“Did you get the tail number?” VARIABLE asked.
“Negative,” the captain replied. “It’s raining pretty heavy now. Visibility is dogshit. But he got off at twenty-fifty-one Lima, heading north-northwest.”
“Roger, copy. Out.”
Ramirez didn’t like the effect that the reduced visibility might have on his unit. He took another pair of soldiers forward to the OP, but he just as well might not have bothered. The guards didn’t bother extinguishing the flares this time, letting the rain wet things down. The truck left soon after the aircraft took off, and the two chastised runway guards retired to the shack to keep dry. All in all, he thought, it couldn’t be much easier.
Bronco was bored, too. It wasn’t that he minded what he was doing, but there really wasn’t much challenge in it. And besides, he was stuck at four kills, and needed only one more to be an ace. The fighter pilot was sure that the mission was better accomplished with live prisoners – but, damn it, killing the sons of bitches was… satisfying, even though there wasn’t much challenge to it. He was flying an aircraft designed to mix it up with the best fighters the Russians could make. Taking out a Twin-Beech was about as difficult as driving to the O-Club for a couple of brews. Maybe tonight he’d do something different… but what?
That gave him something to think about as he orbited north of the Yucatan Channel, just behind the E-2C, and of course out of normal airliner tracks. The contact call came in at about the right time. He turned south to get on the target, which took just over ten minutes.
“Tallyho,” he told the Hawkeye. “I have eyeballs on target.”
Another two-engine, therefore another coke smuggler. Captain Winters was still angry about the other night. Someone had forgotten to check the maintenance schedule on his Eagle, and sure enough, that damned widget had failed right when the contractor said it would, at five hundred three hours. Amazing that they could figure it that close. Amazing that an umpty-million-dollar fighter plane went tits-up because of a five-dollar widget, or diode, or chip, or whatever the hell it was. It cost five bucks. He knew that because the sergeant had told him.
Well, there he was. Twin engines, looked like a Beech King Air. No lights, cruising a lot lower than his most efficient cruise altitude.
Okay, Bronco thought, slowing his fighter down, then lighting him up and making the first radio call.
It was a druggie, all right. He did the same dumbass thing they all did, reducing power, lowering flaps, and diving for the deck. Winters had never gotten past the fourth level of Donkey Kong, but popping a real airplane under these circumstances was a hell of a lot easier than that, and you didn’t even have to put in a quarter… but he was bored.
Okay, let’s try something different.
He let the aircraft go down, maintaining his own altitude and power setting to pass well ahead of it. He checked to make sure that all of his flying lights were off, then threw the Eagle into a tight left-hand turn. This brought his fire-control radar in on the target, and that allowed him to spot the King Air on his infrared scanner, which was wired in to a videotape recorder the same way his gun systems were.
You think you’ve lost me, don’t you…
Now for the fun part. It was a really dark one tonight. No stars, no moon, solid overcast at ten or twelve thousand feet. The Eagle was painted in a blue-gray motif that was supposed to blend in with the sky anyway, and at night it was even better than flat-matte black. He was invisible. The crew in the Beech must be looking all over creation for him, he knew. Looking everywhere but directly forward.
They were flying at fifty feet, and on his screen Captain Winters saw that their propwash was throwing up spray from the waves-five- or six-footers, he thought – just over a mile away. He came straight in at one hundred feet and five hundred knots. Exactly a mile from the target, he put on his lights again.
It was so predictable. The Beech pilot saw the incoming, sun-bright lights, seemingly dead-on, and instinctively did what any pilot would do. He banked hard right and dove – exactly fifty feet – cartwheeling spectacularly into the sea. Probably didn’t even have time to realize what he’d done wrong, Bronco thought, then he laughed out loud as he yanked back on the stick and rolled to give it a last look. Now that was a class kill, Captain Winters told himself as he turned for home. The Agency people would really love that one. And best of all, he was now an ace. You didn’t have to shoot them down for it to count. You just had to get the kill.
