Relentless (5 page)

He gave it a little aileron and a little rudder—gingerly, because he was flying on the deck, holding less than two hundred feet above the hilltops. The mountain range ran along to starboard, parallel to his course, and he. was staying below it because of the radar at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.

He came around to a heading of Three Zero Five magnetic, vectoring north of Las Vegas VOR. The storm ahead of him was a black cascade, wall-to-wall violence. Under him cool air settled into gully shadows and hot air came rising explosively from the sunwhacked hilltops, and the ground turbulence kept the twin Apache bouncing around.

He had a broad-band receiver mounted below the dashboard, designed to detect radar transmissions, and he was picking up the jiggles of the flicking Nellis scanner circuit. But the mountains above him to starboard would absorb the signals and hide him in the scanner's ground-return. They hadn't picked him up; if they had, he would have seen a change in the interval of the signal—it would have gone to a quicker pattern, a fast localized sweep, but it wasn't doing that. The radar didn't worry him. The weather did. He had never been a white-knuckle flier but he had a survivor's respect for enemy weather and he wasn't confident of the aging Piper's capacity for punishment.

The Major was watching him and when Walker looked at him the Major smiled very slightly with his mouth. The opaque eyes blocked all argument and inquiry, turned all objections back, as effectively as if they had been the eyes of a dead man.

The Major said, “We don't have enough gas to go around it.”

Walker considered that. His eyes swept the panel. The quivering flow meters, manifold pressures, temperatures. The gauges stood half-full; there had been no place to refuel since take-off this morning. With the weight of five passengers and the money she was running on rich mixtures and she didn't have another four hundred miles in her tanks; they had the Beechcraft waiting on a dirt landing strip northwest of Reno and that was something more than three hundred miles from here in a straight line. To go around the storm would eat up another hundred and twenty miles and they just didn't have it. The Major's eyes didn't miss a thing.

Walker said, “Then we won't make it anyway. You know how much gas you eat up bucking a storm.”

“The winds are counterclockwise. Stay on the north side of the storm and you'll have a tail wind.”

“More like a sixty-mile gale. It'll shake this crate to pieces.”

The Major's eyes just stood against him, like a knife blade—motionless but prepared to cut.

He had to think. Behind him in the passenger seats the others were talking loudly, keyed up, nervy. Eddie Burt was making exultant noises and Baraclough was saying in his flat nasal voice, “No need to smack your lips so loud,” but laughing off-key with excitement. The Piper 235 had seats for six, including pilot, and there were five men in it; the sixth seat held the duffel bags. Too cramped in here to count it but Baraclough had a good eye and had estimated it at a minimum of nine hundred thousand dollars. About ten cubic feet of tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds. Walker had hefted the four duffel bags when they'd put them aboard and the things weighed maybe sixty pounds each.

Baraclough was saying in a travelogue-narrator voice, “And now, happier but wearier, we bid a warm farewell to the home of the jolly green swag.…”

“Jesus, will you please shut up?” Jack Hanratty was in a fever of terror. He couldn't take heights, airplanes terrified him, and the Major was angry with him—back there in the car for a minute Walker had thought the Major was going to kill Hanratty for shotgunning the fat old Indian bank guard. The Major could have done it without working up a sweat; the Major was versed in a dozen methods of killing a man barehanded and silently and very quickly.

When somebody got killed during the commission of a felony all parties to the felony were automatically and equally guilty of first-degree murder. That was the felony-murder statute. Hanratty and his shotgun. The son of a bitch just had to carry that shotgun. Walker hadn't even had a gun but Hanratty had made a murderer out of him. It was no wonder Hanratty was shaking: all five of them had got sucked into this mess by his nervous trigger finger.

The Major had drummed it into them time and time again while they were setting up the score.
Arizona still has the death penalty. I don't want anybody killed. I don't even want anybody bruised. They'll forget the money but there's no statute of limitations on murder.

Hanratty and his fucking shotgun.

The fat old Indian guard had sneezed.

Sneezed.

It was the stupid little things that got you every time.

2

Walker had a tooth with a hole in it. Food got stuck there and made him suck on the tooth. He should have gone to a dentist weeks ago.

