by Dean Ing
Ullmer: "The dumb shit, he's just happy to be in a Phantom Two. He'll be in Dago in less'n three hours, meeting those Company mercenaries for the last leg. I expect that's when he'll start taking it all seriously." His sigh would have been appropriate for a wayward son. "I wonder where the hellbug is now," he added.
"It has to be down," said Sheppard, "unless the pilot expects to glide it to Moscow." Scanning the big wall map, he went on, "He's got to have fuel dumps along the way, and some help. It just won't play any other way unless the man is crazy."
"The hellbug will soar," Ullmer replied, "especially without much of a fuel load." He pulled up a folding chair, reached for a doughnut, thought better of it. Seated at a worktable with Dar and Sheppard, he studied the deletions Sheppard had made in the APB while Terry Unruh, lost in his own thoughts, paced behind them.
"Looks good, I guess I was saying too much," Ullmer said, dropping the page with the neat lines Sheppard had drawn through a few phrases. "Except one place. You cut out the caution against destroying the hellbug."
Dar took a deep breath, but held his silence. "You can build another one, Ben. The Sovs will be monitoring radio traffic and chances are overwhelming they'll realize the airplane can become visually low-observable on demand. That's okay, so long as they don't find out how. We're giving them a chameleon paint job as it is. But the real pixel skin must not be seen by the other side, not even a piece of it," said Sheppard.
"I'm thinking about the girl," Ullmer said, "and you know it. She's not a ringer or a copilot. She's a goddamn hostage. Must be twenty people who know that already. You want the Feebs holding that over you?"
Very softly, pulling at his tie and with a glance toward Dar that might have contained guilt, Sheppard said, "That decision is over my head, Ben. Like Dar, I'm not making policy, I'm just implementing it."
Ullmer licked his lips and nodded, glancing to Dar, then to Sheppard. "Say we find the hellbug well inside the continental U.S., where we can try to force it down. What does policy say about that?"
"Judgment call," Sheppard said. "But it may be in Canada already, or near the border." He shifted position to peer at Dar. "Do you know how much I hate this, Weston?"
One of the telephones rang. Before Dar could reach it, Terry Unruh had snaked an arm out. "Ops center; Bumblebee here."
He's already given us code names for this, thought Dar. And I don't even know mine yet. "For the record, the DCI has made the hostage's welfare the prime factor. I won't pretend I'm not relieved."
Unruh, holding the phone against his chest, said, "Mr. Ullmer: Black Stealth One runs on aviation gas?"
"One hundred, one-thirty," Ullmer nodded. Dar thought he saw something in Unruh's face: fear, or excitement.
Unruh persisted, "Could it fly from here to Sugar Grove, West Virginia, without refueling?"
Dar's "Christ! Have they found her?" was lost among two other voices.
Ben Ullmer knocked his chair over getting to the ladder, where he stretched the tape. "It's an easy reach," he said over his shoulder.
"Fifteen gallons of avgas were stolen early this morning from the chopper pad up the valley from your own facility in Sugar Grove," Unruh said. "With your permission, I'm going to call for a microsearch of the area," he said, looking at Dar.
"Do it," said Dar and Sheppard simultaneously.
While Unruh spoke earnestly into the phone, Dar strode to the map. He watched Ullmer swing an arc from Sugar Grove to St. Louis, past Memphis, then southeast to Jacksonville, Florida. Then the grease pencil dashed a straight line starting at Elmira, passing through Sugar Grove. The line continued through Tallahassee and, with Ullmer squatting to complete the line, into the Gulf of Mexico.
Dar's smile was not very convincing as he turned to Sheppard. "Not much to go on, is it?"
"No. Not enough to send us chasing down a grease-pencil line in a Lear," Sheppard agreed.
Unruh cradled the phone and looked up from his notes as Dar patted his shoulder. "You sent out a query for thefts of avgas, I take it," said Dar.
"By way of the Feebs," said Unruh, "I mean the Bureau."
"Quick thinking," said Sheppard.
"Very," Unruh assented, "an hour ago. But not mine. Mr. Ullmer's assistant, Marie. Said if I didn't, she'd ask them herself."
Ben Ullmer had a laugh like a farm pump, and did not use it often. "She would," he said, subsiding. "Any other suspicious stuff like that?"
