They walked another fifty feet to the truck, finding themselves in some kind of depression in the land, so that down here the white-walled prison was not visible.
“You drive,” said Bob.
Russ climbed into the truck, parked a few feet away.
“Shall we head back up to U.S. 40?”
“Hell no,” said Bob, looking at a map. “We’ll go back the scenic way. I got some thinking to do. We’ll head down to Hawthorne and then over to Talihina. There’s a real pretty road down that way, takes us back over the mountains to Blue Eye. The Taliblue Trail. You’ll like it. We’ll be home for supper.”
Around noon, Red filed a flight plan that set him on a course of 240 degrees south-southwest toward Oklahoma City. It took him another half an hour to fuel up the Cessna 425 Conquest and ten minutes after that for a takeoff clearance, as American Eagle’s 12:45 P.M. from Dallas into Fort Smith was landing. But at last he was airborne.
The plane surged upward as Red eased the stick back, seemed to catch a little thermopane and rushed even faster skyward. He leveled out at 7,000 feet, well below commercial traffic patterns, scudded southwest toward the green mounds on the horizon that were the Ouachitas. The first leg all twenty minutes’ worth, was easy flying; beneath him the land was a blue haze, rolling and vague, without true detail, not particularly revealing.
He loved to fly and was quite a good pilot: perfect solitude, the fascinations of the intricate machine that held him aloft with its clever compromise of dynamic forces and its endless stream of numerical data. Yet at the same time, as mechanistic an equilibrium as it was, there was still the wildness of the unpredictable, the sense of being a true master of one’s fate. Also, it was for rich people mainly, and Red liked that quite a bit.
When he got ten miles north of Blue Eye, he dropped down to 4,000 feet and the details sharpened considerably; he had no problem picking up the parallel roads of 270 and 88 as they plunged westward from just above Blue Eye, which itself looked like a scatter of dominoes, blocks, cards and toys against the roll of the earth. As he flew west, the town disappeared and below him were just two roads cutting across the rolling mountains and valleys. Traffic on both of them was very light.
He leaned to his radio console, switched to the security mode in the digital encryption system and keyed in the code he’d selected from the 720 quadrillion possibilities, the same code selected in de la Rivera’s radio on the ground; the radio was now secure from intercept.
He picked up the microphone, punched the send button and said, “Yeah, this is Air, come in, please.”
The radio fizzed and crackled and then de la Rivera’s slightly Hispanic tones came back at him.
“Yes, I have you loud and clear.”
“That extender is working nicely,” said Red, “I have you loud and clear. No trouble installing it?”
“No sir. One of the boys did army commo.”
“Good. Position report, please.”
“Ah, I have you visually, you just buzzed my position. I’m at the wayside just inside Oklahoma. I got a car with three men with me. I got my other two units about twenty-five miles ahead, right where 259 cuts across 1.”
“What units are those?”
“We’re just calling them Alpha and Baker. My car here is Charlie, I’m Mike.”
“Alpha and Baker, you there?”
“Yes sir,” came a voice.
“You got me visually?”
“I see you on the horizon. You’re still a few miles away.”
“Okay, I’m going to buzz to Talihina and back. That’s where I’ll be. When I get a visual, I’ll confirm. Then I’ll trail him into your range. When you see me, you’ll know he’s coming.”
“Yes sir,” came the replies.
Red dropped down a thousand feet. At his altitude, the cars on the mountain road were easily recognizable by type and color, though not by make. He was looking for a green pickup with one unpainted fender. Suppose he found one and directed it into the ambush and it was some Mexican family traveling from bean harvest to bean harvest or some group of tender young college girls going to the Little Rock Pearl Jam concert? He had a set of Zeiss 10×50 binoculars, the finest that could be found in Fort Smith on a crash basis, and from 3,000 feet up he found he could get a very solid up-close and personal view of the vehicle. There wouldn’t be any mistakes.
