That’s for Al, he allowed himself to think. No victory roll, just a thought, as he leveled out and picked a likely spot to egress the area. The strike force could come in now, and that SAM battery was out of business. Okay. He selected a notch in the ridge, racing for it just under Mach-1, straight and level now that the threat was behind him. Home for Christmas.
The red tracers that erupted from the small pass startled him. That wasn’t supposed to be there. No deflection on them, just coming right in. He jinked up, as the gunner had thought he would, and the body of the aircraft passed right through the stream of fire. It shook violently and in the passage of a second good changed to evil.
“Robin!” a voice gasped over the intercom, but the main noise was from wailing alarms, and Zacharias knew in a fatal instant that his aircraft was doomed. It got worse almost before he could react. The engine died in flames, and then the Thud started a roll-yaw that told him the controls were gone. His reaction was automatic, a shout for ejection, but another gasp from the back made him turn just as he yanked the handles even though he knew the gesture was useless. His last sight of Jack Tait was blood that hung below the seat like a vapor trail, but by then his own back was wrenched with more pain than he’d ever known.
“Okay,” Kelly said and fired off a flare. Another boat started tossing small explosive charges into the water to drive the fish away from the area. He watched and waited for five minutes, then looked at the safety man.
“Area’s clear.”
“Fire in the hole,” Kelly said, repeating the mantra three times more. Then he twisted the handle on the detonator. The results were gratifying. The water around the legs turned to foam as the rig’s legs were chopped off bottom and top. The fall was surprisingly slow. The entire structure slid off in one direction. There was an immense splash as the platform hit, and for one incongruous moment it appeared as though steel might float. But it couldn’t. The see-through collection of light I-beams sank below sight, to rest right on the bottom, and another job was done.
Kelly disconnected the wires from the generator and tossed them over the side.
“Two weeks early. I guess you really wanted that bonus,” the executive said. A former Navy fighter pilot, he admired a job well and quickly done. The oil wasn’t going anywhere, after all. “Dutch was right about you.”
“The Admiral is a good guy. He’s done a lot for Tish and me.”
“Well, we flew together for two years. Bad-ass fighter jock. Good to know those nice things he said were true.” The executive liked working with people who’d had experiences like his own. He’d forgotten the terror of combat somehow. “What’s with that? I’ve been meaning to ask.” He pointed to the tattoo on Kelly’s arm. a red seal, sitting up on his hind flippers and grinning impudently.
“Something we all did in my unit,” Kelly explained as offhandedly as he could.
“What unit was that?”
“Can’t say.” Kelly added a grin to mute the refusal.
“I bet it’s something to do with how Sonny got out—but okay.” A former naval officer had to respect the rules. “Well, the check’ll be in your account by the end of the business day, Mr. Kelly. I’ll radio in so your wife can pick you up.”
Tish Kelly was glowing her me-too look at the women in The Stork Shop. Not even three months yet, she could wear anything she wanted—well, almost. Too soon to shop for anything special, but she had the free time and wanted to see what the options were. She thanked the clerk, deciding that she’d bring John here in the evening and help him pick something out for her because he liked doing that. Now it was time to pick him up. The Plymouth wagon they’d driven down from Maryland was parked right outside, and she’d learned to navigate the streets of the coastal town. It was a nice break from the cold autumn rain of their home, to be here on the Gulf Coast where the summer was never really gone for more than a few days. She brought the wagon onto the street, heading south for the oil company’s huge support yard. Even the traffic lights were in her favor. One changed to green in such a timely fashion that her foot didn’t even have to touch the brakes.
The truck driver frowned as the light changed to amber. He was late, and running a little too fast, but the end of his six-hundred-mile run from Oklahoma was in sight. He stepped on the clutch and brake pedals with a sigh that abruptly changed to a gasp of surprise as both pedals went all the way to the floor at the same speed. The road ahead was clear, and he kept going straight, downshifting to cut speed, and frantically blowing his diesel horn. Oh God, oh God, please don’t—
She never saw it coming. Her head never turned. The station wagon just jumped right through the intersection, and the driver’s lingering memory would be of the young woman’s profile disappearing under the hood of his diesel tractor, and then the awful lurch and shuddering surge upwards as the truck crushed the wagon under his front wheels.
The worst part of all was not feeling. Helen was her friend. Helen was dying, and Pam knew she should feel something, but she couldn’t. The body was gagged, but that didn’t stop all the sounds as Billy and Rick did what they were doing. Breath found its way out, and though her mouth couldn’t move, the sounds were those of a woman soon to leave her life behind, but the trip had a price which had to be paid first, and Rick and Billy and Burt and Henry were doing the collecting. She tried to tell herself that she was really in another place, but the awful choking sounds kept bringing her eyes and her consciousness back to what reality had become. Helen was bad. Helen had tried to run away, and they couldn’t have that. It had been explained to them all more than once, and was now being explained again in a way, Henry said, that they would be sure to remember. Pam felt where her ribs had once been broken, remembering her lesson. She knew there was nothing she could do as Helen’s eyes fixed on her face. She tried to convey sympathy with her eyes. She didn’t dare do more than that, and presently Helen stopped making noise, and it was over, for now. Now she could close her eyes and wonder when it would be her turn.
