I unbuckled my seat belt and stood as the Gulfstream hummed westward with the night. Savage had stuffed a pillow against the window and now slept peacefully. Karla had leaned her seat back as far as it would go, her eyes closed, curls of black framing the softened features of her face.
I walked forward, opened the cockpit door, and stepped inside. Winny Swink sat in the pilot’s chair, knee up, her left arm draped across it so that her thin fingers hung limp. She arched an inquisitive eyebrow as I slipped into the copilot’s seat.
Obviously, she had the jet on autopilot. I considered this either a major concession to the rest of us, or else she’d had enough excitement over the Chesapeake to suffice for the day.
“How they doing back there?” she asked.
“Asleep. I figured you might be on the verge of nodding off yourself, so I thought I’d come keep you company.” Flying alone had to be breaking a slew of FAA regulations.
Winny gave me a sly smile and adjusted her headset. “While you were out stealing boats and generally raising hell last night, I was sacked out in the hotel. I figured if you guys got busted, I still had a chance to steal the Gulfstream, fly off to Saudi Arabia, and offer it and my services to some sheik.”
“Provided they had it fueled up and ready to go, huh?”
She nodded. “As long as our sugar daddy holds out, I’ve got an escape. I presume that’s Grazier?”
“You presume right for the moment.”
“And if he pulls the plug?”
“The fact that someone tried to kill Eli last night significantly diminishes that possibility.”
“But he does have superiors.”
“We all do.”
She pulled off her headset, ran fingers through her red hair, and replaced it. “Skipper, I’m not going back. If they pull the plug, I mean. There’s a whole world out there desperate for someone with my skills. Knowing that. Being free for these couple of days? I’d rather be dead than face the future locked up in Grantham.”
“What if some Saudi general’s wife shows up wearing pink?”
She grinned, green eyes devilish. “Okay, maybe I should take a couple of your mystical, magical, mood stabilizer pills with me. What would you recommend?”
“Trileptal might help. But I’d have to check side effects of long-term low dosage to see what it would do your flying skills.”
I stared out at the black night. We were flying over clouds that looked like a somber, gray-blue, lumpy mat; a sliver of moon hung on the southeastern horizon. A billion stars frosted the black in patterns of swirls.
“We came pretty close to dying today, didn’t we?”
I’d walked around the sagging helicopter and counted seven .30 caliber bullet holes. Fuel was dripping from one that had center-punched the tank, and even as we walked away, the Bell was sagging onto its left side as the traumatized skid collapsed. Grazier was going to have a wonderful time explaining all that to whichever agency he’d borrowed the bird from.
Winny barely raised her shoulders in a shrug. “I could have put us down in a parking lot, and we could have run for cover. Probably would have been safer.” She glanced at me. “But then they’d still be out there, wouldn’t they?”
“What if they’d flown right into us?” I was remembering the image of the looming Beech filling my window as Winny flipped us sideways in midair.
“Not likely. It’s about how the guy was flying. Each time he’d overshoot us and bank? Did you see that slight wobble? Like he was feeling his way?”
“No.”
“I watch a pilot fly, I know what level of skill I’m dealing with. The guy was okay, probably an advanced weekender with a couple of thousand hours under his belt. But he wasn’t any maestro. And certainly not a combat-trained pilot.”
“You know all this from watching a couple of passes?”
“A combat stick jockey would have taken us out. So, once I had this guy’s number, I set him up. I just had to hope Karla had her shit together and didn’t freeze when I jinked sideways.”
“Karla doesn’t freeze in tight spots.”
“Skipper, you never know.”
“What if she’d killed the pilot? Dead at the stick, he might have rammed us.”
“Naw. Cockpit glass is tough stuff. At that range nine millimeters should have bounced off. I needed three things to come together. My altitude had to be right. Karla’s bullets had to scare the shit out of him at the same time we filled his entire sky. And third, I knew he’d slam everything he had into a panic dive to clear us.” She grinned. “Even then, the asshole’s stabilizer hit the skid.”
A slender red eyebrow arched. “My biggest worry, Skipper? I was praying we wouldn’t fold up those rotors like they were made of tinfoil. We kind of exceeded the Kiowa’s performance envelope with that maneuver.”
“Yeah, I felt the g-force.” I winced, having puked all over the deck as Winny sent us flying from the scene.
I really hate helicopters. Always have. Always will.
She resettled her position, eyes thoughtful. “General Grazier believes Gray is what Falcon says she is?”
“He does.”
“You know how weird that sounds?”
“I do.”
“What do you think, Skipper?”
“I don’t know, Major. But we keep running into things like that computer box we left with Rogers. And who knows what Falcon, Cat, and the anthropologists have come up with while we’ve been gone.”
Swink glanced at the instruments, then cocked her head. “Falcon was serious about me bombing the Los Alamos lab. But I think he’s a little hazy on what it would take to get live ordnance placed on either an F-18 or F-16, let alone stealing one off the flight line.”
“How’d you do it last time?”
“I was a serving officer at Andrews. A familiar face. Everyone on the flight line knew me. And no weapons were involved in my ‘test flight.’”
“But you’d do it if you could? Bomb Los Alamos? It has the potential of killing people.”
She gave me one of her “You’re an idiot” looks, and said, “Skipper, we killed at least two people today when that Bonanza slammed into the bay. When it comes to Skientia and Gray? Well, let’s assume that Falcon’s right. Gray wants to go home, no matter what it does to my world. And whatever Skientia’s figuring to get out of this, it’s nothing beneficial for the rest of humanity. So, sure, I may be an alley cat of a mother, and have an antisocial personality disorder, as you occasionally remind me, but those two boys are still mine.”
She winked at me. “And I’d get to fly a real airplane one more time and blow the ever-loving crap out of the bad guys.”
“Assuming we could pull it off.”
“There’s always that.” She hesitated. “And don’t forget, Skipper, the bad guys know we’re coming.”