He flew onward, enjoying the freedom and the sense of the hunt. Off far to the left and a thousand feet higher, he made out another flight, a Lear, obviously headed south to Dallas; there was no other air traffic. The road below was equally empty, though he made out a station wagon pulling tourists along the vividly beautiful road as it rolled along the crest of the green mountains, one of those ludicrous camper things, a couple of private automobiles and one black and white Oklahoma Smokey pulled off by the side of the road, on watch for speeders or merely dozing in the sun. He switched from his secure channel to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol frequency and heard nothing except the odd exchange between troopers somewhere in the area, nothing of note.
He passed over the 259 crossroads and the possibility of contact drew him ever lower, down to 2,500 feet. Maybe too low; he didn’t need FAA complaints against his license. But there were no other flights in view. The road beneath him, bright in the afternoon sun, was a ribbon. Onward he flew, all the way to Talihina, spotting nothing.
He veered and headed back along the highway, now having risen to 4,000 feet, and raced back toward the ambush kill zone. He could monitor the road just in case he’d missed something, but there were no green trucks.
“Okay, boys,” he said into the radio when he was in range, “so far I got nothing. You all okay?”
“We’re fine,” said de la Rivera.
“No police interest or anything?”
“Haven’t seen a cop all day, sir.”
He glanced at his Rolex. It was 3:30 by this time. Where the hell were they? It was beginning to look like a wash. He’d guessed wrong.
He used some left rudder, then dropped back down to 2,000 feet and began to zoom up the road, eyes peeled. The traffic had really thinned out by now. It wasn’t—
Green vehicle.
He dropped a little lower.
Pickup truck.
He overflew it and got on the radio.
“I got a possible. Got a possible.”
“Copy you, Air.”
“Okay, let me just check this out.”
He banked wide to the left, left wingtip falling, right rising, the world going giddily topsy-turvy as the two big engines drove the props through the air, and came around again level-out about a half mile to the right of the road and saw the truck ahead of him. He reached for the throttles, eased them back; the sound of engines racing could be heard for several miles and he didn’t want to alert them at all.
Gradually, he gained on them, trying not to force it or rush or anything.
When at last he was nearly parallel, he set the plane on autopilot and drew the binoculars into position and diddled with focus.
Green pickup. Unpainted left front fender. Dodge.
Got you, he thought, exultant.
He applied a touch of right rudder, a little aileron, and gently banked to the right, settling on a course of 180 degrees due south. He held the course for one minute, loafing at eighty knots, looking innocent, putting distance between himself and the target. Two minutes. He drummed his fingers on his thighs. Two minutes forty seconds. Red could take no more. He quickly reset the trim tabs, increased the pitch and pushed the throttles forward.
As the revs came up he executed a hard climbing turn to the left, straining for altitude. He was sweating.
“Air to Mike, Air to Mike. Are you there, are you there?” he said, hoping he was still in range.
“Yes sir,” said de la Rivera.
“I have them confirmed, about twenty miles west of the 259 cutoff. They’re coming your way. ETA 3:55 P.M.”
“Here’s something I thought of,” said Russ. “A theory.
Let me just throw it out.”
Bob said nothing, just waited. They were cruising along the Taliblue Trail, a two-lane blacktop that ran along the crest of the Ouachitas and had just blown by the crossroads with Oklahoma 259. Ahead of them stretched empty road, gritty and dusty from poor upkeep here in Oklahoma. On either side, the mountain fell away, not a cliff but a steep slope; beyond, on either side, the valleys were deep and green; to the right, he could see the lesser ranges of the Ouachitas, the Jack Forks, the Kiamichis, the Winding Stairs. He heard something somewhere, on the far edge of his consciousness, that he couldn’t quite place. He ignored it.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“In the movies or in books, there’s no such thing as coincidence. No one’s going to pay to see or read about some guy who just finds something or something just happens to him.”
“Forrest Gump shows that one’s full of shit.”
“No, no, I mean normally. Forrest Gump being an exception to the rules. You can’t—”
“Russ, I was just joking. Don’t you got no sense of humor anywhere?”
