“I do believe you.” She was quiet for a moment, looking tired. “I’m sorry. Merriwether… he got in too far. That horrible Morgan…” Her voice trailed off. “Blackmail or not, I don’t know what Merriwether was thinking to leave an injured man unattended like that. But I do I know how we can get the two of you out of here,” Mrs. Milliken said. “They won’t shoot me. Let me go out first, and you keep between me and them as we go. Once we get to your, ah, airplane, you’ll be out of their sight, and I’ll go distract them until you take off. Can you leave from our yard?”
I laughed, shaking my head. “Mrs. Milliken, you have the mind of a bank robber. And I mean that as a sincere compliment.”
“You’d best come back. I will straighten out Merriwether and that dratted Kenneth Hauptmann with Chief Davis and those nice Army men. Not even our sheriff can pressure the Army into something it doesn’t want to do. I know you’re a good boy, Vernon. None of this was your doing.”
Well, almost none of it, I thought. I should have ratted out Floyd at the train depot in the first place. Too late for that now.
Mrs. Milliken took Dad’s feet again. “I’m going out first, Vernon,” she said. We circled around each other to get her headed out first. My back complained mightily about taking Dad’s weight in my arms, but we had to get him to Wichita. I staggered through the door after Mrs. Milliken, crouching low to keep her between me and the police.
I could hear yelling from the street as we came out the door. “Hold your fire, by God! It’s Mrs. Milliken,” called a voice. I was pretty sure that was Chief Davis.
Mrs. Milliken marched straight toward Pegasus like she was going down the aisle to take Holy Communion. There must have been thirty guns pointed at her from the street but she didn’t flinch. We got to where Pegasus’ hull was between us and the cops, then she trotted the last few paces to the open hatch.
“You’ll have to lift him in yourself, Vernon” she gasped. “I’m an old woman and I don’t know if I can do it.”
I didn’t know how I was going to do that either, so I just boosted Dad up to the lip of hatch. Damn Floyd for being a murdering fool, I thought, or I could ask him for help. Overhead, the plane buzzed us again.
Great. I was going to have to deal with that when we took off, in a computational rocket with a conscience that wouldn’t allow it to fight back. Not that I wanted to shoot down one of our boys anyway. The pain of Dad’s weight against me made me grunt. I could feel something snap in my bad shoulder. I pushed him through the hatch by main force of character as much as anything, then climbed in after him.
That done, breath heaving, I turned to look at Mrs. Milliken. I couldn’t tell, but it looked like she was crying in the moonlight. “Take care of him, Vernon,” she said.
There wasn’t anything else to say, so I simply said, “Thanks.” I remembered our takeoff from the Bellamys’ barn, so I added, “You might want to hit the dirt right about now.”
I stepped over to the pilot’s seat and laid my body down in it. I ached so much I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to get up again, but that didn’t matter. Behind me, I heard the hatch hiss shut. I glanced at Floyd, who was looking over his shoulder at Dad. Floyd turned to smile weakly at me.
“Old man’s still alive, huh?” he asked. It was almost like talking to the old Floyd, my Floyd.
“Yeah.” Grudging, I gave into his attempt at good will. I grabbed the flight control handles and looked at the main viewer. It showed the array of cops and soldiers out in the street. They seemed to be getting ready to fire a volley at Pegasus. “Time to go,” I said out loud. “Mind the air traffic overhead.”
“Takeoff in three seconds,” said Pegasus in my ear. I hoped Dad wouldn’t be buffeted too much, then remembered how smoothly we had lifted from the burning barn. The next thing I knew, Broadway Street was getting smaller and smaller in the main viewer. I was glad to see Mrs. Milliken getting to her feet as we pulled away. The cops swarmed over her as I glanced at the other view screens.
I followed the highway into Wichita. I wanted to tend to Dad, but there really wasn’t much I could do for him in his current state. Pegasus needed me to navigate. We flew about two hundred feet above the asphalt, heading toward the city.
As we passed over the outskirts of Augusta, I saw that there was a roadblock set up along the dike at the west edge of town, right where the Cadillac had seized up on me. They were serious about cutting off the town, I realized. We overflew the roadblock with an air speed of at least three hundred miles per hour.
“We will be over metropolitan Wichita in about three minutes,” said Pegasus, “but we are being pursued by two North American P-51 Mustangs. Model ‘D’ versions.”
“How the heck do you know that?” I asked.
“I can see them on multiple frequencies.”
“No, no.” I shook my head. Pegasus was very smart, smarter than I without a doubt, but it could miss the obvious. “How do you know they’re P-51Ds?”
“The Luftwaffe provided me with an extensive set of Axis and Allied aircraft recognition data. I can resolve mechanical details at a power of ten thousand to one, so it is not difficult for me to match aircraft types already known to me.”
“Fine, fine.” This was another capability I could understand well enough to make me profoundly jealous. Would that I could inspect the fasteners I bought for Boeing with that level of detail. We’d never have another parts failure again. But where had the Army gotten Mustangs in eastern Kansas anyway? As far as I knew there wasn’t a fighter wing at military section of Wichita Municipal. “Are they going to catch us?”
“Not in open flight,” said Pegasus, “but when we land to discharge your father they will have a distinct operational advantage.”
And we were going to blow past the Beech, Cessna and Boeing plants and Wichita Municipal before reaching the St. Francis Hospital. The fighter pilots behind us would get awfully nervous when Pegasus started buzzing industrial sites essential to the war effort, or whatever we called that now. “What can you do about them?”
“Nothing,” said Pegasus. “The aircraft are too primitive for their pilots to survive the craft being disabled. I will not destroy them.”
“What will fifty caliber bullets do to you?”
“They will cause very little damage to me in flight,” said Pegasus, “as I generate my own shielding with a combination of electromagnetic manipulation and the atmospheric pressure waves on my airfoils. But when we set down to discharge your father, we will be vulnerable.”
I doubted that the Mustangs would follow us down to street level in Wichita. The pilots would have orders not to endanger the civilian population. Plus no pilot in his right mind would perform a low-altitude, high-speed pass over a big city, not even a hot dog fighter jock with murder in his eye. Too many radio masts, water towers, power lines and so forth. So our biggest danger would probably be in lifting out again.
“All right,” I said. “We’re just going to have to go in and hope for the best.” I looked at the screen. The Beech plant was approaching on the right. We were in Wichita. The highway was now Kellogg Street, and I could see traffic. I could also see wrecks happening on the road as drivers became distracted by the passage of Pegasus overhead.
Great, I thought. Just what we needed. More death and destruction. I hoped the people in the street below would be safe.
We flew past Wichita’s airport, in the process violating every flight rule I knew of regarding traffic patterns and approach procedure. The hospital was coming up, just past the corner of Murdock and 9th. I glanced up at the array of smaller screens. Pegasus showed a tail view of two Mustangs chasing us. They were clearing Wichita city limits as I banked steeply to make it down to Murdock Street and the hospital.