The Menacers (19 page)

I felt Carol stir uneasily beside me, listening to these details of my secret life, but for the moment she didn’t count. I was thinking of another woman I’d known, and of the fact that there are always people, on both sides, who have a thing about fraternizing with the enemy, even when it’s done with the most patriotic motives. So Vadya, without a thought of betraying her country, had died at the hands of her own people because a vicious, suspicious girl had misconstrued her behavior. Well, it wasn’t exactly a new idea. The possibility had occurred to me before, when I’d had time to think about what had happened.

Harsek spoke suddenly: “There is the island, below us. And there is the boat, on schedule.”

I looked down and saw the crescent-shaped island below, and a black power cruiser of reasonable size, the kind with a cockpit large enough to hold a couple of fishing chairs.

Harsek was still speaking: “Have no fear, Mrs. Lujan. You will be picked up almost before you have time to get wet.”

He was a little too reassuring, a little too soothing; and Priscilla was watching me too closely. There was something in her eyes that I did not understand; I could think of no personal, private reason for her to show so much hatred and triumph. Between agents, even agents of hostile nations, it was an unprofessional display of emotion.

She said, “Of course, it was not expected that Laura would die because of your trigger-happy behavior. I am not forgetting that, Helm! You killed her and you will pay for it. Very soon now you will pay!”

She was quite a pretty girl, but I saw again the funny dry look in her face that I’d once taken for unawakened virginity, but which I now realized was something quite different. I remembered a red-haired girl saying casually:
come to that, I’m not really sure she likes boys.
If true, it explained a number of things about Priscilla Decker, including the fact that her sexy getup had never seemed quite convincing, even when she was presumably luring me to her room for purposes of seduction.

It also explained the cold hatred in her eyes; and I realized suddenly that all this business of life-jackets and ditching-advice meant nothing where Carol and I were concerned, because we were not intended ever to leave the cabin. We were merely being kept docile and unresisting until the time came to slam the door in our faces—to the accompaniment of a few shots if necessary—and let us sink with the plane.

After all, we served no useful purpose. We’d merely been brought along because there had not been time to dispose of us neatly, earlier. Well, it was too bad. I’d hoped to get farther and learn more, but obviously this was, for the moment, the end of the line. Somehow I’d have to find another streetcar to take me the rest of the way.

I looked at the girl in the front seat, and gave a malicious laugh. “Sure,” I said deliberately. “Sure, I killed her. But what’s one bull dyke between friends? You can find another soon enough.”

I heard Carol gasp at my crudity—I was getting a little tired of that mechanical ingenue reaction—but I was really watching Priscilla, waiting for her response, and it came. Her face went totally white, her eyes narrowed dangerously, and her finger tightened on the trigger.

I yelled loudly, as if giving a prearranged signal: “All right, Carol!
Now!
”

Priscilla’s eyes wavered for an instant, giving me time to grab the gun and force it aside before it fired. The crash was very loud inside the cramped cabin.

Harsek did not move for a second or two. The bullet hole in the right side of his neck was clean and small, but the exit hole on the left side was ragged and much bigger, and there was blood and stuff splattered all over the window beside him.

Then he slumped forward against the controls, and the plane nosed down in a screaming dive towards the Sea of Cortez, five thousand feet below…

I had not, of course, intended for anything of the sort to happen. In fact, I would have been happy to remain a model prisoner as long as the plane was in the air. As I have indicated, they kind of scare me. On the other hand, the idea of plumbing the depths of the Gulf of California trapped inside a winged plexiglass-and-metal coffin scared me even more.

My spur-of-the-moment plan, if you could call it that, had merely involved distracting and disarming Priscilla while Harsek had his hands full with the plane, and then coming to terms with the Mad Czech somehow. It wouldn’t have been easy, since a man at the controls of an aircraft has certain advantages over a passenger with a pistol he’s obviously not going to shoot unless he wants to commit suicide for everybody on board. But it had seemed worth trying. However, when you start wrestling for firearms in a confined space, anything can happen…

The plane was still heading downwards at a considerable angle and steadily increasing speed. My impulse was to strap my seat belt tighter, close my eyes, and pray for heavenly intervention, but this seemed impractical, since my praying experience has been very limited, and some truly expert praying was obviously required here, if anything was to be accomplished that way.

