Cody-193’s engine was turning at full power, hanging from its pylon and actually giving the mother aircraft a few knots of free airspeed. The sergeant gave it a final look before turning back to his instruments. Sixty-one small parachute symbols were painted on the left side just forward of the wing, and with luck, in a few days he would paint a sixty-second. Though he was not clear on the precise nature of this mission, merely beating the competition was reason enough to take the utmost care in preparing his personal toy for the current game.
‘Be careful, baby,’ the sergeant breathed as it dropped free. Cody-193 was on its own.
Sarah had a light dinner cooking. Kelly smelled it even before opening the door. Kelly came inside to see Rosen sitting in the living room.
‘Where’s Pam?’
‘We gave her some medication,’ Sam answered. ‘She ought to be sleeping now.’
‘She is,’ Sarah confirmed, passing through the room on the way to the kitchen. ‘I just checked. Poor thing, she’s exhausted, she’s been doing without sleep for some time. It’s catching up with her.’
‘But if she’s been taking sleeping pills -‘
‘John, your body reacts strangely to the things,’ Sam explained. ‘It fights them off, or tries to, at the same time it becomes dependent on them. Sleep will be her big problem for a while.’
‘There’s something else,’ Sarah reported. ‘She’s very frightened of something, but she wouldn’t say what it was.’ She paused, then decided that Kelly ought to know. ‘She’s been abused, John. I didn’t ask about it – one thing at a time – but somebody’s given her a rough time.’
‘Oh?’ Kelly looked up from the sofa. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean she’s been sexually assaulted,’ Sarah said in a calm, professional voice that belied her personal feelings.
‘You mean raped?’ Kelly asked in a low voice while the muscles of his arms tensed.
Sarah nodded, unable now to hide her distaste. ‘Almost certainly. Probably more than once. There is also evidence of physical abuse on her back and buttocks.’
‘I didn’t notice.’
‘You’re not a doctor,’ Sarah pointed out. ‘How did you meet?’
Kelly told her, remembering the look in Pam’s eyes and knowing now what it must have been from. Why hadn’t he noticed it? Why hadn’t he noticed a lot of things? Kelly raged.
‘So she was trying to escape … I wonder if the same man got her on the barbiturates?’ Sarah asked. ‘Nice guy, whoever it was.’
‘You mean that somebody’s been working her over, and got her on drugs?’ Kelly said. ‘But why?’
‘Kelly, please don’t take this wrong … but she might have been a prostitute. Pimps control girls that way.’ Sarah Rosen hated herself for saying that, but this was business and Kelly had to know. ‘She’s young, pretty, a runaway from a dysfunctional family. The physical abuse, the undernourishment, it all fits the pattern.’
Kelly was looking down at the floor. ‘But she’s not like that. I don’t understand.’ But in some ways he did, he told himself, thinking back. The ways in which she’d clung to him and drawn him to her. How much was simply skill, and how much real human feelings? It was a question he had no desire to face. What was the right thing to do? Follow your mind? Follow your heart? And where might they lead?
‘She’s fighting back, John. She’s got guts.’ Sarah sat across from Kelly. ‘She’s been on the road for over four years, doing God knows what, but something in her won’t quit. But she can’t do it alone. She needs you. Now I have a question.’ Sarah looked hard at him. ‘Will you be there to help her?’
Kelly looked up, his blue eyes the color of ice as he searched for what he really felt. ‘You guys are really worked up about this, aren’t you?’
Sarah sipped from a drink she’d made for herself. She was rather a dumpy woman, short and overweight. Her black hair hadn’t seen a stylist in months. All in all she looked like the sort of woman who, behind the wheel of a car, attracts the hatred of male drivers. But she spoke with focused passion, and her intelligence was already very clear to her host. ‘Do you have any idea how bad it’s getting? Ten years ago, drug abuse was so rare that I hardly had to bother with it. Oh, sure, I knew about it, read the articles from Lexington, and every so often we’d get a heroin case. Not very many. Just a black problem, people thought. Nobody really gave much of a damn. We’re paying for that mistake now. In case you didn’t notice, that’s all changed – and it happened practically overnight. Except for the project I’m working on, I’m nearly full-time on kids with drug problems. I wasn’t trained for this. I’m a scientist, an expert on adverse interactions, chemical structures, how we can design new drugs to do special things – but now I have to spend nearly all of my time in clinical work, trying to keep children alive who should be just learning how to drink a beer but instead have their systems full of chemical shit that never should have made it outside a god-damned laboratory!’
