The farmer sent another of his thunderous rounds in the direction of Rodrigues, then ran in a crouch toward the room where he had dispatched Aleman, and Medina did not pause to think it out but dashed to the open battery panel near the cockpit of Blue Sky Three. I spent too many months helping build this bird to let some fucking bandit destroy her, he told himself, and flung the battery charger clips aside with one thought: she’s not that heavy, I can roll her outside before that maniac blows her full of holes. Filled with this suicidal optimism, he began to hope that the shotgunner had fled through the broken back windows.
Rodrigues stepped into the hangar. “Aleman! Medina! Let me hear you,” he barked.
“Aleman’s dead,” Medina called, slapping the battery panel closed as he ducked under the wing to kick a wheel chock aside. Then, because his view opened directly into the little rooms and sunlight had replaced shadows, Medina saw the shotgunner finish reloading. “I’m here under the,” he said, and dived for the other wheel as the man aimed directly toward him.
The blast of buckshot shredded the wing skin of Blue Sky Three and carried away most of the wing’s main spar, and the next round tore through the landing gear mount, and it was the failure of the mount that sealed Medina’s fate. Raoul Medina still had his hand on a wheel chock in a heroic effort to salvage his mission when the landing gear collapsed on him, the wing smashing him against concrete, spearing him with jagged ends of spruce as the damaged main spar failed. Fuel was already running from a punctured tank when the battery charger clips, still energized and side-swiped by debris, clicked together.
Rodrigues heard the chuff of ignition, sidestepped fast around the aircraft still facing his enemy, emptied his magazine into the little room. Though four seconds are good time for reloading an Ingram, Rodrigues managed it in three, and snapped off more rounds before he squatted next to Medina, whose inert head and shoulders protruded pathetically from beneath the shattered wing.
When Rodrigues saw the flow of viscous crimson from under Medina, and felt the heat of the blaze from the fuselage, he staggered back and set his weapon for semiautomatic fire, sending his single rounds into the open door of the room in a maneuver the yanquis called “suppression fire.” It seemed to be working because he could no longer see the shotgunner, but he found no good reason to remain. What did one more bandit matter to him, with pilot and compatriot both dead and the aircraft ablaze? Still pumping single rounds into that little room, Rodrigues sidled out the ruined door and ran for the Chevette.
Five minutes later, Rodrigues parked near the ruts of the Regocijo road and squinted back toward the hangar. He saw smoke, but no actual flames. He could stow his weapon as poor Aleman had done, but if Mexican federal agents stopped him they would find it sooner or later. Better to remove all traces of his employment and report this savagely failed mission from the safety of Mazatlan. He hurled the little Ingram as far into the grass as he could, dumped the now-useless SCUBA gear in a ditch, and used Aleman’s oilcloth to wipe down the car. The Chevette was rented in his own name, so he would not have to abandon it, but Aleman and the foolishly unprepared Medina had left fingerprints all over it. Those prints had to be removed before anyone stopped him.
When at last Rodrigues stood up after wiping down the front passenger’s seat and windowsill, he glanced again toward the distant hangar. He swore because the flames now rose higher than the hangar roof and a tendril of smoke arrowed straight into the sky, a signal of disaster that would soon be visible for many kilometers. He leaped back into the Chevette and turned it toward Regocijo. He saw no telephone lines flanking the road; it was still possible that he might outrun detection.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“No, he isn’t going to make trouble. When he works his hands loose, Bobby will dump his pal in that hidey-hole with a bag of quicklime and forget about the whole thing,” said Corbett, who was heartily sick of the whole argument after a half hour in the air.
Petra, holding a sectional chart across her knees, placed her finger over a spot on the chart and leaned her forehead against the window canopy, gazing downward. “You don’t have enough appreciation for the habits of stupid people, Kyle. Someone shoots your friend; you call the police and demand justicewhen you sober up,” she amended, and then began to sing: “Wayyy down upon the Swaneee River…”
When she stopped, with an expectant glance toward him, he said, “I hope you don’t expect me to sing, young lady.”
“No, I was just commemorating it. The Suwanee River; it empties into the Gulf just ahead, according to this map.”
He shook his head in mock dismay and peered past the nose of Black Stealth One. At twelve thousand feet, they could see the gradual curl of the Mexican Gulf which indented the Florida coast ahead. He glanced at her chart quickly, then back at his console. “That puts us dead on course, due south,” he said after a moment.
“Kyle, where are we headed, really?”
“Dry Tortugas, at the moment. Just run your finger straight south down the eighty-three degree line. It’s out in the Gulf, west of the Keys.”
She refolded the chart and, after a moment, said, “Ahabut what’s there?”
“I don’t know; don’t much care. I said we’re headed there, but we aren’t going there.”
She wrinkled the heavy paper in frustration. “Please don’t play these damn games with me.”
“Sorry,” he said, “I suppose I’m pretending you’re in a search plane, and I’m trying to throw you off.”
“Well, I’m not,” she said emphatically. “So talk to me.”
“You mean, you’re in this for the adventure, not the puzzle.”
“If you want to put it that way,” she sighed. “Adventure is fun, but puzzles worry me. I’ve worried enough.”
Now the green of savannah growth below had given way to the blue of the Mexican Gulf, the Florida coastline stretching away southward on their left. In the far distance overland, a condensation trail stretched across the lower edge of the stratosphere. “Let’s paint the bird for that guy, he’s heading in our general direction,” Corbett said. He kibitzed as Petra called up the pixel program, using Black Stealth One’s infrared sensors to locate the searcher’s coordinates.
When she had finished, she looked at him for approval. “Very nice,” he said. “Petra, the TV news makes it clear that we’ve been seen. We can be invisible only to a single viewpoint, and we can’t know when some guy with a fishing pole will glance up.”
“We probably won’t even notice him,” she agreed. “You can only fool some of the people some of the time, hm?”
“Yeah. Well, anybody on land who saw us this morning saw us heading south. But there aren’t nearly as many people looking up from boats. I’m betting we can turn west in a couple of minutes, and nobody will see that.”
Petra nodded, a sly smile lifting the corners of her mouth. “That’s what you intended all along.”
“Sure.” She’s still going to face interrogation sooner or later. I’ve got to use that against them. “We’re going to Nevada while half the world’s airplanes patrol the airspace between here and Cuba.”
“On my say-so, if you’d had your way,” she prodded.
“Partly. I’ve made a hell of a long detour to put that idea across.” He moved the control stick and watched the readout on the compass as Black Stealth One banked westward. “Check the video now; let’s see if the program is still following the IR signature of that guy.” He nodded to their left where the contrail, now an intermittent scrawl, extended almost parallel to their course.
“It’s still locked on him,” she said presently. “Would it, if he had flown through clouds?”