A nod. “You wanta put the trapdoor back?”
“Don’t,” Petra spoke up. “Leave it open as a reminder.”
Corbett got up and headed for the doorway. “Teach you not to screw around, old-timer,” he called back. “A woman will keep you terrified all your life. All I’ll do is kill you.” He made an after-you-Alfonse gesture, and Petra walked out ahead of him toward the back door of the little store, which was not even locked. The place was silent but for the tick of a big, old spring-wound Westclox that squatted beside the cash registerthe kind of clock that more or less keeps time but will do it until the blast of Gabriel.
By common consent, they found the toilet first, Petra cursing as she cleaned the filthy thing before she would park her rump on it. Then he used it, knowing that when he opened the door he might be alone. He heard a car go by on the blacktop, its tires sizzling a tone that rose and fell familiarly with its passing. So she didn’t flag it down, he thought, only half surprised. He found her opening two cans of beer from the old refrigerator that squatted near the sales counter.
They gulped for a few moments. “You let me go, back there in the melon field,” she said at last.
“No I didn’t. You ran. I came looking for you, that’s all.” A devilish smile. “You sorry I did?”
“Don’t joke about it, Corbett, I Thanks, just thanks. Look, you were going to beat the daylights out of me. Well, weren’t you?”
After a pause: “Yep. Petra, leave it alone. You’re going to be interrogated in ways you never imagined.” He put down the can, opened another.
“I can imagine hypnosis. I can imagine an injection, uh, what’s that stuff?”
“Sodium pentothal,” he replied, sighing.
“Whatever. And I keep seeing you offering me your little shooter so I could kill that poor peawitted scarecrow who tried to rape me. I’m sorry, Kyle”she smiled, and he realized that she had done things to freshen her appearance while in that neanderthal bathroom“but you’ve already blown it.”
“Shit; I did, didn’t I?” He began to laugh, the near-silent uh-uh of near exhaustion. “Well, say I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“I can’t imagine why,” she said, softly now. “You put in a hard day kidnapping big-mouthed society girls yesterday, flew all night, flew all day today. I think,” she said, and now she was laughing too, “I think you should take me to a dance tonight.”
“That and a bicycle ride would kill me right now.”
“I know that old joke,” she said.
“I’m not surprised,” he said, shaking his head ruefully, dragging up a stool he saw in the shadows. She spied a broken couch near the door and claimed it, shoving the tattered cushions onto the floor. When another car sizzled by she did not look up. Its lights swept past her face for a moment and made her, he decided, very beautiful.
It was she who prodded: “And now?”
“Now you make your call, there’s the phone over by the cash registerunless you made it already,” he said in sudden alarm.
“I didn’t. Trust me, as my favorite kidnapper says. Listen, Kyle, are you on uppers? I don’t see how you’re on your feet as it is, let alone fly Black Stealth One to Cuba tonight. That is your idea, isn’t it?”
He paused a long time before saying, “Forget Cuba. Doesn’t matter, I’ll make it. I think. Yeah, I took a pill earlier today. And I’m gonna crash if I don’t take some more.”
“Where are they?”
Longer pause. He laid his cheek on the counter, feeling the first buzz of the beer in his head. “In my bag. Out in the field.” He wanted to add, “in the hellbug,” but somehow it did not seem terribly important. When the girl went out the back door he stood up, knowing he had to stay alert, swung his arms, tried deep-breathing exercises as he rolled a fresh can of cold beer over his forehead and smoked a cigarette. Then he sat down on the couch. He was snoring heavily when Petra returned, the cigarette smoldering at his feet.
TWENTY-THREE
With a wealth of landing sites to choose from, Ben Ullmer suggested Jacksonville Naval Air Station. Naval surveillance aircraft carried highly sophisticated hardware, and in answer to a wild surmise by Ullmer, the NSA computers had kicked out a surprising answer. Yes, NAS Jacksonville had not one but three special X-Band radars gathering dust in a hangar.
Dar Weston approved Jacksonville because they could duck newsmen, who lacked the required clearances. The story had hit evening papers and now, as the Learjet taxied away in gathering darkness, Dar wanted to use a scrambler to Terry Unruh. Instead, he stood in the hangar, loosening his tie and trying to understand the impenetrable thicket of terms as Ullmer swapped jargon with a spiffy naval officer who seemed too young for his oak leaves.
When the officer turned away to confer with three ratings, all electronics technicians, Dar caught Ullmer’s eye. “Ben, if Black Stealth One is invisible to radar, what’s the point in putting these sets in naval aircraft?”
Ullmer blinked, looked as if he were about to explode, then shook his head. “I keep forgetting you’re auhm. Okay: aircraft use a certain band of frequencies to avoid collisions and so on. We call it ‘C’ Band; it ignores clouds and birds and locust swarms and a shitpot of other stuff that clutters your scope. I mean, if C Band reflected everything you’d have mostly clutter all over your video screen. With me so far?”
Another time, Dar would have given an icy response to Ullmer’s blatantly patronizing tone. But Ben Ullmer was under stress too, Dar told himself, and it had been Ullmer who’d had the humanity to balk at shooting down an airplane with a hostage in iteven before he knew who that hostage was. “Go ahead,” Dar said calmly.
“But there’s an ‘X’ Band of radar too,” Ullmer went on, darting glances toward the men who were trundling test equipment out. “X Band sees everything, Weston; it’ll see the hellbug. It’ll also see everything else, including dust and clear air turbulence, and all of it gets painted on the scope so you have to guess what’s what by the way it acts. Result is clutter like you wouldn’t believe. But if you’re already within a mile or two of something like the hellbug, especially in good weather, you might pick it up on X Band and then maybe you could get an eyeball on it. You narrow the X-Band aperture and boost its transmission power, and ignore everything that isn’t acting like an airplane. It’ll see the airchine, all right; you just have to recognize what you see.” His faint smile held less worry and more confidence than Dar had seen that day. “Some scope men can do it. It’s an art.”
Sheppard, back at Elmira, had endorsed the X-Band idea. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind, now, that Kyle Corbett had flown at medium altitude through a swarm of military aircraft over Georgia without being spotted by anything but an unarmed Cessna. “When science fails,” Dar said, “I suppose we turn to art.” Then, seeing the officer’s return, he said quickly, “What’s the X-Band stuff doing here?”
The young officer, Hinshaw, heard the question. “We have gulls, sir. Googols of gulls. We’ve retrieved naval aircraft from the bay and found the jet intakes packed half full of gull bodies. So we had to study their behavior. We, uh,” he seemed faintly embarrassed now. “We did some of those studies in P2V’s in nice clear weather using X Band for the, uh, chase. Eglin and Pensacola have the same problem, but we’ve got the P2V’s. Gulls are protected animals but can we help it if they fail to avoid a big propeller?”
Ben Ullmer nodded. “Gulls won’t hurt those old Lockheed prop jobs much, Weston. But a Neptune could pretty much wipe out a few thousand gulls. Civilians call the P2V a Neptune.”