Glory Boys (57 page)

Lightning flashed around them. Up there inside the thunderclouds, lightning wasn’t as simple as a bolt or a flash. It was a change in the entire sky. One second there was blackness. The next moment Pen’s entire field of view was completely filled with an awful yellowish glare that lasted an instant before vanishing again. In that chaos of sky, Pen kept her eyes fastened on the instrument panel. Like many planes of its type, the DH-4 had a dual set of controls so that it could be operated from the front or rear cockpits. The instrument panel was replicated in both cockpits. Pen read off the vital measurements.

Altitude: altering violently, but never less than two and a half thousand feet. Good.

Fuel: a three-quarters full tank. Abe must have been absolutely full before he’d left Marion. Good again.

Turn indicator and banking indicator: moving all the time, but shifting so fast and so unpredictably that they were hard to read. But as Pen kept her eye on the controls, she felt that perhaps – yes, quite likely – some kind of turn seemed indicated.

Pen swept her gaze across to the compass. When she’d learned to fly, she’d been taught to think of the compass ball itself as stationary, the needle always fixed on north. If the compass needle seemed to move, that wasn’t because the needle was moving but because the plane was. Right now, the compass was seeming to swing clockwise, which meant that the plane was turning anti-clockwise. Slowly, slowly, Abe was bringing the plane around to head north-west. On that course, it would ride the curve of the storm inland – and hope at some stage to outrun the winds.

She didn’t possess Abe’s sense of hyper-alertness, but she too felt very calm. She was in a vastly dangerous situation, but she had long accustomed herself to the possibility of dying in a plane crash. The thought of being gunned down by one of Marion’s thugs had been obnoxious beyond description. And there was Abe. She knew that perhaps no pilot in the world was better qualified to fly in these conditions than the man in the cockpit ahead of her. As the airplane surged and struggled, she felt only infinite trust, a kind of loving glow that connected her to him.

She barely glanced now at the destructive violence outside the cockpit. There was nothing to see there except swirling cloud. For all that the view out could tell her, the plane could be travelling north or south, east or west, it could be right-side up or upside down. It could be travelling dead straight for open sky, or dead straight for the ground below. In the giddy lurching of the airplane, Pen knew that she had to stop trusting the senses of her body. The human body tends to interpret any strong pull as gravitational. But there were too many other forces which confused things. Acceleration, deceleration, centripetal force all felt exactly the same as gravity. So did the shocking lifts and drops that were caused by sudden updrafts and downdrafts in the air. Any of those forces could be stronger than gravity, could simply cancel it out.

Pen ignored the blood pulsing in her head and concentrated. The altitude reading was good. Whatever other problems they had, there was plenty of empty sky beneath. Airspeed was worse. The gusting wind meant that the plane’s speed was hard to control. There were moments when the wind suddenly betrayed the airplane, speed dropped away, the plane began to drop. Abe was doing a mighty job, but conditions were abominable.

Then the plane suddenly seemed to drop off a cliff. Pen experienced something like a little tremor running through the plane. The machine lost a thousand feet of altitude in a matter of seconds. Pen gulped – belched – and found herself vomiting that day’s meal, seeing the solids flash over her shoulder and into the thick cloud behind. She wiped off her mouth, then her goggles. Some of the fog around had been from the spray of burned castor oil on her goggles. But there had been vomit there too, and something else, something red.

She put her hand to her head again and wiped carefully. Her hand came away with more red, little spatters of blood. And with the blood, little chips of red stone. She remembered the tremor that had hit the aircraft. Had she been struck by something? She kneaded her scalp. But her aviator’s brain had already switched its attention to something else. The altitude needle was still dropping, not so fast now, but still inching down. They had less than eight hundred feet of height now. In normal cirumstances, that was plenty, but right now they were in extreme danger. They’d just lost a thousand feet in a downdraft. If they did the same now, they’d smash into earth or ocean and be destroyed for sure.

A huge sheet of lightning filled the sky. The plane felt as though it was flying in the middle of the sheet. Lightning can’t harm a plane, but the experience was eerie.

The altitude needle was still dropping. Six hundred feet.

‘Abe? Abe?’

