Those Thai rubies, something he hadn’t mentioned even to Dar, had made the difference. The interest on eighty-seven thousand dollars, added to the salary of a Mexican crop duster’s mechanic, might have kept him safely dead and tinkering with airplanes for the rest of his life. He had even given up all plans for revengeuntil he saw Medina’s ad in Sport Aviation. A shame I can’t talk about those bits, he thought. But I’d be sorry later.
“Corbett,” she said earnestly, “I don’t know what to believe. I suppose it might be possible that Uncle Dar might be capable of such a thing, if he thought youlook. What if, don’t ask me how, but somehow, they got what they thought was absolute proof that you were a Russian spy or something?”
He saw the agonized hope in her gaze, and smiled sadly. “Or what if I really was, and they found out? Same thing. I spent sleepless nights for two years afterward, trying to explain it in a way that would take Dar off the hook. I never found a scenario that would justify it, Petra. And who better than Dar to catch me napping?”
“I never thought a reason like that would justify murder in my own country,” she said.
“Me, neither,” he replied, refolding a nav chart, watching the altimeter as Black Stealth One descended to a few thousand feet above a broken, creek-veined plain. “But it won’t hurt my feelings if you report every damn word of this to your favorite uncle, next time you see him. You can tell him I kept the secrets, all of ‘em. The son of a bitch,” he finished under his breath.
She turned her puzzled frown from him to the terrain below. “Are we out of fuel?”
“Not yet. But jet interceptors don’t fool around much, this low, and now I don’t think they’ll spot us from above. See the wing?”
She twisted, studying the wing surface. He had finally learned the trick of using the video monitor to give the computer a viewpoint, a point from which a viewer must be fooled. If that viewpoint were infinitely far away above, the computer would look below and “paint” the skin with a replica of the terrain as they passed over it, perfect camouflage against a viewer high above. As they passed the fenceline from a fallow field of rich dark soil to a field green with cotton, a shadow of green swept across the upper wing skin to replace the rich brown of a moment before.
She saw a man standing next to a pickup truck on a dirt access road. The man did not look up but, “Could people on the ground see us now?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Most likely our belly’s blue. I could go outside and see.”
“You go to hell, is where you go.”
“Not far off the truth,” he said, restarting the engine. “The middle of the Okefenokee might be hell at night, so we’re going to see if I can stretch a glide to its southern edge. And that’s over the line into Florida.”
TWENTY
Yevgeni Melnik, whose taste for vodka had faded after his first glass of Kentucky sourmash, was scribbling in a small spiral-bound notebook when he saw two familiar faces in the mirror behind the bar. He put away his pencil slowly, took a slower sip of Jack Daniel’s, and slipped the notebook into his coat pocket. “Fallon, Hendrick,” he said, turning toward the men with a welcoming smile. “Have we all made the same good guess, or the same bad one?”
Tom Fallon, of the Post, had the thick shoulders and flattened nose of a mediocre club fighter twenty years after leaving the ring. He recognized the rumpled little Russian first and made a comical face of surprise to Hendrick, the roly-poly veteran Times reporter. “Jeez, they’ll let almost anybody drink in Atlanta,” Fallon said, but slid onto the stool next to Melnik and clapped him on the shoulder as Hendrick took the next stool. “I’ve noticed you’re a good guesser, Melnik. But are we guessing about the same thing?” He caught the bartender’s eye. “Whatever he’s having,” he added, nodding at Melnik’s glass.
“Sounds right to me,” Hendrick added to the bartender in his lazy Midwest twang. “In the spirit of glasnost, Melnik: you guess first.”
Melnik truly enjoyed the byplay of such men, all of them a bit jaded, all slightly cynical about human affairsperhaps because he had become one of them. After a few years, hardened professional newsmen learned how to balance their natural love of competition against the virtues of shared information. If they had not both flown into Atlanta International on the trail of Black Stealth One, their editors would doubtless divert them to the story before long. If they had come for that, probably they had already done a bit of sharing. “I would guess,” Melnik said, “that you are both trailing a lead about a stolen airplane, as I am. And because Delta and American have hubs in Atlanta, we will find it easier to catch other flights towherever rumor leads,” he finished with an expansive wave.
Quickly, from Fallon: “Why not, say, Dallas?”
“A flip of the coin,” Melnik shrugged charmingly. “You?”
Fallon glanced at Hendrick. “You, uh, probably have some pretty special sources. So do I; so does Hendrick. A quid pro quo might help us all. Sound good?”
“Why not?” Melnik’s openhanded gesture seemed to invite a body search, but it was he who asked the next question. “What do you have so far?”
Fallon hesitated, but glasnost worked both ways and the little Sov had already admitted he was on the Spookplane story. Accepting his drink, Fallon sipped, blew a richly scented exhalation, and said, “There’s a place called Monroe about forty miles east of here that’s popular with glider nuts.”
“Sailplane,” Hendrick put in, without lowering his glass. “High performance glider’s a sailplane.” While he tended to ramble in writing a story, Hendrick seemed to make up for it with telegraphic speech.
“Ah,” Melnik said as though it was important.
“Whatever,” Fallon said. “The Georgia state cops came down on that little field at Monroe like acid rain on pantyhose a few hours ago. They practically ringed it with patrol cars, turned the police channels to mush arguing over what the hell they were after, and snagged a couple of guys out of a gliderawright, sailplanethat had just landed. The sailplane was clean, but it turns out that the cops had got a tip about a hush-hush government plane that’d been stolen up north and positively identified near Monroe by a flying cop. When somebody used the word, ‘stealth,’ the Post got wind of it and pulled me off something else I was bird-dogging in Nashville. When I got on the next flight to Atlanta, guess who was already on it.” He jerked a thumb toward Hendrick.
“Times jerked me off a piece in Memphis, sent me here,” Hendrick said.
“They’re always jerkin’ him off,” Fallon put in. “He loves it.” Sip; sidelong look at Hendrick.
Melnik frowned for a moment, searching his mental file of American idioms, then smiled. “There has to be more to it,” he urged.
“Governors of several states are loaning air guard planes to the feds,” Hendrick went on, unfazed. “Flying search patterns for a stealth plane spotted near here, and the sky’s full of everything they can muster. Plane’s not a Lockheed stealth fighter, or the Northrop stealth bomber; a sailplane, like. May be a hostage onboard.” He saw Melnik’s face change and added, “May be, I said. Times has some people schmoozing weekend warriors in the guard to see what we can learn. But if it’s a sailplane, it’s slow. Could still be someplace near.” He cocked his head, thought about it, then shrugged and sipped. “Now you.”