Skyhammer

by Richard Hilton

  L’Hommedieu watched the hand count off another five seconds. It wasn’t going to work, he thought.

  “Emil, you still there?” Kelly asked.

  “Where’s Farraday?” Pate said. “That’s who I’ll talk to. Not you.”

  L’Hommedieu breathed a sigh. He heard Kelly’s breath expel at the same time.

  “He’s on his way in right now,” Kelly said. “Be here any minute.”

  “In the meantime they dug you up?”

  “Well, they had to pry me away from the tube. Army-Navy game today, buddy. You sure have a knack for bad timing.”

  “Careful,” L’Hommedieu said quietly into the phone.

  “This must be pretty important, huh?” Kelly transmitted immediately.

  “You know it is,” Pate answered. “You know why I’m doing this. Jack Farraday’s just going to ruin more people.”

  “You want to talk about that?” Kelly said. “I’m all ears—you know that.”

  There was another pause. “I’m pretty much through talking, pardner,” Pate answered. “Story’s out there. People just aren’t paying attention yet.”

  Kelly was silent for a second. L’Hommedieu shook his head, trying to think of something. Then Kelly said, “How’d you come up with this plan, anyway?”

  “Good,” L’Hommedieu whispered into the phone.

  “It just happened.” Pate clicked off, then came back on. “You know what it was, Kelly? The final straw? An engine fire. I’m riding shotgun to a squirt, a goddamn scab—one of Farraday’s kiddie-corps captains, and we get a fire light, and I’m sitting there in the right-hand seat, a copilot for this jerk while he’s sweating bullets. Pardner, it did me in. The last final straw. I swore I wasn’t making one more trip. I’d kill myself first. But instead—” Pate quit again. Kelly was quiet, too.

  “Sympathize with him,” L’Hommedieu said. “He’s not ready yet.”

  “I know just what you’re saying, buddy.” Kelly said immediately. “I understand. If I’d gone back I’d be feeling exactly the same way. You sure you have to take it this far, though? I mean, you’re making quite a statement already. You sure you need to make any more of one?”

  “Talk’s cheap, Kelly,” Pate transmitted back, “You can’t just say it, you have to do it, or it don’t mean squat.”

  “I know,” Kelly said. “But it’s no good if you can’t be here to enjoy it, buddy. And personally I’d hate to lose a guy like you. You’re too good a pilot, for one thing. Too professional for this sort of thing.”

  “Okay,” L’Hommedieu said. “Good, now go for it.”

  “Emil? Let me ask you this. How do you think this will help the rest of us? If you get revenge?”

  Pate didn’t answer.

  “Keep going,” L’Hommedieu cautioned.

  “If that’s what you think,” Kelly went on, “then you’re wrong, buddy. Better to quit right now, cut your losses.”

  Pate answered immediately. “That’s the whole point,” he said. “I didn’t quit. I’m still here. If I hadn’t gone back I wouldn’t be able to do this. But now I can turn this around on the bastard. Monster—that’s what he is. Swallowed me up, but he didn’t figure on this. I’m stuck in his throat. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah,” Kelly answered, but he didn’t sound sure. He said nothing more.

  “It’s okay,” L’Hommedieu said, but he, too, was unsure. Pate was going off in a direction he hadn’t anticipated. “Keep to the point,” he told Kelly. “You’re not mad at him, but revenge isn’t a good motive.”

  “You see what I’m saying, though, Emil?” Kelly said. “Two wrongs don’t make a right. In fact, it’ll work against you, buddy. We’ll all feel worse. We won’t think you did the right thing.”

  “Too late for doing the right thing,” Pate answered. “But Kelly, you’ve got to understand this. The mistake I made, going back to work—there’s a reason for it, see? It was a mistake. It was wrong, but now I’m here. You see how it was necessary? And so is this.”

  In the second of silence that followed, L’Hommedieu did see it finally—exactly what Pate was driving at. “Tell him you don’t condemn him,” he whispered to Kelly

  “What?” Kelly said, forgetting he couldn’t talk back.

  “Don’t you see it?” Pate said, as if Kelly’s response had been for him.

  “Tell him—” L’Hommedieu said, “tell him he didn’t make a mistake going back to work.”

  “I see it,” Kelly said.

