“Give me a few minutes to sort things out,” Dogan managed.
“I’ll call you back in a half hour, comrade.”
Dogan hung up the phone dazed. Masvidal had not made the rendezvous in Keysar Flats. Locke was there alone.
But he didn’t have to be. It was time to forget about precautions and procedures. None of that mattered any longer. He would make more calls and demand the meetings begin at once. He would keep calling until somebody listened and sent the marines into Keysar Flats.
Dogan had lifted the receiver from its hook again when the door to his room burst open and a flood of bodies poured through. He was in motion immediately toward the pistol hanging from the back of a chair, but he knew he’d never make it. The men charged forward, guns all black and steel, promising death.
It had been seven o’clock Saturday evening when Locke had given up waiting for Masvidal at the Ramrod Roadside Motel. He might have given up much earlier, when the messenger did not arrive as promised by five, but had no idea of what to do next. So he had stayed, hoping against hope Masvidal would materialize. He had no way of contacting Dogan, Nikki was gone, and now something had stopped Masvidal from coming.
It had been drizzling all day and by seven, when Locke finally returned to his room, the heavier rain had finally started, subsiding back to a drizzle around midnight.
The trip there had been long and unsettling. The man with the porkpie hat had reminded him to trust no one. Every person he passed was a potential assassin. Chris had spent much of the flight from Madrid to New York scrutinizing the half-filled cabin. He changed seats twice to avoid being near any one person too long.
Returning to the States made him think sadly of his family. He could only hope the real Burgess had been right about the government protecting the rest of them after Greg had been kidnapped. But the Committee could reach anybody. If he failed in Keysar Flats, what would become of his loved ones?
It hurt too much to think about, so Chris made himself stop. His mind swung back to Masvidal and a hundred possible explanations for what might have gone wrong. None of them mattered, though, because the one overriding fact was that he wasn’t coming and neither were his people. That left Chris with two choices: Either he could sit and sulk or he could go out and do something on his own. Keysar Flats was a big place but he had lots of time, a whole night to drive his rental car around every road he could find. He was looking for cropdusters and plenty of them. They’d be well protected and that might make them stand out.
Of course, Locke had no idea what he would do if he found the planes, but he had to make the effort. He was well rested, having slept a full dozen hours since arriving at the Ramrod. And he had a full tank of gas in the car he had rented in Dallas.
Chris started for the door, the absurdity of the situation almost making him smile: if the Gods themselves had imprisoned Tantalus, how could he possibly hope to free him?
Pop Keller sat in the corner of the Lonesome Horn Bar and Grill drinking his second special of the young day, a sweet concoction that tasted like sugared prairie dust. Yesterday’s special had been Jack Daniels straight up with a twist, and that had been much more to his liking. The day before that …
Pop Keller scratched his head. He couldn’t remember what the special had been day before yesterday. Amazing what advancing age could do for you….
Pop sipped his special and blessed the thin mist in the skies above the Lonesome Horn because it saved him the trouble of spending the day looking for a new site for his Flying Devils air show. The engagement had been scheduled to begin a week ago but then the rains came and on top of that they lost the only site in the Flats worth a damn. So Pop had sent his people out to enjoy the sights of Texas, hid himself in the Lonesome Horn, and started on the specials. Today was the sixth, seventh maybe. They were all starting to taste alike.
He might have stayed with his sugared prairie dust all day, except he was supposed to meet his people at their roadside camp at noon sharp. All this waiting around had the boys getting restless. Most had regular jobs they had already taken too much time away from.
The Flying Devils had once been the best in the business. They barnstormed the country with their World War II fighters, putting on mock air battles that thrilled their audiences. No jet-powered engines, no gymnastic circles in the air. Just plain old gutsy flying in reconditioned fighters.
The planes carried live ammunition in their front-mounted machine guns and real rockets under their wings. The highlight of the exhibition had often been Pop Keller himself putting on an amazing display of target practice at a thousand feet. He’d been able to shoot the horns off a bull … until his eyes went, that is.
He should have gotten glasses but they looked lousy under his leather flying goggles. Seven years back he had been squinting to focus when his fighter made a sudden dip and scraped the wing of another. At least it felt like a scrape. In fact, the collision tore the wing off his buddy’s plane and a moderate crowd of 1,200 watched him crash and die in a nearby field.
Pop Keller escaped jail but not scandal. The insurance company laid into him heavy and there were so many lawsuits, he figured he might as well move a cot into the Superior Court. The Devils started to come apart. Pop’s best fliers, the young ones, left for the Confederate Air Force or the Valiant Air Command and took their planes with them, leaving him with a ragtag unit of mostly old men who napped before and after performances. But flying was an important part of their lives and they didn’t want to quit. And their pension checks took some of the strain off Pop Keller’s barely solvent operation.
He had weathered the storm of the scandal, steeled himself even against the pranksters who changed the first “e” in his name to an “i” on billboards, proclaiming him Pop “Killer.” And the Flying Devils had managed to hang together, keep their live ammunition, and change their show to include more mock air battles, which were strangely the most rehearsed and safest segments of their show. The younger fliers started coming back and the Flying Devils again became as good as any of their competitors.
But not many people seemed to care anymore. They had done only six gigs in the past nine months and no crowd had reached a thousand. They collected far less money at the gate than it took for repairs and reconditioned parts for the ancient fighters which, like Pop Keller, didn’t know enough to give up. Pop was down to thirty-seven fighters, and there was seldom a day when more than twenty of them were able to take the air. Parts had been traded around so much that it was impossible to tell which had started where. Pop kept hiring mechanics to patch his fleet together with Scotch tape, Elmer’s Glue, or whatever else it took. He was living off a dozen loans now. Before too much longer, though, he’d have to sell all his beautiful fighters just to get out of debt.
Pop had gotten in the World War II air show business early, before the Warbird craze caught on. He bought most of his fighters in the fifties and sixties at rock-bottom prices that didn’t even approach their value today. But as they appreciated, so did his insurance costs until he had to sell off a few every six months just to stay above water. He started taking on pilots just to get their planes in the show, agreeing to pay upkeep, maintenance, and insurance on them just so long as they were ready to go at showtime. The compromises made his flesh crawl. Doctors, pharmacists, cesspool technicians — for a while the civilians had outnumbered the true fliers in the Devils. Bad times had forced most of them out now, leaving Pop with a nucleus of hardcore Warbirds who had lasted through a week of rain and a cancellation here in Keysar Flats.