The crew thought it was pretty funny. They had the American pilot tied up right outside their sandbagged emplacement so he could see the guns that had shot him down. Less funny was what their prisoner had done, and they’d expressed their displeasure for it with fists and boots. They had the other body, too, and they set it right next to him, enjoying the look of sorrow and despair on his face as he looked at his fellow bandit. The intelligence officer from Hanoi was here now, checking the man’s name against a list he’d brought along, bending down again to read off the name. It must have been something special, the gunners all thought, from the way he reacted to it, and the urgent phone call he’d made. After the prisoner passed out from his pain, the intelligence officer had swabbed some blood from the dead body and covered the live one’s face with it. Then he’d snapped a few photos. That puzzled the gun crew. It was almost as though he wanted the live one to look as dead as the body next to him. How very odd.
It wasn’t the first body he’d had to identify, but Kelly had thought that aspect of his life was a thing left far behind. Other people were there to support him, but not falling down wasn’t the same thing as surviving, and there was no consolation at a moment such as this. He walked out of the emergency room, people’s eyes on him, doctors and nurses. A priest had been called to perform his last duty, and had said a few things that he knew were unheard. A police officer explained that it hadn’t been the driver’s fault. The brakes had failed. Mechanical defect. Nobody’s fault, really. Just one of those things. All the things he’d said before, on other such occasions, trying to explain to some innocent person why the main part of his world had just ended, as though it mattered. This Mr. Kelly was a tough one, the officer saw, and all the more vulnerable because of it. His wife and unborn child, whom he might have protected against any hazard, were dead by an accident. Nobody to blame. The trucker, a family man himself, was in the hospital, under sedation after having gone under his rig in the hope of finding her alive. People Kelly had been wo
rking with sat with him, and would help him make arrangements. There was nothing else to be done for a man who would have accepted hell rather than this; because he’d seen hell. But there was more than one hell, and he hadn’t seen them all quite yet.
1
Enfant perdu
MAY
He’d never know why he stopped. Kelly pulled his Scout over to the shoulder without a conscious thought. She hadn’t had her hand out soliciting a ride. She’d just been standing at the side of the road, watching the cars speed past in a spray of highway grit and a wake of fumes. Her posture was that of a hitchhiker, one knee locked, the other bent. Her clothes were clearly well used and a backpack was loosely slung over one shoulder. Her tawny, shoulder-length hair moved about in the rush of air from the traffic. Her face showed nothing, but Kelly didn’t see that until he was already pressing his right foot on the brake pedal and angling onto the loose rock of the shoulder. He wondered if he should go back into the traffic, then decided that he was already committed, though to what he didn’t know, exactly. The girl’s eyes followed the car and, as he looked in his rearview mirror, she shrugged without any particular enthusiasm and walked towards him. The passenger window was down already, and in a few seconds she was there.
“Where you goin’ ?” she asked.
That surprised Kelly. He thought the first question—Need a ride?—was supposed to be his. He hesitated for a second or two, looking at her. Twenty-one, perhaps, but old for her years. Her face wasn’t dirty, but neither was it clean, perhaps from the wind and dust on the interstate. She wore a man’s cotton shirt that hadn’t been ironed in months, and her hair was knotted. But what surprised him most of all were her eyes. Fetchingly gray-green, they stared past Kelly into ... what? He’d seen the look before often enough, but only on weary men. He’d had the look himself, Kelly remembered, but even then he’d never known what his eyes saw. It didn’t occur to him that he wore a look not so different now.
“Back to my boat,” he answered finally, not knowing what else to say. And that quickly, her eyes changed.
“You have a boat?” she asked. Her eyes lit up like a child’s, a smile started there and radiated down the remainder of her face, as though he’d just answered an important question. She had a cute gap between her front teeth, Kelly noticed.
“Forty-footer—she’s a diesel cruiser.” He waved to the back of the Scout, whose cargo area was completely filled with cartons of groceries. “You want to come along?” he asked, also without thinking.
“Sure!” Without hesitation she yanked open the door and tossed her backpack on the floor in front of the passenger seat.
Pulling back into traffic was dangerous. Short of wheelbase and short of power, the Scout wasn’t built for interstate-highway driving, and Kelly had to concentrate. The car wasn’t fast enough to go in any other lane than the right, and with people coming on and off at every interchange, he had to pay attention because the Scout wasn’t nimble enough to avoid all the idiots who were heading out to the ocean or wherever the hell people went on a three-day weekend.
You want to come along? he’d asked, and she’d said Sure, his mind reported to him. What the hell? Kelly frowned in frustration at the traffic because he didn’t know the answer, but then there were a lot of questions to which he hadn’t known the answers in the last six months. He told his mind to be quiet and watched the traffic, even though it kept up its inquiries in a nagging sort of background noise. One’s mind, after all, rarely obeys its own commands.
Memorial Day weekend, he thought. The cars around him were filled with people rushing home from work, or those who’d already made that trip and picked up their families. The faces of children stared out of the rear-seat windows. One or two waved at him, but Kelly pretended not to notice. It was hard not having a soul, most especially when you could remember having had one.