  “Tell him there’s nothing to make up for.” L’Hommedieu pounded the table lightly, beating out the cadence of the words as Kelly repeated them to Pate. This was terrible, he thought. He needed to sign Kelly off, talk him through the whole thing, explain to him that finally, finally, he had nailed it down—what was driving Pate more than revenge. “Redemption,” he whispered into the phone. “Kelly—”

  But Pate was talking again.”... Farraday’s still out there,” he said. “Swallowing up more of us. Someone’s got to stop him. Someone’s at least got to try. And there’s only one way. From the inside. And I’m on the inside. You see? I’ve got this airplane, and I’m going to stick it right in his heart, where it will do some good.”

  L’Hommedieu looked up. Peggy Lofton was coming over, fast. The agent covered his mouthpiece.

  “They found her!” Lofton said.” Katherine Winslow. She’s on her way down there right now.”

  “Jim,” L’Hommedieu said, intending to tell Kelly, but he was saying, “... an airplane, with a lot of people on board. Innocent people. You’re going to kill all of them?”

  Pate was silent. “Jim,” L’Hommedieu shouted, desperate now. He had to stop this. “Don’t talk to him about—”

  But Pate was back on again. “I am sorry about that,” he said, “but they’re casualties of war. And this is war. Just like Viet Nam. Remember? We were over there bombing innocent people, but nobody cared. Plenty like Farraday were back here in Harvard Business School, learning how to ruin us when we got home. No, Kelly, I reckon I’ll just press on and complete this mission.”

  “It’s not a mission,” Kelly answered. “There’s no war, not like you think.”

  “Maybe,” Pate said, but he sounded only irritated now. “Tell it to the Ripper when you see him. Later, pardner.”

  “Hold on!” Kelly said. “Emil, one sec!”

  “Is his wife there?” L’Hommedieu asked. “Did she make it?”

  Kelly was silent for a few seconds. Then he said quietly, “Yeah, she’s here. But I don’t think he is.”

  “It’s all right. We’ll get him on again. We’ve got what we need.” L’Hommedieu sat back, exhausted suddenly but no longer discouraged. The pieces had fallen into place and shown at last what he needed to see. The final piece had been provided by Pate himself, explaining how a mistake could be turned into a victory. He couldn’t give up flying, and so had given in to Farraday’s temptation. Another man might have rationalized away the guilt, but not Pate. Now he couldn’t live with himself. It answered L’Hommedieu’s question: What would make a soldier kill innocent people? Loyalty to his credo and his fellow soldiers would. And if he had failed them once, the need to redeem himself would push him toward self-sacrifice, blind martyrdom.

  No, it wasn’t over yet, but now L’Hommedieu felt he could win. He had the whole reason, and he only needed to get Pate to see that his sacrifice wouldn’t achieve what he wanted. Perhaps he already saw it and only needed time, or one more hand to reach out and help him in that direction. And the next hand would be Katherine Winslow’s. What better person was there?

  As he talked to her now, over the phone to Albuquerque, telling her everything he’d realized, L’Hommedieu felt relief pulsing through him. Katherine Winslow sounded relieved too.

  “I know you’re right,” she said. “He’s always been that way. Always felt like everything was his responsibility, his fault if it didn’t go right.”

  “He’s playing a role,” L’Hommedieu
said. “Seeing his life as a crucial element in the scheme of things. He has to. It’s the only way to make up for this mistake. Life is a very serious matter to him. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Everything he did was like his life depended on it. Except he was such a daredevil, too. Even when it came to little things. Like his life didn’t matter. I could never understand that.”

  “Believe me, it fits,” L’Hommedieu said. “But we can’t talk about that now. He’s going to check in again. He wants to talk with Jack Farraday, who should be arriving there soon. You’ll be the one who answers. You’ll have to convince him that flying was his purpose, and he couldn’t give it up—that there’s no crime in what he did. Let me explain to you what I want you to say.”

  She said nothing while he laid it out. But when he had finished, she said, “What if he won’t talk to me?”

  L’Hommedieu hadn’t considered this. In an instant he real-ized that in his own need to have things work out he had made the same assumption Pate was making—he’d believed mere desire would make everything all right. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ve got to make him listen. You’ve got to talk to him in whatever way only you would. Trust in your own way. If he loves you, it’s for that reason.”

  She was quiet. Then with a firmness L’Hommedieu liked, she said, “Okay.”

