“You got me visually?”
“I see you on the horizon. You’re still a few miles away.”
“Okay, I’m going to buzz to Talihina and back. That’s where I’ll be. When I get a visual, I’ll confirm. Then I’ll trail him into your range. When you see me, you’ll know he’s coming.”
“Yes sir,” came the replies.
Red dropped down a thousand feet. At his altitude, the cars on the mountain road were easily recognizable by type and color, though not by make. He was looking for a green pickup with one unpainted fender. Suppose he found one and directed it into the ambush and it was some Mexican family traveling from bean harvest to bean harvest or some group of tender young college girls going to the Little Rock Pearl Jam concert? He had a set of Zeiss 10×50 binoculars, the finest that could be found in Fort Smith on a crash basis, and from 3,000 feet up he found he could get a very solid up-close and personal view of the vehicle. There wouldn’t be any mistakes.
He flew onward, enjoying the freedom and the sense of the hunt. Off far to the left and a thousand feet higher, he made out another flight, a Lear, obviously headed south to Dallas; there was no other air traffic. The road below was equally empty, though he made out a station wagon pulling tourists along the vividly beautiful road as it rolled along the crest of the green mountains, one of those ludicrous camper things, a couple of private automobiles and one black and white Oklahoma Smokey pulled off by the side of the road, on watch for speeders or merely dozing in the sun. He switched from his secure channel to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol frequency and heard nothing except the odd exchange between troopers somewhere in the area, nothing of note.
He passed over the 259 crossroads and the possibility of contact drew him ever lower, down to 2,500 feet. Maybe too low; he didn’t need FAA complaints against his license. But there were no other flights in view. The road beneath him, bright in the afternoon sun, was a ribbon. Onward he flew, all the way to Talihina, spotting nothing.
He veered and headed back along the highway, now having risen to 4,000 feet, and raced back toward the ambush kill zone. He could monitor the road just in case he’d missed something, but there were no green trucks.
“Okay, boys,” he said into the radio when he was in range, “so far I got nothing. You all okay?”
“We’re fine,” said de la Rivera.
“No police interest or anything?”
“Haven’t seen a cop all day, sir.”
He glanced at his Rolex. It was 3:30 by this time. Where the hell were they? It was beginning to look like a wash. He’d guessed wrong.
He used some left rudder, then dropped back down to 2,000 feet and began to zoom up the road, eyes peeled. The traffic had really thinned out by now. It wasn’t—
Green vehicle.
He dropped a little lower.
Pickup truck.
He overflew it and got on the radio.
“I got a possible. Got a possible.”
“Copy you, Air.”
“Okay, let me just check this out.”
He banked wide to the left, left wingtip falling, right rising, the world going giddily topsy-turvy as the two big engines drove the props through the air, and came around again level-out about a half mile to the right of the road and saw the truck ahead of him. He reached for the throttles, eased them back; the sound of engines racing could be heard for several miles and he didn’t want to alert them at all.
Gradually, he gained on them, trying not to force it or rush or anything.
When at last he was nearly parallel, he set the plane on autopilot and drew the binoculars into position and diddled with focus.
Green pickup. Unpainted left front fender. Dodge.
Got you, he thought, exultant.
He applied a touch of right rudder, a little aileron, and gently banked to the right, settling on a course of 180 degrees due south. He held the course for one minute, loafing at eighty knots, looking innocent, putting distance between himself and the target. Two minutes. He drummed his fingers on his thighs. Two minutes forty seconds. Red could take no more. He quickly reset the trim tabs, increased the pitch and pushed the throttles forward.
As the revs came up he executed a hard climbing turn to the left, straining for altitude. He was sweating.
“Air to Mike, Air to Mike. Are you there, are you there?” he said, hoping he was still in range.
“Yes sir,” said de la Rivera.
“I have them confirmed, about twenty miles west of the 259 cutoff. They’re coming your way. ETA 3:55 ”
“Here’s something I thought of,” said Russ. “A theory. Let me just throw it out.”
Bob said nothing, just waited. They were cruising along the Taliblue Trail, a two-lane blacktop that ran along the crest of the Ouachitas and had just blown by the crossroads with Oklahoma 259. Ahead of them stretched empty road, gritty and dusty from poor upkeep here in Oklahoma. On either side, the mountain fell away, not a cliff but a steep slope; beyond, on either side, the valleys were deep and green; to the right, he could see the lesser ranges of the Ouachitas, the Jack Forks, the Kiamichis, the Winding Stairs. He heard something somewhere, on the far edge of his consciousness, that he couldn’t quite place. He ignored it.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“In the movies or in books, there’s no such thing as coincidence. No one’s going to pay to see or read about some guy who just finds something or something just happens to him.”
“Forrest Gump shows that one’s full of shit.”
“No, no, I mean normally. Forrest Gump being an exception to the rules. You can’t—”
“Russ, I was just joking. Don’t you got no sense of humor anywhere?”
“Well,” said Russ, thinking, No, no, he probably didn’t. “Anyhow, in real life, however absurd and irrational, coincidence occasionally happens. And I can’t help but notice you have an army night-shooting program that’s trying to develop tactics around night-vision devices in roughly the same area as the one where your father got hit at night. Maybe it’s not a conspiracy; maybe it’s one of those insane, ridiculous coincidences.”
“You saying Forrest Gump did it?” Bob laughed.
Russ breathed out his frustration.
“Now, suppose,” he continued, “they had a patrol or something and they got lost, got turned around. And they’re off post: and they watch this gunfight through the infrared scope where the details aren’t clear. They watch as one guy kills two others. And then he gets in a car; he’s going to get away. Maybe the sniper can’t help himself: he pulls the trigger and that’s that.”
“Won’t work,” Bob said. “He was in a tree. Had to be, otherwise he couldn’t have seen through the corn. And there wouldn’t have been that slight oval shape to the bullet hole.”
Russ nodded. He thought, Goddammit! He thinks he’s so smart!
“Okay, okay. Now, maybe, well, you know the attitudes were different then, there was very little press scrutiny, they all thought they were on some kind of crusade against the communists. They did test atom bomb radiation, biological warfare, LSD and some other stuff on unwary civilians. Maybe it was some test: they had to shoot at a human target. So they’re on the track of Jimmy and Bub because they know those’re clean kills without problems. But there’s a terrible mistake and your father’s the one that gets hit.”
“Not bad,” said Bob after a pause, “not bad. Wrong, but not bad.”
“Why wrong?”
“I’ll tell you why. You remember that short little guy in the photograph, the one Preece couldn’t remember?”
“Yeah.”
“Couldn’t remember, my ass. I knew that little prick. And anybody who knew him would remember him.”