The Ransom of Black Stealth One

by Dean Ing

  "Hell, that's easy. First thing we do is put the Air Force and ever'body else with a clearance in the air flying tight grid patterns. Also, keep light civilian air traffic on the ground, however we do it. Searchers will need a three-view of the hellbug, something that doesn't give too much away." Ben allowed some glum satisfaction to creep into his voice: "Marie's already putting it together upstairs. Next thing is, we send Raoul Medina by fastest possible means to fly Blue Sky Three to Llano Majado. If the Sovs are busy stealing the fake, they may not be looking for the real one. Of course, if this is a big Sov operation, they may already have both of 'em. That's something we need to know, and Medina will have to be ready for an ambush."

  Dar Weston rubbed bristles on his chin, gazing at the wall map. "If it's a big operation, they may have fuel dumps waiting for a long flight in stages. Make sense?" He saw the NSA man nod and continued: "That's something we could release under a cover story to state police. Give the Feebs something to do, too. But what if it isn't? What if this is a singleton, some American or Canadian? Don't ask me how, I don't know! We know the man speaks unaccented American English, and the guards seem to think he's not a young man. It wouldn't be the first time a freelance thief played for big stakes."

  "I can't believe a singleton, out there by himself without a support organization," Ben said, and paused. "Only guy I can imagine who'd have a prayer of flying it like this has been dead for years." He shrugged as if slipping from under a cloak of memory and turned to face the taller man. "But one thing I do know: anybody who spots the hellbug must take it out right then and there. The longer that fucker flies it, the more likely he is to learn all its stealth systems. No simple close passes, no fuckin' around. Fly through a wingtip or something, shit, it isn't armed and it'll only do a hundred and fifty knots flat-out. You could take it out with a fast chopper."

  Dar Weston was nodding, thinking it over, as he saw Terry Unruh pacing toward them. "There's the hostage to think about," Dar said. "But here's a scenario you might like: it's not a woman, it's a copilot in drag. Or in any case, the hostage is on the other side; a fake." He watched Ullmer chew that cigar, trading gazes with him. "If we take that tack, it might play better when the press gets hold of this—and they will, sooner or later. If we destroy the plane in flight and the hostage turns out to be genuine, we don't look like uncaring butchers."

  "But that's what we will be," Ben Ullmer muttered, shaking his head. "I forgot about the hostage and I'm having second thoughts about this. I know, Job One is to make the bird unflyable. Maybe it can be done without dicing it up in midair. What d'you think, Dar? Fuck the press, I'm not into ordering an innocent woman killed." He turned, hearing footsteps.

  Unruh carried a large sealed bag in one hand, holding it up for inspection. Through the plastic film they could see a slender hardbound book, the color of dried blood, and a stiff card that might have been a credit card. "Had to promise to hold it this way, and give it right back," he apologized. "They've already dusted the stuff and checked the prints by digital link. These were left in the passenger seat of the Ford," he added, "evidently genuine; they tally with the woman's ID here. An FBI forensics tech tells me they get faint traces of model airplane cement from the car and other stuff the guy touched. He probably left these to prove he had the woman. Hardly more than a girl, actually. Driver's license says she's twenty-two."

  Ben Ullmer stared at the bag, then snorted. "Formulas for Stress and Strain, "he remarked. "Funny kind of book for a girl to be carrying."

  Dar squinted, remembering. "Model cement; we used to rub it into our fingers to fill fingerprint whorls. This guy is using old-fashioned tradecraft but I'll bet they didn't get any usable prints from him."

  "Just the woman," Unruh agreed. "The book has her name in it and an address in Providence, Rhode Island."

  Dar Weston felt a sudden jolt, as if his stomach had been pierced by a meteorite as cold as deep space. Taking his work seriously, he never discussed his family with colleagues except, of course, those few he had known for most of his lifetime. What's in a name? Terry Unruh had no way of knowing. With unwilling fingers, Dar grasped the bag and stared at the card inside, a Rhode Island driver's license, and his world narrowed suddenly to a single image, an image of Petra Leigh falling forever in a cloud of debris.