‘And it’s going to get worse,’ Sam noted gloomily.
Sarah nodded. ‘Oh yeah, the next big one is cocaine. She needs you, John,’ Sarah said again, leaning forward. It was as though she had surrounded herself with her own storm cloud of electrical energy. ‘You’d damned well better be there for her, boy. You be there for her! Somebody dealt her a really shitty hand, but she’s fighting. There’s a person in there.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Kelly said humbly. He looked up and smiled, no longer confused. ‘In case you were worried, I decided that a while back.’
‘Good.’ Sarah nodded curtly.
‘What do I do first?’
‘More than anything else, she needs rest, she needs good food, and she needs time to flush the barbiturates out of her system. We’ll support her with phenobarb, just in case we have withdrawal problems- I don’t expect that. I examined her while you two were gone. Her physical problem is not so much addiction as exhaustion and undernourishment. She ought to be ten pounds heavier than she is. She ought to tolerate withdrawal rather well if we support her in other ways.’
‘Me, you mean?’ Kelly asked.
‘That’s a lot of it.’ She looked over towards the open bedroom door and sighed, the tension going out of her. ‘Well, given her underlying condition, that phenobarb will probably have her out for the rest of the night. Tomorrow we start feeding her and exercising her. For now,’ Sarah announced, ‘we can feed ourselves.’
Dinner talk focused deliberately on other subjects, and Kelly found himself delivering a lengthy discourse on the bottom contours of the Chesapeake Bay, segueing into what he knew about good fishing spots. It was soon decided that his visitors would stay until Monday evening. Time over the dinner table lengthened, and it was nearly ten before they rose. Kelly cleaned up, then quietly entered his bedroom to hear Pam’s quiet breathing.
Only thirteen feet long, and a scant three thousand sixty-five pounds of mass – nearly half of that fuel – the Buffalo Hunter angled towards the ground as it accelerated to an initial cruising speed of over five hundred knots. Already its navigational computer, made by Lear-Siegler, was monitoring time and altitude in a very limited way. The drone was programmed to follow a specific flight path and altitude, all painstakingly predetermined for systems that were by later standards absurdly primitive. For all that, Cody-193 was a sporty-looking beast. Its profile was remarkably like that of a blue shark with a protruding nose and underslung air intake for a mouth – stateside it was often painted with aggressive rows of teeth. In this particular case, an experimental paint scheme – flat white beneath and mottled brown and green atop – was supposed to make it harder to spot from the ground – and the air. It was also stealthy – a term not yet invented. Blankets of RAM – radar-absorbing material – were integral with the wing surfaces, and the air intake was screened to attenuate the radar return off the whirling engine blades.
Cody-193 crossed the border between Laos and North Vietnam at 11:41:38 local time. Still descending, it leveled out for the first time at five hundred feet above ground level, turning northeast, somewhat slower now in the thicker air this close to the ground. The low altitude and small size of the speeding drone made it a difficult target, but by no means an impossible one, and outlying gun positions of the dense and sophisticated North Vietnamese air-defense network spotted it. The drone flew directly towards a recently sited 37mm twin gun mount whose alert crew got their mount slued around quickly enough to loose twenty quick rounds, three of which passed within feet of the diminutive shape but missed. Cody-193 took no note of this, and neither jinked nor evaded the fire. Without a brain, without eyes, it continued along on its flight path rather like a toy train around a Christmas tree while its new owner ate breakfast in the kitchen. In fact it was being watched. A distant EC-121 Warning Star tracked -193 by means of a coded radar transponder located atop the drone’s vertical fin.