Pen yelled, knowing that Abe could never hear her. But even as she yelled, she guessed what had happened. It hadn’t been her blood she’d found, but Abe’s. Blood and stone that had spattered backwards from the front cockpit. Some heavy object must have been torn loose by the storm and must have struck Abe. Was he conscious or not? Dead or alive? There was no way to know, but one thing was certain, the plane was no longer under his control.

Pen swept into action. The rudder bar passed freely under her feet, but what she needed now wasn’t the rudder, but the stick. The socket was right there in front of her, but the stick itself had been moved out of the way, strapped to the side of the cockpit. Pen fought the tight canvas straps. Arnie Hueffer was the world’s best mechanic, but he was a man, and had a man’s completely unreasonable view of how tight to make a strap. Pen fought the buckle.

The altitude was still dropping – and the compass was swinging around and around. Too fast. The lightning had probably disabled the compass. She looked at the turn and banking indicators, which seemed to indicate a tilt – not that she was sure she could trust the instruments under the current circumstances.

Pen looked up from the controls. Instinctively, she knew the problem. They were in a spin. Out of control and circling down.

Four hundred feet.

Somehow, she didn’t know how, Pen freed the control stick. She jammed it in the socket. There was a bolt to thread in, a split pin to make it fast, but Pen had no time for that. Four hundred feet was an ugly enough height to attempt a spin recovery under any circumstances, but it was close to a death sentence when the control stick was out of position and the pilot was flying blind.

She reacted by instinct, by years of training.

She gave the plane a little forward stick to add airspeed, then gave the plane starboard rudder, opposite to the direction of spin. The big craft eased out of its deathly circle, but was continuing to race towards the ground. For one split second, Pen let the plane settle on its course, before pulling back on the stick. There was no view ahead. The altitude needle was so close to zero, that according to the needle she could have been driving along the highway. She pulled back harder, the big plane wrestling her for control. She could still see nothing, nothing but cloud.

And then she could.

Trees. Black topped trees, lashing furiously in the wind. Trees which would kill her if she touched them. She gave the plane full back stick, hoping and praying that it would respond.

126

Geddes had taken Roeder not to the Firm’s K Street offices, but to the offices of the Inland Revenue Service. Senator Paulet had met them in the lobby, pacing up and down and smoking, flicking cigarette ash into the potted palms. Geddes had made the briefest possible introduction before the three men had walked unannounced into Jim Carpenter’s fifth-floor office.

The conversation hadn’t lasted long.

‘We want McBride,’ said Roeder. ‘McBride and Bosse.’

‘Mr Geddes, Senator,’ said Carpenter, half-rising. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t –’

‘McBride. Where is he?’

‘Fourth floor, I’ll call downstairs. Now listen, gentlemen, why not –?’

‘He’s not at his desk. He hasn’t been in the office all day,’ said Geddes. ‘Nor Bosse.’

‘Really? They ought to be here. I don’t know where else they could be.’

‘Why not?’

It was Roeder who spoke. At times like this, he had a habit of speaking very softly. So quietly, you could hardly catch his words. That meant people had to bend forwards, listen up, even quiet the sounds of their own breath if they wanted to hear him. Roeder’s habit was a way of pointing up who had the power and who didn’t. And Roeder did, not Carpenter.

‘Sorry? What? Why not?’ Carpenter licked his lips. He didn’t know who Roeder was, but Senator Paulet was clearly minded to pay Roeder a lot of attention and Carpenter wasn’t inclined to argue. ‘I don’t know why not. They ought to be here.’

‘They report directly to you?’

‘Yes, McBride does.’

‘He’s working on a major case? One that is coming close to completion?’

‘Yes.’

‘What case? Who is the target?’

‘Hey, now. This investigation is confidential. I can’t…’

Roeder pulled back with a flick of irritation. Paulet turned away from the window and towards Carpenter. ‘You better believe you can, Carpenter. You want to hold on to your job, you better cooperate with a Senate investigation.’

‘Mr Roeder, you mean? He works – you work – on behalf of the Senate?’ Carpenter had turned to Roeder, but Paulet answered instead.

‘I’m a Senator, aren’t I? This is an investigation, isn’t it?’

‘Sure…’ Carpenter’s gaze wavered between the two men. There was something strange in the power structure. Paulet was the Senator, but it wasn’t him calling the shots. ‘Sure, OK.’