  THIRTEEN

  Sugar Grove, West Virginia, population 56, lies sequestered between steep, heavily wooded ridges that loom like eyebrows over the townsfolk. The village harbors a fine old Appalachian dialect and a postal drop. It is possible to get kerosene there in the shadows of those steep mountain ridges, or an illegal, equally flammable product sold in Mason jars to fuel the lamps of the inner man; but not much in the way of FM broadcasting. Locals do not bother twiddling knobs on FM portables because line-of-sight transmissions do not penetrate there through rocky ridges. This natural shielding runs for some distance beyond the town, and a few miles north of Sugar Grove the casual hiker must retrace or climb a mountain because the signs make very clear that trespassing beyond that chain-link fence is a federal crime.

  This isolation from stray radio frequencies is precisely why the NSA, and later the U.S. Navy, chose to build secret listening posts including a huge dish antenna fifty yards across and a submerged communications center. Now and then, NSA officials pass through Sugar Grove. Occasionally, special maintenance teams drive out to the remote antennas in a flatbed or a pickup truck to work on the Big Ear or the twin Wullenwebers which form essential parts of what is probably the world's most sophisticated communication network. Rarely, the chop of helicopter blades echoes through the long hollow. Fuel drums of three kinds are stocked on-site by the U.S. Navy for those rare occasions, choppers being such sots for fuel.

  The simplest way to appreciate all that technology hidden in a West Virginia hollow is to look straight down on it and, thanks to Soviet satellites, Sugar Grove is a popular subject for photography from orbit. The main operations building, of white cinder block, has no windows because its occupants are not supposed to be thinking about all that splendid mountainous isolation. Nor would they be likely to suspect the damnedest-looking airplane on earth touching down on grassy stubble shortly after dawn, a mile from that windowless building.

  Petra's first impression, on waking, was of the dull ache at the base of her neck. She started to reach out, and to yawn, and found that she could do neither because her wrists were tied to an immovable post—her ankles as well—and something that smelled like Wrigley's Spearmint was pasted over her mouth. She could even hear the hiss of air through small holes that someone had cut in the tape so that she could breathe through her mouth. For an instant, as long as it took for her to whimper while her vision made sense of her surroundings, she was terrified with the nameless dread of a child. And then she remembered; not everything, but too much, enough so that she kept from wetting herself only through great effort. And that made her mad enough to quell panic.

  Puffing, wrenching furiously at her bonds, she realized that she sat in the right-hand seat of some kind of grounded aircraft, perhaps a helicopter, in a narrow valley flanked by wooded heights. The left-hand hatch, functioning both as a door and a window and formed mostly of clear plastic, was raised, gleaming in the early sun like some enormous contact lens. Her hands and feet were taped to a control stick which was evidently locked, yet she could feel something give. She fought harder.

  "That's enough!" Petra swiveled her head and stopped. There were voices that had to shout to be taken seriously. This was not one of them. Its owner, Mr. John Smith, peered around the door opening. He looked like bloody hell, the crow's-feet at his temples almost meeting the puffiness under his eyes. A middle-aged man who has missed a night's sleep does not bubble over with pleasantries. John Smith proved it, squinting at her: "You break anything and you get broken."

  "I've got to go," she said. Amazingly, the little holes in the tape let her say it, though not very loudly.

  "You go where I go," he grunted, and now she saw that
he held a big floppy bag on his shoulder.

  He was trying to fit its mouth into something behind the open hatch.

  "I mean, I have to go," she said louder. "To the bathroom." It sounded like "wathroom" through the tape but she saw sudden comprehension in his gaze.

  "In a minute," he said. Petra realized that Smith was using a camper's plastic waterbag, a squarish thing that might hold five or six gallons, to fuel the vehicle. He cursed softly, shifted the bag, then seemed satisfied. The sound of liquid splashing into some cavity behind her did not make Petra's self-control any easier. To take her mind off her full bladder, she used a trick she had learned when facing a final exam with a mind suddenly gone blank: she thought of something worse.

