Everything around her was stripped to bare essentials, the few interior panels not even painted, and she guessed correctly that they were made of filament and polymers, exotic stuff with an unfinished look. She had seen no sign of a hangar, so Smith had already flown here to refuel. Where from, and where to? Perhaps he would tell her, but not if she continued to fight him. She would escape this brute, no question about that; and the best way to do it was first to convince him of her obedience.
She thought about Smith for a while. Medium height, hard face, not young; old enough to be her father, with a gut that protruded a bit over his belt buckle and heavy sloping shoulders beneath that old leather jacket. His hand and arm strength were incredible, and he made every move with the coordination of a card-sharp. And I know him from somewhere, she thought with increasing certainty.
She heard him before she saw him, shuffling in a slow trot with that bag over his shoulder, head down like a coolie as he approached through the scrub. She lay back, eyes closed as if asleep, and felt great satisfaction at his heavy breathing as he began topping off the tank. Presently she heard the cap snap into place, and a moment later he stuffed that plastic bag, still sloshing with fuel, behind her own seat. Petra did not enjoy the aromatic odor, though it reminded her of the blends she used to smell in the pits with her father. Gasoline, then, not jet fuel.
She eyed him silently as he sealed her hatch, and noted the care he took when climbing in, seeing her horizon dip and sway as this unbelievably flimsy vehicle flexed with his entry. Then he reached down and retrieved the wire from her ankles, then her wrists. They were still taped, but no longer to the control stick between her knees. Grunting, he managed to reach behind her headrest to untwist the last wire, and she felt the tension across her throat release as he spoke, coiling the wire neatly without looking at it. “There might be some buffeting at takeoff, kid, so you’ll want to harness up. If you force me to, I can always wire your neck up again. I won’t like it if you make me do that, and you’ll like it a damn sight less.”
She might have handled it differently if she had read any sign of pity or friendliness in his face, but all she saw there were determination and maybe a touch of anxiety. She nodded and watched him thrust a metal link through the loops of his own shoulder harness, so that all harness ends terminated with a fitting across his lap. She tried to link her harness the same way as he brought the strange craft alive, but when the engine’s soft whisper steadied and he tested the controls, she was still fumbling hopelessly.
“Ah, shit,” he muttered, “I liked you better asleep,” but he reached across to help. Not to do it all, only to give minimal assistance. A vagrant shred of memory, of a man who had treated her that way many years before, tugged at Petra but she would deal with it later. Right now, she wanted to be strapped in tight because if the motions she felt through the seat were any indication, this gigantic paper airplane was going to start flapping its wings any second.
Before the pilot moved the throttle beyond idle, he did a curious thing with his feet, pressing on two pedals that she took at first to be brake and steering pedals. But the exhaust rush, hardly noticeable until now, suddenly took on a different note with muted whistles in it. The pilot throttled up, watching his instruments carefully, and then something began to tremble under Petra’s backside. She looked over her right shoulder, seeing the sudden dust storm below the wing. The wing’s backward sweep was such that she could barely see it, but it was no longer sagging downward. It was sloping up, flexing as it tilted, but by the time Petra decided the wings did flap, she saw the brown earth dropping away.
No, the wings did not flap, but they seemed to be filled with helium. Without helicopter blades or rockets, the vehicle was rising straight up, then nosing forward, dipping a little, almost skimming the brush as it began to pick up forward speed in a whispering rush that changed as the pilot moved those pedals. Only one American military airplane did that, and no light planes at all. But I don’t know what the Soviets have, she thought.
Petra knew an airspeed indicator when she saw one. Before it registered thirty knots, a little over thirty miles an hour, Smith had the control stick tilted to the left. The great bird responded sluggishly, and the gust of breeze that struck them before they had risen a hundred feet became a near disaster. The pilot’s hand slapped the throttle hard, his feet mashing those pedals, and Petra saw scrubby trees rushing up at them as the aircraft heeled over, pivoting so that the nearside wing missed the upsloping terrain by a foot or so. Then the craft was rising again with a sickening lurch, headed toward the narrow end of the little valley. And even when the tachometer needle strayed toward the red, the engine sounds were muffled.
They circled twice in a tight climbing spiral before rising above the ridgeline, at a pace so lazy as to seem in slow motion, and only then did Petra see the great electronic ears spread out in the distance below. Not far from their takeoff point lay a concrete pad with painted legends and a low shed nearby. “Where are we, Canada?”
“West Virginia,” he said, throttling back now, the aircraft still climbing although the antenna complex now slid from sight behind a ridge. “It’s a spook listening post, one of the biggest. And this is a spook airplane. Appropriate, huh?”
She ignored the grin that went with his last comment, swallowing to keep her stomach where it belonged. “You’re not one of my uncle’s people,” she said.
“Nope.” He tilted the video screen so that it faced him, and began to finger its keyboard. “I’m not anybody’s people, Petra Leigh. For that you can thank your uncle’s people, the whole miserable lot of them.” He swore at the screen, scanned the horizon, then tried the keyboard again. And swore again. “If only that dumb schmuck weren’t so cute with passwords,” he added.
Petra made it light, airy. “What schmuck?”
“No you don’t, kid. Get this through your head: if we don’t get shot down or forced down or just plain fall down, sooner or later you’ll have a lot of people asking questions. I’ve spent a long time working this out alone, but some of my enemies used to act like my friends. I know how they thinkor at least you’d better pray that I do,” he added, punching at the keyboard again. His disgusted grimace suggested another failure.
“When do we get to eat, Mr. Smith?”
“I’ve got water, cheese, sausage, raisins. Sorry, no eggs Benedict,” he said, rummaging with his left hand behind his seat.
That was the instant when she knew him; not the whole picture, but the essential bits. A friend of Uncle Dar’s from long ago, one who had learned her breakfast favorite at Old Lyme, but a friend no longer. If she kept cudgeling her memory, she might remember his name. She tried to keep the light of this small triumph from her eyes, accepting the old suede bag as he swung it toward her. He’d put his repair kit back in the bag, which seemed to be full of duct tape, tools, and bottles. She held a bottle up and looked at him.
“Don’t drink that, it’s full of tetraethyl lead,” he said quickly. “Food’s at the bottom. And be careful with those cardboard tubes. They’re dangerous.”
She took inventory, trying to remember it all, even the flimsy bag, model cement, and the tubes of epoxy. The water was in a pair of two-liter plastic Seven-Up bottles. She opened the pound box of Sun Maid raisins as well, and took a handful, pretending not to study the instrument panel. The magnetic compass and the sun agreed that they were climbing almost due south.