Relentless (10 page)

Little shocks ran through the wings and the plane lurched: they were crossing the leading edge of the storm front again. Walker had one eye on the starboard wing: no sign of flames yet. “If anybody knows how to pray this might be a good time for it.”

Baraclough said, “If you're half the pilot you think you are you'll get us down in one piece.”

14

The sky was cut down the middle in two neat halves: black storm to the west, cobalt blue clarity to the east. In the cockpit it was cold and there was no more talk, only the gutteral growl of the port engine. The Apache had no more than five hundred feet and now there was a flicker of flame on the starboard nacelle. The wind whipped it away and for the moment it was gone.

He was looking for a flat stretch clear of boulders and uncut by gullies. The sun was behind the storm and there were no clear shadows; the bad light made it hard to judge the terrain. Walker's eyes whipped from point to point.

Flame burst from the nacelle again and Walker toggled the starboard extinguisher. He heard the hiss of foam; he didn't waste time looking. It wouldn't matter now anyway.

With all power concentrated on the port side the plane had a heavy tendency to yaw and tilt. The little airplane silhouette on the turn-and-bank indicator was all over the gauge. She still had a hundred and ten knots airspeed but even at that she wanted to corkscrew.

“Over there,” the Major breathed. “Flat as an ironing board.”

“Don't kid yourself. That's soft clay. But it'll have to do.” He had to turn counter to the plane's tendency to spiral right; she fought him heavily and they were all pitched violently around in the cabin.

“You're going to overshoot,” Baraclough hissed.

“Shut up. Gear down—
pull!
”

He could hardly budge the controls. His ears picked up the grind and thud of the landing gear going down. The straining port engine throbbed and chattered. “Brace,” he said.

The ground came up slowly and she was beginning to tilt, banking into the beginnings of a spiral; at seventy-five feet he shot his hand forward to the board, snapped off fuel and. ignition, punched the feathering button. Sudden silence: the rush of wind over the wings.
Hit this wrong and there'll be nothing left of us but a spot of grease
.

The greasewood clumps were bigger than they had looked from the air. Silent flames began to flicker from the engine again. He shoved the nose down, dead stick, fishtailing with the rudder to reduce speed, and he thought
Christ I'm coming in too fast
.… He had overshot the first hundred feet and there was a gully running across their path up ahead there and he shoved the nose down savagely and only yanked it up at the last instant, hauling the wheel back into the pit of his belly. If the nosewheel hit first she'd flip right over on her back and crumple them all to jelly. No sound at all now, then the cracking of twigs, the earth rushing past and under them, waiting for the ultimate sickening grab and flip.… He had a vision of the gray Portland runway swooping up above his head as the old DC-6B had crashed—and he almost closed his eyes.

… She hit on her main gear: hit and bounced, nose-high, tailskid flicking off a bush. For an instant she was airborne again and then she settled in, main wheels snagging thickly into the soft clay of the earth, bringing the nosewheel down with a blow that slammed them all forward against their seatbelts. Greasewood rushed toward them and around them and against them. The starboard nacelle was fully on fire now and the wheels snagged against roots and rocks, rivets sprang loose in the airframe, a branch scratched the length of the fuselage with a wicked chatter. The gully was dead ahead and coming toward them too fast and so Walker did a groundloop by hitting the right footbrake and putting her into a spin. She whipped around in twice her own length and tried to stand up on her wingtip and there was a moment when he knew they were going over backwards.… And she settled back down, right side up on her gear, with a jarring crash that crumpled the port oleo and left her sitting in her own dust cloud on one main wheel and one wingtip.

He sat suspended, breathing in and breathing out. Finally he reached for the extinguisher handle and started the pump. Foam smothered the flames on the starboard nacelle and covered the windows on that side like lather out of a pushbutton shaving-cream can.

Baraclough said hoarsely, “Holy Mother of God.”

15

He unstrapped his seat belt and made an inventory of his bones.

The Major said mildly, “That was a shitty landing, Mister.”

“Tough tit,” he said absurdly, and found himself grinning like an idiot. “Major, any landing you walk away from is a good landing.”

Baraclough stared at him out of bleak hooded eyes. “Walk away to where?”

CHAPTER

3

1

A town cop sat cross-legged in the corner analyzing the rope they'd picked up on the highway by the cut power lines. There was an array of objects on the floor around him. Clues.

Buck Stevens said, “Time's it?”

“Twenty to four,” Sam Watchman told him. About an hour and a half since they'd discovered the abandoned Buick.

“Christ.”

“Patience, white man.”

Stevens' rookie eyes flashed at him. “You don't care much.”

He thought of old Jasper Simalie. “I care. Just take it easy, Buck.”

Radio microphone wires were tangled on the cluttered desk. Watchman stood near the front window, leaning a crook'd elbow across the top of the brown metal filing cabinet. Jace Cunningham was slumped at his desk and when Stevens paced angrily across the office Cunningham rolled his thin face around a few inches, without moving the palm on which his jaw and cheek rested. Cunningham's freckled face was morose.

The radio speaker crackled—the Highway Patrol dispatcher in Kingman. Because of the approaching storm the signal was weak and pulsing. Watchman walked over to the desk and picked up a microphone, pushed its Send button and talked and listened. There was no news. The Civil Air Patrol had planes in the air in three states and there had been a report from Nellis AFB radar that a blip had appeared briefly and then disappeared again somewhere near the mountains eighty miles west of San Miguel. Probably an ionized cloud; the storm was playing hell with radars.

“That FBI agent get there yet?” the radio asked.

“Negative,” Watchman said.

