The Major said, “We don’t have enough gas to go around it.”
Walker considered that. His eyes swept the panel. The quivering flow meters, manifold pressures, temperatures. The gauges stood half-full; there had been no place to refuel since take-off this morning. With the weight of five passengers and the money she was running on rich mixtures and she didn’t have another four hundred miles in her tanks; they had the Beechcraft waiting on a dirt landing strip northwest of Reno and that was something more than three hundred miles from here in a straight line. To go around the storm would eat up another hundred and twenty miles and they just didn’t have it. The Major’s eyes didn’t miss a thing.
Walker said, “Then we won’t make it anyway. You know how much gas you eat up bucking a storm.”
“The winds are counterclockwise. Stay on the north side of the storm and you’ll have a tail wind.”
“More like a sixty-mile gale. It’ll shake this crate to pieces.”
The Major’s eyes just stood against him, like a knife blade-motionless but prepared to cut.
He had to think. Behind him in the passenger seats the others were talking loudly, keyed up, nervy. Eddie Burt was making exultant noises and Baraclough was saying in his flat nasal voice, “No need to smack your lips so loud,” but laughing off-key with excitement. The Piper 235 had seats for six, including pilot, and there were five men in it; the sixth seat held the duffel bags. Too cramped in here to count it but Baraclough had a good eye and had estimated it at a minimum of nine hundred thousand dollars. About ten cubic feet of tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds. Walker had hefted the four duffel bags when they’d put them aboard and the things weighed maybe sixty pounds each.
Baraclough was saying in a travelogue-narrator voice, “And now, happier but wearier, we bid a warm farewell to the home of the jolly green swag…”
“Jesus, will you please shut up?” Jack Hanratty was in a fever of terror. He couldn’t take heights, airplanes terrified him, and the Major was angry with him-back there in the car for a minute Walker had thought the Major was going to kill Hanratty for shotgunning the fat old Indian bank guard. The Major could have done it without working up a sweat; the Major was versed in a dozen methods of killing a man barehanded and silently and very quickly.
When somebody got killed during the commission of a felony all parties to the felony were automatically and equally guilty of first-degree murder. That was the felony-murder statute. Hanratty and his shotgun. The son of a bitch just had to carry that shotgun. Walker hadn’t even had a gun but Hanratty had made a murderer out of him. It was no wonder Hanratty was shaking: all five of them had got sucked into this mess by his nervous trigger finger.
The Major had drummed it into them time and time again while they were setting up the score. Arizona still has the death penalty. I don’t want anybody killed. I don’t even want anybody bruised. They’ll forget the money but there’s no statute of limitations on murder.
Hanratty and his fucking shotgun.
The fat old Indian guard had sneezed.
Sneezed.
It was the stupid little things that got you every time.
2
Walker had a tooth with a hole in it. Food got stuck there and made him suck on the tooth. He should have gone to a dentist weeks ago.
He glanced at the ASI and saw the airspeed was down to 140 in the thinning dead air ahead of the storm front. He gave the throttles a boost, up to seventy percent of power, got the engines in synch and adjusted the trim tabs. “Look, we can turn north, go up to Ely or Elko and set down. We could steal another plane there or maybe even a car.”
“No.”
“Why the hell not? They’ll get it figured out we used a plane. They’ll start an air search. If we switch to a car they won’t be looking for us. Why the hell not?”
“Because I’m telling you. Because it’s all worked out down to the button. We’re not going to start changing the plan now,” the Major said.
The engines made a harsh drone and there was a loose rivet somewhere, rattling. Walker pointed at the blackness ahead of them. It ran right up out of sight above them. The mountain peaks, running alongside their course on the right-hand side, disappeared right into the opacity of weather. The Nevada state line was somewhere under all that. “Look, we’ve got four or five minutes to make a turn and get out of the way of it, that’s all. That thing’s no autumn shower, Major, that’s a fucking blizzard. You saw the weather map.”