“Well,” said Russ, thinking, No, no, he probably didn’t. “Anyhow, in real life, however absurd and irrational, coincidence occasionally happens. And I can’t help but notice you have an army night-shooting program that’s trying to develop tactics around night-vision devices in roughly the same area as the one where your father got hit at night. Maybe it’s not a conspiracy; maybe it’s one of those insane, ridiculous coincidences.”
“You saying Forrest Gump did it?” Bob laughed.
Russ breathed out his frustration.
“Now, suppose,” he continued, “they had a patrol or something and they got lost, got turned around. And they’re off post: and they watch this gunfight through the infrared scope where the details aren’t clear. They watch as one guy kills two others. And then he gets in a car; he’s going to get away. Maybe the sniper can’t help himself: he pulls the trigger and that’s that.”
“Won’t work,” Bob said. “He was in a tree. Had to be, otherwise he couldn’t have seen through the corn. And there wouldn’t have been that slight oval shape to the bullet hole.”
Russ nodded. He thought, Goddammit! He thinks he’s so smart!
“Okay, okay. Now, maybe, well, you know the attitudes were different then, there was very little press scrutiny, they all thought they were on some kind of crusade against the communists. They did test atom bomb radiation, biological warfare, LSD and some other stuff on unwary civilians. Maybe it was some test: they had to shoot at a human target. So they’re on the track of Jimmy and Bub because they know those’re clean kills without problems. But there’s a terrible mistake and your father’s the one that gets hit.”
“Not bad,” said Bob after a pause, “not bad. Wrong, but not bad.”
“Why wrong?”
“I’ll tell you why. You remember that short little guy in the photograph, the one Preece couldn’t remember?”
“Yeah.”
“Couldn’t remember, my ass. I knew that little prick. And anybody who knew him would remember him.”
“Who was he?”
“His name was Frenchy Short. He was CIA all the way. A cowboy. On my second tour I was detached TDY to lead recon teams in liaison with the Agency up near Cambodia. The Frenchman was hanging around; it was an outfit called SOG, Studies and Observation Groups. Lots of very nasty boys. Frenchy had a little war going on in Cambodia with some mercenary Chinese called the Nung and a marine officer named Chardy as the XO. Frenchy thought he was Lawrence of Cambodia. He was one of those goddamned screwball showboat guys, the rules didn’t apply to him, he was bigger than the rules, he was bigger than the service or the Agency. Hell, he was bigger than the fucking war. He just happened to work for us, but he’d have worked for anybody. It was the work he loved, not no cause. The point is, I put out the question earlier: who could put together the kind of operation fast and on the fly that connected the criminal world, Jimmy Pye, a well-planned robbery, a daring escape, and brought it all off with my father getting whacked as the end result and nobody knowing any better? Well, maybe two or three men in the world. One of them being Frenchy Short. That was his goddamned specialty. And there’s one other thing.”
“Yeah?”
“When I DEROSed out of SOG and headed back to the world, Frenchy drew me aside and asked me to ship him five hundred rounds of civilian ammunition.”
“I don’t—”
“He carried a Colt automatic in a tanker’s shoulder holster over his tiger suit. I just assumed it was a .45, same as mine. No, it was a .38 Super. He told me how he loved the .38 Super, it had so much less recoil than a .45 for the same killing power, plus extra rounds in the mag. He called it a pro’s gun.”
“Jesus,” said Russ.
“It’s more than—”
But Bob stopped.
A plane. That was it. The sound of an airplane engine, steady, not increasing in speed, just low enough and far enough away, almost a fly’s buzz.
“Go on,” said Russ.
“Just shut up,” Bob said.
“What is—”
“Don’t look around, don’t speed up, don’t slow down, you just stay very calm now,” Bob said.
He himself didn’t look around. Instead, he closed his eyes and listened, trying hard to isolate the airplane engine from the roar of the truck, the buffeting of the wind, the vibrations of the road. In time, he had it.
Very slowly he turned his head, yawning languidly as he went along.