13. The Bloody Weekend
IT REALLY WASN’T fair to make him wait, was it? Moira thought on her drive home Wednesday afternoon. What if he couldn’t come? What if he needed notice in advance? What if he had something important scheduled in for the weekend? What if he couldn’t make it?
She had to call him.
Mrs. Wolfe reached into the purse at her side and felt for the scrap of hotel stationery – it was still there in the zipper pocket – and the numbers written on it seemed to burn into her skin. She had to call him.
Traffic was confused today. Somebody had blown a tire on the 14th Street Bridge, and her hands sweated on the plastic steering wheel. What if he couldn’t make it?
What about the kids? They were old enough to look after themselves, that was the easy part – but how to explain to them that their mother was going off for a weekend to – what was the phrase they used? To “get laid.” Their mother. How would they react? It hadn’t occurred to her that her horrible secret was nothing of the kind, not to her children, not to her co-workers, not to her boss, and she would have been dumbfounded to know that all of them were rooting for her… to get laid. Moira Wolfe had missed the sexual revolution by only a year or two. She’d taken her fearful-hopeful-passionate-frightened virginity to the marriage bed, and always thought that her husband had done the same. He must have, she’d told herself then and later, because they’d both botched things so badly the first time. But within three days they’d had the basics figured out – youthful vigor and love could handle almost anything – and over the next twenty-two years the two newlyweds had truly become one.
The void left in her life by the loss of her husband was like an open sore that would not heal. His picture was at her bedside, taken only a year before his death, working on his sailboat. No longer a young man when it had been taken, love handles at his waist, much of his hair gone, but the smile. What was it Juan said? You look with love, and see love returned. Such a fine way of putting it, Moira thought.
My God, What would Rich think? She’d asked herself that question more than once. Every time she looked at the photograph before sleep. Every time she looked at her children on the way in or out of the house, hoping that they didn’t suspect, knowing in a way conscious thought did not touch that they must know. But what choice did she have? Was she supposed to wear widow’s weeds – that was a custom best left in the distant past. She’d mourned for the appropriate time, hadn’t she? She’d wept alone in her bed when a phrase crossed her mind, on the anniversaries of all the special dates that acquire meaning in the twenty-two years that two lives merge into one, and, often enough, just from looking at that picture of Rich on the boat that they’d saved years for…
What do people expect of me? she asked herself in sudden anguish. I still have a life. I still have needs.
What would Rich say?
He hadn’t had time to say anything at all. He’d died on his way to work, two months after a routine physical that had told him that he should lose a few pounds, that his blood pressure was a touch high, but nothing to worry about really, that his cholesterol was pretty good for somebody in his forties, and that he should come back for the same thing next year. Then, at 7:39 in the morning, his car had just run off the road into a guardrail and stopped. A policeman only a block away had come and been puzzled to see the driver still in the car, and wondered whether or not someone might be driving drunk this early in the morning, then realized that there was no pulse. An ambulance had been summoned, its crew finding the officer pounding on Rich’s chest, making the assumption of a heart attack that they’d made themselves, doing everything they’d been trained to do. But there had never been a chance. Aneurysm in the brain. A weakening in the wall of a blood vessel, the doctor had explained after the postmortem. Nothing that could have been done. Why did it happen… ? Maybe hereditary, probably not. No, blood pressure had nothing to do with it. Almost impossible to diagnose under the best of circumstances. Did he complain of headaches? Not even that much warning? The doctor had walked away quietly, wishing he could have said more, not so much angry as saddened by the fact that medicine didn’t have all the answers, and that there never was much you could say. (Just one of those things, was what doctors said among themselves, but you couldn’t say that to the family, could you?) There hadn’t been much pain, the doctor had said – not knowing if it were a lie or not – but that hardly mattered now, so he’d said confidently that, no, she could take comfort in the fact that there would not have been much pain. Then the funeral. Emil Jacobs there, already anticipating the death of his wife; she’d come from the hospital herself to attend the event with the husband she’d soon leave. All the tears that were shed…