Atkinson flashed past his left wingtip. A few cars had pulled to the side of the highway — Route 20 — so their occupants could crane their necks up at him.
He dialled in a thirty-mile scan on the radar, then went active.
The back-and-forth sweep appeared on his right CRT, imposed on the navigation screen. There were no aerial targets there, nor any on the HUD.
He increased the scan to sixty miles.
Blip.
Target at ground level, forty-two miles ahead of him, moving east at 320 knots, following the river.
Wyatt could imagine that Barr had the Citation about twenty feet off the river surface and below the tops of the trees.
He switched in the attack radar mode, used the small joystick to centre the target reticule over the symbol on the HUD, and locked it in. The radar would now keep track of that target while, in its search mode, it continued to seek additional targets.
Wyatt advanced the throttles, moving the speed up to four hundred knots while he continued to lose altitude. He stayed two hundred feet above the river since his speed didn’t allow him to make the same course changes as the river.
The gap closed to thirty miles.
If he had had missiles aboard, he would soon have been able to lock a heat-seeker or a radar-homer on the target, then go on to find himself another target.
“Lock-on, Yucca Base.”
“Roger, One.” After a couple seconds, Kriswell came back with, “Bucky says ‘bullshit.’”
“He’s lucky I gave him a chance to say it.”
Wyatt checked his fuel state. He had about fifteen minutes left.
He shoved the throttles into afterburner.
The HUD symbol zipped toward him.
A few moments later, the Citation appeared sharply in the video screen, dancing above the thin trickle of the river, dodging the trees leaning toward it from both sides.
Wyatt pulled the stick back and went vertical as soon as he passed over the business jet.
“One, Base. Bucky says you’re a show-off.”
“He’s probably right,” Wyatt said.
The pressure of the gravitational force pressing him into the seat was sobering and exhilarating, yet he didn’t feel the same sense of clarity and elation he knew he would feel when his target was the real thing.
It wouldn’t be as easy then, and the targets were capable of shooting back.
That’s what got the adrenaline pumping.
Janice Kramer’s United flight landed at Albuquerque at one in the morning, and she took a cab north to her condo.
After unlocking the door, she dropped her two pieces of luggage on the carpet inside, then went around turning on table lamps and checking the soil of her plants for moisture. They were all in good shape, so she suspected that Liz Jordan had stopped by.
Someone cared, anyway.
She didn’t think Wyatt had been in.
While she stripped off the jacket of her travelling suit, then her blouse and skirt, she punched the replay for the answering machine. There were eleven messages, six of them from Wyatt. His missives were curt and to the point, as usual. “It’s me again. Call, will you?” She picked up the phone and called the Sandy Inn in Ainsworth. It rang eight times while some poor soul got out of bed to answer the switchboard. Whoever it was tried to be cheerful, though not quite successfully, when she asked for Cowan’s room.
The room phone rang twice.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Cowan. This is Miss Manners.”
“Jan? Where are you? I’ve been trying…”
“I’m back on the old stomping grounds,” she said.
“Great. Look…”
Are you going to ask me where I’ve been?
“Look at what?” she asked.
“Where have you been?”
“Out.”
“I see,” he said. The sleep was going out of his voice, and the steady baritone sounded good to her.
“I called to tell you I’ll be here until the present project is completed.”
“What? What are you talking about, Jan?”
“Somebody has to man the shop until you’re back, and that’s me. So I came back.”
“Thank you.”
Just say you need me.
After a long silence, she said, “I talked to some law firms in L.A. I think I’ll be getting some offers.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
Just ask me to stay.
“If you need anything — letters of recommendation, a phone call or two… “
She slammed the phone down.
Nine
“You woke me up, Bucky.”
“Some mornings aren’t so grand,” Barr said. He hadn’t felt good himself since the middle of breakfast, when Wyatt told him about Kramer. In fact, he had left his stack of pancakes in favour of the phone in the hallway next to the unlit and vacant bar area.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Kramer asked him, and Barr could hear the concern in her tone. “Did someone get hurt? Who?”
“Me,” he said. “I’m hurt that you dropped this bullshit about leaving on us.”
“It’s not bullshit at all, Bucky. It’s time for me to move on.”
“That’s always an excuse for some other reason.”
He waited for her to say something about needing new challenges.
She said, “I need some new directions, Bucky. New challenges.”
“As an associate in some stuffy law firm? Where’s the thrill in that, Jan?”
“They’re talking partnership.”
“You’re already a partner. Hey, you have enough crises in a week to keep you going for a year…”
“The money’s good,” she said.
“You want more money? We’ll give it to you.”
“That takes a vote of the board.”
“You’re on the board,” he countered. “Hell, you can have my salary.”
“I don’t want your salary. I want to move on.”
“Goddamn it! Do me one favour.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t make a commitment to anyone until I get back and talk to you.”
“We’ve just talked,” she said.
“Face-to-face.”
She sighed. “All right, Bucky.”
The Noble Enterprises bunch were up from their tables and filing out the door to the Jeeps when Barr hung up.
Wyatt was standing a few feet away, looking at him. “What’d she say?”
“You need a kick in the ass.”
“She said that?”
“She might as well have.”
Barr was going to add more to that statement, then decided to hold off. He brushed past Wyatt, crossed the cafe, and pulled open the glass door.
It was hot out, but that wasn’t unusual.
Neil Formsby arrived in Quallene, Algeria, at three in the afternoon of the twenty-fifth of July. It was 119 degrees in the shade of the date palms, but there weren’t enough palm trees to go around.
By his estimation, they were almost nine hundred miles south of Algiers and eleven hundred miles from the western coast of the continent. From his point of view, that was just about right.
The overland route from Rabat, with detours around population centres, had added eighteen hundred miles to the tens of thousands already on the odometers of his rented and badly abused vehicles. There had been a dozen breakdowns en route, but he had planned for the possibility with a cache of extra parts, and each repair to carburettors, fuel pumps, alternators, and broken springs had been accomplished at the side of the road.
His convoy included seven tanker trucks, one flatbed semi-truck with an aged D-9 Caterpillar tractor on it, and the Land Rover that he was driving. There were seventeen men of just about as many nationalities and driver’s licenses assisting him, and he suspected that all of them were wanted in one country or another for at least a single capital crime. He had let his beard grow, and he had allowed the grime to build up in his clothing, just to fit in with the crowd.