He had picked up the map overlay this morning at five o’clock at the Reno tower, when he’d filed the phony VFR flight plan for Salt Lake City. That had been the midnight weather report. At that time the storm had been crossing the California-Nevada line somewhere south of Reno and the projections indicated it would hit Vegas around midmorning and keep moving east toward Kingman at about twenty-five or thirty knots. But obviously it had gathered speed and shifted course since then. Now it was getting sawed up by the mountaintops northeast of Vegas and that meant it was dumping moisture.
He said, “There’s snow and hail in there.”
The Major glanced at the quivering needle of the outside-temperature gauge. It stood at 43 degrees, but Walker shook his head. “You don’t get this. We haven’t crossed the front yet. Inside there you’ll get a ten- or fifteen-degree drop. You get a hailstone driven by a sixty-knot wind and you can get bullet holes in the wings of a light plane. This is no Air Force cargo job, Major.”
In back the others had stopped talking: they could see the storm for themselves and it was beginning to penetrate past their other fears and past the excitement the money had generated.
Now Baraclough leaned forward and Walker could feel the man’s menthol-cigarette breath on his neck. “Listen, Major, I think he’s right. That’s no monsoon rainstorm.”
“Ice,” said Eddie Burt. “We don’t want to go into that.”
“Now you’re getting the idea,” Walker said. His mouth felt powder dry. He locked both fists on the split wheel and toed the rudder pedal with his right foot. “I’m turning.”
The Major stiffened to speak but then they hit the front and the plane stuttered. The blast of the wind hit the underbelly of the banking plane and skidded it back, and Walker, feeling her begin to slide, had to give her a heavy left aileron. It leveled her off and he let the wind push her around and complete the turn for him, sideslipping rather than banking. But now the mountains were dead ahead and he had to put on full power and lift the nose into a climb, and in the low air pressure she responded only sluggishly. Half a minute of this and he could see it was no good.
“We’re not going to make it,” he said. “We’ve got to turn around and get some altitude.”
The Major didn’t say anything. Walker didn’t have time to look at him, to measure his expression, but he knew what the Major’s face would be showing: irritation, not fear.
At least the Major wasn’t arguing with him.
He completed the ninety-degree turn and now he was headed east again, the way they had come, and the winds of the storm’s leading edge were pushing him forward while he climbed. He would have to pick up at least five or six thousand feet of additional altitude before he could think about turning north again and crossing over the mountains; in fact it would be better to climb 7,500 feet higher because you never knew what kind of downdrafts you might hit over those canyons. And with the low pressure of the air and the heavy load inside the plane she wasn’t going to climb that high very fast. It was going to take a while.
When he had a chance he glanced at the Major and saw the thoughtful squint on the Major’s cold hawked features. In back the rest of them began to talk again in harsh snappish voices-they had the sweats, all of them-but the Major held his tongue, squinted forward, worked his jaw from side to side. The Major was thinking, hatching a plan. It would probably be a good one.
3
In the old days he had known Major Leo Hargit at Tan Son Nhut and Da Nang but they hadn’t been close or anything n
ear it, and when Walker had come back to the States he’d never given the Major another thought until the night the Major had looked him up in Tucson.
The breaks had passed Walker by. He’d been good at war, not so good at much of anything else. In Vietnam the Army had trusted him with a plane worth half a million dollars and ten men’s lives but now, since the Portland accident, it appeared nobody would trust him with a cropduster.
The Army-not the Air Force-had recruited him to fly and he’d flown Med-Evac planes up and down the Indochina peninsula for three years, saving up his back pay and re-upping twice to get the combat bonuses. A few times he’d been shot up by ground fire but he’d never been shot down; he was twenty-nine now and he’d been flying since he was seventeen, he had eleven thousand hours behind him and until Portland he had been rated and certified for instrument flying in anything from single-engine to multiple jet.
