Flight of the Serpent

by R. R. Irvine writing as Val Davis

  “Chet Green,” the reporter said, nodding sympathetically. “I’ll be here for a while if you need help.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Reese called over his shoulder.

  Nick hoped not and went to work, while Gault stood behind her, reading over her shoulder. One by one she sorted through the list of files on Matt’s computer. Matt had written on a wide variety of subjects, but there was no mention of Mesa d’Oro, or Arizona either for that matter.

  When she ran out of files, she sat back and stared at the screen.

  “Is that it?” Gault asked.

  “I guess so.”

  Chet rolled his chair around. “What are you looking for exactly?”

  “We were hoping to find out what Matt was working on in Arizona.”

  “You’re not going to find much there,” Chet said. “Matt didn’t write anything down until he had the story complete. He did a lot of background work on the Internet, but he kept that to himself too.”

  There were icons for e-mail and Internet access. She tried the browser to see if Matt had left any bookmarks behind, but there was nothing.

  “That was Matt for you,” Chet said. “He could keep a secret.”

  “How long have you had the desk next to him?” Gault asked.

  “A long time. Matt and I were friends, but that doesn’t change things. We reporters are very jealous when it comes to our stories. One thing, I do know. Whatever Matt was working on made him jumpy. In fact, if you ask me it scared him a little. I know the feeling. I had it when I was working on a drug bust. I—”

  Gault interrupted him. “How did you know Matt was scared?”

  “Because he was sitting right here one day, when he ups and says, ’You know something, Chet, I’m going to have to take some precautions this time. I’m going to have to leave some cookie crumbs behind, just like Hansel and Gretel.’ ”

  “They were bread crumbs and I seem to remember the birds ate those,” Nick pointed out.

  Chet shrugged. “Whatever he left behind I don’t know about it.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell us?” Nick asked.

  “Matt was a hell of a reporter.”

  Gault laid a gentle hand on Nick’s shoulder. When she looked up he was nodding toward Reese’s office. On the other side of the glass wall, Reese was in an animated conversation with two men. Though they were at least a hundred feet away, with their backs to Nick, their dark suits made her think immediately of FBI. Or Feds, anyway.

  Don’t get paranoid, she told herself. Probably they were nothing more than accountants dressed up to commit downsizing or some other fiscal crime.

  “I don’t like the looks of that,” Chet said.

  Gault immediately began gathering up Matt’s personal effects.

  A moment later, a security guard, carrying a small cardboard box, arrived and escorted them from the building. He refused to answer their questions or even to speak until they were on the sidewalk outside. Then he said, “I’m sorry. The paper is off-limits from now on.” He handed Nick the box. “Matthew Gault’s personal things from his locker are in here. Everything else belongs to the Herald.”

  “Why are we being thrown out?”

  He tipped his service hat and said, “Have a nice day.” Then he did an about-face and retreated into the Herald building.

  Nick was furious. Gault was too, judging by the muscle twitching along his jaw line.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he snapped.

  “I think it has something to do with those two in black. What did you make of them?”

  “I think we met their brothers in Arizona.”

  “The NTSB men?”

  “I’d bet on it. Well, to hell with them all. I’m going home to the Lady-A.” With that, he headed for the truck that was parked down the street.

  They were about to drive away, when Chet came jogging up, carrying a laptop computer in one hand and waving at them with the other.

  “Mr. Reese sent me,” he said somewhat breathlessly. “It’s Matt’s personal laptop. It doesn’t belong to the paper. I was using it until just before you arrived today.” He paused to take a deep breath. “I guess I could have kept it, but you know, Matt really was my friend.” He thrust the laptop into the car.

  “When you were using it, did you notice if Matt left any crumbs behind?” Nick asked.

  “Not a one that I could find,” Chet said. “Mr. Reese had two experts take a look, but they couldn’t find anything either.”

  Chapter 31

  Nick was still musing about bread crumb trails as they pulled into the parking lot at Gault Aviation. Inside the Lady-A’s hangar, two mechanics she’d never seen before were in the final stages of reassembling the inboard port engine. Theron Christensen was standing beneath the engine nacelle watching their every move.

