The By-Pass Control (26 page)

Beside me Camille sneezed into her handkerchief, sniffling hard as she fought the cold the rain drenched her with. Her eyes were watery when she looked at me through a forced smile and said, “Can I help somehow?”

“Keep watching those side roads. I can’t see too well.”

“Where are we going?”

“The airport.”

She spotted an intersection and cleared me with a nod. “You found ... your friend?”

“Yeah, I found him. He was supposed to be dead.” I described the scene briefly to her and her shoulders shook with some inward revulsion. “I’m ... sorry. I’m not very ... good about these things.”

“Forget it. We’re almost on target.”

She took the handkerchief away from her mouth and wiped at her eyes. “Tiger ... I’m frightened.”

“Don’t be.”

“I can’t help it. Maybe it’s silly ... but I haven’t ... before I haven’t been part of anything....”

“You did fine, kid.”

“I wasn’t any help.... You’ll leave me here?” she asked.

“I have to.”

“But ...”

“Nobody’ll bother you. The action’s left this place. It’ll be in Leesville now.”

“Where?”

“A spot on the map in North Carolina near the ocean. The killer I want has a few hours’ start, but it won’t do any good.”

“Hours?”

“I have an F-51 waiting, honey. It can bore right through this weather ahead of any transportation he can pick up. Even if it only took him an hour to locate the right Leesville I can beat him in. The benefits of the Martin Grady organization.”

The wind shifted, bringing the crosshatch patterns of the sirens coming from my left as cars toured the main roads in their futile searching. Twice, I had to follow a sandy side road too close to the highway, but each time another strip heading south showed up and I took it, plowing past rough holes and shoulders that fell off into drainage ditches. All I had was a rough idea of my position, but it was enough. A white arrow nailed to a tree read AIRPORT, and I cut sharply, took the branch road and stayed on it until I reached the fringe of the field, then turned into the first opening, picked up a runway and laid on the gas as I tore down the paved surface to the hangar area.

Mason Armstrong was inside with a steaming cup of coffee, idly reading the NOTAMS posted on the wall when I walked in. He put the cup down and said, “Going somewhere?”

“What’s the weather?”

“N.G. They’re holding everything down. All commercial flights are canceled.”

“Can we move?”

Mason shrugged and grinned. “Not unless you want trouble.”

“A little more won’t matter,” I told him.

“A Piper Comanche took off a while ago. They raised hell in the office, but the pilot had a happy look like whatever he was paid was worth losing a license for.”

That cold, bleak feeling traveled up my back again. “You see who rode with him?”

“Just from the back. Tall skinny guy, but I didn’t see his face.”

I pulled the map from my pocket and opened it. “Check your sectionals. See if you can get down someplace close to here.” I pointed out the dot that was Leesville. Mason gave me a strange look, shrugged again and went over to his mapcase.

Down on the far end of the wall was a public phone. I dropped in a dime, gave the operator two numbers Rondine could be reached at and waited while she tried to connect me. Neither one answered. I gave her Ernie Bentley’s and waited again, knowing that if a call to Newark Control had gone in from Rondine it would reach him too.

Ernie was there, his voice choppy. I identified myself and said, “Rondine call?”

“Damn right, but she wouldn’t talk to Newark. Virgil contacted me but I couldn’t put him on you when I didn’t know where you were.”

“No message at all?”

“Nothing. She was pretty well shook up about something ... said it was absolutely imperative that you reach her, but she wouldn’t talk. All I gathered was that she found something. She said she’d be at the place you told her to stay at three this afternoon.”

“I just called there.”

“It isn’t three yet.”

“Okay, I’ll make the call. That’s the roominghouse you quartered me at. Get some of our people over there and have them stay put with her until I call in. But in any event, get her to talk, damn it. Hell broke loose down here.... I have the spot Agrounsky’s holed up in but Hoppes is ahead of me. Anything that can rush things, do.”

“Get him with the Bezex?”