When he had enough money saved he had come back to his home town, Sacramento, and bought into a third-level carrier outfit that did air cargo and taxi and business-commuter charter work up and down the west coast, covering all the small towns in northern California and southern Oregon that the scheduled feeder lines missed. Or-Cal Coast Airways had a Lear, two twin Apaches, a Convair and a DC-6B, and when Walker had bought in they had used his capital to pick up an almost new British Dart 500 twin turboprop which carried fifty-six passengers or a prodigious tonnage of cargo. It gave him a one-fifth ownership in a working airline and that was what he had always wanted; that first year was the best year of his life but it was the last good one.
It had started to fall apart when one of the pilots broke his leg in a bowling accident and they had had to hire a temporary replacement on a half-hour’s notice to fly a four-passenger taxi charter to Eugene. The stupid pilot had forgotten to put down his gear at Eugene, gone in with the wheels retracted and ground-looped on his belly, totaled the Apache and killed himself and all four passengers.
That had brought the National Transportation Safety Board down on them and their certifications had been yanked for two weeks, after which they had gone on probationary status with Government snoops hanging around doing constant checks on their safety standards.
They were limping but they were still on their feet, and they might have overcome that, but Walker was having private trouble then.
He had met Carla at a TWA pilot’s party in San Francisco less than a week after he’d become a full partner in Or-Cal; he’d been flushed with success and he’d infected her with it. She had been a stew on Northwest Orient but she hadn’t liked it much-“I’m sort of a cozy quiet girl, Keith, I just didn’t like living in hotel rooms.” When Walker met her she’d been working four months in an airline ticket office in the St. Francis and she admitted frankly she was anxious to settle down and make a home, be a mother, be a wife.
It suited him. She wasn’t gorgeous but she had a cute little face, a triangle of good bones with enormous soft onyx eyes. A small soft cuddly girl, nervously vivacious, with a quick flashing smile and a healthy frank body. He had felt good with her, right from the start.
He hadn’t thought much about whether he loved her; he had never actually seen any love lying around. His romantic dreams had been focused on airplanes from the time he’d built his first model kit plane at the age of nine. But in the Army he’d worked it all out for himself, how he was going to save money and buy into an airline and get married and have kids. That way he’d have the best of both worlds-the kind of success everybody admired, the solid-citizen home and family and free-enterprise ownership of his own business; and at the same time an airplane to fly. The only real freedom was being in motion, piloting yourself across the sky.
Five weeks after he had met Carla he had married her. That had been part of the good year too. It had been a sybaritic year, a lot of drinking and a lot of laughs and a lot of sex. Carla knew airplanes and pilots and she was part of the whole thing, not an outsider.
But she hadn’t got pregnant.
They went to doctors. She took hormones. They had tests. Jesus, the money it all cost. But it didn’t solve anything and finally after a year of specialists and lab analyses the pussyfooting doctor had screwed up courage enough to tell him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Walker. You might try artificial insemination-have you thought of it? It’s probably the only answer if you’re still adamant about not adopting children. You’re sterile, you see. No, don’t worry about your potency, it’s nothing to do with that. But some men have natural antibodies. Something in the chemical make-up of the body-a genetic incompatibility between the genes of your mother and father. The spermatozoa simply don’t function properly, and therefore you can’t impregnate your wife-or any other woman for that matter, it’s not merely a matter of individual sexual partners.” And the sly wink: “In a way you know it gives you a kind of freedom some men would give their right arms for.”
At first it didn’t seem to matter to him all that much. There were plenty of kids around for adoption. But Carla wasn’t having any of that.
She became gloomy, depressed. And his own uncertainty had begun to feed on her despondency. Somehow his manhood had been challenged, denied.
She had turned chilly and sarcastic-angry and moody by turns; he had to tiptoe around her.
Finally the plane had crashed in Eugene and he had had a lot to drink that night when he’d heard about it. The next day she had collapsed in tears: “I just don’t want you near me.”
And she had moved out the same day. Packed all her clothes and left.