"Since early today, only two more reported," Unruh said. "A holdup for five gallons of unleaded in Queens, and a hot-wired station pump in Algona, Iowa."
"Hey, wait a minute. That Iowa thing just might be possible," said Ullmer, glaring at the map.
Unruh: "For diesel fuel?"
Ullmer's baleful look said he'd been swindled. "Another good call. How'd you know it couldn't be diesel?"
Unruh blinked. "Well, I didn't think airplanes used it."
"Not many do," Ullmer said grudgingly. "Bill, if it comes to a vote on the hostage—"
"Only two votes count here," Sheppard cut in, checking his wristwatch. His meaning was clear: CIA and NSA. And every second of delay counted against them. Sheppard threw his pencil down and leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Weston, I'll compromise if you will. I'll reinstate the phrase that prohibits forcing it down."
"If?"
"If you'll agree to taking it down, any way possible, the moment we have solid evidence that it's within a hundred miles of our borders."
"The shoreline is a border. Fifty miles," Dar countered. "Solid evidence means visual contact."
"Would you compromise on seventy-five?"
An agonized pause. "If I must," Dar sighed.
With a single abrupt nod, Sheppard committed himself. "Agreed. Here, get this thing into the computer," he said, handing the printout to Ullmer.
"I'll take it to the Bureau," Unruh said, waiting for Ben to make erasures. "It goes to everybody with dedicated aircraft, right? Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, Air National Guard units, and state highway patrols."
Dar nodded and felt a massive weight lift from his shoulders as Unruh darted out. At least he'd bought Petra a little time.
Dar, studying the map, mused, "We may be able to limit the individual states' involvement to those along the Eastern seaboard. The governors have the power to refuse, you know."
"That's what martial law is for," Sheppard snapped. "It would also let us ground all private aircraft. Make the job a lot easier."
Dar almost laughed. "You can't."
"The hell you say," Sheppard said, perplexed.
"Ex parte Milligan, Supreme Court decision," Dar explained quickly. "Martial law can't be applied where the civil courts are functioning. I hear they're still in business, Bill."
"I didn't know you were a lawyer."
"I'm not. I've just heard the argument in Security Council meetings. Personally I'd declare martial law myself if I could. I guess that's why the court said 'no.'"
The telephone buzzed. "What's my code name on this?" Sheppard asked.
"Christ, I don't know," Dar said, and grabbed the receiver. "Ops center, Bumblebee here," he lied.
Ullmer and Sheppard watched in silence. "My God, that's wonderful," he said, closing his eyes as if in prayer. "Certainly didn't take you long. Any other tidbits? ... It's enough. Well done; you've earned a commendation." He simply could not remain seated, but stood up, stretching, wiping his face to remove the moisture at the corners of his eyes.
"Well?" Sheppard was a patient man, but within limits.
"They're analyzing fresh human excrement and scuff marks less than a mile from the chopper pad. And they've found a piece of duct tape. With right thumb and forefinger prints of the hostage, clear and unequivocal."
Ullmer was up instantly. "Let's fire up that Lear and fly down the line," he said, pointing to the wall map.
"This is my post for the duration," Sheppard said to Dar. "Weston, this isn't an official objection but—what can you do in a Learjet that a squadron
of naval aviators can't do better?"
Dar, without hesitation: "Make decisions about what that squadron does."
"Well, this is official, from Dernza: we doubt you're the right man to make those decisions in a midair confrontation. I just wanted you to know."
"Let's leave the second-guessing for debriefing, shall we?" Dar's voice was tight, but steady.
Sheppard, softly: "No offense intended. You're leaving Unruh here?"
"As my deputy," Dar nodded, feeling the surge of adrenaline course down his arms and legs.
"And, Ben," Sheppard continued as the others reached for luggage, "don't make me ask for frequent bulletins."
"We'll keep you in the loop," Dar said, pausing at the edge of a partition. "I still don't even know our code names yet. You'll find Unruh is so efficient it'll scare you."
SEVENTEEN
''We're turning," the girl said, looking up from the video monitor.
"Can't fool you for a minute," he said laconically, easing the stick upright again. With no power-assist for the controls, the craft needed severe steering and more muscle power than Corbett liked. Have to bitch at Medina about that, he thought idly. And he'll tell me I'm just getting old, and we'll both be right. He kept an eye on the contrails on his western horizon, four fast jets streaking north at medium altitude.
