“…wreckage on the water,” said the gruff voice of Ben Ullmer. “It’ll be gray. Wait one.” A pause. The big patrol plane droned overhead and Corbett saw what might have been the head and shoulders of a man in the nose bubble of the Neptune. Ullmer again: “Cyclops Two, we’re dropping a dye marker.” As he spoke, something fell from the Neptune’s open belly hatch into the sea in a long, steepening curve. “Navigator reports a Plexiglas bubble with two occupants in the water. They’re not moving. Could be part of the fuselage. On your pass, please drop a rescue raft, ah, five hundred yards southwest of our marker.”
“Wilco, Cyclops One.” Corbett spotted the second patrol plane again, closing from two miles off. It banked toward a stain of orange, bright against blue water, that was now spreading to the right of Black Stealth One.
Flying the hellbug so near the water that it hid its own shadow from the noonday sun, its skin a near-perfect imitation of the moving lines of whitecaps, Corbett shoved the throttle forward and cursed the clear shining Plexiglas of the canopy around him. There was not one damned thing he could do about that canopy and the glassy reflections it could provide in bright sunlight. He could only flee at top speed, and hope that the orange dye stain across the water would become the focus of the Cyclops team. He waited another few seconds and then firewalled the throttle.
These guys are too good, Corbett thought, as the airspeed indicator crawled toward a hundred and forty knots. But I wonder if Dar has just started to learn what a conflict of interest is all about? He didn’t want ‘em to drop those ‘chute bombs, that’s for sure. Can’t blame you, Dar, old buddy, you murderous bastard. I’ve had the same problem ever since your kid showed me what she’s made of. He risked an instant’s glance at Petra, noting the gleam of sunlight in her hair as she studied the video monitor with steady concentration. Reminds me of an ad for pasteurized milk; lord, she’s lovely. At a time like this, I want to kiss a college girl? One thing I don’t want to do, is tell her Dar Weston’s in one of those goddamn Neptunes.
Judging by the crosstalk, Corbett realized that the Cyclops teamperhaps including Weston, who was apparently in the same aircrafthad succumbed to a seductive belief in the thing most desired: Black Stealth One shot down, with survivors. The navigator’s eyesight might be excellent, but it had registered only the clear canopy and its occupants, virtually on the water amid the image of whitecaps endlessly repeated to the horizon. But some of those whitecaps were electronic, rolling back across the skin of Black Stealth One as it whispered northwest.
Two minutes later, Corbett intercepted a rendezvous message from a Navy Grumman Hawkeye and another from a flight of Marine Broncos, all converging on that dye marker. He never saw the Hawkeye but the three Broncos, twin-engined loiter craft with prominent gun pods, passed at low altitude no more than a mile to the left of the hellbug. He held his breath over that one; any one of those close-support gunships could have churned Black Stealth One into floating fragments.
When Corbett heard the Air-Sea Rescue choppers respond en route from some place called Grand Isle, he was within sight of islands off the Louisiana coast. He pointed the hellbug westward and, to Petra’s profound relief, put five yards of safe air beneath the fuselage. “I think we’ve squeezed through,” he told her as he listened to a fruitless rescue operation on Bravo channel.
“I have never been so scared in my life,” Petra replied, “except maybe for last night. It’s really strange how safe I feel with you.”
He uttered a snort of astonishment. “Well, you weren’t. You still aren’t.”
“I know it. Maybe ‘safe’ isn’t the word.” She yawned and stretched, flexing her fingers, gazing at him reflectively. “Like just before a design competition, or a game against Yale. Very special things are going to happen but even if you take some lumps, you enjoy it; oh, I don’t know.” She shrugged, unsatisfied with her own explanation.
“Try this, from a guy who took some lumps,” he said: ” ‘I do not regret the journey. We took risks; we knew we took them. Things have come out against us. Therefore, we have no cause for complaint.’ That pretty much sum it up?”
Now her look was sidelong. “Not quite, but close. It’s beautiful, and a little scary.”
“Yeah. It was one of the last lines Captain Scott wrote as he sat freezing to death in the Antarctic.”
A long silence. Then: “You really know how to make a woman feel good, Corbett.”
“I want you to know how I feel. Of all the dumb fucking things I ever did in my life, to take you along today! Petra, you talked your way into the hellbug this morning because you thought it would be fun. I don’t think you have any clear picture of what it’s like to get yourself killed.”
“Who does, except those who die?” She began as if voicing a mild objection, but developed a strong cadence, as if marching toward an objective clearly seen. “Some of the men flying those airplanes, trying to kill us, are probably younger than I am. Don’t tell me it’s different, I won’t buy it. When a young man dies for his country, do you think he joined up to die? I’ll bet you’ve forgotten, Kyle. I’ll bet he joined thinking of the fun! Of course it’s a risk; so is riding a bike in Providence traffic.
“But you don’t think I know what it’s like to hurt. Hey, ever get kicked in the head by a soccer forward who’s a head taller than you are? I woke up with a molar missing and would have slide-tackled that bitch into the middle of next week, only the game had been over an hour when I woke up. Listen, you want to loop this fucking thing again? I might panic the first time, but I learn fast, and I’ve learned to go with the experts, so I trust you. Go ahead, try me; wring the sucker out.”
Her eyes blazed with internal light, her jaw knotted, her challenge unequivocal. Corbett decided she was the finest-looking thing he had ever seen. Not just her appearance, it’s a way of thinking. You consider the risk and then you go for broke, like Medina. Sure I do it. Dar did it a hundred times, God damn him to hell. And Petra is truly his child, and it’s no longer a matter of my turning her loose. Damn if she hasn’t captured me… “Some other time, maybe I’ll teach you aerobatics. Right now we’re conserving fuel.”
“Suit yourself,” she replied. “I’ll be ready.”
“I believe it, but it’ll have to wait. It’s still a long way to the Texas barrier islands.” He jabbed a thumb toward the monitor. “You might keep an eye on the IR scanner.”
She nodded and began to key the device, and was encouraged by the clean scope. “I meant what I said about experts, Kyle,” she said, her tone friendly again. “I’ve known you for two days, but there are some things I trust you with. And if it’s not asking too much, how on earth did you get away from those airplanes? I mean, what was the key?”
Corbett laughed aloud; shook his head, knowing there was only one honest answer. “We hid our shadow, and pulled maneuvers I didn’t know the hellbug could manage, and painted this bird just right. Now, you want a translation with the ego strained out?”
“That would be nice.”
“We had a shithouse full of luck,” he said.
THIRTY-TWO
New Orleans Naval Air Station is not in New Orleans proper, but adjoins the suburb of Belle Chasse some miles to the south. NAS New Orleans sprawled so near the half-mile-wide Mississippi River that Dar Weston, holding a ham sandwich with one bite missing as he stared out the window, could see barges traverse the great waterway in evening shadows. He had been sitting there, with telephones at his elbow, ten minutes earlier when Ben Ullmer had left the room. Dar was still sitting with the same bite filling his cheek when Ullmer returned. He did not react when Ben placed a fresh cup of coffee before him and sighed into a nearby chair.