He glanced at the ASI and saw the airspeed was down to 140 in the thinning dead air ahead of the storm front. He gave the throttles a boost, up to seventy percent of power, got the engines in synch and adjusted the trim tabs. “Look, we can turn north, go up to Ely or Elko and set down. We could steal another plane there or maybe even a car.”

“No.”

“Why the hell not? They'll get it figured out we used a plane. They'll start an air search. If we switch to a car they won't be looking for us. Why the hell not?”

“Because I'm telling you. Because it's all worked out down to the button. We're not going to start changing the plan now,” the Major said.

The engines made a harsh drone and there was a loose rivet somewhere, rattling. Walker pointed at the blackness ahead of them. It ran right up out of sight above them. The mountain peaks, running alongside their course on the right-hand side, disappeared right into the opacity of weather. The Nevada state line was somewhere under all that. “Look, we've got four or five minutes to make a turn and get out of the way of it, that's all. That thing's no autumn shower, Major, that's a fucking blizzard. You saw the weather map.”

He had picked up the map overlay this morning at five o'clock at the Reno tower, when he'd filed the phony VFR flight plan for Salt Lake City. That had been the midnight weather report. At that time the storm had been crossing the California-Nevada line somewhere south of Reno and the projections indicated it would hit Vegas around midmorning and keep moving east toward Kingman at about twenty-five or thirty knots. But obviously it had gathered speed and shifted course since then. Now it was getting sawed up by the mountaintops northeast of Vegas and that meant it was dumping moisture.

He said, “There's snow and hail in there.”

The Major glanced at the quivering needle of the outside-temperature gauge. It stood at 43 degrees, but Walker shook his head. “You don't get this. We haven't crossed the front yet. Inside there you'll get a ten- or fifteen-degree drop. You get a hailstone driven by a sixty-knot wind and you can get bullet holes in the wings of a light plane. This is no Air Force cargo job, Major.”

In back the others had stopped talking: they could see the storm for themselves and it was beginning to penetrate past their other fears and past the excitement the money had generated.

Now Baraclough leaned forward and Walker could feel the man's menthol-cigarette breath on his neck. “Listen, Major, I think he's right. That's no monsoon rainstorm.”

“Ice,” said Eddie Burt. “We don't want to go into that.”

“Now you're getting the idea,” Walker said. His mouth felt powder dry. He locked both fists on the split wheel and toed the rudder pedal with his right foot. “I'm turning.”

The Major stiffened to speak but then they hit the front and the plane stuttered. The blast of the wind hit the underbelly of the banking plane and skidded it back, and Walker, feeling her begin to slide, had to give her a heavy left aileron. It leveled her off and he let the wind push her around and complete the turn for him, sideslipping rather than banking. But now the mountains were dead ahead and he had to put on full power and lift the nose into a climb, and in the low air pressure she responded only sluggishly. Half a minute of this and he could see it was no good.

“We're not going to make it,” he said. “We've got to turn around and get some altitude.”

The Major didn't say anything. Walker didn't have time to look at him, to measure his expression, but he knew what the Major's face would be showing: irritation, not fear.

At least the Major wasn't arguing with him.

He completed the ninety-degree turn and now he was headed east again, the way they had come, and the winds of the storm's leading edge were pushing him forward while he climbed. He would have to pick up at least five or six thousand feet of additional altitude before he could think about turning north again and crossing over the mountains; in fact it would be better to climb 7,500 feet higher because you never knew what kind of downdrafts you might hit over those canyons. And with the low pressure of the air and the heavy load inside the plane she wasn't going to climb that high very fast. It was going to take a while.

When he had a chance he glanced at the Major and saw the thoughtful squint on the Major's cold hawked features. In back the rest of them began to talk again in harsh snappish voices—they had the sweats, all of them—but the Major held his tongue, squinted forward, worked his jaw from side to side. The Major was thinking, hatching a plan. It would probably be a good one.

3

In the old days he had known Major Leo Hargit at Tan Son Nhut and Da Nang but they hadn't been close or anything near it, and when Walker had come back to the States he'd never given the Major another thought until the night the Major had looked him up in Tucson.