  “I see we’re making progress,” Gault said enthusiastically.

  “Another week and she’ll be like new,” Christensen assured them.

  “I wish somebody’d rebuild me,” Gault said. “I’ve logged too many hours.”

  “Don’t tell the Lady-A that,” Christensen shot back. He pointed at the mechanics working the engine. “You know Marty and Ben, don’t you? I stole them from Delta for the rest of the week.”

  “You bet,” one of the men called down from his perch on a ladder. “It’s not every day you get to work on a war bird.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” Gault said and headed for the sliding doors with Nick right behind him.

  Once they were out of the hangar, and beyond Christensen’s sight, Gault’s shoulders slumped. His pace slowed. When Nick reached out to him, he shrugged her off.

  “I meant it, you know,” he said. “I have logged too many hours. Flying the Lady-A again is nothing but a dream.”

  “You heard Theron. He said she’s coming along fine.”

  “Did I ever tell you about Lady Luck?”

  Nick shook her head. “Don’t tell me you’re superstitious.”

  “A pilot has just so much luck to spend,” he said, coming to a stop in front of the office door. “In the war, you burn it up like gasoline. After that, you owe the Lady. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can see her waiting to collect.”

  Nick hesitated. Was he feeling sorry for himself, or merely expressing a pilot’s credo? Or feeling his own mortality?

  “You could always stop flying,” she said.

  “That won’t change anything. Lady Luck can catch up with you on the ground too.”

  “What are you saying, then, that you’re not going to take Matt on one last flight?”

  Gault shook himself. “I must be tired, that’s all. And if Lady Luck catches up with me aboard the Lady-A, I’ll die happy.”

  “Wait a minute. What about me? I’m going to be up there with you.”

  “Sorry. You said you had a day or two’s research, so I didn’t think you’d be sticking around that long. I guess I didn’t think you were serious about joining the crew.”

  “I think you know better than that.”

  He ducked his head self-consciously and opened the door for her. Inside, Brad Roberts was leaning against the customer counter eating a doughnut. A mustache of powdered sugar covered his upper lip.

  “I hope you saved me one,” Gault said.

  “What are copilots for?” Roberts reached under the counter and came up with a plastic bag filled with doughnuts. “Theron won’t let us eat them in the hangar, otherwise I’d be out there helping.”

  Gault fished out a jelly doughnut. Raspberry filling ran down his chin at the first bite. “You’re like me,” Gault said with his mouth full. “Good only for washing windshields, until it’s time to fly.”

  Roberts sobered. “Theron tells me you’re stripping yourself bankrupt to rebuild the Lady-A.”

  “They tell me antiques are a good investment.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. We’re the antiques around here, and I wouldn’t pay much for any of us.”

&nb
sp; “Is that male bonding?” Nick asked sarcastically. “Or bullshit?”

  Roberts snorted. “What I’m trying to do is offer my help.”

  “You can do that from the copilot’s seat,” Gault said.

  “Since you have a copilot and bombardier,” Nick said. “What does that leave for me?”

  Roberts snapped his fingers. “That reminds me. I called Russ Yarbrough a few minutes ago.”

  “He was one of our gunners,” Gault explained for Nick’s benefit. “The best man with a .50-caliber I ever saw.”

  “I told him we had one more mission to fly,” Roberts said. “Do you know what the old bastard said to that? ’What took you so long?’ ”

  Gault started to say something, then turned away to stare out at the tarmac, where his twin-engine Cessna 340 was standing.

  “There’s something you ought to know,” Roberts said. “Russ lost his wife last month.”

  Gault leaned his forehead against the window. “I should have kept in closer touch.”

  “That ranch of his in Oregon,” Roberts went on. “It sounds pretty damn scratch to me, so I didn’t want to ask him to spend money getting here.”

  “I’ll wire it.”

  “There’s no need. I told him you’d fly up to Medford this afternoon and get him.”