I remembered reading, or being told, that modern light planes are pretty good at flying themselves out of trouble if you give them a chance. I drew a long breath, unfastened my belt, leaned forward, and pulled the dead man back into his seat.

Carol was clutching at my coat and making some panicky noises, to which I paid no attention. I’d already determined that she couldn’t fly. Priscilla, bracing herself stiff-armed between the seat and the instrument panel, was staring at Harsek wide-eyed and shocked, as if waiting for him to come back to life and take over again.

It was fairly obvious that she didn’t know what to do or she’d have started doing it already, but I shouted: “Can you fly?”

Her face turned towards me. “What?”

“Can you handle this plane?”

She shook her head convulsively. “No. No, of course not. Can’t you? My God, what are we going to do?”

Still hugging Harsek with one arm, I turned the gun around and shot her. She stared at me blankly, uncomprehending. Then she died and fell back against the right hand door. I thought that was rather nice of her. At least she’d had the decency to stay off the controls.

Carol was yanking at me again. “Matt, have you gone utterly
mad—
”

I was studying the instrument panel for inspiration. I’d seen quite a few of them on one job and another, and I’d whiled away the long hours of various secret flights trying to figure out which dial meant what; sometimes I’d even asked a silly question or two. Now was obviously the time to fuse all those scattered scraps of aeronautical information into real understanding.

“Matt—”

I said without turning my head: “Get her out of here.”

“What?”

“You heard me,” I snapped. “Open the door and dump her. Then give me a hand with this one—”

“But you
shot
her!”

I looked aside irritably. “For God’s sake, Carol! We’ve got a dead man and an out-of-control airplane on our hands! Do you want us to keep a dangerous enemy agent around for a pet, as well? Sure I shot her. What else could I do with her? If I hadn’t, she’d have loused us up the minute she stopped being scared, and I’d most likely have been too busy to stop her. Now, for the love of Christ, let’s dump the stiffs so I can maybe do something with this berserk machine before it flies us straight into the drink!”

There followed a rather ghoulish performance that had some elements of what I think is known as black comedy. The door of an airplane traveling at well over a hundred miles per hour doesn’t open easily, and a dead body isn’t very maneuverable under the best of circumstances. I had to leave Harsek to give Carol a hand, and even then we might not have made it if the plane hadn’t obligingly executed a kind of sideways flip that released the air pressure for a moment, almost dumping out live and dead indiscriminately. I hauled Carol back inside and latched the door.

“That’s enough of that!” I panted. “One down and one to go. Climb up front there and give me some room.” I helped her over the seats. “Good girl! Now we’ll snake this one back here instead of trying to… What’s the matter?”

Carol was staring at her hands, which had blood on them. It happens when you’re dealing with bodies freshly dead of gunshot wounds, but apparently this hadn’t occurred to her until now. Her glance shifted, horror-struck, from the blood on her hands to the smears on her sweater and life-jacket. Her face turned a pale greenish color. She gulped and looked at Harsek in a sick way.

“I… I can’t. Matt, I just can’t bear to touch him!”

Sometimes I have serious doubts that nice girls are here to stay. They’re delightful to have around in times of noncrisis, but their survival value is open to question. They always seem to have some sentimental or fastidious reason for not doing whatever’s necessary to keep on living. I found myself remembering my former wife, another nice girl who’d been a total loss when things got messy.

I said sharply, “Snap out of it! You can puke later, Angel. Right now, just grab hold of the bloody cadaver, bravely and firmly, and give it a boost aft so I can get to those controls!”

It worked. It angered her enough so that she forgot her incipient nausea, temporarily at least; and a moment later I was in the driver’s seat, for whatever good it might do me. My surroundings looked, in some respects, like rush hour at the butcher shop, but that was irrelevant.

What was important was that the plane’s nose was down again and I was looking through the windshield at water ahead, close enough that I could see detail in the white crests of the waves. The altimeter read less than a thousand feet, dropping. I took hold of the gadget between my knees and pulled it towards me. The plane immediately made a surging, roller coaster rush skyward, and started to fall over on its side.

