Capitol Offense (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 2)

by George Wier

  “Okay,” he’d said, after about an hour in the air. “You know the drill. So land this thing.”

  As I recall I did my best that day.

  I put us into a “landing pattern” over a small town airport about a hundred miles east of Austin, leveled the plane off at five hundred. I looked over at Carl, at first just wanting him to critique me. He just stared straight ahead, looking a little wooden, a little too solid for just an afternoon ride. I picked up the radio and announced I was turning on final approach, just like he’d shown me, and after I hung the radio up, I looked over at him again. I couldn’t read a thing from his tobacco-store-wooden-Indian face.

  I throttled down, put in some flap, and made my final turn to line up with the runway. I took one last look at him and knew that something was wrong.

  “What?”

  He didn’t say a word.

  As the runway grew longer and wider and the white hash marks and numbers at the beginning of the runway took on distinct definition, I all but killed the engine and pulled the nose up.

  When we touched down, the plane just sighed onto the end of the runway and stopped. I suppose I could have landed it sideways across the runway without going off the other side.

  I taxied us over to the quonset huts to fill up with fuel.

  “Okay, Carl,” I said. “What gives?”

  “Bill,” he said. “I’ve never seen that before. In fifty years of flying, I’ve never seen anyone land with the wind.”

  I had reversed my whole landing pattern and had landed on the wrong end of the runway with the wind, instead of against it. I had touched the ground at just under forty-two knots, which was well below stall speed.

  Me? I do things backwards. And that’s what saved my life during the so-called landing in Hap McCorkindale’s crop duster.

  *****

  In the old World War II serials, they always come out of the blinding sun spraying lead at ninety to nothing.

  What Hap and I got by way of warning was a subtle thocking sound from behind.

  I turned my head.

  There was a helicopter back there.

  I slapped the fuselage behind Hap. His head turned and he saw it. He turned the plane to the right and then back again so as to get a better look.

  The helicopter was black and white: the Texas Highway Patrol, Airborne Division.

  I got a sinking feeling in my gut.

  Hap evened out and the helicopter moved in parallel to us.

  The trooper in the passenger seat stuck his arm out the window into the fierce downdraft. He pointed at us and then pointed to the ground.

  “He wants us to land!” I shouted at Hap.

  Hap, who couldn’t turn all the way around to face me, simply shook his head: “No.”

  I smiled at the State Trooper and gave him the same head shake.

  He consulted with his pilot for a moment, then turned to us again, pointed at us with an accusing finger, then pointed at the ground and made jabbing motions: “Land NOW!”

  Hap answered him by putting us into a right roll. The sun disappeared to our left and we lost altitude. Hap put us into a full circle that did interesting things to my breakfast.

  I whipped my head about, looking for the chopper, and found it. They were right behind us, and gaining.

  “Uh... HAP!” I shouted.

  Hap abruptly rolled us to the left again and pulled back on the stick and again I felt an amusement park sensation in my stomach.

  A neat hole appeared in the lower wing to our left.

  They were shooting!

  I heard a very distant popping sound just beneath the roar of the engine and the wind; the same sort of sound you might get from popping a knuckle during a thunderstorm.

  When being shot at many things happen at once: First, there is an immediate shock, which lasts about as long as it takes to blink, followed by an overpowering feeling of disbelief, the verbal equivalent of which might be “this isn’t happening.” Then there is an adrenaline rush and a flood of anger through which the perceptions of the body kick into overdrive and the effect is one of time slowing down — each moment becomes an event within itself and is probably best measured in terms of heartbeats, which themselves are distant pulses of thunder not only heard by the physical ears, but also by the capillaries of the face, scalp, neck and arms, each heartbeat declaring as if in letters a mile high: “At this instant, you are alive... still.” All of these things occur at once. In the real world, perhaps a second has passed, if that.

  Another hole opened in the fabric closer to the fuselage where Hap was seated.

