Corbett’s sense of balance was finely honed, and he knew that the hellbug was starting a shallow bank, just as he’d said it must. He was already fumbling the fuel bag into his arms when the girl made her correction, but she made it too fast.
The drooping left wing came up swiftly, inertia forcing his face against the fuel bag, and his heel slipped from its purchase. Instantly Corbett was hanging halfway out, his right-hand trouser leg flapping as the hellbug tried to inhale him, the harness biting into the calf muscle of his left leg, the stench of avgas thick in his lungs. Corbett could hear tiny moans of anguish from the girl, almost the same sounds some women made during sexual climax. His left arm and leg strained convulsively, dragging his gonads across the sill so hard it took his breath away.
Fighting a wave of nausea from the pain, he turned his head and saw her, glancing quickly from him to the instruments and back to him, and he tried to make it seem less than the near thing it had been. “Nice try,” he gasped.
“Don’t say that, oh God, I’m trying,” she moaned.
“Shut up. Steady as she goes,” he grated, and found the step with his heel again. Still weak with the ache that radiated from between his legs, he tried three times before he could straighten his trembling right leg. He could feel the craft trying to bank, saw control surfaces move as the girl responded. Now he had the fuel bag in both hands, the hatch lip biting into his left forearm as he fumbled with his free right hand to introduce the bag’s flaccid neck into the filler opening.
He took a deep breath and forced upward against the bag, tilting it, partly flattening it against the cabin skin. Fuel began to pour out. Most of it went into the filler neck, but a filmy mist of high-octane fuel began to stream backward, sucked directly into the hellbug’s gaping mouth. He glanced back, focusing into the huge opening, and that was a mistake because it made him think about things he did not want to consider at this moment.
Inside the duct was a whirling blur of motion, the big impeller blades of Black Stealth One, sucking an explosive mixture of air and fuel through, hurling it out behind. The inlet’s screen mesh, solid enough to deflect a bird, might keep him from being swallowed if he lost his purchase. But if that fine mist of avgas hit anything hot on its way through, the sudden firebloom would scatter their fragments over half of Georgia.
Corbett concentrated on flattening the bag, grateful for the wide filler neck, feeling the almost imperceptible slip of his heel from its purchase in the shallow step. A half cupful of fuel sloshed out and was swallowed in an instant by whirling impeller blades. Never again! Didn’t have to risk the kid with this prehistoric in-flight refueling, could’ve landed and taken my chances.
He was tiring; could actually feel the energy leaking from arms and legs as he hugged the hatch sill. A half gallon of fuel was visible, caught in a fold of the translucent plastic, and when his heel slipped from its tiny ledge this time, he was ready. His fitful lunge inward against the harness pulled his crotch across the sill, and he was able to maintain his grip on the bag only because it was nearly empty.
He dragged the bag inside, found the filler cap without looking, managed to reach outside and twist it into place without dropping it. And then he was inside again, struggling weakly from the harness loops that had saved him twice. He twisted in the seat, so drained that he could barely sit erect, and somehow managed to drag himself into his harness properly.
He reached for the control stick. “Good work,” he said. “I’ll take it now.”
“Your face is red as a beet,” she said in wonder, relinquishing her stick.
“Embarrassment,” he said, and gave her a sick smile.
She raised her hands aloft, making claws of her fingers. “Aaagggh, how I hate that macho man stuff! Why don’t you just admit it, Corbett? It’s okay to be scared; I was scared too.”
He nodded at the fuel gauge, then said, “You handle fear your way, I’ll handle it my way. Sure I was scared; I’ve got nicotine stains in my shorts. I’ve also got a beer gut, which is why my face is red from huffing and puffing, okay?”
“That’s honest,” she said. “And speaking of stains, I, uh, I’ve got to go again. I really do, in the worst way.”
“Go ahead. Jesus,” he exclaimed suddenly, “you didn’t know! There’s a relief slot built into each seat, Petra. This thing was designed to fly two days without landing.” He snugged back into the seat, tapped the printed legend set into the forward lip of the seat. “It’s kind of self-explanatory; works for both sexes, they tell me.”
He made a show of putting on his minitel, attending to his instruments, ignoring her as she studied the mysteries of a seat with its own small trapdoor.
After a minute or so he heard her cycling the little actuator experimentally. She muttered, “It sure isn’t the Ritz. I’ll have to shuck my jeans.”
“Or stain ‘em. Suit yourself, we’ll be up here another hour if I can stretch it that far.”
Another long moment while he consulted his charts again, making himself conspicuously busy. Then he heard her say, “Good lord, it even has tissue. Am I doing my doo-dahs on some poor farmer’s head?”
“Fluids go through. Solid waste is retained,” he said, as impersonal as he could make it while a young woman prepared to use a toilet beside him. At the moment, he was slowly gliding down from twelve thousand feet with the engine off. At five thousand he would restart and begin a gradual climb again. It was slow, and it was chancy; but it could greatly increase their range.
Because he could hear her progress he began to hum a tune, attending to the intricacies of the “pixel” program on the video monitor.
From the girl, in strained sarcasm: “Louder music.”
If she could joke about it, he could. “What would you like, Handel’s Water Music?”
A chuckle, deep as a man’s. “Better try the twenty-one-gun salute from the 1812 Overture.”
Presently she sighed in relief. Corbett paid her little attention because he had just found the “buzzard” subroutine, and punched it in while craning his neck to see the upper surface of the wing. “It works,” he breathed. “My God, how it works!”
The girl, zipping her jeans, studied the monitor. “What did you do?”
“Check the wing on your side,” he suggested.
She did, and gasped. “It’soh wow, we’ve got feathers, Corbett!” She laughed in sheer delight, then swapped grins with him. “Are vultures really dark brown?”
“This one is,” he said. “You notice, out near the tips, the spaces between the big pinion feather patterns are tan and olive green. That probably works for anyone looking down. Can’t see the underside, but”
“Probably blue to fool people looking up,” she finished for him. “It’s not really perfect, from close up like this.”
“Give ‘em another five years,” Corbett replied. “Meanwhile, when they debrief you, somebody’s going to shit a brick. This is ‘eyes only’ stuff, Petra. For God’s sake, don’t even hint about it to outsiders.”
She nodded and fell silent while he rechecked their position. Their path had taken them past Athens, then southward over coils of sluggish river and marshland. He saw her studying the terrain. “The town to our left is Vidalia; river’s the Oconee,” he said.
But she was thinking along different lines. “The longer I’m with you, the less sense you make,” she mused. “Once you turn this airplane over to whoever gets it, why shouldwellmy uncle, for example, think it’s still a secret?”