“Let us know,” said Ullmer. “Wasp out.” He switched channels again. “Cyclops One to Cyclops Two, we have reason to believe the aircraft may be fully fueled, so there’s less reason to think your blip is the one we’re after. If you can”
“Cyclops Two to Cyclops One, I have our ghost blip on visual,” said the voice, no longer dry or bored. “And he’s for real. Dropping toward low cloud cover but it’s a flying wing, all right. Short fuselage bulge, big intake scoops, paint job like ocean waves. That’s really something for the books; he’s still hard to see.”
Dar and Ben Ullmer shared a half-second stare. “Turn this thing around,” Dar shouted, letting protocol go to hell, and snatched at the wrinkled chart that lay clipped to a writing surface near him.
“That’s him,” said Ullmer into his microphone. “You know what to do, Cyclops Two. But listen: don’t drop your live rounds until you’ve tried to snare him with the others. You know you’ve got a hostage there.”
“Wilco, Cyclops One, banking now for a run. He’s trying to get under cloud cover but he hasn’t made a course deviation since we picked him up. We’ll try to snag him.”
“They could wait for us,” Dar said, his face tortured.
“No they can’t,” Ben Ullmer replied, suddenly looking very old, “and we both know it.”
The lurch of the big Neptune as it banked was a heavy drag at Dar’s shoulders. “Ben, put the word out,” he said. “We’ll want all those picket aircraft pulled back toward Tallahassee.”
“I’m going to alert Air-Sea Rescue too,” said Ullmer. “The hellbug should float like a cork, Dar. There’s still hope for the girl.”
Ullmer was redirecting the aerial armada off the tip of Florida when the radioman, monitoring the standard frequencies, called it out for all to hear: “Commander Openshaw in Cyclops Two reports munitions away!”
TWENTY-NINE
They had lost hundreds of feet in altitude before Corbett found the cure for the downward spiraclass="underline" he brought the aircraft to a stop with the waste gates, steering with the nose jet, and hovered. “Okay, I’ve got it,” he said, hoping to calm Petra. “I can’t see your wingtip, but something’s fouling that elevon. Can you describe it?”
Petra, whose features were pinched with fright, swallowed hard and twisted her body, loosening her harness with reluctance. “I can’t see through the wing. There’s a wire hanging down from the tip.”
“The tip?”
“Well, six or eight feet from it. Two wires, actually. One hangs straight down; the other one slants a little.”
“Makes a big difference,” he said sharply.
“Wire’s got to be caught at the inboard hinge of the elevon. I think there’s a little drag chute on one end of the wire; a breeze must be pulling it. Christ knows what’s on the other end. Look, this is going to take muscle. See the pin clipped to the control stick down between your feet? Slip it in so your stick is engaged.”
She did so, with a glance at him that reeked of doubt.
“Now,” he said, “we know the right elevon is stuck in the ‘up’ position because the control sticks are stuck sloping to the right.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, her eyes shut in concentration. “Okay, I can see it. In here,” she tapped her forehead. “Also because we were sort of spinning down to the right before you got it stabilized.”
“Don’t try to understand it all, for God’s sake, there could be another skyful of those things coming down any minute.” A sigh, as he wrapped himself with intense calm. “Now, we’re going to try and force the elevon the other way, but with both of us horsing on it too hard, we could snap a filament cable.”
“In which case?”
“Don’t ask. Just lean into it, that’s right, I want you to preload it before I put my shoulders into it. Okay, I can feel it,” he said, and felt the control stick begin to come upright when he had put half of his power behind it.
“OH GOD, KYLE,” she screamed, staring ahead, recoiling.
The Neptune had turned after its pass, dropping down beneath the clouds, and some sharp-eyed aviator must have seen Black Stealth One immediately because the heavy reconnaissance plane thundered in, boring straight toward them, the twin scythes of its props perfect blurred circles, closing a gap of less than a quarter mile at a hundred yards a second. Corbett had no option save one: he firewalled the throttle and levitated Black Stealth One straight up, seeking the clouds that he knew he could not reach in time.
He bared his teeth as he saw the Neptune respond, realizing that the naval pilot could shred a wingtip with his propellers or simply slice through it with the far stronger wing of the Neptune. But, though the hellbug’s downblast of air lacked the great power of a true jet engine, it did accelerate the gossamer craft and in an eyeblink the big Neptune had passed scant yards beneath them, with a shattering roar and two distinctly separate results on Black Stealth One. Corbett felt a faint tug from the right wing, then a tremendous buffet as the Neptune’s slipstream tossed them, sucked them down, spun them in almost a half circle as the bonded structure of the hellbug groaned and creaked.
“It’s free,” he exulted, realizing that the P2V had somehow torn the wire clear. A whirling prop could have wound that wire up, or cut it; but no matter. The hellbug was floundering but apparently still intact, trying to right itself as Corbett sought the clouds again. He did not look back at Petra until they were surrounded in grayness, moving ahead under maximum power. Some half-perceived cog in his mental clock reminded him that every minute, at this pace, brought them two miles closer to the Texas coast.
She breathed long shaky breaths as she watched him. “I’m sorry I screamed,” she said, rubbing her cheek.
“You know why I didn’t? Too damn scared,” he said.
“If you grin and wink I will get out and walk,” she said, her mouth trembling into a shape that imitated a smile.
“There’s blood on your teeth, honey,” he said.
“Too late for sweet talk now,” she muttered to the video console, and explored her mouth with her tongue. “Wow, the side of my face is numb; I wasn’t cinched up tight when we did that whirligig-”
“It could happen again,” he warned, easing ever upward until they soared atop the cloud layer. The sky was innocent of any other aircraft. Blinking in the sunlight, he asked, “What’re you doing?”
“Running an IR scan,” she said as if surprised that he needed to ask. “I don’t want one of those big bozos to surprise us again. And what’s so damned funny?”
“The way you adapt, I guess,” he said. “If everybody your age learns as fast as you do, Petra, old farts like me might as well pack it in right now.”
The girl seemed unwilling to believe him, though he had been perfectly candid. Most experienced copilots would have adapted faster to the physical part of flying this craft but few, he decided, could have picked up utterly new and abstract techniques any more quickly than Petra Leigh. He began toying with different frequencies again, while mentally reviewing the attack of that P2V.
It had been no fluke; they were ready with some kind of aerial tripwire that he had never heard of.
That recon plane had somehow penetrated their chameleon disguise from afar, picking them out of an otherwise empty sky. But how could they pick us up at all? Maybe something’s wrong with the pixel skin, but it was okay this morning. If Ullmer’s guys had buried some kind of transceiver in this crate, they’d have nailed me last night. Even the harness attachments are glass-filled nylon, there’s not ten pounds of metal in the hellbug. Except for the fat, five-gallon steel gas can at my elbow! “Oh, lord, but I can be stupid,” he said, and checked the fuel tank readout. “Petra, take the cap off the gas can and feed the end of that hose into it. Just squeeze the bulb, like you were milking a cow, and keep pumping as fast as you can ‘til I tell you to stop.”