The rising, then falling rasp of a nearby engine signaled another pass by the Cessna. Corbett did not see its aluminum hide until the patrol pilot, banking abruptly to the right, dropped the nose of the bird dog and began a shallow dive toward the south. Corbett eased his own craft up into the fleecy belly of his cloud, perplexed. Why would the Cessna break off its pursuit?
The patrol pilot’s next transmission explained a lot. “Thirty-one, this is Eighty-three fifty-three, fugitive sighted southwest of me near the Monroe strip, no more’n a thousand feet off the deck. Could be in the landing pattern. Don’t see him raght now but I got a glimpse. He sure got there in a hurry. Hold your horses.”
“Your help should be onstation soon,” the dispatcher replied. “I’m dispatching units from Route Twenty to that airstrip. Standing by,” she added calmly.
Corbett eased downward into the clear, still in the shadow of the cumulus, and at that instant he saw the achingly clean lines of an Air Force F-16 as it streaked overhead in the distance, a deadly silver dart with a rakishly underslung intake duct. Before Black Stealth One nosed into its foggy haven again, Corbett had spied the second interceptor plummeting in a long arc toward the Monroe strip, its drag brakes already extended to slow its ferocious plunge.
The turbulence in his cloud, Corbett knew, could grow from gentle to lethal at any time. Merely to kiss its edges was inviting catastrophe, but he could see no better choice. He steered north by compass for what seemed an age, breaking out of the cloud again and throttling up to rise near its bulbous tops.
Presently, though he did not manage to intercept the military frequency, Corbett heard the disgust of the Cessna pilot. “It was a sailplane, Thirty-one. He’s so slow he’s still on final approach. I tell you flat out, that looks different from the airplane I was followin’.”
Black Stealth One, meanwhile, slid into the open toward another cloud to the east. Because a cloud constantly changes shape, Corbett could see through occasional rifts that the Cessna was now bird-dogging another cloud somewhat above and westward a few miles, sniffing around the wispy perimeter, its pilot too cagy to risk plunging into that ugly gray mass.
Presently the girl looked up. “I can’t concentrate. It feels like we’re bouncing around.”
“We are,” Corbett nodded, and tapped his right ear, grinning. “The highway cop lost track of which cloud we ducked into. Maybe because prevailing winds are taking the clouds northeast, or maybe because their shapes have changed so much. Damn, I wish I could find the frequency those blue-suiters are using.”
“Talk sense, Corbett.”
“Air Force jocks, a pair of General Dynamics F-16’sthere,” he pointed suddenly toward the heavens to his right. “Look ahead of that faint contrail for the silver speck.” But almost as soon as she looked up, the nearby edges of cloud cover sealed off the view. “Those guys are practically falling out of the sky, Petra; they can’t fly as slow as the Cessna so they’re circling the cloud at a steep angle. Pull out five thousand feet off the deck, zoom up to twenty-five thou or so, around and around the wrong cloud, waiting for us to pop out. I don’t think the bird dog has much credibility left,” he chuckled.
Petra merely “hmphed” and studied the video monitor again. Corbett did not add that, to use his best cloud cover, he was moving east of his course. At this rate he’d be over the Atlantic when his fuel ran out, but Corbett did not abandon his tactic until the twin-jet Thunderbolt sizzled across the sky some distance ahead, into the region circled by interceptors. Meant for close support of troops on a battlefield, the craft had the lines of an airborne tow truck. Its pilot gave no sign he had seen them.
As it happened, Petra was looking up at the time. “Boy, now that’s ugly,” she said.
“Good God,” Corbett muttered. “This place is going to be wall-to-wall airplanes.” There was nothing to be gained by telling the girl that an A-10, a Fairchild Thunderbolt, was built around a rapid-fire cannon that could obliterate a tank. Oh yes, it’s an ugly bastard. And it can loiter a lot slower than a Mach two interceptor.
Black Stealth One surged on toward a series of puffy cloudlets that seemed deceptively near. Corbett chafed at his slow pace, expecting to be jumped at any moment, sliding down an imaginary line that might keep him hidden a few moments longer. He dared not approach the ground too closely because from miles above, a young pilot’s sharp eye could spot a hedge-hopping aircraft more easily than the same aircraft flying somewhat higher.
“Corbett”the girl sighed“I just can’t break in any further than the second menu in this thing. Are you sure there’s a ‘paint’ program in here?”
He could not say, “Speedy swore that it was there,” nor any similar assurance, else she might recall it later; and Medina would suffer for it. “I know it’s what this airchine is all about. It had better be in there,” he grumbled.
“All I’ve found is the main menu, and the secondary.”
“Secondary?” He was damned if he’d admit, again, just how little he knew about computers. Some fine airplanes had been designed with slide rules, and Kyle Corbett had rarely used anything more sophisticated than a hand calculator. “Show me,” he demanded.
“Here it is.” Her fingers flew over the keys, and the screen passed from the main menu after she keyed “Subrout.”
He watched the saffron text scroll down the screen, thinking idiotically that if he had a quirt he could lean out and whip the damned airplane a little faster. “‘Protect Xmit,’ no; ‘Flir,’ no; ‘Fueldump,’ ‘Xsec,’ ‘Pixel.’ whatever that is; ‘Submun’”
“What’s a flir?”
Pronouncing it correctly as she had, to rhyme with “cheer,” made him smile. He enunciated each letter for her. “Forward-looking infrared,” he explained. “Good to have it but that’s not what we’re looking for. Or are we?” He’d used FLIR in its primitive days and, if he knew Ben Ullmer, this version would be state-of-the-art stuff. Maybe good enough to spot a distant aircraft before it could spot the hellbug. “Try it, Petra.”
She did, watching the golden scroll, lifting her brows in unspoken question.
He read the basic instructions, ignoring the thin scrawl of a fresh contrail that arrowed far above them, concentrating on the illustration which depicted the screen and keyboard. Evidently, once he pressed the “execute” key, the tiny keyboard stick could be twisted to adjust the FLIR gain. By moving the stick he could scan in all directions, including rearward.
Corbett hit the key. “Now you’re talkin’,” he breathed. The image had false color, painting a pink tinge to the image of the cloud ahead where it reflected bright sunlight. He twisted the stick; the cloud grew red, even better defined than with the naked eye. He diminished the gain and saw the cloud fade to a faint pink. A hard pinpoint of scarlet inched slowly across the bottom of the screen.
Petra pointed at the scarlet dot. “What’s moving?”
“It’s not, we are. Somebody burning trash, I guess; see the smoke?”
He reduced the hellbug’s power as they neared their target, a somewhat smaller cloud with fuzzily defined edges. Skirting the thing, Corbett moved the tiny stick for a rearview, which caused a dizzying shift on the screen. “This is more like it,” he said. A full half-dozen crimson dots moved across the screen, growing larger and smaller, winking off and on, in a mesmerizing dance. “Those guys are thirty miles away,” he said. “Infrared won’t penetrate clouds much, that’s why their emissions keep disappearing in the center of our screen.”