  Gault moved away from the window, his eyes shining with rekindled passion. “I should have thought of that. Call Yarbrough back and tell him I’m on my way.”

  In that moment, Nick envied them both their common bond. Experiencing combat had been the defining moment in their lives. Everything after that must have been anticlimactic. It was a truth she’d read on countless gravestones. He fought in the Great War, read the simple inscription. It was as if nothing after that had measured up, neither wife nor children, nor the work of a lifetime.

  Chapter 32

  Wiley and Voss switched vehicles, trading their sedan for an electronic monitoring van they’d parked on the highway within camera range of Gault Aviation.

  “What a bunch of losers,” Voss said, momentarily taking his eye from the telephoto lens. “Imagine spending all that money on an old plane.”

  “Cheer up,” Wiley answered. “They’ll probably kill themselves if they ever get up in the air.”

  “Bite your tongue. Where’s the fun in that?”

  Wiley sighed. No matter how much Voss enjoyed his work, or how much Wiley himself did for that matter, there was always a chance that something could go wrong. A real accident was the safest.

  “Take a look at this,” Voss said.

  “What’s up?”

  “The old geezer, the pilot, he’s climbing into one of the planes.”

  “You heard them talking. He’s flying to Oregon to pick up one of his old crew.” Another dead man in the making, Wiley thought, but kept it to himself rather than spoil Voss’s prospects.

  “Don’t you want to look? He’s starting the engines.”

  “I can always watch the tape replay later.”

  “Suit yourself.” Voss began to hum, slightly off-key.

  Wiley clenched his teeth. He’d had partners with worse habits, so he kept any criticism to himself.

  Then the cell phone beeped. Wiley switched on the scrambler and punched up the speaker so Voss could listen in.

  “Do you know who this is?”

  “Yes,” Wiley said, mouthing Odell for his partner’s benefit. Voss grimaced.

  “I need a full report,” Odell said.

  “We usually deal with the Director,” Wiley said.

  “Are you challenging my authority?”

  Wiley and Voss exchanged inquiring looks, followed by reluctant shrugs.

  “No, sir,” Wiley said, “we took care of the reporter’s laptop computer as instructed.”

  “Did you get rid of the bookmarks?”

  “We know what we’re doing,” Voss answered.

  “What about the cookie file? Did you dump that, too?”

  Voss opened his mouth but nothing came out, so Wiley spoke up. “What the hell’s a cookie file?”

  “Idiots!” Odell said. The phone went dead.

  “I know what a cookie file means,” Voss said dryly.

  “I’m listening.”

  “It means we fucked up.”

  Chapter 33

  Nick stood on the tarmac admiring Gault’s expertise as he swung the twin-engine Cessna onto the taxiway and headed for the airport’s short runway. Once he was out of sight, she returned to the office. The others went back to the Lady-A.

  Nick sat at Gault’s desk, staring down at Matt’s laptop. “You’re welcome to use it for your research at the library,” Gault had told her. He’d also left her the keys to his truck to save her the trouble of renting a car.

  One thing was certain, she’d better check the computer first before using it. Even though all computers worked pretty much the same, there was always the chance of losing something on an unfamiliar machine.

  She plugged it in to save the batteries, which she might need at the Genealogy Library, and ran through the Windows start-up. Nothing unusual there. Next, she looked for Matt’s files. There were none.

  Gault had said his grandson was closemouthed and secretive about his stories, but there was such a thing as paranoia.

  “All right then,” she told herself. “Check the Internet bookmarks.” After all, Chet had said Matt loved surfing the net for background material.

  A moment later, Nick blinked in disbelief. There were no bookmarks either. Matt had definitely been paranoid.

  Shaking her head, Nick unplugged the laptop and carried it outside to the truck. Across the airport, jet engines roared as one of Delta’s Boeing 727s took off. It was a sight she’d loved to watch since her first trip to the airport as a child. But jets were one thing, a B-24 Liberator’s twelve-hundred horsepower Pratt and Whitneys quite another.

