‘It is death that is coming,’ sobbed Tavares. ‘That’s no jeep, Hardee. It is the plane, coming for you!’
They ran to the door and flung it open.
It came from the east, like a faint angry snarl of bees, the sound of the Ford tri-motor’s three labouring engines.
‘There it is!’ cried the girl. ‘Look, over the dunes!’
Sunlight glinted off a wing. It was the plane, all right, hardly five hundred feet up. It was heading off to one side, more in the direction of Wakulla’s hut than Hardee’s; clearly whoever was flying it was unfamiliar with the exact locations of the prefabs.
But clearly also, it would not take long to straighten them out.
‘Come on!’ said Hardee, and flung out the door. Whatever it was that Tavares was talking about, something of the old man’s panic and desperation had reached him. ‘We’ll have to hide! Wakulla, you know the old mining shack? Let’s go!’
Hardee caught his son up and raced for his own jeep, leaving the others to follow in Wakulla’s.
The heat was murderous. Before they had gone a hundred yards, the radiator needle was climbing; in a hundred more, it was pressing perilously against the backstop. But Hardee couldn’t wait to baby the motor now, not when the plane had begun to wheel around towards them. Already it might be too late; it was quite possible that the plane had spotted them. But it was at least a chance that the plane had not. A desert drenched in a vertical sun is not easy to scan, and there was a lot of it.
Next to him, on the seat, the little boy looked up wonderingly at his father, and was silent.
‘It’s all right, Chucky,’ Hardee said, the automatic lie coming to his lips. It wasn’t all right. There was nothing all right There was nothing all right about it.
But it satisfied the boy. He squirmed around and knelt backward on the seat, peering out the rear mirror. ‘They’re catching up, Daddy!’ he yelped cheerfully. ‘Step on it! We’ll beat them!’
Even through heat and worry and overpowering weariness, Hardee had enough left to feel fondness and pride for his child.
At the abandoned old mine site, Hardee spun the jeep in towards the shed. He parked it under the overhang of the dangling board sign marked Joe’s Last Chance No. 1, crowding over as far as he could to make room for the other. In a moment, Wakulla drove up beside him and squeezed in.
Climbing out, they stared at the hostile bright sky. ‘Stay under the shed!’ Hardee said. ‘If they’ve seen us -’
But apparently the plane had not.
They could see it clearly, dropping down over the dunes. It picked out Hardee’s prefab, banked and swung around it twice; then levelled off, headed out across the desert, banked again, came in and landed bruisingly on the uneven sand.
It was a rotten landing, but as good as could be expected for drifted sand. A tyre might have blown or a wheel collapsed, but did not. The plane was lucky and the hidden fugitives were not; they would not be saved by a crash that would destroy their pursuers.
The plane stopped perhaps a quarter of a mile from the prefab but well out of their sight. The motors died.
They waited.
‘Now what?’ demanded Wakulla angrily. He had been dragged away from a woman, and made to drive bouncingly across the hot sand with a hangover, and there was talk he hardly understood of danger that was never quite clear, and he was irritable.
Hardee climbed to the top of the old shed wordlessly. He stretched tall and peered towards his home.
‘Can’t see,’ he called down to the others. ‘I can’t even see the house. I wonder what they’re doing.’
‘Come down,’ said old man Tavares in a tired voice.
He sat on the sand with his back against the weathered boards, his eyes half closing, but not with drowsiness. The heat was very great, especially for a man near seventy, and especially for a man who had lived with outrageous fear for four years and now found his fears exploding in his face.
‘Doing?’ Tavares repeated wearily. ‘I shall tell you what they are doing. They are searching.’ His voice was hardly louder than a whisper, in the perfect quiet of the hot desert air. ‘They see that your jeep is not there, but they search your house. They observe that you are not in it. It takes very little time to do this; there is not much to search.’
‘Right,’ said Hardee roughly, dropping to the sand beside him. ‘Then what will they do next?’
Old man Tavares opened his eyes. He looked out across the sand. ‘Then I think they will take off again in the plane and look all through the desert for you. They will figure to find you easily from the air. But -’ He paused, thinking. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is not a good plane for the purpose and in any case they will want more, for they do not wish to miss you. So more will be summoned.’
‘More planes?’ repeated Joan. ‘I never saw any other planes.’
‘You will,’ said Tavares sadly. ‘In an hour, perhaps, or two hours, there will be many planes flying overhead. But in much less time than that, this one that is by Hardee’s home will search for us.’
Out behind the shed was the blank headboard and the shallow grave where Hardee had buried the stranger. Tavares looked at it longingly.
‘If he were alive,’ he whispered, ‘then perhaps we could learn something.’
‘We could dig him up,’ Wakulla rumbled.
The girl made a faint sound. ‘In this heat? After nearly a week?’
Hardee shook his head. ‘No, we won’t dig him up. Not because of the heat - it’s dry, Joan; he’ll be half a mummy by now. But I put him there and I know what I buried. There’s nothing on him but ragged shorts and a pair of shoes. Nothing that would tell us anything.’ He gestured back towards the ringing hills. ‘That’s where his trail came from. I didn’t follow it, and now the wind has wiped it out, but that’s where it was.’
‘No matter,’ said Tavares with the calm of resignation. ‘It is too late for any of those things.’ He nodded towards where the plane had landed.
‘You think they mean trouble?’ Wakulla demanded.
‘Think?’ Tavares glanced at him opaquely, then once again out across the hot, dry sand. ‘I do not think. I know. Look.’
A flare of flame, almost invisible against the bright sky, fringed with bits of metal and sand and unidentifiable debris, leaped up over the dunes. Smoke followed.
‘They are taking no chances,’ said Tavares slowly. ‘They looked for you, and when you were not to be found, they destroyed your home - perhaps you had hidden, you see. But now they will look some more.’
In a moment, the sound of the explosion reached them.
The boy began to cry.
5
The sky was full of aircraft, high-winged light planes that chopped the desert into sector strips and patrolled them, seeking, seeking; helicopters that darted from place to place.
‘I never saw so many planes,’ breathed Joan Bunnell, one arm around the boy. He was thrilled, so excited that he forgot to be afraid; he had never seen so many planes either, had hardly believed that so many planes existed.
All through the afternoon, they lay there in the waning heat, while the searching planes crisscrossed the sky. Wakulla looked angry, then puzzled, then contemptuous. He said: ‘Stupid! Why don’t they follow our tracks? If it was me up there, I’d find the jeeps in ten minutes!’
Tavares shrugged. He was very silent; he didn’t want to talk, it seemed. Hardee and the others kept probing at him with questions, but he only shook his head. The heat was wearing. Even under the strain of the time, it lulled them, drugged them ...
Hardee woke up, and it was a cold, bright night.