  He put us into a nose dive, directly for the ground. The engine surged and crackled with power, spit gouts of flame a foot long into the air directly behind a furious propeller blade, and for an instant I was weightless.

  Also, I was screaming, I’m not sure what.

  Hap pulled back on the stick and my stomach tried to crawl into my shoes. The sky ahead was as blue as the Pacific Ocean is in my dreams.

  The engine suddenly developed a rattling elephant cough, a distinct misfire. They’d hit us somewhere critical.

  A leather skullcap-clad Hap bent forward. I was pretty sure that he was checking his gauges and such. Also, I knew there was trouble coming.

  He was too long bent low.

  In the distance directly ahead there was a high ridge, upon which was a line of rotating wind turbines, the kind they have by the thousands lining the highway along I-10 just east of Los Angeles and San Bernadino, California. As the first one hove into full view I could see that it was a megalithic metal monster all of a hundred feet in height with three forty foot blades rotating at a pretty good clip. I’d always wanted to see one of things up close, and with each passing moment, the certainty that I’d shortly have that wish granted grew on me.

  “Hey! Hap!” I yelled.

  No good. He couldn’t hear me.

  The engine coughed again, loudly, sputtered and resumed.

  Hap looked up for a split second, not seeing what I saw coming. It was still a good mile or more away, but our speed was such that the sparse traffic moving along I-10 down below us looked as if it were moving at a crawl.

  There were two more coughs, about half a second apart.

  Hap looked down again, his attention on his instruments.

  I noticed that the plane was ascending slightly. As it did, Hap’s head lined up perfectly with the center of a wind turbine. Surely he’d look up again any second.

  There was one large belch from the engine. A thin stream of black smoke emerged from the left side of the engine at the front of the cowling, just behind the spinning prop. I watched as the stream of smoke slipped past me.

  I saw Hap raise his right hand and bring it down fast, like he was beating on something.

  The turbine ahead spun inexorably, growing larger. The effect was slightly hypnotic.

  “HEY! HAP!” I screamed.

  No good.

  The nose came up some more, and for an instant I was a good forty or so pounds heavier. The turbine disappeared from view. We’d miss it.

  The engine whined, a shrill sound that continued for three full seconds, and suddenly all was quiet but for the gentle roar of the wind against my leather helmet.

  Our speed dropped off, fast.

  The nose came down.

  Hap turned his head to the right. I saw his lips moving. I strained my ears and heard a bit of shout, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  “WHAT?” I yelled.

  He nodded his head and turned back to face forward just as I saw a turbine blade arc over his head, like a huge windshield wiper.

  I grabbed the yoke.

  Turned it hard to the right in the direction of spin of the turbine blade.

  Our propeller stopped turning.

  I pushed the yoke in, hard, and felt a muscle give way in my shoulder.

  Time seemed to slow down.

  Another turbine blade came up from the left, a gigantic shark fin
on an intercept path with the plane at a point midway between me and Hap.

  I held the yoke down and we dropped.

  The shark fin grew. I looked over at it. I could see grayish-brown streaks along its length and I wondered, distantly, if it was dried bird blood.

  The plane dropped and the forty-foot knife edge sliced downward at me and I got a fleeting image in my head. It was Julie in a hospital bed, her sweat strewn hair matted against her forehead and her face all red and puffy. She was laughing and crying as a nurse put a tiny, naked newborn into her arms.

  “NOOO!” I screamed, and meant it.

  The blade sliced right behind me. I anticipated the impact, but it never came. Our plummeting ship shook hard with the down draft on the tail and for a moment, just an instant of time, we were level with the earth some hundred or so feet off the ground.

  Hap had his arms crossed in front of his face.

  I pulled back again hard on the yoke and twisted it to the left.

  The fore-section of the plane dipped again and there was a corn or maize field directly ahead, all green and golden in the setting sun. I’d know which it was soon.

  I pulled back even further, leveled off as best I could.

