There were heavy thunderstorm cells in the area and Dees was circling ninety miles from the airfield, pogoing up and down in the unsteady air and cursing as the last hour of daylight began to slip away. It was 7:45 P.M. by the time he was given landing clearance. That was less than forty minutes before official sundown. He didn’t know if the Night Flier stuck to the traditional rules or not, but if he did, it was going to be a close thing.
And the Flier was here; of that Dees was sure. He had found the right place, the right Cessna Skymaster. His quarry could have picked Virginia Beach, or Charlotte, or Birmingham, or some point even farther south, but he hadn’t. Dees didn’t know where he had hidden between leaving Duffrey, Maryland, and arriving here, and didn’t care. It was enough to know that his intuition had been correct – his boy had continued to work the windsock circuit. Dees had spent a good part of the last week calling all the airports south of Duffrey that seemed right for the Flier’s MO, making the rounds again and again, using his finger on the Touch-Tone in his Days Inn motel room until it was sore and his contacts on the other end had begun to express their irritation with his persistence. Yet in the end persistence had paid off, as it so often did.
Private planes had landed the night before at all of the most likely airfields, and Cessna Skymaster 3375 at all of them. Not surprising, since they were the Toyotas of private aviation.
But the Cessna 337 that had landed last night in Wilmington was the one he was looking for; no question about it. He was on the guy.
Dead on the guy.
‘N471B, vector ILS runway 34,’ the radio voice drawled laconically into his earphones. ‘Fly heading 160. Descend and maintain 3,000.’
‘Heading 160. Leaving 6 for 3,000, roger.’
‘And be aware we still got some nasty weather down here.’
‘Roger,’ Dees said, thinking that ole Farmer John, down there in whatever beer-barrel passed for Air Traffic Control in Wilmington, was sure one hell of a sport to tell him that. He knew there was still nasty weather in the area; he could see the thunderheads, some with lightning still going off inside them like giant fireworks, and he had spent the last forty minutes or so circling and feeling more like a man in a blender than one in a twin-engine Beechcraft.
He flicked off the autopilot, which had been taking him around and around the same stupid patch of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t North Carolina farmland for far too long, and grabbed a handful of wheel. No cotton down there, high or otherwise, that he could see. Just a bunch of used-up tobacco patches now overgrown with kudzu. Dees was happy to point his plane’s nose toward Wilmington and start down the ramp, monitored by pilot, ATC, and tower, for the ILS
approach.
He picked up the microphone, thought about giving ole Farmer John there a yell, asking him if there happened to be anything weird going on downstairs — the dark-and-stormy-night kind of stuff Inside View readers loved, perhaps — then racked the mike again. It was still awhile until sunset; he had verified the official Wilmington time on his way down from Washington National. No, he thought, maybe he’d just keep his questions to himself for a little while longer.
Dees believed the Night Flier was a real vampire about as much as he believed it was the Tooth Fairy who had put all those quarters under his pillow when he was a kid, but if the guy thought he was a vampire — and this guy, Dees was convinced, really did — that would probably be enough to make him conform to the rules.
Life, after all, imitates art.
Count Dracula with a private pilot’s license.
You had to admit, Dees thought, it was a lot better than killer penguins plotting the overthrow of the human race.
The Beech jounced as he passed through a thick membrane of cumulus on his steady downward course. Dees cursed and trimmed the plane, which seemed increasingly unhappy with the weather.