  Stop procrastinating, and get to work she told herself. Track down the Benson sisters. Worry about the Lady-A later.

  But even as she headed for the library, she couldn’t get the old bomber out of her mind. Or was it Gault who kept intruding on her thoughts?

  “It’s a good thing he went to Oregon,” she chastised herself, “or you’d never get anything done.”

  ******

  In Oregon, Russ Yarbrough knew it was time to see his wife. He’d known it since the moment Brad Roberts called. Roberts’s news of Gault’s loss had shamed Yarbrough into action. By God, the Skipper hadn’t allowed the death of someone close to paralyze him. Instead, Gault was doing something, not sitting on his butt moping like Yarbrough had been doing for the last month. No, indeed. The Skipper was taking action. And what a genius idea it was! To fly the Lady-A one more time. That was better than any memorial service or headstone.

  Well, by heaven, Yarbrough would make it Donna’s memorial too.

  He smiled wryly as he thought of the Lady-A’s bomb bay doors opening. Maybe he’d shout. “Bombs away,” and jump out along with Matt Gault’s ashes. He nodded. The thought of joining his wife in eternity was appealing.

  He left the ranch house and crossed the yard toward the barn. Halfway there, he paused to look back at the one-story cedar house. Part of him, the dreamer refusing to accept reality, half-expected to see his wife standing at the kitchen window, waving to him as she always did when he went out to saddle one of the horses. The realist in him saw how dirty the windows had become, how abandoned the house looked. He felt abandoned, too.

  He gritted his teeth. From the veranda, Donna’s favorite place, there was a panoramic view of the ranch.

  Not that it was really a ranch, more of a hideaway actually. There wasn’t much grazing land. Instead, a second-growth forest of birch, pine, and aspen stretched in every direction, except west where the road ran into the state highway.

  Donna’s meadow was due north. Yarbrough hadn’t been there in a week.

  In the distance, a chicken clucked. Another answered it. Donna’s chickens, taunting him as usu
al.

  “They’re smarter than we are,” she’d say every time she came back empty-handed from one of her egg hunts.

  “We should keep them in coops.”

  “Range chickens are better eating. Their eggs have less cholesterol.”

  Since neither eggs nor chickens ever found their way to a pot, the point had been moot.

  Yarbrough entered the barn and filled a bucket with chicken feed. Because the birds were too smart to come anywhere near the barn or its adjacent corral, he carried the feed well into the trees before spreading it around. Donna had done the same thing twice every day.

  Once that chore was taken care of, he wrote a note to his part-time hand and neighbor, Jerry Jacques, giving precise instructions on the daily distribution of chicken feed and horse fodder. On second thought, Yarbrough decided a note wasn’t good enough, not if he was going to fly off in a fifty-year-old airplane. He’d call Jerry later and put him on a full-time basis for the next few weeks.

  That decision made, he saddled Donna’s horse, Janie, a black and white pinto. His horse had been ridden yesterday.

  Janie seemed skittish as he took the meandering trail leading north. Overhead, the low cloud cover was showing signs of breaking up, and last night’s wind had subsided to occasional gusts that had the aspens quaking.

  When Janie tossed her head and snorted, he patted her neck reassuringly. “I know, girl. I know you miss Donna.”

  The horse snorted again and settled into a steady pace, picking her way among the boulders and fallen trees. All the while, overhanging branches did their best to sweep him off the horse’s back. Finally, he got tired of ducking and rode low, hugging Janie’s neck like a jockey.

  On occasion Donna had accused him of being a jockey in another life. How else could you make it look so easy, she’d say, while I’m bouncing myself black and blue!

  He was short enough to be a jockey, too. Being short had gotten him into gunnery school, since B-24s didn’t have much headroom. Thank God he’d been an inch taller than Tim Lambert’s five feet six. Otherwise, Yarbrough would have been the one crammed into the belly turret.

  Tim was dead now, a heart attack. Ridiculous when you thought about it, since Messerschmitts, Focke-Wulfs, and flak hadn’t so much as scratched him.