The breaks had passed Walker by. He'd been good at war, not so good at much of anything else. In Vietnam the Army had trusted him with a plane worth half a million dollars and ten men's lives but now, since the Portland accident, it appeared nobody would trust him with a cropduster.

The Army—not the Air Force—had recruited him to fly and he'd flown Med-Evac planes up and down the Indochina peninsula for three years, saving up his back pay and re-upping twice to get the combat bonuses. A few times he'd been shot up by ground fire but he'd never been shot down; he was twenty-nine now and he'd been flying since he was seventeen, he had eleven thousand hours behind him and until Portland he had been rated and certified for instrument flying in anything from single-engine to multiple jet.

When he had enough money saved he had come back to his home town, Sacramento, and bought into a third-level carrier outfit that did air cargo and taxi and business-commuter charter work up and down the west coast, covering all the small towns in northern California and southern Oregon that the scheduled feeder lines missed. Or-Cal Coast Airways had a Lear, two twin Apaches, a Convair and a DC-6B, and when Walker had bought in they had used his capital to pick up an almost new British Dart 500 twin turboprop which carried fifty-six passengers or a prodigious tonnage of cargo. It gave him a one-fifth ownership in a working airline and that was what he had always wanted; that first year was the best year of his life but it was the last good one.

It had started to fall apart when one of the pilots broke his leg in a bowling accident and they had had to hire a temporary replacement on a half-hour's notice to fly a four-passenger taxi charter to Eugene. The stupid pilot had forgotten to put down his gear at Eugene, gone in with the wheels retracted and ground-looped on his belly, totaled the Apache and killed himself and all four passengers.

That had brought the National Transportation Safety Board down on them and their certifications had been yanked for two weeks, after which they had gone on probationary status with Government snoops hanging around doing constant checks on their safety standards.

They were limping but they were still on their feet, and they might have overcome that, but Walker was having private trouble then.

He had met Carla at a TWA pilot's party in San Francisco less than a week after he'd become a full partner in Or-Cal; he'd been flushed with success and he'd infected her with it. She had been a stew on Northwest Orient but she hadn't liked it much—“I'm sort of a cozy quiet girl, Keith, I just didn't like living in hotel rooms.” When Walker met her she'd been working four months in an airline ticket office in the St. Francis and she admitted frankly she was anxious to settle down and make a home, be a mother, be a wife.

It suited him. She wasn't gorgeous but she had a cute little face, a triangle of good bones with enormous soft onyx eyes. A small soft cuddly girl, nervously vivacious, with a quick flashing smile and a healthy frank body. He had felt good with her, right from the start.

He hadn't thought much about whether he loved her; he had never actually seen any love lying around. His romantic dreams had been focused on airplanes from the time he'd built his first model kit plane at the age of nine. But in the Army he'd worked it all out for himself, how he was going to save money and buy into an airline and get married and have kids. That way he'd have the best of both worlds—the kind of success everybody admired, the solid-citizen home and family and free-enterprise ownership of his own business; and at the same time an airplane to fly. The only real freedom was being in motion, piloting yourself across the sky.

Five weeks after he had met Carla he had married her. That had been part of the good year too. It had been a sybaritic year, a lot of drinking and a lot of laughs and a lot of sex. Carla knew airplanes and pilots and she was part of the whole thing, not an outsider.

But she hadn't got pregnant.

They went to doctors. She took hormones. They had tests. Jesus, the money it all cost. But it didn't solve anything and finally after a year of specialists and lab analyses the pussyfooting doctor had screwed up courage enough to tell him. “I'm sorry, Mr. Walker. You might try artificial insemination—have you thought of it? It's probably the only answer if you're still adamant about not adopting children. You're sterile, you see. No, don't worry about your potency, it's nothing to do with that. But some men have natural antibodies. Something in the chemical make-up of the body—a genetic incompatibility between the genes of your mother and father. The spermatozoa simply don't function properly, and therefore you can't impregnate your wife—or any other woman for that matter, it's not merely a matter of individual sexual partners.” And the sly wink: “In a way you know it gives you a kind of freedom some men would give their right arms for.”