  Flight Deck

  New World 555

  19:46 GMT/14:46 EST

  He was just south of the Kiowa National Grasslands now. Below him, to the north, the Canadian River was making its big loop. Las Vegas, New Mexico, lay dead ahead, almost under the plane. On the horizon, the pale blue peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range were becoming visible, floating above the low-level haze, edged with slivers of white, distinct but cut loose from the earth, like a mirage.

  He would make it, he thought, but it wasn’t going to be easy. He could feel his will, his resolve, crumbling under him now, like a steep dirt bank he was trying to climb. Kelly had caused it somehow. Doubt was edging its way in. The spark, the fire, the need he had felt seemed cold suddenly. Wrong.

  Pate stared at the dials in front of him, knowing he could not let this happen. He had to quit thinking entirely, not feel anything now. That was the trick. Become machinelike, another one of the meters, readouts, gauges that were like fingers pressed to the pulse of the plane. Telling him all systems were normal, all pressures and fluids stable. The plane was working fine still. That was all that mattered. The engines—twin hearts a hundred feet behind him—were beating in unison, powering the body of which he was the brain. No, he was the mind—he had to admit that. The brain was this cockpit with all its sensing devices; he was the thing beyond it, the part that could think about itself and knew what it was. The plane was only a dumb thing. Obedient—with no will of its own to live. It would fly on and on, until it ran out of fuel, unless he commanded otherwise.

  His doubt had faded. But now there was only a cold hollowness where the heat of his anger had been. He could deal with that, though. Resting his head back against the top of the seat, Pate stared at the mountain peaks ahead. With the radio dialed off again, the solitude was complete, vast, serene. Everything beyond the windshield an illusion. Only the metal and glass that surrounded him were real. Only what he could touch. The instruments measured an imaginary world—there was no distance, no speed, no altitude, no location or destination. Beyond the mountains was only the dream of Albuquerque. He closed his eyes. He hadn’t slept in three days.

  How could you stay sane, he wondered a minute later, if sleeplessness became ordinary? Yet he was sleepy now. Very tired. All he really wanted was to keep his eyes closed for a few minutes. And he could. The plane would continue flying, like a man sleepwalking. Walking through a great open field where there was nothing to run into.

  But he needed to stay awake. Maybe because each minute, each second, was precious now. He hadn’t expected time to be so precious; he’d thought he was ready to die. Instead death loomed ahead of him like solitary confinement without light or sound. Or feeling. No, it wasn’t even like the Viet Cong sweatbox they’d put all flight cadets into during basic training. Death was confinement without boundaries; it was oblivion. A zombielike state, unconscious but still existing. Stories from his grandmother had pictured it as the “Shadow Side.” A lodge somewhere across the prairie, where Death had once led Coyote. Was Boyd there now in the lodge of the dead, waiting for him?

  Feeling a strange curiosity, Pate opened his eyes and looked at the blanket-shrouded shape in the seat beside him—studied it, wanting suddenly to pull away the blanket, as if to prove Boyd was lifeless, not grinning at him, unable to keep a straight face about this whole bad joke.

  But no, if Boyd could think anything it would not be that. He would be thinking Pate was doomed, too, that Jack Farraday had won after all. Pate closed his eyes so he would not see the dead man beside him, not see Boyd’s congealed blood on the floor between the seats. Instead it was his own blood he saw, filigreed into the tiny corpuscles of his eyelids, spread in a pink, thick gauze over his eyes. His own blood throbbed through him heavily, like liquid metal.

  He kept his eyes closed for another full ten-count. Then he made them open. The Sangre de Cristos were still there, not a mirage. The peaks were sharp, solid rock and snow, and as he passed over them he’d feel the turbulence they created, and then the city would spread out beyond, and he’d fly right over it, and Katherine would really be there somewhere below him, and Melissa and Carrie, real too, all of it as real as his own hands. His own blood. Sangre de Cristo meant Blood of Christ. Now it seemed so clear. Coyote had created the Nez Perce out of the dead Monster’s blood. There were signs all through the story, if you only thought about it. But that was the problem. Nothing was really what you thought it was. It was all what you made it. He remembered now that, long ago, Louise Yellow Wolf had told him he would have three names, the one given him at birth, and a nickname, and a secret name. To get his secret name, he had to climb a mountain, build a cairn of stones, and remain there three days, not eating or sleeping. And then he would sleep, and while he was sleeping some animal or creature would come to him and give him his secret name.

