In the silence, Doris turned to Carlos and said crisply, “Are we going to hang around here all night?”
It was a small, private airport, a single dirt strip with two hangars at the near end. Hobart was waiting for us as the big sedan swept off the main road and jounced along a rutted track to the far end of the field. In the moonlight, the plane looked larger than it was. I recognized the aircraft as a Piper Aztec Model D with twin turbo-charged engines in flat nacelles.
We got out of the car, all of us except Paco. He sat immobile, the engine running.
“Hello!” said Hobart as he saw me. “You’re the chap I met the other evening. Fancy meeting you again so soon.”
“Are you ready to go?” Carlos asked impatiently.
“I topped the tanks myself. She’s checked out and been run up. We can take off as soon as you’re all on board.”
Susan helped her father climb into the aircraft and followed him in. Doris went in after them, stepping up onto the wingroot, waiting until they had seated themselves and had fastened their seat belts before she entered.
I climbed up onto the wing and paused. From the time we had arrived at Bickford’s until now there had not been a moment for me to take any action. Had I been alone, it would have been a different story, but I had seen how ruthlessly Doris Bickford had put two bullets into her husband. I knew she’d have no compunction about turning the gun on Susan or Dietrich. She’d no more hesitate in killing either of them than she did in killing Johnny Bickford.
This would be the last opportunity to make, a break in one way or another, but if I was aware of that fact, so was Carlos. Sharply, he said, “Please don’t try to delay us. We’re running out of time.”
There was nothing I could do, not with Doris in the aircraft holding a gun on Dietrich and Susan, not with Carlos holding a revolver that he could turn on me in a split second, and especially because Paco was now leaning out the window of the car, holding his big 9mm Mauser Parabellum pistol as if he were just hoping for the chance to use it.
I was about to duck my head into the aircraft when I heard the sound of an automobile racing down the dirt load toward us.
“Hurry!” Ortega shouted at me.
The police car turned on its siren and its flashing red beacon. A series of shots came from it as it raced down the side road toward us. I heard the thunk of bullets slamming into the side of the heavy sedan. Paco flung open the door and scrambled to the front of the car. He began to fire back at the police cruiser. The big Parabellum bucked in his hand with each shot.
I heard Ken Hobart cry out, but his shout was drowned in the blasting of Paco’s Mauser.
Suddenly, the police car swerved off the road in a long skid, spinning around in a scream of tires, completely out of control, its headlights making revolving arcs in the darkness like a gigantic, whirling St. Catherine’s wheel. Paco stopped firing. I heard the gasping wheeze of Carlos’ breathing.
The silence was almost complete, and in that moment, with the danger gone, Paco fell into a panic. He leaped to his feet and threw himself into the driver’s seat. Before Carlos could grasp what he was doing, Paco had put the sedan into gear and was racing off into the night across the fields as fast as he could push the car.
Carlos shouted at him to come back. “Idiot! Fool! There’s no danger! Where are you going? Come back!”
He stared at the taillights of the car growing smaller every second. Then he shrugged and dropped down off the wing, ducking under it to get to Ken Hobart The lanky, redheaded Englishman lay in a crumpled mess on the ground near the right main landing gear.
Carlos stood up slowly, the gun in his hand held limply by his side, frustration showing in every line of his body.
“He’s dead.” He uttered the words in a tone of quiet resignation. “And that fool has driven off.” He turned away from the body. I dropped off the wing and knelt beside Hobart. The Englishman’s head had fallen against the right tire of the aircraft. His chest was covered with blood that still seeped slowly out of him.
I pulled Hobart as far away from the aircraft as I could. Wiping the blood off my hands with my handkerchief, I walked back to Carlos, who was still standing beside the aircraft. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked him roughly.
Defeat was written into every line of his face. “We’re finished, amigo,” he said dully. “Paco has gone with the car. Hobart is dead. We have no way to escape from this place. How long do you think it will be before there will be more police here?”
“Not before we can be gone. Get in that airplane!” I snarled at him.
Carlos looked up at me blankly.
“Damn it!” I swore at him. “If you’re going to stand there like an idiot, we’ll never get out of here! Now move!”
I scrambled up onto the wing and into the pilot’s seat. Carlos followed me in, slamming the cabin door shut as he settled himself in the seat.
I snapped on the cabin overhead light and scanned the panel quickly. There was no time to go through the complete checklist. I could only hope that Hobart had been right when he’d said that the plane was ready for takeoff, and I prayed that none of the shots fired by the police had struck a vital part of the aircraft.
Almost automatically my hand went out, turning on the master switch, turbo-charger circuit breakers on, turbo switches off. I flicked on the magneto and the electric fuel pumps, then I cracked the throttles about half an inch and pushed the fuel mixture levers to full rich. The fuel flow meters began to register. Back to idle cutoff. I engaged the left-hand starter switch and heard the whining, rising scream of the starter motor.
The left-hand prop swung over once, twice, and then caught with a spitting, cracking roar. Mixture back to full rich again. I fired up the right engine.
No time to check out all the gauges. Time enough only to move elevators, ailerons, rudder, as I fed in power to the twin engines and taxied the aircraft to the runway, turning onto it, trying to line up with its dim outline in the darkness. I turned off the cabin interior light and turned on the landing lights. I set quarter flaps, and then my hands were on the twin throttles, pushing them forward smoothly until they hit the stop. The big turbo-charged Lycomings bellowed as the aircraft began moving forward down the strip, faster and faster.
As the airspeed indicator reached eighty miles an hour, I hauled back on the ram’s horn control wheel. The nose lifted, the pounding of the main gear on the bumpy dirt strip ceased. I snapped off the lights. We were airborne.
I made the rest of the climbout in complete darkness, pulling up the gear lever, hearing the whine and then the heavy thunking of the main gear retracting into their wheel wells. At a hundred twenty miles an hour, I trimmed the aircraft to hold a steady rate of climb.
For the same reason I’d snapped off the landing lights as soon as I’d cleared the ground, I didn’t turn on the red and green running lights or the rotating strobe beacon. I wanted no one on the ground to see the aircraft. We were flying in complete darkness, illegal as hell, with only the faint, blue spitting flames from our exhausts to give away our position and, as I reduced climb power, even those disappeared.
At eighteen hundred feet, I turned the aircraft northwest, keeping the mountains to my right. I turned to Carlos. “Look in the map compartment. See if Hobart has his charts there.”
Ortega pulled out a stack of WAC maps.
“Good,” I said. “And now, if you’ll tell me where we’re going, I’ll try to get us there.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was daylight when I reduced power and came down over the mountains to the brown, bare hills somewhere in the area bounded by Durango, Torreen and Matamoros. We were flying now at less than five hundred feet, with Ortega peering out the starboard window, giving directions to me.