The Ransom of Black Stealth One

by Dean Ing

  Corbett firewalled his throttle; the impeller was still revving respectably and as he cleared the ground, the sweep line was almost directly overhead, slowing in response to the sighting. But an aircraft of the Harrier's fourteen-ton mass does not maneuver well at such low speeds, and though they were spaced over four hundred yards apart, they used precious seconds in their attempts to maneuver in midair without colliding. Meanwhile, Corbett skimmed tumbleweeds as he plunged Black Stealth One's nose into that dust cloud.

  Eighty knots would not have been enough for most light craft to crab sideways, dead-level, in a pall of dust without losing a wingtip. Corbett managed it using partial waste-gate power, virtually skidding, the right wing swinging fast until he was moving almost parallel to the dust pall. But one of the Hueys must have seen his canopy too, and Corbett knew it only when he saw the earth before him erupt as if a land mine had detonated.

  If Corbett had been in doubt about the Hueys' armament, he knew now. Though some military helicopters carried rockets and cannon, this one had loosed a burst from its chin turret, a minigun firing as many rounds as six machine guns. Corbett veered right, now moving at a hundred knots, passing under the Huey before it could swing to keep him in its sights. He saw the bulk of a Harrier swing sluggishly into place ahead of him, sinking, and no more than fifty feet above.

  The tremendous downblast of the Harrier's superheated jet exhaust, so close above, would have slammed the delicate hellbug into the ground had Corbett flown into it. Instead, he judged that the Harrier was slowing and killed most of his own forward speed by a sharp, almost vertical climb, then nosing over. He ended directly above the Harrier, slamming the waste gates open, and found himself riding a few yards above the brute, its rudder an upswept scimitar scant feet from the hellbug's wing root.

  The Broom channel was simply chaos. Two of the monsters had apparently collided, one of them damaged enough to force an emergency landing. A Huey circled, clearly unwilling to risk hurling a wall of lead so near a "friendly," but Corbett could see the shining ellipses of other Huey rotor blades as the choppers converged. He wasted no time trying to reprogram the hellbug's skin, knowing the bird plumage would be useless and too many warriors were converging from too many points to let him fool more than one.

  Corbett could see the pilot below him as the man twisted in search of the hellbug, revealing his head-up display screen. The HUD might reduce a Harrier pilot's workload, but it was little use against a fugitive hanging overhead. The Harrier pilot did not take time to consider his choice, so he did what attack pilots like to do: he began to accelerate.

  Corbett grinned fiercely, though he knew he could not keep forward pace with the Harrier for more than a few seconds. Had its pilot simply landed then and there, Corbett would have been an easy target for those Huey slicks the instant he moved away at fifty miles per hour. The pilot had a definite agenda, however, with darted glances at the rearview mirror on the upper left side of his canopy. Corbett saw him try to use his rudder like a cleaver through the hellbug's wing and rocked that wing upward, as if to bank in one direction. Then, failing to match the Harrier's pace above a hundred knots, Corbett jinked upward and banked the other way.

  The main rotor of the following Huey almost cut his wingtip off. It could not have missed the hell-bug by more than an arm's span and its tail rotor did not quite miss, ripping a chunk the size of a man's hand from the wing trailing edge; and the hellbug's trailing edge was tough stuff, developed from the same filament-loaded aramid polymers used in bulletproof vests. The Huey's small tail rotor, its tips shredded unevenly, set up a hellish vibration as it began to come apart.

  Corbett saw the Huey go down, spinning madly around its main rotor axis, and took the time to "check his six," using the scanner to show him who might be closing on him from his six o'clock position, directly behind. There were three of them, a Harrier and two Hueys, and Corbett heard the Marine pilot warn the Hueys aside as he readied his rocket pods. Good, I'm more worried about them than about you, Corbett thought, and saw the two smaller blips on his rearview screen move well aside. That was when he yawed the hellbug to place himself directly between his pursuer and the Harrier he had used as a shield before. It was completing an ungainly turn ahead of him.

