Puffing, wrenching furiously at her bonds, she realized that she sat in the right-hand seat of some kind of grounded aircraft, perhaps a helicopter, in a narrow valley flanked by wooded heights. The left-hand hatch, functioning both as a door and a window and formed mostly of clear plastic, was raised, gleaming in the early sun like some enormous contact lens. Her hands and feet were taped to a control stick which was evidently locked, yet she could feel something give. She fought harder.
“That’s enough!” Petra swiveled her head and stopped. There were voices that had to shout to be taken seriously. This was not one of them. Its owner, Mr. John Smith, peered around the door opening. He looked like bloody hell, the crow’s-feet at his temples almost meeting the puffiness under his eyes. A middle-aged man who has missed a night’s sleep does not bubble over with pleasantries. John Smith proved it, squinting at her: “You break anything and you get broken.”
“I’ve got to go,” she said. Amazingly, the little holes in the tape let her say it, though not very loudly.
“You go where I go,” he grunted, and now she saw that he held a big floppy bag on his shoulder.
He was trying to fit its mouth into something behind the open hatch.
“I mean, I have to go,” she said louder. “To the bathroom.” It sounded like “wathroom” through the tape but she saw sudden comprehension in his gaze.
“In a minute,” he said. Petra realized that Smith was using a camper’s plastic waterbag, a squarish thing that might hold five or six gallons, to fuel the vehicle. He cursed softly, shifted the bag, then seemed satisfied. The sound of liquid splashing into some cavity behind her did not make Petra’s self-control any easier. To take her mind off her full bladder, she used a trick she had learned when facing a final exam with a mind suddenly gone blank: she thought of something worse.
This man knows about Uncle Dar, she thought, but he is no friend of ours. Or of my country. He hasn’t taken me away for the usual reason men take women. I’m just a piece of some game to him, a pawn, and since my uncle is involved somehow, it is a huge game. Very few big games end with all the pawns alive. Abruptly, she decided to think about her bladder again, but she would not cry; damned if she would cry.
At last he lowered the empty bag, locked the tank’s cap, and moved around to lift the hatch on Petra’s side. For a moment they traded glances; hers angry, his devoid of expression. Then he said, “You can go behind those bushes, but the place is alive with rattlers so be careful. A gentleman would turn his back, but I won’t. We’re miles from water or people. If you run, I shoot you; it’s that simple.”
Seeing her nod, he unwound tape from her ankles, then her wrists, sticking one end of each tape to the smooth leather of a toolkit on his belt so that the tape hung down, ready for reuse. He made no comment as she ripped the patch from her mouth and tossed it away. He showed her how to position her feet as she exited backward, and steadied her when the entire aircraft rocked alarmingly in the process. She went where he pointed, dismayed that those bushes were hardly more than knee high, scanning the stubble for snakes.
This was not the first time Petra had shucked her jeans behind a bush, and she took a perverse pleasure in the sounds her body made, hoping it would embarrass John Smith. Leaves made a poor excuse for toilet paper but they were better than nothing. She slipped a jagged piece of stone into a hip pocket, turned away, and stood up to arrange her clothing because, as promised, he stood facing her ten yards away, arms folded, with that automatic pistol in his right hand. She had never seen a handgun quite like it. It looked like a plastic gizmo from Star Trek.
And then, for the first time, she saw the vast wingsweep of the aircraft, with no identifying marks of any kind, and realized that her mouth was hanging open. “Get back in,” he said, gesturing with the sidearm, “I’m not through fueling this thing and I won’t have you running loose.”
It was not the chill breeze that lifted gooseflesh on Petra’s arms. She had studied the human-powered aircraft of MacCready and MIT, and the pioneering Bowlus designs, in Applied Structures. This thing seemed generations beyond them all with that gaping mouth that surrounded the cockpit, and the multibladed fan half hidden inside.
And in a way, it looked frighteningly alive. She paused beside the cockpit, gripping a handhold. “Why don’t I just stay with you? I won’t run.”
“You sure won’t.” His hand on her backside was not gentle, boosting her upward. “Hold on, what the hell is that?” He dug two fingers into her hip pocket and produced the fragment of stone, then tossed it away, his hand returning in a slap that stung her rump. She lay facedown in the seat now, her right breast mashed painfully by the seat’s thigh support, and these multiple insults proved too much for the daughter of Philip and Andrea Leigh of Old Lyme, Connecticut. Petra kicked hard, felt her heel connect, and began to scream as she kicked harder.
Abruptly she felt herself lifted by the back of her belt and shirt collar, snatched upward and back as if she were some hollow store window dummy. He dropped her flat, full length, in the dust, cutting her off in mid-yell, then sat on her lower legs until he had taped her ankles again.
He then proceeded to spank her as she had not been spanked since she was six years old for using only one of the words she was using now. When she managed to grab the edge of his jacket, he merely spun her over and forced her hands together, holding them with only one of his own hands while he taped her wrists with the other.
In common with many women of gentle breeding, Petra had never fully understood the disparity of male and female upper body strength, especially when accompanied by an extra seventy pounds, until now. Humiliated, terrified, and with buttocks that burned, Petra clamped her eyes shut as if that would stop her tears. She felt herself hoisted over his shoulder, then lifted bodily into the aircraft, offering no resistance until she felt the wire circle her throat.
“Hold still unless you want to strangle,” he said, fumbling behind her head, his face so near she could feel his heat on her cheeks. “You asked for this, kid.” When he stepped back, she saw the blood at the corner of his mouth before he spat more of it onto the ground. He took a small pair of cutters from the kit clipped at his belt, snipped behind her head, and drew a coil of black anodized wire out. He cut two pieces, each a yard long, and secured her to the control stick again. “I told you before not to break anything. If you do, this whole rig can fall right out of the airand so will you. Now behave yourself, I’ll be back soon.” And with that, he circled the cockpit to retrieve that plastic fuel bag before trudging off, parallel to a dry gully.
Petra could open her hands enough to grasp the control stick, but stretching her fingers toward that cruel wire only tightened the loop around her throat. She wanted to sob, but that hurt too. It was hell when she could not even abandon herself to justified self-pity.
Well, what could she do? Think, dammit; that’s what, she decided. One thing sure, she had heard Smith’s voice before all this began and he or one of his cronies knew Uncle Dar well enough to fake that note. Somehow, her kidnap and the CIA were connected. Those damned spooks had lots of ways to knock you out for hours and, in fact, the sun said it was nearing midmorning. She could see the pilot’s console, with only a few small instruments instead of the massive array in most aircraft she had seen. Not even a clock, though it had a swiveling video screen with a keyboard. All the lettering was in English, but that didn’t mean much; she’d heard a prof say that the international language of flight was English too, though the language of spaceflight would probably be Russian.