"Your repartee stinks, Corbett."
"You're just browned because you can't find the paint program either," he said, and saw her jaw tighten. "Look, I'm sorry; I know it's frustrating. And we're turning a few points southeast because there's usually choppy air over Atlanta."
"Uh-huh. Not to mention a few million people," she said dryly. "I think I see it under the haze to the southwest."
"That's it. Plus Dobbins Air Force Base, which doesn't thrill me. We've got to thread our way around a lot of military bases in these parts. I've spotted more contrails than I like in the past half hour or so, and they're radioing a lot of negatives on several channels. They could be searching."
"Then why come this way?"
"Because," he said patiently, "Okefenokee is about two and a half hours from here."
She gritted her teeth and swore at the video terminal, cleared the display and sat back, rubbing her forehead. Then she snapped her head around. "Is that where you're delivering this? A Florida swamp?"
"Not delivering, just parking; and Okefenokee's mostly in Georgia. I don't think anybody will realize how far we can stretch a tank of avgas. We've saved an hour's fuel riding Blue Ridge thermals and—let's just say I need to get to Florida. But first I'll need to refuel, and if I were flying search grids, the last place I'd look for this airplane is in a cypress swamp." He delivered a solemn wink and then put his forefinger to his right ear, turning up the gain on the radio. "Oh shit," he said softly.
He had set the second radio on a police frequency scan pattern only as an afterthought, because highway patrol aircraft flew at heights and speeds similar to his own. The good news: it had paid off. The bad: some Georgia bear in the air had spotted them.
Unlike military pilots, airborne highway patrolmen used little jargon to their home bases. "You betcha," an educated Georgia cracker was saying, "looks just lahk your description. No insignia; scary-lookin' thang. If it had a tail it'd look lahk a dragonfly, but it doesn't have one. I'm patrollin' Route Eighty-five north of Athens and he's maybe fahv miles west of me. 'Bout eight thousand feet headin' south, maybe southeast, a hunderd knots or so. Over to you, Thirty-one."
Crackle. A female dispatcher's voice: "Wait one." Crackle. Corbett felt centipedes of tension crawling up the back of his neck as he waited. Then the same voice: "Remain in visual contact, Eighty-three fifty-three, but do not approach. Give me exact coordinates and expect a flight of Air Force jets to take over surveillance."
Black Stealth One was at seventy-five hundred feet, and had passed a highway arterial moments before. The little city of Athens, Georgia, lay on the southeast horizon. No question about it, the search was on and now it was becoming a chase.
"Sorry, I need the video," he said to the girl, and swung it toward him. A yellow key labeled "AFT SCAN" lay apart from the computer keys. His first discovery on the keyboard was that one press gave him a rearview, the second press returned him to the computer—a feature he had not expected. Thanks to video scanners linked to the computer, Corbett could see around the gaping mouth of the fuselage. As he moved a tiny joystick next to that yellow key, the video scanned the skies behind. In his right ear he could hear coordinates that sounded right, and this was no time to check the chart to be sure.
"What's happening?" The girl's sharp glances took in every motion he made: the toylike rearview adjustment, his quick movement on the throttle, his own glances into the vast volume of air ahead with clots of gleaming cloud.
Above all, thought Corbett, I can't have her panicky. "Change of pace. We're going to hide out awhile in cloud cover." The hellbug's acceleration was gentle but firm while it climbed as if to divert around a huge, flat-bottomed cottony cumulus to the south. If I make any sudden correction right now he'll know I'm monitoring him. Corbett switched the left-hand radio to the "guard" frequency, but heard nothing.
"Something spooked you, Corbett, I want to know what to expect," said the girl.
"Ah, there he is," Corbett muttered, nodding toward the video. As he twisted the tiny stick on the keyboard, a silvery spot became magnified until it became a small airplane, seen almost head-on from slightly above as it followed them. "God damn, a bird dog! Petra, there's a Georgia state cop in an old Cessna One-seventy hanging back there. In the Air Force we called it an 'L-Nineteen bird dog.' I can probably outrun and outclimb him, but he's called for help and I expect he'll get it."
"What do you want me to do?" Her voice was very small.
