blood, maybe some of his youth, too, to help fight the ravages of sun and wind in the central highlands of Mexico. Evidently this was going to be one of those days when envy drove him early to a cantina. Well, no hay problema, no problem. The Negro Modelo was cold and cheap, and better than Dos Equis. At least he could afford a few of the finer things in life. Good beer, a restored Borgward coupe, and a small whitewashed place with a patio near town, yes; safe travel and young bones, no.

He offered the pack to the youth, who shook his head. “Tomato, Enrique,” the older man insisted, but the youth was already lighting a Winston. He pocketed the pack, thinking the kid was right, the little unfiltered Alas were strong as dynamite fuse and burned just about as fast. Winstons were a luxury. He felt good, knowing Enrique could afford them.

He squinted at the reflection off Morales’s AgriCat, glad that they’d finished the overhaul early because a man could fry petrified eggs on that aluminum by now. Morales, a man who knew how to keep good help, would probably spring for a bonus, and the middle-aged mechanic would share it with Enrique because that kid already had two kids of his own.

The windburned mechanic would have gladly traded his bonus for a chance to test-hop the AgriCat, or for that matter anything else with enough power to make a cinch of a hammerhead stall, but knew Morales would never allow it. The rancher, a better than average pilot with several aircraft in addition to the AgriCat, had good reason for his view. He’d seen his mechanic flying his own fabric-winged MX, an ultralight that was half hang glider and half go-kart which had been sold cheap to Morales and which the rancher had sold more cheaply still. Some pilots were deadly mechanics, some mechanics deadly pilots. Morales watched his excellent mechanic falling around the sky in that damned MX and then, good man that he was, tried to buy it back at a higher price. He’d rather have a live mechanic, he’d said, than a dead pilot. But Mexicans, even rich ones, know how to let a man go to hell as he likes and Morales hadn’t insisted.

It evidently never occurred to the rancher that it took an exceptional pilot to make an ultralight flounder like that, year after year, with never a bent spar. So Morales helped spread the legend: fine mechanic, awful pilot.

Enrique was idly flipping the pages of a new copy of Sport Aviation magazine which Morales subscribed to, though the text was in English and the youth could understand only the pictures. Knowing the older mechanic always kept them, Enrique borrowed it first. The semiofficial magazine of the Experimental Aircraft Association, Sport Aviation’s tattered remnants could be found in hangars all over the world. Presently the youth finished, handing it silently to his companion, and strolled off to douse his head in tepid water. The older man spent ten minutes on a first cursory survey of the articles, which might save lives, and then turned to the Marketplace section which could only lose him in further hopeless envy.

Well, this was a day for it. A Long-EZ with all the trick stuff in the cockpit, only $14,000; a steal, but not on his pay. One of Molt Taylor’s little Imps, half completed; he noted the seller’s address and forgot it. And, near the bottom of the ultralight category, felt gooseflesh in hundred-degree heat, sliding his backside down the hangar wall to squat, his knees trembling.

His hands did not tremble, but they sweated as he checked the instructions for classified ads. That ad had been placed only two months before, but a lot can happen in sixty days. He did not doubt for a millisecond that the ad was intended to be read by a dead man, but by now the man who had that telephone number might be dead, too; dead, or turned. If so, the ad was as neat a trap as a man could devise.

He read the ad again, moving into the sunlight to soak up warmth which had suddenly fled his body. He had absolutely no doubt about most of the ad, but foreign sale? That seemed wildly unlikely, but a hell of a bunch of unlikely things had happened since he and Speedy began their little games. The ad itself was roughly as likely as tits on a lizard. And nobody on God’s earth could have devised that ad but Speedy, whether or not somebody had held a gun at his head while he did it.

Probably that was the truth of it: caught and turned, and once the mechanic called that telephone number he would be on the shit list again, and that would mean he was half caught already. But only half, and he’d escaped worse odds. But you were younger then, his demon critic whispered.

Fuck it, he answered it; nobody lives forever. He knew what he was going to do, as surely as if he had already done it, but there were ways to do it half smart, and ways exceedingly estúpido. He could fire up the MX and be in Aguascalientes in two hours, not that he needed more than a cow pasture but there was a jet-rated strip there too, and that might make them hunt Lears, not MX’s. Or they might not.

There was a chance, no bigger than a needle roller but still a faint chance, that Speedy was running clear on this. And besides himself there were only two men on Earth, if that many, who had reason to become inextricably tangled in the fate of the “complete Humongous.” Oh, that was cute, Speedy. To any other EAA reader that would be plain gibberish, easily forgotten, especially when there was no ultralight designer named Depew. But there was a place.

If he intended to be back from Aguascalientes before dark, he knew it was time to pray for tailwinds both ways. He walked behind the hangar and tossed the magazine into the Borgward, then told Enrique to go home to his kids. He needed only a few minutes to fuel the MX alone, and pushed it out of the hangar as a man would push a kite. A humongous kite…