Off a mile on the right, a white twin-engine job, maybe a Cessna. Those babies went 240 miles per hour. Either there was a terrific headwind howling out of the east, or the pilot was hovering right at the stall speed to stay roughly parallel and in the same speed zone with the truck.
“It’s more than coincidence,” Bob said, “that you got the one man in America there who could do such a thing and that he’s a great believer in the .38 Super, just what Jimmy was shooting. I smell Frenchy all over it. I think Frenchy threw it together, real smart, very fast, a fucking Agency home run the whole way. Not for the Agency, maybe, but for someone else. Someone powerful, that I guarantee you.”
He glanced quickly out the window. The plane was turning lazily away.
“Yeah, well—it’s okay? I mean, you tensed up there, now you’re relaxed. Everything’s okay, right?”
“Oh, every goddamn thing’s just superfine,” said Bob, yawning again, “except of course we are about to git ambushed.”
“Air to Alpha and Baker,” said Red, holding steady at 2,500 feet, running east, loafing again, dangerously near stall.
“Alpha here,” came a voice.
“What about Baker?”
“Oh, yeah, uh, I’m here too. I figured he said he was here, you’d know I was here.”
“Forget figuring. Tell me exactly what I ask you. Got that?”
“Yes sir,” said Baker contritely.
“Okay, I want you in pursuit. He’s about four miles ahead of you, traveling around fifty miles an hour. No Smokeys, no other traffic on the road. You go into maximum pursuit. But I am watching you, and on my signal you drop down to fifty-five. I don’t want him seeing you move superfast, do you read?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then step on it, goddammit.”
“Yes sir.”
“You hang steady there, Mike and Charlie. No need you racing anywhere, they are coming to you. I see intercept in about four minutes. I’m going to let Alpha and Baker close in, then I’ll bring you and Baker into play, Mike. You read?”
“Yes sir.”
He looked back along the road and out of the distance watched as two large sedans roared along the highway at over a hundred miles an hour, trailing dust and closing fast with the much slower moving truck.
“Oh, I smell blood. I smell the kill. It’s looking very good. Alpha, I see you and your buddy closing. You just keep closing, you’re getting close, okay now, slow way down. Mike, you and Charlie
now, okay, you start moving out, nice gentle pace, about fifty-five, we are two minutes away, I got you both in play.”
Someone inadvertently held a mike button down and Red heard strange things over the radio—some harsh tense scraping and what sounded like someone systematically turning a television set on and off. Then he realized: that was the dry breathing of men about to go into a shooting war and they were cocking and locking their weapons for it.
Words poured out of Russ as if he’d lost control of them, and he could not control their tone: they sounded high, tinny, almost girlish.
“Should we stop?” he moaned. “Should we pull off and call the police? Is there a turnoff? Should we—”
“You just sit tight, don’t speed up, don’t slow down. We got two cars behind us. I bet we got some traffic ahead of us. And we got a plane off on the right coordinating it. We are about to get bounced and bounced hard.”
Russ saw Bob shimmy in the seat, but he could tell he was reaching to get something behind the seat without disturbing his upright profile. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw two cars appear from behind a bend in the road.
“Here’s the first and only rule,” said Bob steadily. “Cover, not concealment. I want you out of the truck with the front wheel well and the engine block between you and them. Their rounds will tear right through the truck and get to you otherwise.”
Russ’s mind became a cascade of silvery bubbles; he fought to breathe. His heart weighed a ton and was banging out of control. There was no air.
“I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m so scared.”
“You’ll be all right,” Bob said calmly. “We’re in better shape than you think. They have men and they think they have surprise, but we’ve got the edge. The way out of this is the way out of any scrape: we hit ’em so hard so fast with so much stuff they wish they chose another line of work.”
Ahead, one and then a second vehicle emerged from the shimmery mirage. The first was another pickup, black and beat-up, and behind it, keeping a steady rate fifty yards behind, another sedan. Russ checked the rearview: the two cars were drawing closer, but not speeding wildly. He made out four big profiles, sitting rigidly in the lead car.