  This man knows about Uncle Dar, she thought, but he is no friend of ours. Or of my country. He hasn't taken me away for the usual reason men take women. I'm just a piece of some game to him, a pawn, and since my uncle is involved somehow, it is a huge game. Very few big games end with all the pawns alive. Abruptly, she decided to think about her bladder again, but she would not cry; damned if she would cry.

  At last he lowered the empty bag, locked the tank's cap, and moved around to lift the hatch on Petra's side. For a moment they traded glances; hers angry, his devoid of expression. Then he said, "You can go behind those bushes, but the place is alive with rattlers so be careful. A gentleman would turn his back, but I won't. We're miles from water or people. If you run, I shoot you; it's that simple."

  Seeing her nod, he unwound tape from her ankles, then her wrists, sticking one end of each tape to the smooth leather of a toolkit on his belt so that the tape hung down, ready for reuse. He made no comment as she ripped the patch from her mouth and tossed it away. He showed her how to position her feet as she exited backward, and steadied her when the entire aircraft rocked alarmingly in the process. She went where he pointed, dismayed that those bushes were hardly more than knee high, scanning the stubble for snakes.

  This was not the first time Petra had shucked her jeans behind a bush, and she took a perverse pleasure in the sounds her body made, hoping it would embarrass John Smith. Leaves made a poor excuse for toilet paper but they were better than nothing. She slipped a jagged piece of stone into a hip pocket, turned away, and stood up to arrange her clothing because, as promised, he stood facing her ten yards away, arms folded, with that automatic pistol in his right hand. She had never seen a handgun quite like it. It looked like a plastic gizmo from Star Trek.

  And then, for the first time, she saw the vast wingsweep of the aircraft, with no identifying marks of any kind, and realized that her mouth was hanging open. "Get back in," he said, gesturing with the sidearm, "I'm not through fueling this thing and I won't have you running loose."

  It was not the chill breeze that lifted gooseflesh on Petra's arms. She had studied the human-powered aircraft of MacCready and MIT, and the pioneering Bowlus designs, in Applied Structures. This thing seemed generations beyond them all with that gaping mouth that surrounded the cockpit, and the multibladed fan half hidden inside.

  And in a way, it looked frighteningly alive. She paused beside the cockpit, gripping a handhold. "Why don't I just stay with you? I won't run."

  "You sure won't." His hand on her backside was not gentle, boosting her upward. "Hold on, what the hell is that?" He dug two fingers into her hip pocket and produced the fragment of stone, then tossed it away, his hand returning in a slap that stung her rump. She lay facedown in the seat now, her right breast mashed painfully by the seat's thigh support, and these multiple insults proved too much for the daughter of Philip and Andrea Leigh of Old Lyme, Connecticut. Petra kicked hard, felt her heel connect, and began to scream as she kicked harder.

  Abruptly she felt herself lifted by the back of her belt and shirt collar, snatched upward and back as if she were some hollow store window dummy. He dropped her flat, full length, in the dust, cutting her off in mid-yell, then sat on her lower legs until he had taped her ankles again.

  He then proceeded to spank her as she had not been spanked since she was six years old for using only one of the words she was using now. When she managed to grab the edge of his jacket, he merely spun her over and forced her hands together, holding them with only one of his own hands while he taped her wrists with the other.

  In common with many women of gentle breeding, Petra had never fully understood the disparity of male and female upper body strength, especially when accompanied by an extra seventy pounds, until now. Humiliated, terrified, and with buttocks that burned, Petra clamped her eyes shut as if that would stop her tears. She felt herself hoisted over his shoulder, then lifted bodily into the aircraft, offering no resistance until she felt the wire circle her throat.

  "Hold still unless you want to strangle," he said, fumbling behind her head, his face so near she could feel his heat on her cheeks. "You asked for this, kid." When he stepped back, she saw the blood at the corner of his mouth before he spat more of it onto the ground. He took a small pair of cutters from the kit clipped at his belt, snipped behind her head, and drew a coil of black anodized wire out. He cut two pieces, each a yard long, and secured her to the control stick again. "I told you before not to break anything. If you do, this whole rig can fall right out of the air—and so will you. Now behave yourself, I'll be back soon." And with that, he circled the cockpit to retrieve that plastic fuel bag before trudging off, parallel to a dry gully.