“Sorry, buddy. This time your gimmick was no good.”

I hung up and turned back to the counter Mason had his maps spread out on. “What’s there?”

“Nothing but farmland. The nearest strip is ten miles away and all dirt. This weather would have turned it into a mudhole. Nothing’s getting in there.”

I pushed his maps toward him.
“We
are,” I said.

“You’re nuts, Tiger.”

“So I’ve been told. But we have no other choice. That Comanche was heading for there too.”

“He’s light enough to make it in the strip with that but we can’t.”

“Ever come in with your wheels up?”

“Not when I didn’t have to, friend. I hope you’re not thinking what I think you are.”

“You’ll be right if you do.”

“Look ... ,” he started.

I cut him short. “There won’t be a world worth flying in if we don’t.”

He took two seconds, no more. He had been around with us before. He saw my eyes and the set of my face and said, “What are we waiting for?”

I pulled out the keys to the car and went over to where Camille was sitting quietly, coughing into her handkerchief, and handed them to her. “Stay here an hour, honey, then check into a motel until it clears. There ought to be flights leaving in the morning to New York and you be on board. I’ll see you there.”

She turned her eyes up to me, a sad, tired expression emanating from their beautiful depths. “Will you really?” she asked with no inflection in her voice at all.

I reached out my hand. She took it and stood up facing me, her hands touching my waist with a gentle pressure. “Maybe,” I said.

Her smile had a little-girl quality. “No ... it’s over. My web ... wasn’t strong enough.” She let her smile brighten a little. “But I tried, you know.”

“I know.”

“And it was worth it. I only regret one thing.”

“What?”

“You didn’t get to paint me with the oiled feather.”

My mouth touched the wet spots on her cheeks and brushed away the dampness that clung to her eyelashes. Under my hands she began to tremble again and her lids half closed as she choked out a tiny sob I stifled with my lips, fanning the fire in her to immediate and violent life. Her mouth was a wild thing, sucking hungrily, tasting quickly to absorb the present and the future in the few seconds left to us, then I pushed her away when I didn’t want her to go at all.

“Be careful, Tiger.”

I nodded.

“Will you see me ... sometime, perhaps?”

“Sometime. It has to happen again.”

“Then I’ll weave a new web,” she smiled. “Be careful, darling.”

Behind me Mason said, “Ready, buddy?”

“Coming,” I told him.

 

The Mustang was chocked and tied on the ramp area at the end of a short line of private planes, its WWII fighter silhouette towering over the other craft, the menacing nose pointing skyward as if sniffing out an enemy hidden there.

Mason had pre-flighted the plane earlier, part of his normal routine, so we were ready for immediate take off barring any interference. The rain solved that problem nicely. The field was officially closed and anyone present was behind closed doors sipping coffee near electric heaters that took the bite out of the air.

I climbed in, strapped on the shoulder harness and seat belt while Mason pulled the chocks, then put on the headset and plugged it in while he was getting set. With the canopy closed and the rain obscuring us, no eyes caught the preparations until Mason flipped the starter switch and the four great paddle blades whipped into life.

No other sound in the world is like it. The twelve massive cylinders of the Merlin coughed once, then roared alive with a snarl of gratitude for being awakened, and as the radio suddenly took on life with the startled voice of the tower operator questioning us, Mason pulled out to the taxi strip, went downwind to the runway where he checked the mags, then kicked the tail around and gave the Mustang full take off power into the wind. He went on instruments fifty feet off the ground, broke out of traffic and started to climb, saying the things softly to himself all pilots say when they’re hoping there are no other chunks of metal in the sky ahead.

At thirty-five hundred feet we broke out into a bright, beautiful day that was like turning on a switch. Beneath us the rolling clouds that had been dangerously black from the inside took on the soft mounds and valleys of hilly country under a fresh snowfall. The shadow of the plane was encircled by a tight spectrum, a rainbow in full, that rode the crests and dipped into the recesses of the whiteness that capped the hell going on below.