  His pursuer loosed one salvo anyway, the pencil-slim rockets glinting harmlessly past the hellbug's wingtip like huge needles, and Corbett was nearing top speed as he flew directly toward that turning Harrier which now approached head-on. Both of the Harrier pilots announced, one of them with short Anglo-Saxon comments, their plight: they would be firing toward each other. And while their rockets were no thicker than a man's wrist, one of those little warheads could equal one Marine airchine. Broom leader evidently forgot which channel he was on as he demanded side passes by the Hueys.

  Corbett realized that the aircraft approaching him would be more dangerous if its pilot jinked upward to catch the hellbug in his exhaust, so Corbett did it first, again using the nose diverter to help flick the nose upward so suddenly that G forces nearly dragged his head down. Then he was over and past the Harrier, darting quick glances in search of enemies, which were plentiful, and cover, which was nonexistent.

  The almost silent shuddering from his left wing made his decision for him; four neat holes had punched a straight pattern between leading and trailing edges. Corbett had penciled the line that defined the main spar of Black Stealth One, and he knew where that crucial structure lay under the hellbug's skin. One of the Huey slugs had missed it by less than six inches. Corbett rolled his aircraft onto that wing from an altitude of three hundred feet, seeing the rotors of two Hueys flash as they moved in from that side, seeing other flashes from a chin turret.

  And ahead, cutting into the hardpan soil like angular fingers, lay one branch of a ravine that deepened and broadened as it stretched away to the southeast. More than one cadet had made of himself a flesh and metal marmalade by playing in these arroyos with fast, heavy airplanes. Corbett kept his left wing down, knifing toward the ground like a broad arrowhead in a long sideslip that brushed shrubs at the right-hand lip of the ravine.

  Typically, the lip of a Texas ravine is an absolutely vertical cliff, abruptly becoming a slope that is not curved, but angled, toward the bottom. The wider that ravine, in general, the deeper—and the longer that vertical drop at its lip.

  No airplane falling in a sideslip at nearly two hundred miles an hour could maneuver abruptly enough to avoid careening into the opposite slope of this ravine, without thrust diverters beneath its wing and nose. Among the excited voices clamoring in Corbett's ear was one that said, "Scratch one bogey." As Corbett let the hellbug's diverted thrust align him, now angling his right wing down, perfectly parallel with the ravine's left-hand slope and no more than a man's height above jumbled stone, he knew that his abrupt disappearance must have looked like a hopeless fall into destruction.

  Ravines do not simply quit. They issue either into flat lower plains or bigger ravines. In his haste and bedeviled by G forces, Corbett punched a wrong instruction, erased it, then punched the right one into the pixel program while keeping the hellbug's belly mere yards above the slope that was leading him downward toward a blind bend. Virtually the only real curve associated with such a ravine is the graceful bend that changes its horizontal direction. If he could only reach that bend ahead, and bank tightly around it before one of them saw him, he could...

  "Bogey in the ravine, Broom leader," called the only voice that did not sound perplexed. "Still taking evasive action but that canopy sparkles like a diamond ring. Broom nine pursuing," it went on, and Corbett cursed. I had to polish the goddamn-canopy, didn't I? Should've left it dirty. A fragment of his mind said it would not have mattered. They would have borne him down like this anyway, sheer numbers overwhelming Black Stealth One's bag of tricks.

  Corbett was already committed to a tightly curved bank to negotiate the bend but, as he swept through it, saw that the ravine was only an arm of a broader depression. Eastward, t
o his left, the glitter of whirling blades peeled over the ravine's lip a mile distant. Almost immediately he saw the Huey crabbing toward him, winks of light almost a steady gleam from its chin turret. Corbett dropped lower, following the slope contour, and saw what appeared to be a small volcanic eruption halfway up the slope across from him. It was a small area of ravine disintegrating in a solid hail of minigun fire, and the pattern seemed to be moving only up and down slightly, as if some huge beast were writhing just beneath the rocks.

  The bastard doesn't see me, he's just keeping up a curtain of fire, Corbett realized. But he locked the scanner onto that Huey anyway and hoped that his canopy would not give him away again until he had flashed below that steady withering blast. Corbett actually heard the ricochets humming like bees in hell as he passed two hundred yards from that disintegrating rubble, beneath the line of gunfire.

