“The damned car is pulling to the left—hard,” Walters groused. “Either the wheel bearings have seized, or the left drive motor is getting weak.”
“Won’t drive a straight line, huh?”
“Not unless I fight it. Makes me wish I’d gotten a single motor drive, instead of one with a motor at each wheel.”
“Yeah, but then you’ve got the losses in the drive train.” Gantt leaned under the open hood and fingered the cables leading to the electric drive motor. “You’re sure you don’t have a high resistance connection somewhere in this line? Corrosion would cut the current coming through, and the motor’d seem weak.”
Walters scowled at him, then at the car. “Hadn’t thought of that. Got a minute?”
Gantt glanced at his watch. “Sure, plenty of time.” He ran his fingers back up the wiring harness. “Oh, yeah. Something else. We ought to check the voltage regulator for this side. I think Chrysler uses two smaller ones instead of one big one. If that’s OK, then we—”
His voice was blotted out by the wailing of the klaxon warning all personnel to stand clear.
Walters flinched. “Jesus! I don’t know why they bother with that thing. By the time they drop the rock, everybody’s on their way home. It’s not like anybody’s stupid enough to stay in the hole when it’s time to shoot.”
Gantt turned back to the car. “It’s the law, Chuck. If MSHA catches them not sounding—”
There was a massive, earth-rending burrrump as the charges blew in the quarry behind them. Even before the rough-edged thunder of falling boulders ceased, Gantt knew something was wrong. There were undertones of rending metal beneath the sound of the rock. He turned and ran across the grassy strip along the edge of the parking lot towards the chain link fence surrounding the pit.
Walters rushed up behind him. “What was it? Did some moron leave a… truck…” his voice trailed off into stunned silence.
“What the hell?” Gantt muttered.
Protruding at an angle from the solid rock wall of the quarry was the nose of a commercial airliner, battered, but still recognizable.
Lisa Entwhistle was torn. On one hand, she was frantic to find out what had happened to Dan’s flight—and whether he was all right. On the other, she had to acknowledge that if she was confined to a room in the airport, control would pass from her hands into those of the executive director and the men in Naval uniforms. They might, or might not, choose to tell her anything.
Then again, if her suspicions were correct, there was the possibility that anything they told her could very well be a tissue of lies.
She drove erratically, sparing only a bare minimum of her attention for the road. Finally, after half an hour of agonizing indecision, she pulled her car up next to a tele booth in the parking lot of a pet shop that had been closed for two years.
The low-powered link in her car’s dash sought the dial tone from the booth without her having to get out of the car. When connection had been established, she dialed the airport.
A face appeared over her dash, seemingly in the windshield. “Good afternoon. My name is Susan, how may I help you?”
Lisa began haltingly. “My, uh, husband was due in this afternoon, and he’s not home yet. I was just wondering if you have any flights which are late.”
“Do you know your husband’s flight?”
She took a deep breath before answering. “North American Airlines, Flight 371.”
Lisa watched as the woman’s smile turned carefully bland. “Ma’am, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to transfer you to the executive director’s office. I’m sure that they’ll be able to help you.”
The image over Lisa’s dash went to a neutral blue as soft music played under a voice extolling the virtues of the airport’s restaurants. It took ten seconds for the implications of what the woman had said to sink in.
Without even bothering to disconnect, Lisa floored the accelerator, quickly putting her car out of range of the booth.
She began to shake. Clearly, something was wrong if they were forwarding inquiries to the executive director’s office. Judging from what she had seen and heard so far that afternoon, that was only likely to result in more indirection.
A small voice deep inside of her began to scream in agony. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction that Dan was alive.
A charge station further down the road had another tele booth. She pulled in.
A polite, recorded voice came up when her car established contact with the booth. “You have a call still in progress on another line. Do you wish to resume that call?”
“No!” Lisa screamed. “Hang up!”
“That call has been terminated,” the voice said calmly. “Would you like to place another call?”
Gripping the steering wheel tightly, fighting tears, Lisa said, “Yes. Place a call to the nearest NewsNet office.”
If she couldn’t get to the bottom of this, perhaps someone who knew how to get around news blackouts could. Maybe they could get straight answers about what had happened to Dan.
Sergeant Owen Rivers of the South Carolina Highway Patrol sat on the hood of his car, watching figures swarm along the edge of the man-made cliff in the rock quarry. Although he was off duty, the dispatcher had called to let him know that something distinctly odd had happened. She thought that he might be interested, especially after the incident with the Ford.
She had been right.
Six high intensity flood lamps were spaced in an arc across the floor of the rock quarry. They were all focussed upwards on the silvery aluminum nose of what had once been a jet. Two more were angled down from the top of the wall of rock.
The central problem, of course, was that the jet had no business being where it was—seven meters below the surface of the ground. Ignoring the blatant impossibility of it all, he had called the airport to see if any airplanes were missing. None were. He had that straight from the executive director himself.
Rivers hadn’t decided yet whether that made matters worse or better.
He had gathered a few basic facts after arriving three hours earlier. The workers had spent the afternoon filling holes drilled in the upper surface of the exposed rock face with explosives. The blast had gone off on schedule, a little after five o’clock. Dropping the wall of rock late in the day gave any unstable boulders time to fall before the workers returned in the morning.
When the rock fell, it had revealed the nose of the jet. The exposed portion had been crushed and twisted by the force of the explosion, and by the rock falling over it. Indeed, the drill had narrowly missed the plane on one side; the smooth, semicircular scar of the bore hole was easily seen.
Access to the interior of the plane had been gained by cutting open the sheet metal on top of the fuselage. Those who had been inside told of carnage beyond their worst nightmares. There had been people aboard. None had survived. Like a car wreck, the plane had stopped abruptly, but the passengers had kept going; most had not been belted in.
Rivers felt no need to see the inside for himself. He was content to sit on the hood of his car, slap mosquitoes, and contemplate the impossible.
Owen and Monica Rivers lived at the end of a court. The house was smallish, but adequate for their needs. They had no children and few friends.
Owen carried his first cup of coffee to the table, sat, and called out, “Computer, bring up the news, please.”
The computer was quite capable of reading the news items aloud, but he preferred silence in the morning, so it projected the articles in print over the table for him to read. The lead story, as usual, was the war. Casualties were detailed. Brief clips of soldiers running past the mangled metal of a crashed and burning plane. The Mexicans, aided by the Americans, had managed to take back a small amount of territory west of Mexico City. Reading between the lines gave a different story, however.