I hastily shoved the stick or yoke or whatever they call it back where it had been and let go of it. The motors were laboring uncertainly. I started to reach for the throttles and pulled my hand back: I didn’t really know whether we needed more power or less. The plane was flopping around in the sky like a wounded duck, but I left it alone, and presently it straightened itself out and started flying in a more reasonable manner. I took hold of the controls again, this time using only thumbs and forefingers, very gently; and I drew the thing back to me a delicate fraction of an inch at a time…

The important thing, obviously, was to get the damn bird a safe distance up into the sky so I’d have a little room to make mistakes in. Gradually, I got things sorted out after a fashion—rudder, elevator, ailerons and the works.

The altimeter began to show a profit instead of a loss. I was actually flying the machine, more or less, or it was flying me. Anyway, it began to look as if we might remain airborne for a while, and it was time to decide what to do next.

I looked around. It was full daylight now, and for a startled moment I could see nothing but water below. I had a panicky feeling we might be lost out over the Pacific, heading for China, or rather, since we still seemed to be aimed generally southwards, South America and the Antarctic. Then I saw some shadowy dots of land far behind on the right quarter. The next project, obviously, was to get our flying machine headed back that way.

It took some experimentation since a plane, I quickly learned, can’t just be steered where you want it to go, it’s got to be banked as well. Furthermore, the rudder pedals worked backwards from the way they had on the Flexible Flyer racing sled I’d used as a boy—a detail that tended to confuse me in moments of stress.

At last we were headed kind of northwest, however, and I discovered some knobs and cranks—the ones Harsek had used right after takeoff—that let me adjust things so the aircraft was flying itself without my heavy-handed guidance. Early during all these efforts, I had been aware of my passenger being violently ill, but there had been nothing I could do about it, so I’d left her to her own devices. Now she spoke, steadily enough but a little apologetically:

“Aren’t you… aren’t you steering the wrong way, Matt? The mainland is east of us, isn’t it? Shouldn’t we be heading into the sun, rather than away from it?”

I said, “I’ve lost nothing on the mainland, doll. I’m looking for a crescent-shaped island and a boat about forty feet long.”

“But—”

I sighed patiently. “Carol, we came on this ride to learn something, didn’t we? At least I did. There’s a place I’m supposed to find. You heard the girl. Something’s planned for the next day or two. A flaming horror, a mass catastrophe connected with this flying saucer hoax, she indicated, to be framed on the U.S. I’ve got to know where.”

“But she’s dead and so is the man—”

“The people on that boat aren’t dead, are they? If I can get us down somewhere near them, they’ll take us aboard, if only to find out what happened up here. And then, presumably, they’ll head for wherever the action is to be, and that’s the place I want to go.” I made a wry face. “Priscilla gave me a hint, but it was only a hint. I can’t afford to gamble when there’s a chance of making sure.”

“Sure? What’s sure about it? You don’t know how to land an airplane, do you? You’ve got to find an airport; you’ve got to have somebody telling you—”

“In Spanish?” I said. “How many flying terms do I know in Spanish? How many do I know in English? Hell, I’d fly us into the ground while I was trying to figure out what the guy was saying. Anyway, I’m doing all right for an instant aviator, aren’t I? I’ll get us down somehow.”

“And what if you kill us? How sure is that?” She drew a long breath. “Oh, all right, darling. I suppose you have to try. What can I do to help?”

I glanced at her. I guess I’d forgotten that while nice girls often have weak stomachs, there’s generally nothing fundamentally wrong with their courage. She gave me a funny, wry little smile as if she knew exactly what I was thinking.

“I… I’m sorry I disgraced myself,” she said. “I’m not used to blood, Matt.”

“Sure.”

“Tell me what to do.”

I shrugged. “Since you ask, our friend in back should have at least three guns on him: a Luger, a Browning, and another pocket pistol belonging to our friend Solana. Priscilla handed them over to him, back there on the highway. Get them, and then strap him in. I’ll get us down, but I won’t say how. He’s a big guy and we don’t want him to come flying through the cabin when we hit.”