The eyes of the man standing near the doorway were so wide the whites showed and the pupils burned. Only a fool would have defied the large revolver he pointed shakily at Dunne’s stomach.
Dunne held his breath and raised his hands cautiously, shrinking against the wall, unconsciously making himself as small a target as possible.
The man’s hair hung in long, wet strands, his light shirt damp across the shoulders and his slacks soaked to the knees. His cheekbones were as prominent as those on a death’s head, his eyes heavily shadowed, his nose fierce and hooked, his lips thin and colorless.
His voice was a snarl. “I want someone to fly me out of here.”
Dunne cleared his throat. “No one flies in this weather. This field isn’t equipped for it.”
“Don’t give me that!” His voice curled from the walls of the small office. “Do you think I’m dumb? I’ve been on airplanes that flew in worse!”
“Airlines on a commercial field,” Dunne told him. “Where they have the facilities for bad-weather flying. Not small private planes at a grass field like this. Besides, no one is flying today at all. Even the airlines have their minimums.”
The gun lifted. “You take me out or I shoot you both! Understand?”
Dunne took a deep breath. “You don’t understand. Trying to take off in weather like this from a field like this can kill you very quickly.”
“They’ll kill me anyway! Now, which of you is going to do it?”
Dunne held his voice level. “I told you. Nobody flies on a day like this in planes like these.”
The eyes burned, the mind behind them beyond reason and sanity. The man’s lips worked soundlessly, and Dunne felt he was only a heartbeat away from dying. Cold sweat covered his palms and trickled between his shoulder blades.
After an immeasurable, unbearable moment of time, the man seemed to grow calmer, his eyes narrowing, a crafty look on his face. “You own one of those planes?”
Dunne hesitated. “Yeah, but it isn’t equipped for instrument flying.”
The barrel of the gun motioned. “Step away from him.”
Dunne moved a few feet to one side.
The man leveled the revolver at Marco’s head, peering down the sights as though he were hoping Dunne would give him a reason to pull the trigger. “You take me or I kill him.” Marco’s eyes, raised to Dunne’s, pleaded for him to do something. Time, thought Dunne. We need time. Go along with him until we run out of it.
He reached above his head and took down the keys to a four-seater Cessna with twin engines — better equipped with navigational and radio equipment than any other plane on the field, even though the equipment was not all it could have been or the latest in design.
“All right,” he said.
The gun gestured. “He goes, too.”
“We don’t need him.”
The smile was sly. “How else you going to do what I tell you?”
The man might have been crazy, but he really wasn’t stupid. Once away from Marco, Dunne had hoped for a chance to jump him and get that gun away. He might fail, but the way things were, he really didn’t have much to lose. Marco did.
He stepped out into the fog that was now as menacing and deadly as the gaunt-faced man who followed, his gun jammed into Marco’s back.
The Cessna was parked only a few planes from the office. Dunne checked the tanks and found them full, mentally cursing Marco for being so conscientious, because filling them would have delayed matters. He fumbled away minutes releasing the tie-downs and kicking the chocks away from the wheels, all the while trying to come up with a way to avoid flying the plane and finding none. When he climbed into the cabin, Marco followed, taking the right-hand seat, the man sitting behind them.
Since no miracle had materialized out of the fog to save them, Dunne buckled himself in tightly. The experienced Marco did the same. The man did not.
Dunne spoke over his shoulder. “If we do make it, where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere. Just get me away from those cops. They want to kill me.”
“Anywhere is likely where we will end up,” Dunne muttered to Marco. He fired up the engines and studied the gauges.
The revolver poked at his neck. “What are you waiting for?”
Tension gave him the courage to snap, “Get that thing the hell away from me! I wouldn’t take off in good weather with a cold engine, let alone a day like this. Now, you sit there and wait until I’m satisfied this plane is ready to go, or you can damned well pull that trigger and take your chances with the cops.”
Again he felt that he was only a heartbeat away from dying, but the man sank back. “Just make it fast.”
The needles climbed. He ran the engines up, playing with them, delaying, still hoping for that miracle to appear out of the fog.
The revolver poked at his neck. “Let’s go. This time I mean it.”
The tone in the voice made him release the brakes and gun the Cessna out between the parked planes, the aircraft rocking and sluggish on the soft earth. He was rapidly running out of time to do something that would bring this madness to an end, but that gun muzzle remained an inch from Marco’s head. Even if the police the man was running from heard the engines and investigated, they would be too late to save them now.
His mind probed desperately for a way to disable the plane, to buy more time. Hook a wing into a tree, he thought, but deep down he knew the man would accept no excuses. He would kill them both.
Sweating, moving the plane slowly, he worked his way through the mist, and only instinct and the years he had flown from Marco’s field brought him without accident to the bright orange cones that marked the takeoff area.
Here the fog seemed even thicker and more deadly. Mouth dry, he felt trapped — both the fog before him and the man behind him could kill, but with the fog he at least had a chance.
“God,” said Marco, his voice on the edge of panic, “I don’t see how you’re going to make it. You can’t see far enough to get lined up straight.”
“Tell him that, Marco, and see what it gets you.”
The gun poked. “Both of you shut up.”
Dunne went through his takeoff procedure carefully, still delaying, still hoping for a miracle that never came, getting instead another cruel poke in the neck with the gun muzzle. “Let’s go.”
“Get the wheels,” he told Marco, eased the throttles open, and released the brakes. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a pale Marco brace himself, the hands in his lap squeezed so tightly the knuckles were white.
Even on that soggy field the plane leaped forward, and they hurtled into soft nothingness, not knowing where the trees were or if they would clear them. He felt the plane lift slightly, and at that moment they were committed; no way to stop and no way to turn back.
He eased the wheel back gently. The nose wheel lifted, the bumping and thudding ceased, and they left the ground, a hard knot grinding in the pit of his stomach in anticipation of dark shapes of trees bursting out of the fog so quickly they would have time only to scream before being smashed into a fiery ball.
“Wheels,” he said.
Marco touched the switch, and as the wheels retracted, an almost imperceptible darkening in the fog on his right warned him and he flipped the wheel over as a tall pine slid under the wing. Marco gasped. Dunne felt the sweat trickling down his face, and then they were above a hundred feet, the pines below them. He let his breath out slowly.
Suspended in the grayness with no sensation of movement even though the engines were roaring and the plane vibrating, they remained caught in a wet wooliness with only the instruments to tell Dunne what they were doing, his ears straining for the slightest change in the sound of the engines. The minutes scraped across his nerves.