He sipped this time as he listened, jotting cryptic notes in his personal shorthand. Then: “I certainly have, it’s only midnight here and all I need is your blessing to proceed. And Unruh, of course, to screen any fresh reports and coordinate the possibilities with me.” Pause. “A fisherman on Matagorda Island and a teenager in his dune buggy, a few miles northwest of a coastal town called Rockport. Black Stealth One may be damaged because they both reported a hundred-foot bird practically skimming the surface. Scared the hell out of them both.”
Dar drew a long breath of relief at Randolph’s reply and began to itemize the jottings before him. “We should have a press release from your end, announcing we’ve canceled the interagency operation, which we have. Citing solid evidence that the fugitive aircraft was forced down in the Gulf. Meanwhile, I need your recommendation to the Secretary of Defense that I get every rotary-wing and hovering fixed-wing aircraft in the region. I can fly the back seat of a Harrier…. Yes, I checked, they’re right here on the base and a couple are two-seaters for training…. We fly east of San Antonio, refuel at Chase Naval Air Station nearby, and re-form before dawn in a line from Padre Island to Freer. Then we start a very slow sweep, converging toward the coast at Rockport.”
A grim smile twitched at his jaw. “Well, he can’t hide that cockpit, you saw it yourself in Elmira; it’s how we spotted him in the Gulf and I intend us to be several squadrons strong, virtually touching wingtips within a thousand feet of the ground by the end of that sweep. He won’t get past me this time, Abe.”
Dar set the empty cup down and stood up as he heard his director’s penultimate words. He replied, “If he’s flying at night, yes; I could miss him, assuming he manages to get fuel nearby. But he didn’t fly last night, and I think he could be overconfident. Say again? … I know that, Abe; I’ll be happy to resign if I’m wrong, but this time we’ll bring overwhelming force to a small area, and we can force him down by sheer numbers of hovercraft. This time,” he announced, “I’m going to get the son of a bitch.”
THIRTY-SIX
He had forgotten to set his watch alarm, but no matter: the dry-hinge squeal of a gull waked Corbett while the sun was little more than an exuberant promise on the eastern horizon. The sky was cloudless, still star-flecked above and to the west. Probably no cloud cover all the way to Mexico, he thought. He would have kissed the young woman who slept at his side, but chose not to wake her as he gentled his arm from hers, flexing those familiar early-morning twinges of pain from his joints as he stood.
He used his seven-dollar blanket to wipe dew and bug remains from the canopy of Black Stealth One, taking his time to avoid scratching the polymer bubble, with no intuitive concern for anything that might be building low across the sky like a metal stormline, miles away. He hefted his roll of duct tape with mild astonishment, reflecting that he had used almost the entire roll of the stuff in a trail stretching from New York to Texas. He decided he might have enough of it left to make Petra’s bonds look convincing.
She awoke as he knelt beside her to rub her arms, beginning to stretch before she opened her eyes, then opening them wide as memory and recognition flooded her face. She flung her arms around him with the hug of a small, sleek bear. Her “Good morning” was as intimate as foreplay, and as full of promise.
“Hi, little pistol,” he said, hugging her with one arm. “Ready for your morning bondage?”
She saw the roll of tape, realized that it was necessary, and grinned, pretending to misunderstand. “I’ve never tried it, but I might like it.” By the time she stood up to tuck her blouse in, Petra’s face had clouded. “I wish,” she said, and bit her lip. “You know what I wish. God, I’m starting to miss you and you’re still here! Dammit, Kyle! I just hope you leave before I start crying.”
He pulled her into an embrace, sharing a long and fervent kiss before she pushed him away. “Hey, dirty old men need love too,” he joked.
“Go on, get it over with. I intend to be absolutely furious with you before I climb down from here for help,” she said glumly.
He taped her ankles first, then unwrapped his handiwork and did it again. “I taped you up when I went for fuel last night, remember that,” he said, and read her frown correctly. “Well, logically I would’ve had to. You think they won’t analyze the stuff to see how often it’s been used? Never underestimate them,” he said, in unconscious irony.
He rewrapped her wrists too, making certain that she could reach the torn edge with her teeth, and then carried her to the ladder. “Don’t forget the dust the hellbug raises,” he said, pausing on one knee. “If you worry that tape loose before I’m gone, it’ll get all dusty and they’ll wonder about that.”
“Don’t forget to write,” she replied solemnly, and he saw that her mouth was trembling. He kissed it, longingly, gently, and then walked to the cockpit. “And for God’s sake be careful,” she added suddenly, raising her voice in virtual panic.
He gave her a high-sign, then grinned and winked as the hellbug’s engine cleared its throat.
“I hate that macho shit, I hate it! Go on,” she yelled, drumming her feet on the tank dome in a brief frenzy, but once he closed the canopy he could not hear past the hellbug’s subtle stirrings, and it might have been his imagination when he glanced at her for the last time, her eyes closed but her mouth forming, I love you, Corbett, as he lifted.
He set the hellbug’s nose directly toward Beeville, remembering that this entire region was a training ground for Air Force cadets. I’d like to paint this thing as a bird and go high, but I’d best use ground effect to save fuel, he decided, calling up the pixel program to paint his craft for highflying searchers, then checking the IR display. Five minutes later, as the sun’s first direct light hardened shadows in the cockpit, he could no longer see the oil tank. Black Stealth One wheeled southwest, in the general direction of Laredo and the Mexican border a hundred miles distant.
Corbett had not flown across this piece of country for years, but he remembered how suddenly the land changed from creek-veined arable acreage to sere, dry ranchland fit only for oil derricks and forced irrigation. “Derricks,” he said aloud. There might not be many in his way, but those few probably would not show on his scope. Hell of a note, to get wiped out against a damn abandoned derrick over a dry hole. Pull up to two hundred feet? No ground effect there, I might as well be at twelve thousand. Well, keep your bloody eyes open, he commanded himself.
He knew a reasonable chance existed that he would be seen, but at this hour most Texans would be pulling on boots about the time he crossed the border. And whatever they saw, he imagined that he would be in another country’s airspace in less than an hour. Considering the current political climate, he did not worry much about the Mexican Air Force.
He first suspected that he was not going to make it while skimming thirty feet above the lazy waters of a miles-long reservoir. The IR scanner dutifully registered the exhaust of a ferryboatand then showed him a dotted line of pink on the horizon. The line lay directly in his path. Power line reflection? But he knew that power lines did not stretch a hundred feet above this prairie and as he watched, the dots became more distinct on his scanner though still too distant for a visual check. He banked to the west. That line still stretched to the horizon, and it was not stationary, but approaching fast.
He tuned for military frequencies and found two of them fully occupied, the transmissions strong and getting stronger. “…lagging, Broom Five; form on me,” urged one commanding baritone, and “Mop Bravo group, close it in,” said another, with brief acknowledgmentssome of them using jargon that Corbett had almost forgotten, not Air Force but Army. The guys flying Bell “Huey” helicopters had sounded like that over the jungles of Vietnam. And judging from their terse comments, the Broom group had to be Navy or Marine, because the Air Force referred to rear-seat observers as “gibs,” guys in back. Corbett felt an instant of cold trepidation as he glanced at the scanner and saw more blips than he could easily count, forty or fifty of them, low on the horizon. And now he was too close to risk a steep climb because, as he had learned the previous day, that gleaming canopy would not remain totally invisible this close to such a far-flung set of eyes, and his rate of climb was comparatively sedate.