He read the ad again, moving into the sunlight to soak up warmth which had suddenly fled his body. He had absolutely no doubt about most of the ad, but foreign sale? That seemed wildly unlikely, but a hell of a bunch of unlikely things had happened since he and Speedy began their little games. The ad itself was roughly as likely as tits on a lizard. And nobody on God’s earth could have devised that ad but Speedy, whether or not somebody had held a gun at his head while he did it.
Probably that was the truth of it: caught and turned, and once the mechanic called that telephone number he would be on the shit list again, and that would mean he was half caught already. But only half, and he’d escaped worse odds. But you were younger then, his demon critic whispered.
Fuck it, he answered it; nobody lives forever. He knew what he was going to do, as surely as if he had already done it, but there were ways to do it half smart, and ways exceedingly estúpido. He could fire up the MX and be in Aguascalientes in two hours, not that he needed more than a cow pasture but there was a jet-rated strip there too, and that might make them hunt Lears, not MX’s. Or they might not.
There was a chance, no bigger than a needle roller but still a faint chance, that Speedy was running clear on this. And besides himself there were only two men on Earth, if that many, who had reason to become inextricably tangled in the fate of the “complete Humongous.” Oh, that was cute, Speedy. To any other EAA reader that would be plain gibberish, easily forgotten, especially when there was no ultralight designer named Depew. But there was a place.
If he intended to be back from Aguascalientes before dark, he knew it was time to pray for tailwinds both ways. He walked behind the hangar and tossed the magazine into the Borgward, then told Enrique to go home to his kids. He needed only a few minutes to fuel the MX alone, and pushed it out of the hangar as a man would push a kite. A humongous kite…
SEVEN
Two thousand miles to the northeast of the aircraft buzzing toward Aguascalientes, the blue vintage Javelin of Dar Weston thrummed onto the Connecticut Turnpike at roughly half of its potential speed. Dar enjoyed the old brute but would have denied he loved it, with its firm ride, whopping semirace engine and fat tires to match. Weston had thought auto racing a singularly senseless pastime until his sister Andrea married Philip Leigh.
Who would have thought a no-nonsense New Haven stockbroker like Phil, with more serious money than the Westons, would take up such a sport? Dar had turned over the family portfolio to Philip Leigh, his sister’s husband, in 1960 after returning from a Turkish U-2 base. Now that had been a fiasco! A sweet bird of high passage, the U-2 had scanned millions of square miles of Soviet turf before the Sovs, with an SA-2 missile the size of a telephone pole, managed to shoot one down on May Day, of all days. Dar, dividing his time between base personnel and the handling of the U-2’s crucial spy equipment, had listened to the vacillations of his own leadership, including Dwight Eisenhower, with growing disappointment and then alarm. You didn’t offer transparent lies to the Sovs, let alone switch stories in public, if you wanted the bastards to respect you. If they didn’t respect you, sooner or later they would eat you alive. The trick to living with a murderous paranoid, Dar’s father used to say, was to keep him respectfully worried but not terrified. Old Farley Weston had made a lot of mistakes with his stony conservatism, but Dar had found that particular adage more apt with every passing year.
Reposted to Langley after the U-2 incident, Dar had found that he’d lost a pile of Weston money because you couldn’t simultaneously watch a stock portfolio and fight a cold war from an outpost. As executor of his father’s estate, Dar took his responsibilities as seriously as Farley Weston had expected. His mother, already in failing health then, needed expensive care until her death some years later. His sister, Andrea, would never go hungry so long as young Philip earned a six-figure income; but even if Andrea did not feel her paper losses, Dar had felt them deeply. The solution was simple: turn the Weston portfolio over to Phil, then pursue his career. It had been Farley Weston’s assumption that his son Dar could do both: husband the family fortune, and become the kind of cold warrior who protected and served his country in important ways.
Dar apologized to his father’s memory, relinquished the portfolio, and pursued his career with the kind of quiet, balanced zeal that marked him as a comer. Inside the Company, top posts were reserved for people who managed a fine balance between stolid conservatism and a willingness to consider the new, the offbeat, and the unthinkable. Dar Weston, year after year, worked to improve the delicate sense of balance that marked him as a cold warrior.
Still, he had learned when to hold another warrior’s coat, and it was Kyle Corbett and Phil Leigh who’d taught him. When Phil’s tiny roll-caged Cooper sedan showed up in 1966 at the Leigh estate in Old Lyme, Connecticut, Dar thought it was a joke. When he heard that Phil was racing the damned thing, he thought the joke had gone far enough. It was not until after the birth of Petra Leigh, when Phil graduated to a bellowing Mustang racer, that Dar tried to talk sense into his sister’s husband.
And through two tours in Southeast Asia, overseeing the hardware security of U-2’s and the prodigious “Blackbird” SR-71’s, Dar Weston had continued to try talking sense to Phil.
Corbett, one of the Blackbird pilots, had become one of Dar’s few close friends by 1968. Nursing their third round of San Miguel“MacArthur specimens,” as Corbett called themon Luzon one night, Corbett had put the challenge to his friend. “Okay, your brother-in-law could buy a plot some Sunday, but this isn’t exactly safe shit we’re doing, Dar. Go on, tell me you didn’t get a taste for living on the edge behind German lines in Greece. Or in Israel in the fifties, to hear you tell it.”
“It’s not the same,” Dar had said. “I had a profession.”
“Oh bullshit. You had an excuse.” The brown burr haircut bobbed as Corbett nodded to himself, hunching thick shoulders as he crossed those short, heavy forearms. “Leigh just doesn’t have the excuses they gave you in Lipton Prep and Yale. What you’ve never done, and what you ought to do when you’re stateside again, is go with Leigh some weekend. Check it out.”
“Bloody likely,” said Dar, pulling on his beer.
“Until you do, you’ll never know what it is that he’s really doing. For all you know the guy is just cruising around, keeping out of the way. Or maybe he’s hanging it all out. Like we do.”
“He doesn’t have to. He’s got a family,” Dar countered.
“Your family. You’ve got to let go, you know,” Corbett said. Dar had shared more of his history with Corbett than he had with anyone except, possibly, Phil Leigh. But while Phil said little until he had decided on a course of action, Kyle Corbett came at you straight ahead, right out of the starting gate. “Anyway, if he wasn’t goosing Mustangs around he might be whoring or embezzling. It’s an outlet, Dar, and you don’t know as much about it as that year-old baby girl. Find out. Then at least you’ll have a little credibility.”
Dar had snorted at that, but he’d thought about it. And a year later, permanently posted to Langley, he had made his first appearance on Phil’s pit crew, and by 1971 he could recognize Roger Penske’s silver thatch from behind, or Mario Andretti’s footprint in mud. And the tooth-loosening hammer of Mark Donohue’s Javelin, a red-white-and-blue meteor, from any point on a track.
Dar Weston had known Donohue only as a nodding acquaintance in the pits, but as Phil often said, “There’s nothing like him. He’s not like the pointy-shoe Europeans or the playboys or the Foyt types. I bet the CIA could use fifty of him. He’s a graduate engineer out of Brown, right here in New England, says ‘sir,’ and ‘thank you’and then he gets in that Javelin with the patriot’s paint job and runs away and hides from the best. And waves every time he passes you.”