Melnik saw no reason to explain how his sources might have certain very special information. The American newsmen had been in the business much too long to be naive about Soviet satellites and listening devices. Nevertheless, Yevgeni Melnik lowered his voice and studied his glass, speaking as if to himself. “Your military air arms are searching for an aircraft stolen from the National Security Agency,” he began.
“NSA doesn’t fly spook airplanes,” Fallon objected, sensing a mistake. “They just massage the data from military and CIA.”
“They have been flying this one,” Melnik went on quietly, nodding at his sourmash. Then, quieter stilclass="underline" “They built it.”
“Holy shit,” Hendrick blurted. “A different kind of stealth plane, then. For CIA?”
Melnik remained silent for a moment, then shook his head. “I think you would call it interservice rivalry,” he said, and finished his drink. He saw Fallon’s hand move toward his jacket, then jerk down. You fear I shall quit talking as soon as your pencils come out. And I might, to strengthen my credibility.
“Bartender, hit us again,” Hendrick said, and leaned both elbows on the bar. “This is heavy shit, Yevgeni.”
Fallon, tapping his fingers with newly minted energy: “My God, you don’t suppose the CIA stole it? Nah.” He squinted in a fresh surmise. “More likely your guys, Melnik, I mean, wouldn’t that figure?”
Melnik used his newest Americanism: “Cut me some slack, tovarisch. Why would I be following the story if I already knew the details?”
“Doesn’t mean they didn’t snatch it,” said Hendrick. “Only means they didn’t tell you.”
“Possible,” Melnik agreed equitably. “It would not be the first time I have had a story rewritten. And I have said too much out of friendship. Do not source me, I beg you.”
“I hear you,” Fallon grumbled. “Listen, we’ve got more than one story here, you know that?”
“Not yet we haven’t,” said Hendrick, “unless you’re into filing on something this big with a single, unattributable source.” Still, the Times man was already selecting a quarter from a palmful of change. “I’d better call in, see which way I chase the wild goose next.”
And send others scurrying to ask acutely embarrassing questions of CIA, not to mention NSA, Melnik thought. Long after the stealth aircraft has been forgotten, American spymasters will be busy trying to patch the shreds of their careers. That is the real storyand my real value. Melnik only raised a hand like a Hollywood Indian.
“Yeah, me too. Hold the fort for us, Yevgeni,” said Fallon, in an implied promise of return.
Melnik watched Fallon shuffle away, digging for change in his pocket as he followed Hendrick to the telephones. “Oh yes, you will return to the fort,” Melnik muttered to himself in Russian. Those two were both solid professionals who would want confirmation of every detail by more than one source. But Western news media were strange entities, willing to go far beyond mere glasnost, openness, in search of a story. Fallon and Hendrick were picking, like Pandora, at the lock which would release an administration’s most secret problems.
And if they knew that Melnik had told them for that very reason? Perhaps they did know; what mattered in the West was not the potential damage by the story, but only the story. Fallon and Hendrick saw their duty to the story first, and to their country second.
Melnik drew out his little notebook and began to scribble. If he failed to call in this item about a hostage in Black Stealth One, he would be in he plucked the phrase from his growing repertoiredeep shit.
TWENTY-ONE
It was late afternoon when Petra saw the scrawl of multilane highway below, a broad ribbon that slashed through flat, unvarying leagues of forest leaving verges as wide as the highway itself. She welcomed this sight after watching the endless morass of Okefenokee cypress, with water gleaming up at her like hostile eyes through the rank foliage. She even welcomed the huge triple-tandem trucks that crawled along the ribbon because those nasty brutes only plied major arterials, and this one was a monster. She asked the question simply by pointing with her brows raised.
“Interstate Ten,” Corbett nodded. “We’ve nursed this crate farther than I thought we could. Another ten gallons and we could’ve made it to Key West.”
I’ll bet he’s headed for Cuba. What if I started playing with the pixel program now, she thought. Would anybody notice the buzzard that kept changing color? And if they did, would it help me? Corbett would catch on immediately. She had not forgotten the hiding he’d given her early in the morning. It all came down to, “if I do, I get a whipping” or worse, and such punishments were new to Petra Leigh. She kept her hands where they were.
The altimeter told her they were ghosting along at eleven thousand feet, and she wondered just how accurate the fuel counter was because it read under six pounds, slightly less than a gallon. No wonder Corbett was studying the terrain with such intensity. To their left, the sun glistened and winked from far distant windows in a small town. To the right at roughly the same distance was a larger town. Like it or not, Corbett had come too far to go back to that god-awful, trackless swamp. And now there were farms below, and rundown cafes and service stations at road crossings. And plenty of people. Deep in Petra’s soul, a bubble of optimism began to rise through her nagging fears.
The whisper of the rotary engine was so subdued, she did not notice when the pilot shut it down. She did realize they were losing altitude because the horizon tilted and the earth began to pivot in that dreamlike way which had frightened her so the first few times she had experienced it. How was it possible that you could grow accustomed to such things in a single day, even to wellalmost enjoy some parts of it? Someone, probably Jason in one of his Connecticut cowboy monologues, had drawled that a feller could even get to enjoy hanging if he did it long enough. By the fall term, she would be able to make the same crack about abduction. With maybe just the teensiest bit of truth in it? The hell with THAT kind of thinking, she told herself. Yes, it was exciting, in an oh-my-God sort of way; and yes, Kyle Corbett carried a kind of grizzled, overweight panache with him, the kind of man who, as Uncle Dar liked to put it, would put a feather in his cap and call it macaroni. You couldn’t help a certain grudging admiration for a high-tech thug who declared solitary war on the CIA. But the man was holding her by brute force and threats, and whatever justifications he offered, he was prosecuting his own brand of war against the United States. Or at least against some elements of it. Develop a soft spot for Corbett? Not likely!
The two-lane road seemed to leap up from the flat, wooded landscape ahead. Petra spotted a roof of corrugated tin between trees, tried to keep herself oriented to it, failed as Black Stealth One banked and jittered. Corbett brought the aircraft lower, soaring on airspeed alone, but he cursed and banked sharply away from one field below. “Damn bean poles could damage a wing,” he said curtly, restarting the engine when they were less than a thousand feet above the field. A minute or so later he set the engine idling and Petra saw the second field, an irregular polygon slashed out of the surrounding trees.
They banked lazily over the area, emulating a bird both in plumage and maneuver, moving no faster than an automobile. Corbett split his attention between high-gain infrared video and the real scene out of his bubble. “See anybody down there?”
Petra laughed in surprise. “Would I tell you if I did?”
He muttered, “Jee-zus, Kee-rist,” craning his neck around as he said it, and then brought the great bird of passage down to where Petra could see the shiny green ovals of immature melons in the field. “Cinch up; you never know,” he said, and began to manipulate throttle, stick, and pedals simultaneously.