  He found himself pointed toward the mouth of another ravine, shadowed in early light, and swung into it even though he knew it would become shallower, not deeper, as he flew up its gullet. Another voice, then two, announced that he had been seen before his canopy ducked into the ravine's shadow. Twenty seconds later, as he climbed over the lip and dropped near the brushy plain again, a series of small explosions flung debris into the air three hundred yards ahead. He jinked upward to miss any stray hunks of rock that might still be raining down; he had not even noticed the rocket salvo, but it had missed by a fair margin.

  Then, before darting down to ground level again, he saw the next ravine, less than a mile ahead. If his eyes were still perfect, it was a wide one—therefore probably deep. If his parallax perception was off, he could soon be a smear mixed with plastic. Two big, strong blips on his rearview were closing hard, and patiently settling into that ravine ahead to wait, four Hueys dipped below Corbett's sight.

  Boxed. Trailing those two Harriers on his tail were other blips, flying higher as cover and, in a final, almost certainly suicidal ploy, Corbett prepared an appropriate exit. How do you get out of a box? Same way you got in. Or not at all, he decided, taking five precious seconds to tighten his harness and reset the pixel program. Not to fool anyone watching his upper surfaces: to fool anyone watching the hellbug's belly.

  He could not see those waiting Hueys until he had nosed over at the ravine lip, and they were there, all right, blasting away as he judged the depth of the ravine and risked tearing the waste-gate controls loose. He hauled the stick into his gut, pouring full emergency power into the nose diverter, and started the first part of a loop. This time it would not become an Immelmann.

  He had judged himself no more than five seconds ahead of the pursuing Harriers, but he was wrong: they were still approaching the ravine lip as the hellbug swept up above the ravine, upside down, and he leveled off that way. Inverted, ten feet above the plain at full tilt, Kyle Corbett flew out of the ravine and almost directly below the Marine craft. His pixel program painted not the top, but the bottom of Corbett's aircraft, and his canopy was completely hidden as he arrowed away, still inverted.

  He took another risk, yawing slightly to change course, switching to the Huey channel. One of them had seen his maneuver and was bellowing it out as hard as he could, giving chase although, the Huey pilot admitted a moment later, he had "—no joy." He too had lost sight of Black Stealth One, and hanging upside down while gasoline trickled from his plastic bag into the cockpit, Corbett set the scanner to show him where the rest of his enemies were.

  Coughing, eyes streaming with gasoline fumes, Corbett passed beneath the last of the covering Hueys without provoking a shout of recognition. He could not remember how long that experimental rotary engine behind him was supposed to run inverted, but the hell with it, he had enough velocity now to gain a little altitude and roll rightside up, if his engine seized. He kept waiting for signs of engine trouble, and blinking gasoline fumes from his eyes for a five-minute eternity as he streaked toward the border near Laredo. And he listened with joy to the Mop and Broom channels for even longer than that, until he had righted the hellbug and cracked his canopy door to flush the worst of the fumes out.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Air Force medical examiner, a light colonel with no appreciable bedside manner, ambled into his office and handed a sheaf of Xeroxed pages to Dar Weston with obvious relief. "We don't get many requirements of this sort, Mr. Weston; the Texas U. med center is just across San Antonio. It would have been a better venue for a workup like this."

  Dar, after a perfunctory glance at the findings of Brooks Aerospace Medical Center, realized it would take him an hour to puzzle through it all. "But you were closer and Brooks is more secure, Doctor. We're deeply grateful. Could you summarize her condition for me? Her—father is flying in. What can I tell him?"

  "That's a bizarre question from you people," said the Colonel. Dar saw the flicker of distaste in the man's eyes. Not an unusual reaction, even in the military: CIA had very few friends. "But apart from a few minor contusions and abrasions I'd say Miss Leigh has not suffered much physical abuse."

  "And mentally?"