  The next spinning windmill was suddenly there. Hap’s arms now covered his whole head. He’d thrown in the towel and it was all up to me.

  The blades of this one moved more slowly. Timing the thing would be tricky. I had about two seconds to react.

  I did. I pulled back up on the yoke.

  Airspeed bled off. We climbed just over one blade and even as we cleared it I was pushing the yoke back down again.

  That was it.

  No more.

  We were going to land in the field of green and amber corn below us.

  Corn? I thought. In West Texas? I dismissed the thought.

  Forty feet.

  Our speed bled off. Probably forty or so knots.

  The nose dipped again. I let it go for three seconds, pulled back again.

  Ten feet.

  Our speed was down to about what a fast horse could gallop.

  I heard a slapping sound, likely the tops of a thousand corn or maize heads mowing over underneath us. They slapped and rustled, the sound a barrelful of rattlesnakes might make.

  I pulled the yoke all the way back against my chest and the corn was as high as my head. The lower wings mowed a twenty-five foot swatch of it down as we moved a hundred more yards across the field and jerked to a stop.

  For a moment there was complete quiet. I’ve never heard such stillness, before or since.

  Hap slapped the side of the plane.

  “Yippp-EEEE!” He cried. “We made it!”

  I guess he had a right to celebrate.

  But I knew. The real fun was just about to begin.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  If I had known that I was being followed all along, I would have done things differently. But right then I didn’t know it, couldn’t have known it.

  The highway was less than half a mile away across the corn field. As Hap and I got out of the plane, I looked across the field and up a gentle slope in the direction of the highway and saw a car stopped. A black and white. Texas Highway Patrol.

  I heard a familiar noise from behind us, and glanced back that way in time to see the helicopter dodge a good fifty feet around the wind turbine that had almost nailed us.

  The chopper that had shot us from the sky.

  I turned and looked yet another direction, off across the endless rows of corn. All of West Texas was there. Somewhere, across that expanse to the southwest the Rio Grande River snaked its way down to the sea.

  Nowhere to run.

  I thought about the Sawyer-box in Hap’s beer compartment in the tail section. Maybe it wouldn’t be found.

  I thought about Julie and Junior. If Junior was a girl, I’d call her “Junior” anyway. Maybe “June” for short.

  Hap noticed which way I was looking, saw the olive-gray uniform descend into the corn at the edge of the highway, leaned up against the tail of the plane, looked at me and sighed.

  “That was worth living seventy years for,” he said.

  “I’ll never forget it,” I said. “But I doubt I’ll see seventy. I’ll be lucky to see forty-one.”

  *****

  I was wondering what the hell a cornfield could be doing in West Texas. Corn doesn’t grow in West Texas. Anywhere from Austin all the way to the Pacific Ocean there was no place that I’d ever heard of that you could grow corn, except maybe along the Colorado River Valley in California.

  An out-of-place cornfield, though, was the least of my worries.

  The chopper circled us in the air, hovered, the intense downdraft first rippling the corn, then bending it over. Corn and corn stalks flew about in a man-made tornado. I was willing to bet that it made an interesting-looking crop circle, but I never got to see it from the air.

  I had it figured that it was all over but the shouting.

  The chopper was on the ground, the rotors slowing in a descending whine. The cockpit door swung open and a pair of black brogans came down on the field. Behind the door was a state trooper in a flight helmet. He stepped around the door and stood there, legs apart. He crossed his arms. I couldn’t see his eyes, hidden as they were behind a pair of mirror lens sunglasses, but I saw that he was smiling.

  Hap and I waited.

  There was a rustle in the corn. We looked. The uniform came closer.

  His gun was still holstered. That was a definite plus.

  The trooper emerged from the corn and stepped around the set of wings. He had a cell phone pressed to his ear.

  “Just a minute,” he said into the phone.

  He looked at Hap, then looked at me.

  “Mr. Travis,” the Trooper said. “He really wants to talk to you.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Oh. You don’t know,” he said.