Kelly ran a hand across his jaw, feeling the sandpaper texture. The hand itself was dirty. No wonder they’d acted that way at the grocery warehouse. Letting yourself go, Kelly.
Well, who the hell cares?
He turned to look at his guest and realized that he didn’t know her name. He was taking her to his boat, and he didn’t know her name. Amazing. She was staring forward, her face serene. It was a pretty face in profile. She was thin—perhaps willowy was the right word, her hair halfway between blonde and brown. Her jeans were worn and torn in a few places, and had begun life at one of those stores where they charged you extra to sell jeans that were pre-faded—or whatever they did with them. Kelly didn’t know and cared less. One more thing not to care about.
Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up? his mind demanded of him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation. Different segments of the organism called John Terrence Kelly knew different parts of the whole story, but somehow they’d never all come together, leaving the separate fragments of what had once been a tough, smart, decisive man to blunder about in confusion—and despair? There was a happy thought.
He remembered what he’d once been. He remembered all the things that he had survived, amazed that he had done so. And perhaps the worst torment of all was that he didn’t understand what had gone wrong. Sure, he knew what had happened, but those things had all been on the outside, and somehow his understanding had gotten lost, leaving him alive and confused and without purpose. He was on autopilot. He knew that, but not where fate was taking him.
She didn’t try to talk, whoever she was, and that was just as well, Kelly told himself, though he sensed that there was something he ought to know. The realization came as a surprise. It was instinctual, and he’d always trusted his instincts, the warning chill on his neck and forearms. He looked around at the traffic and Kelly saw no particular danger other than cars with too much engine under the hood and not enough brains behind the wheel. His eyes scanned carefully and found nothing. But the warning didn’t go away, and Kelly found himself checking the mirror for no good reason, while his left hand wandered down between his legs and found the checkered grips of the Colt automatic that hung hidden under the seat. His hand was stroking the weapon before he realized it.
Now what the hell did you do that for? Kelly pulled his hand back and shook his head with a grimace of frustration. But he did keep checking the mirror—just the normal watch on traffic, he lied to himself for the next twenty minutes.
The boatyard was a swarm of activity. The three-day weekend, of course. Cars were zipping about too fast for the small and badly paved parking lot, each driver trying to evade the Friday rush that each was, of course, helping to create. At least here the Scout came into its own. The high ground clearance and visibility gave Kelly an advantage as he maneuvered to Springer’s transom, and he looped around to back up to the slip he’d left six hours before. It was a relief, to crank up the windows and lock the car. His adventure on the highways was over, and the safety of the trackless water beckoned.
Springer was a diesel-powered motor yacht, forty-one feet long, custom built but similar in her lines and internal arrangements to a Pacemaker Coho. She was not especially pretty, but she had two sizable cabins, and the midships salon could be converted easily into a third. Her diesels were large but not supercharged, because Kelly preferred a large comfortable engine to a small straining one. He had a high-quality marine radar, every sort of communications gear that he could legally use, and navigation aids normally reserved for offshore fishermen. The fiberglass hull was immaculate, and there was not a speck of rust on the chromed rails, though he had deliberately done without the topside varnish that most yacht-owners cherished because it wasn’t worth the maintenance time. Springer was a workboat, or was supposed to be.
Kelly and his guest alighted from the car. He opened the cargo door and started carrying the cartons aboard. The young lady, he saw, had the good sense to stay out of the way.
“Yo, Kelly!” a voice called from the flying bridge.
“Yeah. Ed, what was it?”
“Bad gau
ge. The generator brushes were a little worn, and I replaced them, but I think it was the gauge. Replaced that, too.” Ed Murdock, the yard’s chief mechanic, started down, and spotted the girl as he began to step off the ladder. Murdock tripped on the last step and nearly landed flat on his face in surprise. The mechanic’s face evaluated the girl quickly and approvingly.
“Anything else?” Kelly asked pointedly.
“Topped off the tanks. The engines are warm,” Murdock said, turning back to his customer. “It’s all on your bill.”
“Okay, thanks, Ed.”
“Oh, Chip told me to tell you, somebody else made an offer in case you ever want to sell—”
Kelly cut him off. “No chance, Ed.”
“She’s a jewel, Kelly,” Murdock said as he gathered his tools and walked away smiling, pleased with himself for the double entendre.
It took several seconds for Kelly to catch that one. It evoked a belated grunt of semi-amusement as he loaded the last of the groceries into the salon.
“What do I do?” the girl asked. She’d just been standing there, and Kelly had the impression that she was trembling a little and trying to hide it.
“Just take a seat topside,” Kelly said, pointing to the flying bridge. “It’ll take me a few minutes to get things started.”
“Okay.” She beamed a smile at him guaranteed to melt ice. as though she knew exactly what one of his needs was.
Kelly walked aft to his cabin, pleased at least that he kept his boat tidy. The master-cabin head was also neat, and he found himself staring into the mirror and asking, “Okay, now what the fuck are you going to do?”
There was no immediate answer, but common decency told him to wash up. Two minutes later he entered the salon. He checked to see that the grocery cartons were secure, then went topside.