"I need the video to watch for something a hell of a lot faster," he shrugged. "Just snug your harness up." They passed fleeting wisps of cloud that lurked like pilotfish near the huge white mass to their left, and Corbett waited until one of the larger wisps hid their view to the rear.
Then, at full throttle, he flicked the control stick hard to the left and pulled it back. The craft responded in a hard bank to the left, sweeping directly into the solid mass of cloud. The effect was exactly the same as driving very fast into a fog-bank, with the added charm of sudden bumps that alternately lifted them from their seats and pressed them downward.
As the girl gasped in terror at porpoising headlong through fog at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, Corbett throttled back and watched the altimeter, continuing to bank the gossamer craft in a turbulent upward spiral. After a long thirty seconds, they broke out of the cloud top with dramatic suddenness. Corbett applied more throttle but pressed his feet on the pedals, feeling the bite of harness as his body tried to lunge toward the windscreen.
"Nice thing about the waste gates," he said to the girl, "is that you can put on the brakes like nobody would believe." He began to rotate the craft without banking, one eye on the compass, and then cautiously eased downward into cloud again. At that moment, in an aircraft expressly designed for utter quiet, they heard the rasp of an air-cooled engine pass very near and diminish ahead of them. They nosed out from the southern end of the cloud then, moving very slowly on jets of diverted waste-gate air that supported them like a three-legged stool. Corbett adjusted the waste gates, seeing a flash of aluminum as the Cessna disappeared around the cloud in a gentle bank.
"We're going sideways," the girl exclaimed.
"I wasn't sure it would," Corbett admitted, and pressed a finger against his right ear.
"Must have gone into a cloud," he heard the state trooper say. "This is bumpy stuff, Thirty-one, I'm gonna hang around and see where he comes out."
"We copy," said the dispatcher. "Uh, the Air Force needs your exact coordinates. Any maps in there?"
"Somewhere," said the Cessna pilot. "Stand by."
Inside Black Stealth One, Corbett listened and fumed. He could not loiter here forever, but the n
ext cloud in a southerly direction lay several minutes away, and it showed signs of developing the towering hammerhead shape that warned of severe turbulence. A cloud like that could literally twist the wings from a light aircraft. He throttled back until the great swept wing barely crawled across the underbelly of the cloud, circling lazily, the right wingtip grazing vagrant wisps of white, flexing in pockets of clear turbulence.
He punched the yellow key and swung the video toward the girl. "You may as well take this, it's not much use to me right now."
She addressed the keyboard reluctantly, with repeated nervous glances outside. "Would you mind telling me what we're doing now, Corbett?"
"We're parked with the motor running," he grunted. "They've got to come down under the clouds to see us, and Air Force jets gobble fuel at low altitude. Find the damned paint program, I'm busy."
The Cessna pilot had radioed his position at eighty-three degrees, forty minutes longitude, thirty-three degrees, fifty-five minutes latitude. Directly ahead, Corbett could see a small paved runway flanked on one side by neatly aligned aircraft, two of them with the sticklike, incredibly elongated wings of sailplanes. The chart on his knee said it should be the sailplane base outside of Monroe, Georgia.
The rising, then falling rasp of a nearby engine signaled another pass by the Cessna. Corbett did not see its aluminum hide until the patrol pilot, banking abruptly to the right, dropped the nose of the bird dog and began a shallow dive toward the south. Corbett eased his own craft up into the fleecy belly of his cloud, perplexed. Why would the Cessna break off its pursuit?
The patrol pilot's next transmission explained a lot. "Thirty-one, this is Eighty-three fifty-three, fugitive sighted southwest of me near the Monroe strip, no more'n a thousand feet off the deck. Could be in the landing pattern. Don't see him raght now but I got a glimpse. He sure got there in a hurry. Hold your horses."
"Your help should be on-station soon," the dispatcher replied. "I'm dispatching units from Route Twenty to that airstrip. Standing by," she added calmly.
Corbett eased downward into the clear, still in the shadow of the cumulus, and at that instant he saw the achingly clean lines of an Air Force F-16 as it streaked overhead in the distance, a deadly silver dart with a rakishly underslung intake duct. Before Black Stealth One nosed into its foggy haven again, Corbett had spied the second interceptor plummeting in a long arc toward the Monroe strip, its drag brakes already extended to slow its ferocious plunge.