Mason had estimated the time en route at an hour, forty minutes, carefully ignoring the fact of what we might find when he tried to let down. Those things he could think about when he got there. One bridge at a time. Somewhere up ahead another plane and other people were facing the same situation. Mason’s calculated voice told me the answers he had worked out on his computer. The Comanche’s start was a good one. There was a probability he could find a hole in the overcast and make the field. Maybe not. Leesville would have to be selected by dead reckoning and both planes would face the same difficulties. The best he could say was that it looked like a tie. We could overcome the time lag, but getting on the ground was going to be the big problem.

Time, always that time element, always pulling it up to the last impossible second. I closed my eyes and sat back, letting Mason do the worrying until the time came, and thought about Rondine.

What would she tell me she wouldn’t reveal to the others? What was so important? Her assignment was simple and could have given me a lead if the right answer hadn’t broken under my nose. She couldn’t have made contact with anyone out of the ordinary, but there was always that outside chance that it happened. The Soviets weren’t playing this one on a solo basis. Their teams were in there the way our own were, every man alerted, every possible phase of action being explored regardless of how remote it seemed. They had their own experts, their own killers ready to move when necessity demanded it and were forced to do what they had to do to win this crazy game.

Their philosophy for winning was better, too. It was the combat philosophy that the end justified the means and no matter how softly they talked or broadly they smiled in those conclaves at the U.N. they treated the play as war and geared their moves to fit it.

And now they found themselves right on the goal line because we had fumbled the ball through the fault of a player, and they were going to take every advantage of their position and try for the touchdown strategy even if they had to sacrifice their players to do it.

I was the safety man.

Great.

The wind was at their back and the dirt was in our eyes. We couldn’t afford to lose, but neither could they. In one sense, we could lose by winning, so if the laws of luck and circumstance turned back to us again it would all be a game played in front of a blindfolded audience. They’d only know the score if
they
won.

Twice, Mason let down through the overcast, feeling his way on the instruments. The second time he waved and pointed toward the ground and I saw the bleak rain-drenched expanse of a field, but there were no identifiable landmarks.

He switched to intercom and said, “The crosswind was stronger than I thought. We’re too far west.”

“What now?”

“We’ll turn east, pick up the ocean and beat up the coast until we locate ourselves. Ceiling here is too low to mess around in. Hundred feet tops and goes right down to the ground in places.”

“Let’s go then.”

It took another fifty minutes before he found a small summer resort nestled in the sand dunes and circled it, then, satisfied, picked a southwest heading and hugged the treetops at minimum altitude, tensed for anything that might jut up out of nowhere. Once he hurtled a power line, then followed it to a road, banked ten degrees away from it until he reached another highway and stayed with the dull white concrete ribbon several minutes before starting a slow turn to the left.

I looked down, following his glance. Directly below us was the outline of an airstrip, the tracks of three wheels gouged into it before slithering off to one side where the Comanche sat mired in the mud.

There was something else, too.

Face down beside it, half covered by a pool of water, was the body of a man.

Mason said, “They beat us, Tiger. That pilot knew the area too well.”

“Can you get in?”

“No chance in that slop. We’d do better grinding in on a paved road.”

“Any around?”

Mason shook his head. “None on the map. All dirt roads between here and Leesville.”

“Then let’s get as close as we can. Our boy would have gotten transportation one way or another. It’s ten miles between here and Leesville and he’s had the time to do it in. We haven’t.”

“Ever tried this before?” Mason asked me flatly.

“There’s always a first time for everything.”

“Sometimes it’s the last. It’s a good thing I’m a company man,” he said. “Damn.”

Leesville was only a cluster of stores, a gas station and a few houses at a crossroads. We went over it, flaps down at traffic pattern speed, looking for any cleared area that gave a reasonable chance of a landing, both of us trying to fight the restricted visibility that was turning the whole thing into a joke.