In time a lawyer served the divorce notice on him-she’d gone to Reno for six weeks. He had to hock some of his Or-Cal stock to make the settlement. By then he had gone into a kind of emotional anaesthesia and it didn’t seem to matter very much but gradually it had begun to tear at him: grief, the sense of stinging loss. For the first time he realized it: he had loved her.
But she was married again. Another pilot, a United Air Lines captain, twenty years older than she was. And he heard from the airport grapevine that she was pregnant and glowing.
All right; people got along without an arm, without an eye, without their hearing, without both legs. You could get along without love. He had plunged himself into the business; he had flown the maximum number of hours every month that the CAA would permit, and some they didn’t permit. He had gone out on the stump to drum up business, talking up air-freight contracts with coastal fishing outfits and printers and gimcrack cottage industries up in the mountain towns with their ragged-windsock dirt runways.
Then the Post Office Department had started awarding contracts on a low-bid basis to private air-taxi carriers to try for one-day delivery of first class mail in the hick towns. It meant a lot of night flying and a lot of instrument flying because you had to live up to the stupid tradition about the dangers of snow and rain and gloom of night. Walker had sweated blood to get the contract and had started flying the route himself in the Lear-an overnight round-trip from Sacramento to Eureka every twenty-four hours with four stops between, each way-half the time flying blind in bad weather, relying on cockpit instruments and radio ranges. The postal contract left it up to the pilot whether to fly in questionable weather but the point was, if you didn’t fly you didn’t get paid.
It was a grueling grind and you couldn’t keep it up forever, six nights a week. You started taking a harmless-looking little heart-shaped amphetamine tablet now and then, just to give yourself a bit of an edge. Then you took two and three and four and after a while you had a pocket full of them on every flight, and your nerves drew up like bowstrings and your judgment began to play tricks on you: you’d come in too long, overshoot, tear rubber off the tires braking too hard; you’d overestimate your altitude and come down so hard you bent the landing-gear bracings; you’d be flying through a clear night sky and you’d start to hallucinate, you’d see Carla’s face winking sleepily at you from a cloud, you’d see a North Vietnamese MIG-21 diving at you with tracers winking silently out of its wing guns and you
’d take violent evasive action and barely miss clipping a mountaintop.
He began to recognize that he was falling apart and he resolved to steady himself. He took two weeks off and spent the time at Tahoe in a motel just off the lake shore. It took a few days to withdraw from the pills and that was sheer hell but he knew what he was doing. He spent the days around the swimming pool soaking up the mountain sun-this was last June-and evenings he’d go out and gamble a little, taking it easy, just playing a bit of dollar roulette and two-dollar blackjack and not losing more than he could handle. He could feel the tension draining out of him as if a drainplug had been pulled. He started going over to the Nevada side and casually dating the recently freed divorcees who were always in the casinos dying for a man, any man, with no promises demanded and no questions asked.
But he was still putting Carla’s face on every woman he slept with. There was no cure for that malaise.
He’d gone back to work toward the end of June and he’d been flying the old DC-6B up to Portland on a cargo job for a paper mill when he’d flown into a high-tension cable.
There was no excuse for it. The day had been a little misty with drizzling rain but he was flying into a first-class airport on the beams and the visibility was good enough to see the ground from seven or eight hundred feet. The aircraft was in good working order and the copilot had gone through the landing checklist with him without a hitch. But the voice of the girl on the headset, giving him his landing instructions, had reminded him of Carla’s voice and he was seeing Carla’s face in his mind when he should have been watching the earth come up, and the copilot had been working flaps and undercarriage instead of watching the runway, and Walker had lost too much altitude too fast and clipped the power line with the starboard wheel. It had thrown the plane around through a ten-degree arc and she had hit the ground on the port wingtip and spun as if the wingtip were a pivot. The gear had collapsed under her, the props had broken against the concrete, the fuselage had spun with the port wing snapping off at its root and the plane ending up on the grass in half a dozen pieces.
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