Operation Stranglehold (14 page)

I slowed and watched for the Croswell driveway. I passed it when I came to it, then turned down the alley I’d used the night I met Julio and Consuelo at the warehouse. I pulled in beside the big overhead door, and we sat there with the car lights on. After a minute I blinked them off and on three times.

“He could be almost anywhere,” Walter said in a husky whisper.

“Keep that sombrero pulled down if there’s any chance he might know you,” I returned. “We don’t want—”

“There’s someone!” Lisa exclaimed.

A nondescript figure appeared in the headlights, dressed almost exactly as we were. “That’s him!” Walter said tensely. We got out of the car. The night watchman had just started to palaver when we one-twoed him from opposite sides. Walter caught him before he hit the ground.

“Turn out the car lights,” I said to Lisa. We wanted to attract no more attention. “No time-clock keys,” I observed to Walter as I searched the watchman for the warehouse key. “That’s all to the good. We’ll take him inside and stow him where they’ll find him in the morning.”

We left him on a blanket in the center of the floor where they couldn’t miss him. I took a look around the interior of the warehouse to see if there was anything we could use. I couldn’t find anything, so we went outside and locked up again. We got back in the car, and I drove slowly, lights out, through the Croswell property, following Walter’s directions.

The elongated wings of the Croswell air fleet loomed up in front of us, and I pulled in beside the smallest shape. “Show me that switchbox, Walter,” I said as we all got out of the car. It wasn’t a pitch-black night; there was light enough to see.

Hazel had gone directly to the Navion. “Earl!” she murmured from the wing-root alongside the door. “It’s locked!”

“Let me take a look at it,” I said. We changed positions on the wing-root. The lock was similar to those found on kids’ toolboxes; a joke. I started to get down to walk to the Renault to open the trunk and look for tools, then reconsidered. I fished out my handy-dandy, all-purpose, four-bladed pocket knife and worked the catch of the lock free in less than a minute.

We changed positions again and I boosted Hazel through the Navion’s door. She fumbled around in a compartment on the copilot’s side, and a quick glow of light announced that she’d found a flashlight. She muffled the beam with her fingers over the glassed-in bulb to diffuse the glare, then leaned down over the compartment again. She straightened up almost at once. “Charts!” she announced in relief, holding them up.

“That’s great, baby,” I said. “Go to school on this thing now. Dawn comes early, so we should probably leave here no later than three fifteen. That gives you a couple of hours before takeoff. Walter, show me that switchbox.”

When we found it, I didn’t need any more time to open it than with the door of the Navion. I gave the switch a quick on-and-off flick. The runway lights, mounted on eighteen-inch-high inverted cones, glowed for a second and then went out again. They had indicated to all of us the direction of the airstrip.

“Let’s push the plane out on the runway,” I said to Walter. He folded down the copilot’s seat and helped Lisa into the back while I kicked the chocks from under the wheels. We rolled the Navion out onto the strip, between the light standards, aiming it towards the end of the runway. I carried the chocks over and replaced them.

“You sit in front with Hazel while you’re working out the bugs in the flight plan,” I told Walter. I crawled into the back beside Lisa. From the expression on her pretty face, she had plenty of reservations about this type of airplane ride.

I looked over Hazel’s right shoulder. She was bent forward, examining switches and levers on the instrument panel in the glow of her hand-shielded flashlight. “How’s it look, baby?” I asked.

“I wish they’d standardize these things!” she said in an exasperated tone.

“You mean the wings don’t always go on the sides or the tail in the back?”

“You know what I mean! Except for grouping the flight instruments together on the panel, everything else is just scattered around wherever there’s space. Look at the switches for one lousy single-engine, five-passenger airplane. The thing is wired up like a miniature electrical substation.”

For a fact, what I could see of the instrument panel didn’t look too much like the Cessna. Walter’s body kept me from seeing the differences if any on the copilot’s side.

“Ahhhh, here it is!” Hazel exclaimed.

There was a click. but nothing miraculous happened.

“What was the important discovery?” I asked.

“The master switch. It’s like the main one on a fuse box. Now I’ve got power from the battery through the lines.” Hazel moved her hand to subsidiary switches. Lights glowed on the instruments imbedded in the black, padded dash. A bright dome light came on, and Hazel quickly turned it off. “Well, we know where that one is,” she said.