  A shrug. "Difficult to predict over the long haul. No profound depression or confusion; she's a bit suspicious and angry, but that's to be expected. Perfect strangers have been poking her and asking questions for"—he checked his wrist—"what, ten hours or so? Her chief complaints seem to be mild sunburn and a desire, as she put it, to 'get the hell out of here.' Believe me, that would suit us very nicely," he added.

  You're used to patients who have to salute, Dar reflected, shaking the man's hand. "I'll tell her," he said. "Where is she?"

  "Staff lounge," was the reply. "That's where the junk food is."

  Dar paused at the lounge entrance, then saw Petra at a corner table with one of the Company debriefing experts, a marvelously benign old tub of lard named Rogers whose gentle manner could have drawn a moray from its lair. Rogers was among the best men with naive civilians. He had flown portal to portal from Langley in four hours flat, after the Huey had spotted Petra atop that storage tank. After their reunion, Dar scrambling from the back seat of a Harrier to the belly of a helicopter so that he could hold tight to the daughter he had feared lost forever, they had flown straight to Brooks, on the southern edge of San Antonio's urban sprawl. Now, as he viewed those straight little shoulders and heard the barely contained impatience in her voice, Dar began to feel his own body sag. He had stolen very little sleep the past few nights.

  "…no idea where he was going," said Petra as Dar, stepping up behind her, patted her shoulder. She jumped. "Please don't do tha—oh, Uncle Dar," she ended, rising to embrace him. Into his chest she said, "You can do it as much as you like."

  He kissed the top of her head, feeling the warmth of his daughter like a long-sought benediction. He let his raised brows make a silent query to Rogers, who raised an open palm in response, then made it into a circled thumb and forefinger. Murmuring into her hair, he said, "I love you, Pets. These past days, I've realized I never said that to you as often as I should. By the way, we fished your yellow blouse out of the Gulf."

  "Mother will be ecstatic about that blouse," she replied through a gulp that was half laugh, half sob, still holding him. "When will she and Dad get here?"

  "Andrea is at home under sedation, but Phil should be here by now."

  "Then can we please, please wind this up? I've got some summer exams coming up and I don't want to think about that damned skyjacker anymore," Petra said.

  "I think it can be arranged."

  "How about a few quarters for a Hershey? I've used all of his," she said, and indicated the smiling Rogers.

  He found three quarters and smaller change for her and, as she moved off toward the line of vending machines, said, "How about it, Rogers? Get as much as you want?"

  "Never enough," Rogers sighed. "She can't tell us where the man is headed, and she swears he wasn't in radio contact with anyone. He could have telephoned from that place in Florida. No NSA confirmation on it, though."

  "How di
d he treat her? She might not tell me the worst."

  "You already know about her escape and recapture," Rogers said. "He roughed her up, but he also stopped a rape attempt." He released a Kris Kringle smile. "After two days in that airplane, I think the young lady's in love."

  Dar only mouthed, What? but could not keep his face from contorting.

  "With the airplane," Rogers went on, unperturbed. "Every time she mentions it, she gives herself away. I suppose there's no accounting for women engineers."

  Dar let a long breath go, watching Petra tear the wrapper from a candy bar. "But there's nothing more you have to cover?"

  "Nothing we can't go over some other time," Rogers said, feeling inside his coat, doubtless to shut off the recorder. "Section head may want a bit of light therapy in a few days."

  That buzzword, "therapy," usually meant hypnosis or even a polygraph. The sort of thing you do to field operatives who've been out of touch so long they might be compromised. And you can claim it's not all that intrusive but this is my daughter you're meddling with and, by God, she has been through enough already. "Tell him," said Dar with blued steel in his glance, "that might not be necessary, nor politically expedient. Her father is Philip Leigh, a man who has already invoked the blessings of two senators and an undersecretary to get here. I don't think he'd let me do a deep interrogation, much less anyone else. Her family has too many media connections; they'd have a field day, Rogers."

  Rogers cocked his head. "You're family, aren't you?"

  "Yes, but it's not I who would sic the media on my own people. It's Phil Leigh you'd be dealing with."

  Rogers beamed a smile that said he understood perfectly. "Well," he said, "if we have any follow-up questions, perhaps you could do the honors."