  But he’d never gone on his quest. He had thought then it would be a waste of time. It made sense now—that you were more than just what your parents named you, and more than flesh and blood. Your spirit mattered. More than flesh. That was why he couldn’t give up. No matter what Kelly said—no matter if he didn’t blame him, except for killing innocent people.

  Anger, like hot wind, came sweeping down on Pate, piercing him, but he welcomed it. He wasn’t the Monster, Farraday was. Farraday had swallowed all them, even Kelly and Deke Keller, not just the ones who’d quit. Farraday was swallowing up more and more every day. He was the one destroying the 133 lives sitting in the cabin, as surely as he had destroyed everyone else. He had to know it, too.

  Pate reached out suddenly and dialed back to the designated frequency. He keyed his microphone.

  “Where’s Farraday?” he shouted into it. “Get me that sonofabitch! Nobody else!”

  There was no answer at first. A half minute went by. Then someone spoke his name. Pate’s heart stopped still. He couldn’t believe it.

  “Emil?” she said again. “It’s Katherine.”

  Luke Air Force Base

  Glendale, Arizona

  19:41 GMT/12:41 MST

  A jackrabbit big as a child’s tricycle bounded out of the scrub to the left of the taxiway. O’Brien reacted, braking the jet to a crawl, and for a moment the animal froze, giant cars cocked, then took off, zig-zagging away into the strip of desert between the taxiway and the runway.

  O’Brien had seen more jackrabbits than ever in the last month. How they could live near the runway he would never understand, but perhaps the constant jet noise was a lesser evil than the coyotes that roamed the perimeter.

  He eased the jet forward again, taxiing more slowly now. What was the hurry anyway? Nerves
, probably. He certainly wasn’t looking forward to the mission. Although he still couldn’t quite believe it was real. How could a well-trained, disciplined commercial jet pilot go so wacko he would hijack his own plane and threaten to crash it, kill everyone aboard? What could make somebody snap like that? And how had he gotten past all the safeguards—the FAA’s screening, the airline’s own monitoring procedures?

  O’Brien had heard from friends in commercial flying though, that some airlines were letting their standards slip. New World in particular, during and after the pilots’ strike. The stories were scary. According to one rumor he’d heard, low-time pilots, even guys with nothing but light-airplane experience—the sort no other major airline would touch—had made the cut at New World. Maybe that’s what this guy was, O’Brien decided. Some marginal flyer who couldn’t hack the responsibility. It would be a damn shame if they ended up having to kill the whole plane in order to nail him. But what other choice would they have if they couldn’t turn him?

  Now they were closing in on the runway threshold. O’Brien could see the “last chance” crew waiting on the runup pad a hundred yards ahead, where the taxiway turned to intersect Runway 3. It was a cloudless day, nearly eighty degrees. Warm for November. A dry, desert breeze whipped the legs of the techs’ fatigues. To the southwest, the stubby peaks of the White Tanks shimmered in heat waves. The Eagle’s canopy was closed, sealing them into their tiny metal-and-plexiglass cocoon, but now O’Brien smelled jet fumes. The tailwind was blowing their own exhaust forward into the air-conditioning system’s inlets. He reset his oxygen regulator to 100 percent.

  When they reached the pad, he swung the jet around until it was on a forty-five with the runway, and brought it to a stop. The techs disappeared under the plane. It would take them fifteen or twenty seconds to make their ordnance checks and remove the ground safety-pins from the four AIM-7 Sparrows and the two AIM-9 Sidewinders attached to the undersides of the F-15’s wings and fuselage.

  O’Brien had been flying F-15’s for seven years in mock combat, and in the real thing over Iraq. He had been armed scores of times. Today, though, he remembered the first time, the feeling of knowing that the missiles on his wings were no longer dummies, hunks of inert stuff, that with one flick of his thumb he could actually send an explosive charge darting right up the tail pipe of anything hotter than a few hundred degrees within miles of his plane. The power was frightening because it pulled at him, urging him to use it. He had stood on the very edge of the Grand Canyon’s inner gorge once and felt that same abstract fear of doing something deadly simply because he could so easily.