I settled back. I’d have said something comforting to Lisa if I could have thought of anything. I could have used some comforting myself. The closer we came to takeoff in this little air-bug, the chancier the whole thing seemed.

Time passed. I heard Hazel and Walter muttering at each other over the charts they had spread over their knees. I dozed off a couple of times only to wake up with a jerk, startled at the confined space.

A squishing sound roused me from another fitful doze. “What’s that?” I inquired.

“Priming the engine,” Hazel said. “We’re about ready.”

I looked at my watch, then tapped Walter on the shoulder. “Change places now,” I told him. He climbed down to the ground and I joined him. He stepped up on the wing-root again and scrambled into the back with Lisa. I looked in the door at Hazel. “You can’t take too long warming it up,” I warned her. There’s no such thing as a little bit of noise with an airplane engine.

“I know,” she said. She set the brakes, then pressed the starter button. The propellor started churning air and the starter whined uncommonly loud. The engine fired, then chugged painfully while Hazel jiggled the throttle. It caught suddenly, faded again, and finally picked up smoothly and steadily. The little plane vibrated roughly.

I dashed to the switchbox and flicked on the runway lights. Back at the plane, I kicked the chocks away, and despite the brakes, the Navion started to creep along the runway as Hazel poured power to it. I dived into the cabin, sorted myself out, and clamped on my seat belt.

Hazel advanced the throttle slowly. The engine revved up nicely until half-throttle position was reached. Then it backfired violently, causing stuttering vibrations before it picked up again. Even I could see that the oil and cylinder gauges showed the engine to be unready for reliable operation, but I touched Hazel’s elbow and pointed. A set of headlights had turned in from the highway and were heading toward the plane as it sat on the runway.

Hazel’s firm chin jutted. She shoved the throttle full forward and released the brake. The runway lights began to move by. Hazel gripped the control wheel with both hands. I groped for the handle so that I’d be able to pull up the wheels when we were airborne, as I always did in the Cessna, but the handle wasn’t there.

“I can’t find the wheel-up handle!” I shouted above the noise of the engine.

“Forget it for now!” Hazel shot back. “Can’t risk pulling the wrong one.”

The lights were going by faster, but we still didn’t have airspeed. I wondered uneasily if we were going to run out of runway. Hazel was hunched over, trying to keep the rolling plane straight between the lights. I could tell we were weaving by the way the lights ahead kept drifting back and forth across our nose. The rumble of the landing gear became less pronounced as we continued to pick up speed, but we still hadn’t lifted off.

I opened my mouth when I saw the lights end a perilously short distance ahead of us, but Hazel had seen it, too. She dragged back on the wheel, and the plane surged upward for a brief instant, then settled down again. She tried it again, and the wheels left the ground. At the same instant there was a heavy bang underneath, and the plane gave a shuddering lurch just before it became airborne.

I looked across at Hazel. “I drifted off the runway and hit one of those damn runway lights with the landing gear!” she yelled to me.

But we were climbing steadily.

“Better than catching a wingtip!” I shouted back jubilantly. “We’d have cartwheeled for forty-five miles.”

The jewellike lights of Madrid dropped away behind and to the left as we climbed into the star-studded night sky. Hazel throttled back at 4000 feet and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. The engine sound was perceptibly lower. “That’s what’s known as a cardiac arrest takeoff,” she said.

“It affects me more like involuntary diarrhea,” Walter said from the back seat.

“You two doing all right back there?” Hazel asked.

“Fine,” Walter said. “Fine.” He didn’t really sound like he meant it, though.

“Let’s see about that landing gear lever,” Hazel said. She felt around under the seats between us, then took my hand and guided it to a straight bar on the opposite side of where it was on the Cessna. “Pull up,” she said. I did, and a moment later there was a grinding crunch. “Oh-oh, the gear’s only halfway up. Must have messed it up when we hit the light. Would you believe a lame-duck landing?”