“Keep a lookout for him. He should have landed in Kanab by now—he went up from Phoenix by Lear jet and he'll be coming down to San Miguel by helicopter.”

“I don't know what he thinks he can do that we haven't already done.”

“Just cooperate with him, Sam. We don't need to make enemies in that quarter.”

“Well I wasn't planning to put his nose out of joint.”

“Just do what he wants. Hold it—Ben just handed me this, we've got a make on that Buick. Belongs to a fellow named Sweeney runs a café up in Fredonia. He didn't even know it'd been swiped until Ben called him.”

A fat lot of help. “What about Baraclough?”

“Nothing from Washington. We've sent a telex to the Military Records people in St. Louis, maybe get a set of prints on him if he was ever in the arm service.”

It might come to that—the long slow hard way: trace Baraclough back, trace his known associates, gradually build a picture through the FBI's resources. But that could take months. Here it was hardly ninety minutes since the bandits had fled the bank.

“Ten four.”

Watchman put the mike down and went back to the window.

Stevens leveled a pugnacious finger at him. “We ought to be out there
doing
something.”

At the desk Cunningham picked up a pencil and played with it as obstinately as a bored child. Two of his deputies were still down at the bank taking statements. A lot of detail would pile up as a result but Watchman had a feeling it wouldn't lead to much. This bunch had been smart—they'd had it all worked out, every last detail except the bad luck of one of them picking up a speeding ticket. Just the same, they had to be
somewhere
—why hadn't anybody found that airplane yet and started tracking it? He scowled through the window at the Feed & Seed store across the street. Maybe they hadn't gone all that far, after all. Maybe they knew they'd be tracked if they stayed very long in the air. The whole thing might be a bluff: maybe they'd scratched out a landing strip on some ranch close by, flown fifteen minutes and landed, and hidden the plane in a barn. Maybe right now they were sitting in a ranch house within fifty miles of this spot, counting the loot and laughing up their sleeves.

Or it could be they'd decided to take a chance and flown right into that advancing blizzard. Not much chance of coming through that in one piece—but it did offer perfect concealment for an airplane, if you could keep it flying.…

Too many ifs, too many maybes. There was nothing for it but to wait, chained to the end of their prime umbilical, the radio-microphone cord.

The phone rang and Buck Stevens jerked. Cunningham picked up the receiver and grunted, listened, grunted again, and hung up. “They've got the phone lines fixed out east. Still working on the other one.”

It was a small blessing. Watchman said, “Mind if I use it to call Flag?”

“Official call?”

“Personal. I'll pay the charges.”

“Help 'self.” Cunningham got up and made his way around the desk. He moved with a heavy deliberation in his tread. Watchman walked past Buck Stevens, who had the look of a potentially enraged Brahma bull, and took Cunningham's place in the swivel chair. He picked up the phone and listened for a dial tone and when he had one he put his brown finger in the dial holes and rang the number.

“Mogollon Gift Shop, may I help you?”

Watchman's face changed with disappointment. “Hello, Phyllis, it's Sam.”

The woman's voice turned chilly. “Lisa's not here right now.”

He'd known that already. If Lisa had been there she'd have answered the phone herself. Her sister-in-law only filled in now and then at the shop. “She be back soon?”

“Well she went up the street to buy a sweater. I'm minding the store for her. I don't know how long she'll be.” The voice was cool with habitual disapproval.

Watchman said, “Tell her I probably won't make it back to Flag tonight. We've had a little ruction up here.…”

“I just heard about the robbery. On the radio.”

He didn't want to talk about that. Not with her. “I'll probably get in tomorrow sometime.”

“I'll tell Lisa you called.” There was a beat of silence and then Phyllis said politely, “Be careful, Sam,” and hung up. Phyllis was always polite and rarely said what she meant:
I hope you get your red hide in a wringer
. It was going to be an interesting clan to marry into.

It didn't matter. He could see Lisa clearly, her movements and poses and faces; he could hear the cadences of her voice and feel the warmth of their deep silences together, filled with confidences.

He put his hand in his pocket and closed the little velvet ring case in his fist.

Buck Stevens was writing the past hour up in his daybook. He was filling a lot of paper. In this business it was getting so you even had to make out reports on the reports you'd made out. Abruptly Stevens snapped the book shut and began to prowl again. “God
damn
it.”

“Take it easy now,” Jace Cunningham said. “Gentle down.” It didn't matter to Cunningham; he had all the patience in the world and the first thing he'd done was see to it that everybody realized it wasn't his fault the bank had been robbed. Cunningham was going along with middle-aged caution, piling up the years toward his pension and a little ticktack house in a retirement community down in southern Arizona.

They heard the helicopter coming and Watchman said, “You suppose they know where to land that thing?”

“All them Kanab pilots know the drill,” Cunningham said, reaching for his hat. “May as well get on up there.”

2

The FBI man emerged from the bubble canopy and ducked to walk under the decelerating blades. A good deal of light had drained out of the sky and a chilly wind blew across the bald hilltop; only midafternoon, but electric lights were already coming on at the smelter on the hillside and in the town below them. Buck Stevens had his hands rammed in his pockets and was stamping from foot to foot. He said out of the side of his mouth, “Look out now for that masked man. He looks like he carries silver bullets.”

“Dry up,” Watchman said.

The FBI man had a sleek tawny handsomeness, somewhat dated, as if he required a slick part in the center of his hair and a cutaway coat to be in his element. In fact he was packaged in the Bureau's regulation gray suit, handkerchief in breast pocket, white shirt and subdued necktie. His shoes were absolutely brand new: stepping out of the helicopter he had revealed shiny tan leather soles, hardly scratched.