  Petra could open her hands enough to grasp the control stick, but stretching her fingers toward that cruel wire only tightened the loop around her throat. She wanted to sob, but that hurt too. It was hell when she could not even abandon herself to justified self-pity.

  Well, what could she do? Think, dammit; that's what, she decided. One thing sure, she had heard Smith's voice before all this began and he or one of his cronies knew Uncle Dar well enough to fake that note. Somehow, her kidnap and the CIA were connected. Those damned spooks had lots of ways to knock you out for hours and, in fact, the sun said it was nearing midmorning. She could see the pilot's console, with only a few small instruments instead of the massive array in most aircraft she had seen. Not even a clock, though it had a swiveling video screen with a keyboard. All the lettering was in English, but that didn't mean much; she'd heard a prof say that the international language of flight was English too, though the language of spaceflight would probably be Russian.

  Everything around her was stripped to bare essentials, the few interior panels not even painted, and she guessed correctly that they were made of filament and polymers, exotic stuff with an unfinished look. She had seen no sign of a hangar, so Smith had already flown here to refuel. Where from, and where to? Perhaps he would tell her, but not if she continued to fight him. She would escape this brute, no question about that; and the best way to do it was first to convince him of her obedience.

  She thought about Smith for a while. Medium height, hard face, not young; old enough to be her father, with a gut that protruded a bit over his belt buckle and heavy sloping shoulders beneath that old leather jacket. His hand and arm strength were incredible, and he made every move with the coordination of a card-sharp. And I know him from somewhere, she thought with increasing certainty.

  She heard him before she saw him, shuffling in a slow trot with that bag over his shoulder, head down like a coolie as he approached through the scrub. She lay back, eyes closed as if asleep, and felt great satisfaction at his heavy breathing as he began topping off the tank. Presently she heard the cap snap into place, and a moment later he stuffed that plastic bag, still sloshing with fuel, behind her own seat. Petra did not enjoy the aromatic odor, though it reminded her of the blends she used to smell in the pits with her father. Gasoline, then, not jet fuel.

  She eyed him silently as he sealed her hatch, and noted the care he took when climbing in, seeing her horizon dip and sway as this unbelievably flimsy vehicle flexed with his entry. Then he reached down and retrieved the wire from her ankles, then her wrists. They were still taped,
but no longer to the control stick between her knees. Grunting, he managed to reach behind her headrest to untwist the last wire, and she felt the tension across her throat release as he spoke, coiling the wire neatly without looking at it. "There might be some buffeting at takeoff, kid, so you'll want to harness up. If you force me to, I can always wire your neck up again. I won't like it if you make me do that, and you'll like it a damn sight less."

  She might have handled it differently if she had read any sign of pity or friendliness in his face, but all she saw there were determination and maybe a touch of anxiety. She nodded and watched him thrust a metal link through the loops of his own shoulder harness, so that all harness ends terminated with a fitting across his lap. She tried to link her harness the same way as he brought the strange craft alive, but when the engine's soft whisper steadied and he tested the controls, she was still fumbling hopelessly.

  "Ah, shit," he muttered, "I liked you better asleep," but he reached across to help. Not to do it all, only to give minimal assistance. A vagrant shred of memory, of a man who had treated her that way many years before, tugged at Petra but she would deal with it later. Right now, she wanted to be strapped in tight because if the motions she felt through the seat were any indication, this gigantic paper airplane was going to start flapping its wings any second.

  Before the pilot moved the throttle beyond idle, he did a curious thing with his feet, pressing on two pedals that she took at first to be brake and steering pedals. But the exhaust rush, hardly noticeable until now, suddenly took on a different note with muted whistles in it. The pilot throttled up, watching his instruments carefully, and then something began to tremble under Petra's backside. She looked over her right shoulder, seeing the sudden dust storm below the wing. The wing's backward sweep was such that she could barely see it, but it was no longer sagging downward. It was sloping up, flexing as it tilted, but by the time Petra decided the wings did flap, she saw the brown earth dropping away.