Then she leaned forward and studied the instrument panel intently. She caught my eye and pointed to the fuel gauge. There were two needles on it, one each for the separate tanks located in each wing. The right hand needle was almost at the empty mark. “The smash must have ruptured the right hand tank,” Hazel said soberly. “We’ve only got half our fuel.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we can’t miss our target by much because we won’t have fuel to search for it. The flight’s about an hour to an hour and a quarter, and that’s about the limit of one tank.”

Nobody seemed to feel it necessary to comment upon her analysis. The plane droned on through the darkness, although over in the east the first faint tinges of pink could be seen in the sky. On the ground, of course, it was still pitch black.

Hazel pointed ahead of us some time later. “I hope that’s water out there, Earl, but I always thought the Mediterranean was blue.”

I raised up to look over the nose of the plane. Ahead and below us was a gray mass that didn’t have the solid look of water. As the light strengthened in the eastern sky I could see that the cause of Hazel’s concern was a fog bank that stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see. At its near edge was not seacoast, but rocky-looking land.

I looked at Hazel. She shook her head grimly. “There’s holes in it, but we don’t have the gas to play hopscotch,” she said. “We can forget about landing near Málaga. We’ve got to get down on anything that’ll have us. I don’t think we’ve got more than another twenty minutes worth of gas.”

“Maybe it will clear at the water’s edge,” I said.

“Let’s hope so,” she answered, throttling back to extend our air-time. We flew over the gray mass for another ten minutes. “It looks like it extends clear to Africa,” Hazel said then.

Through a gap in the fog bank I caught a glimpse of blue water. Hazel saw it, too. She banked the plane to change course. If we had to sit down in water we didn’t want it to be too deep. Another hole in the fog density made me think it was breaking up, but would it be in time? It closed up immediately, but then another opened, and I saw water edging against a white blur. I jabbed Hazel’s arm. “Isn’t that a beach?”

She whipped the Navion around so the spot would be visible from her side, at the same time dropping down two thousand feet. Then she shook her head. “You had me excited, Horseman, but it won’t do. Take another look.”

The fog was definitely thinning, but what it revealed was far from helpful. I’d seen a beach, all right, but a very narrow one close to jagged-looking cliffs. Rough outcroppings peppered the stretch of sand visible, and clusters of oddly striped, boxlike assemblages dotted the rest of the limited open space. “What the hell are those things?” I demanded.

“Canvas cabanas,” Walter replied. He had been staring down at the beach through his window.

Hazel tapped the gas gauge significantly. It registered about the same as the ruptured one. “We’re going to have to ditch it, Earl,” she said.

“Take a quick pass inland and look for something flat,” I said.

Hazel eased the plane around again. She had reduced power; so we were barely maintaining altitude at 500 feet. Away from the shore the fog was much less thick, but it was darker too, obscuring details. The darkest patches of all must be trees, I thought.

Ahead of us the darkest patches were bisected by a series of oddly meandering lighter patches, both in narrow strips. I strained to see better. “Is that—?” Hazel began doubtfully.

“It’s a golf course!” Walter and I said together.

“You want to try for the nineteenth hole?” Hazel asked kiddingly.

“Put it down,” I said. “We may never get another chance as good.”

“But those are trees, Earl!”

“The dark patches are. Keep in the middle of a light patch.”

“Perhaps if we made one more swing we’d see something—”

The engine interrupted her. It coughed once, twice, then picked up again. If I knew anything about engines, we had two minutes air time left. “Check seat belts back there,” I said, turning to look into the back of the cabin. “We’re about to rejoin the pedestrians.”

Hazel had nosed the plane down again at the first engine miss. She moved a lever, dropping the wing flaps in preparation for landing. Then she lowered the landing gear. “If that wheel holds up,” she said hopefully, “we shouldn’t be spread over too much of the fairway.”

I sat there willing the plane over a bank of trees. We glided above them, but I swear by no more than six feet. The plane’s nose was lined up on a lighter strip. Hazel drew back on the throttle. Needlessly; the engine sputtered and quit. The propellor rotated stiffly for a few revolutions, then came to a stop in a vertical position.

“Brace yourselves!” Hazel yelled. Her voice seemed extraordinarily loud in the confined cabin space after the sudden cessation of engine noise. All of a sudden we were mere feet off the ground, streaking along at a rate that seemed incredible with no engine pulling us. I braced for the ground impact of wheels or landing-gear stubs.