It must have been another ten minutes before Gary heard the soft thrumm of a big motor and creakings of metal. It sounded like hangar doors opening but that didn’t figure, unless the guy was driving his Ford inside Blue Hangar to hide it. For sure, he couldn’t tow those long-winged aircraft away through the gate, and rumor had it that nobody on earth really knew how to fly them.
The two-tone hoots of sirens were so faint at first that Gary thought he was imagining them. But the sounds grew fast, so fast that the chuffing that abruptly started to reverberate from the hangar was soon drowned out, and when he heard tires squalling outside Gary expected to see the gunman burst into the library, back to his hostages. Maybe, Gary thought as feet pounded up the corridor stairs, the guy would be content with the girl in the black Ford.
In the ferocious tumult of the next two hours, Gary Macallister kept asking if the gunman had gone over the fence. It was two hours before someone told him exactly how the guy had gone over it.
TWELVE
“They would’ve had him if it wasn’t for those goddamn sirens,” said Ben Ullmer, stepping aside for a shirtsleeved forensics tech. The black Nikes and jeans were the last things Ben had expected on a fed, but the forensics man’s blue windbreaker left no doubt with its huge white FBI lettering across the back. They were all over the hangar by first light, stretching yellow bands of tape to cordon off areas of interest, leaving only a corridor for foot traffic through most of Blue Hangar. “Did you know a guy in the lead car said he saw something big lift off the runway as they were driving past the main gate?”
Dar Weston nodded, blinking away the sensation of hot dust under his eyelids. He had taken the Lear to Elmira after Ben’s call without waiting for details, taking only Terry Unruh because Terry was the one man under him who already knew about Black Stealth One. And how many will know by noon? A thousand? A million? “If he didn’t finish fueling up, he might be safely on the ground by now,” Dar said.
“Count on it,” said Ben, “if he hasn’t augured it in. Since he doesn’t have wet wings, the tank holds only twenty gallons and the hellbug cruises at six gallons an hour. ‘Course, he could stretch his range by loafing along; but I don’t much think this guy’s a loafer.”
For the first time since he stepped from the Lear, the CIA man found a trace of hope. “Without long-range tanks, we still might have a crack at him. With a hostage along, what does that do to his range?”
“Not much,” Ben admitted. “Let me show you on the wall map,” he added, pointing to a section of hangar wall which abutted the offices. A set of air navigation charts had been pasted together, yielding a map big enough to require the ladder that leaned against it.
“Be there in a minute,” Dar said, looked for Terry Unruh’s blond mop of hair and black down-filled jacket, waving as Unruh saw him. The lank Unruh broke off his discussion with a man whose three-piece suit said FBI more clearly than any lettering, and walked quickly to meet Dar. One thing about Unruh, those pale blue eyes could watch a dozen things at once. Damned good man, Terry Unruh, with a Master’s in chem engineering and twenty years in the Company but with two strikes against his rising higher.
Strike one: his involvement with drugs many years before, as an undergrad toying with the kinds of chemicals that could alter your metabolism in funny ways.
Strike two: his lying about it. They’d found out during an annual “flutter,” the polygraph tests given to Company men in the ranks. In the old days, Terry might’ve been fired, especially since he’d passed the flutter on those same questions before. But then the Company had fired Ed Howard, who had gone straight to the Sovs in revenge. These days, a man with Terry Unruh’s old sins might be keptbut not promoted too far.
“How are you getting along?” Dar asked, not loud enough to carry.
“You’d think we were on the Other Side,” Unruh said, with a baleful glance toward the FBI techs who were working the hangar floor over with cordless Dust Busters, changing bags often, inscribing each bag.
“We are, in a trivial sense,” Dar replied. “I don’t have to tell you how long the Feebs have been waiting for a chance to show us up. This is domestic federal crime, so I can’t fault Ullmer for calling them in. Just keep smiling, and bring me any salient detail that turns up.”
“Not to step on any toes, Dar, but the plumbing for this operation has got to change radically, and fast. Won’t we need an ops center for this? It’s going to get big,” Unruh said a bit defensively.
“I know; and don’t be so afraid to tell me when my fly is open,” Dar said, patting the man’s shoulder lightly. “As it happens, we’ve got a good location below that big wall map and we’ve got to share control with NSA. Ben Ullmer won’t complain if you set it up, he’s got more important worries and so do I. Get someone to rig partitions and scrambled extension phones; coffee, tables and chairs, the usual. I’ll trust you to do it right. Just remember I’m going to be mobile as hell.”
That was the way to keep your man happy without promoting him, Dar reflected while walking to the map. Give him his head, let him enjoy the job, and praise him when he does it right. Of course, that presupposed an employee who was both smart and dedicated. Unruh fitted those specs so well it was almost frightening.
Dar could see from reflected glare that the sprawling map, which Ullmer had begun to attack with a felt-tip pen, was overlaid by a thin layer of transparent plastic. Ullmer, his half glasses perched far down on his nose, leaned back on the ladder for a better look and nearly fell.
“Careful,” Dar said, one hand reaching up to push against the NSA man’s buttocks. “This country has never needed you so healthy as it needs you now, Ben.”
Ullmer only grunted and finished drawing an arc, using a hand-lettered tape to define a radius outward from Elmira. “This line is the hellbug’s range from two a.m. to maybe dawn. Four hundred miles,” he said. “Maybe five hundred if he throttled back for minimum fuel consumption. Top speed’s about a hundred and fifty knots, but you save a lot of fuel by throttling back.”
Dar watched the longer arc take shape. “So he could already be in the edge of Ontario, or near the North Carolina border, if he’s really good.”
Ullmer stepped down and folded his arms as both men stared at the map. “He’s the best. He’d have to be, just to get the hellbug out of the hangar and into the air, first time he ever saw it. I would’ve said it couldn’t be done by anybody who didn’t know the hellbug inside out.”
“Are all your people accounted for?”
“We’re tracing a pair on vacation; neither of ‘em flies, so far as we know. If you mean Raoul Medina, shit, he’s in my office getting sweated by our people. He was home in bedand not alone, either. Mad as hell; can’t much blame the guy. They say he drove like a maniac getting here.”
“We’ve got to blame somebody,” Dar muttered, “starting with me in the Company and Sheppard in NSA.”
Ullmer unwrapped a cigar, turning his head slowly, his voice gruff: “This wasn’t the plan. Or was it?”
“Christ, no! But the Other Side is primed and ready to take what we offered as Black Stealth One. This”Dar waved toward the forensics men“may mean they were readier than we thought. Who’s to say the pilot hasn’t already landed in Quebec or on some Russian trawler?”
“Quebec, maybe. Not a trawler; the hellbug’s wings are too long and they’re bonded on. Have to saw ‘em off to get it into a cargo hold, even if the son of a bitch could land it vertically, which I doubt. Even Medina admits she’s a handful to hover. And I tell you for flat-ass certain, Medina hasn’t checked out anybody else. Hasn’t even been here past his usual shift; too busy chasing nookie.”