He did not move away from her fingers because, simply, it felt so damned good. “Born thirty years too soon! I need reading glasses already, and I can’t see in the dark anymore,” he grouched. “But it’s more than that. There’s a thing that often happens to people after they’re captured, taken over. They flip their allegiances inside out, find a kind of glamor in giving themselves to their captors. A week from now, you’ll be realizing this self-control on my part is the only unselfish thing I’ve”
“Unselfish. I’m glad you told me that,” she said with tenderness he could not fathom. “Do you truly imagine that I’m another Patty Hearst?”
“I doubt it, but I don’t know. She went for the outlaw glamor.”
He could not tell whether anger or determination was foremost in her reply. “It would take me a lot longer than a couple of days to snap like that, mister. As for glamorhave you taken a look at yourself lately? You’re overweight, your whiskers are sandpapering my goddamn sunburn, and you smell like gasoline! I hate to burst your bubble, Kyle, but I’m not just gaga over your glamor.”
After a moment she said, more gently, “On the other hand, this incredible airplane is glamor. But I don’t feel like making love to it. By and large, glamor sucks.”
He grunted softly; she was massaging his shoulders now from behind, her feet touching his thighs, her position more companionable than sexual. “But for Black Stealth One, you’ll make an exception,” he said.
“Sure. If you have any glamor, Kyle, any social status in my eyes, it’s in this airplane and what you did to get it. Not so much because you have it; but because you helped create it. Any muttonhead with money can have a nice house or car or airplane, but how many can build one?”
He sighed in contentment, leaning back, letting her rest her chin on his shoulder. I’ve been waiting all my life for a woman who understood that, but I didn’t know it until this moment. And if I don’t tell her the bad news now, I might weaken. “Petra, you’ll have a lot of time to consider what we’ve said before you hear from me again. I can’t take you any farther now.”
Quickly, as if she’d been expecting something of the sort: “Don’t say that.”
“It’s said, all the same. I just can’t do it.”
“Of course you can; you mean you don’t want to.”
He could feel the tension in her body and knew that she still hoped, with all the naiveté of youth, to somehow argue her way through. “Have it your way, then,” he said, implacable. “I don’t want to, and I damned well don’t intend to, least of all now that I care what happens to you. Period, end of argument.”
“But you promised”
“Consider it broken. I’d break any promise rather than put you at risks you have no conception of. You wouldn’t be a help, you’d probably get me killed, and I can’t tell you why. I’m going alone tomorrow. Period.”
She sat up straight and breathed very slowly and deeply, several times, before sliding her arms around his chest from behind him, her chin snug against his cheek. “But I will hear from you again. I’ll hold you to that,” she murmured.
“If I’m still in one piece,” he said gruffly. “If you don’t hear from me in, oh, say when the leaves turn this fall, you can figure you’re not going to.”
She shivered against him, despite the warm breeze. “Could we just hold one another?”
He turned, straightened his pallet, then lay with her, fingers linked, faces nearly touching. “I should go at first light,” he said, very softly.
“God, I’m going to miss you,” she whispered. “I think we’d be good for each other. And if it turned out otherwisecall it a no-fault love affair.”
“Don’t say that”he chuckled“until you know what kind of lover I am.”
“I was working on it. II guess I knew you’d leave me tomorrow.” And with a simple earnestness that held no sexuality she added, “I just wanted you to leave knowing I’m really a terrific lay, Kyle.”
“I suppose I’m so-so,” he rumbled grudgingly.
“I’ve felt your so-so,” she said, giggling again, and touched her forehead to his, and then she snuggled down against him, her hands cupped together as if she were protecting something of great value, and slept, bathing his face in the candid scents of woman. For a time, he entertained an idea he would have thought laughable only days before. It was, he knew, unworkable. He had committed himself to his original plan, and if Medina was still willing when they met at Regocijo, they would use both aircraft to complete that plan.
Content in his ignorance of the Regocijo disaster, Kyle Corbett kissed his captive gently, and then he slept.
THIRTY-FIVE
“I’m not even asking for Ullmer,” Dar said into one of the Navy’s scrambler phones. “He’s waiting for a Lear to return him to Elmira already, Abe…. Certainly I know,” he replied to the CIA Director after a pause. “In the past two days, Ben Ullmer’s had so many trained observers say they’ve seen something they couldn’t have seen, he simply doesn’t believe tonight’s sightings from a couple of frightened civilians. He believes Black Stealth One is down in the Gulf.”
It was after midnight at NAS New Orleans, and as he listened, Dar sipped his third cup of bitter coffee. He had consumed only two ales and an aperitif at Brennan’s. He would have consumed more, perhaps, had the Commander’s beeper not started the train of events that electrified Dar, made him dizzy with hope and sober with resolve as they sped back to the naval base.
He picked up his cup, but when he had it halfway to his lips, he forgot the steaming brew. “I’ll tell you why, because those two sightings were in line from Corbett’s last known course, and the time fits the parameters we know, and the descriptions fit too, if you bear in mind that they thought it was some kind of feathered monster. All of the other recent reports failed one or another of those criteria, especially the descriptions, everything from lights in the sky to little green men.
“What? I don’t know the exact number; Unruh simply told me they had logged over three hundred reports, thanks to all the media coverage.”
Now Dar had time to sip, injecting a “yes” at one point. But he kept shaking his head and finally cut in: “Ullmer says the airplane could not possibly get that far on the fuel it carries. I say it is foolhardy to underestimate what Kyle Corbett can do in an airplane….Ullmer is, naturally; but I have expertise with the man.”
Again, Dar checked his impulse toward a headlong passionate plea, loath to risk losing the support of the man who could allow or forbid his pursuit of his own daughter. Abe Randolph, he knew, mistrusted too much passion in his people.
He waited until the DCI had finished, this time. “Absolutely no personal conflict between us; none from my end, at least. I have only the highest regard for Ben Ullmer as a man and as a professional, and I will so state in writing.” Dar let his voice slide from formal tones into the more habitual way in which he spoke with Abraham Randolph. “Frankly, I’d say Ben is in mourning for that airplane of theirs. For your ears only, Abe, I think he means to resign…. No, Sheppard canceled NSA’s end of this thing because our man called the bad news in from Mazatlan; they feel, quite rightly, that they’ve lost our whole damned joint operation in Mexico, their pilot and the aircraft included. They’re just hoping the Mexican Federales don’t learn about Regocijo for a week or so. Give us all time to build a cover of plausible denials. The blunt truth is, from here on it’s purely a CIA operationor none. I say we still have a chance.”