‘Well?’

‘The target of investigation? Right. Well, the fact is, McBride has played his cards pretty close to his chest. I’ve always insisted on confidentiality.’

Roeder leaned forwards. ‘You don’t know? You’re telling me you don’t know?’

‘You dumb bastard, Carpenter. How’s it gonna feel being fired and dumb?’

But Roeder was already heading for the door. If McBride wasn’t here, they’d have to find him.

127

A cottonfield in Georgia, ploughed up and red under the aching sun.

A little way to the south and east, there’s a storm coming in, but ahead of its violent battlements, there’s a small plane, red and white painted, racing clear.

And it
is
clear. The storm is moving more slowly now. The plane does a hundred miles every hour, that’s more than fifteen miles in ten minutes. After thirty minutes of excruciating flying, uncertain of her direction, struggling to hold height, and visibility not an inch beyond her propeller, Pen had seen a gap.

Or not a gap exactly. Not a clearing, not even a whitening in the cloud. But suddenly there had been some lessening in the darkness that surrounded her. Movement outstripping thought, she dived for the hole. The big plane had plunged through the air. For a split second she thought she had failed to escape – but then the gap appeared again: a glimpse of dirty soil far below and only a thin grey film of racing cloud in between. She plunged again for the opening and caught it.

With the storm massive over her head, she flew in the thin gap between earth and sky. But she had direction now. She could see where the landscape beyond shone gold and clear in the afternoon sun. She raced for the sunlight.

After putting enough clear distance between herself and the storm, Pen looked for a landing site and found one. She set the plane down, jumped from her cockpit and ran to the forward one.

‘Abe?’ she shouted, ‘Abe?’

The shape in the front of the plane stirred. Abe’s face turned to hers.

There was blood sheeting the front of his goggles and more blood oozing from the flap of his flying helmet. But he was grinning. In his hand he held a red clay roof tile, broken in two. The tile must have struck him over the ear, concussed him, knocked him out.

‘Abe, my love, you’re OK, are you? You’re fine?’

He nodded muzzily, but didn’t answer her, not properly.

‘Neat flying, kid.’

128

‘Haggerty.’

‘Ed, hi. This is my colleague, Jim Bosse. I don’t think you’ve met.’

The three men – the two taxmen and the judge – touched hands briefly. They were in an old three-storey warehouse that fronted the Potomac. The warehouse had been built for the river trade, which had shrivelled away when the railroads arrived. The ground floor was still in use as a tobacco warehouse, and the fumes of the leaves scented the entire building. Upstairs, there was pretty much nothing at all, just bare brick walls, wooden board floors and tall iron-framed windows. It looked like a place where the afternoon sunlight came to die. But the building had power. It had space. And it had privacy.

A line of wooden tables ran under a row of unscreened bulbs. At the head of the line there was a big stack of cardboard boxes. In the room, mostly seated at the tables, were half a dozen typists, four lawyers, an accountant, and Ed Styles, a judge of the District of Maryland Court.

Styles looked at the scene. His eyes had an odd way of taking hold of something then hanging on to it, no matter what. Right now, he hooked his gaze onto a secretary who was emptying and sorting one of the boxes. The secretary felt his gaze and her precise, orderly movements became flustered. McBride had known Styles since their college days together and he let the judge take his time. At last, the judge unhooked his gaze and transferred his attention to McBride and Bosse.

‘What in Pete’s name are you up to now?’

McBride didn’t answer directly. He’d already briefed Styles somewhat over the phone.

‘It’s been a long haul getting here,’ he said. ‘And not my work mostly.’

‘Tax evasion, huh?’

‘We gotta stick ’em with something, Ed.’

Jim Bosse, nodding, muttered in agreement.

The judge walked over to one of the cardboard cartons and took the lid off. The carton, like all the others, was full of papers. Styles picked the first document from the box. The document was headed ‘Powell Lambert Incorporated, IRS Statement March 6, 1922, Supplementary Material, Appendix IV.’ The judge flipped through the document quickly. He put the document back, carelessly, not getting the edges to line up with the ones beneath. McBride, who couldn’t tolerate disorder, put his hand into the box and straightened it.