  “Just tell him,” Hap said, and spat at the corn beneath his feet.

  “It’s the Texas Lieutenant Governor,” he said.

  *****

  “Mr. Travis?”

  “Speaking,” I said, the tiny phone pressed hard to my ear. A quarter mile to the east the wind turbines continued their relentless track. Whoom... whoom... whoom.

  “This is Robert Crenshaw. I’m Texas’ Lieutenant Governor, if you didn’t know.”

  “I know,” I told him.

  “If you only knew what kind of shit you’ve stirred up,” the voice said. I’d never met the Lieutenant Governor, but I’d heard that he was a real hard case.

  “I sort of have an idea,” I said.

  “Good. I got to you first or else right now you’d probably be deader than a hog turd.”

  “I realize that.”

  “That’s good too. Okay. What we’ve got here is a situation, you understand me? A real situation. If we play this right, then nobody else is gonna get killed and the Governor can step down quietly and Texas can be saved from impeachment, embarrassment, and every other kind of brutal public circus that comes with this kind of thing. You with me so far?”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Damn right you are.”

  “One question, sir.”

  “Shoot.”

  The troopers had moved off a good thirty feet or so and were talking amongst themselves.

  “Who’s next in line?”

  “For what?” he demanded.

  “For governor,” I answered.

  “Me,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I got your cooperation on this, Travis? I don’t have any skeletons in my closet and I’ve never murdered anybody and I’m not a terribly wealthy man. But I know an opportunity when I see one, and right now I see duty more than anything. You gonna cooperate?”

  “Duty,” I said.

  “That’s what I said. As much as I hate that word. Will you help me?”

  I thought about it. I thought about John Connally ge
tting hit by a bullet intended for JFK. I thought about a former governor with whom I once shook hands. I thought about Anne Richards at the Democratic National Convention saying that the President had been born with a silver foot in his mouth and I remembered her picking at her food once at Las Manitas restaurant. Our Governors, they’re like our Lone Star flag. They wave and whip about and fray at the edges. And history claims them.

  “You there, Travis?” the voice asked.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “What say you?”

  “I’m not going to commit to anything,” I said. “Not until I know more.”

  “Well,” he said. “I suppose that will have to suffice for now.”

  *****

  I gave the phone back to the trooper. He talked for all of a minute to the Lieutenant Governor, then hung up and dropped the phone in his shirt pocket.

  “Come on, you two,” he said.

  “Where’re we going?” Hap asked.

  “Fort Stockton.”

  *****

  Hap and I got divided up. He got a ride on the helicopter and I got to ride shotgun with the state trooper. He never gave me his name, but the silver name plate on his left shirt pocket read ‘D. Herrera.’

  During our short hike to the state trooper’s car, I at least found out how a cornfield could possibly be in West Texas. At the edge of the highway there was a sign that said: “Texas A&M Agricultural Experiment Station #27.” It figured. Only an Aggie would plant corn in solid rock. What was so amazing was that it actually grew. You could say a lot about the Aggies, and there’ve been thousands of jokes about them, but they could raise any animal, any crop anywhere. If we ever get to the planet Mars, we should send the Aggies first.

  While West Texas rolled past us, Trooper Herrera gave me a little rundown on how we’d been tracked.

  “From what I’ve been told, there’s this guy. Don’t know his name, but he’s been referred to as Frogger. This guy followed you from Huntsville to Austin, back to Huntsville, then to your pilot buddy’s place. That’s where we got called in. By way of radar and squad car radio and a series of cell phone calls to keep most of the chatter off the police band, you were tracked the whole distance until your sudden landing. I just happened to be the last link in the chain.” Trooper Herrera spat his Copenhagen juice into his coffee cup and continued. “So when I called back that your plane had landed — and let me tell you, I was sure you two were about to get your tickets punched right in my line of sight — I got another call about the time I stepped off into the corn: The Lieutenant Governor.”