He feared at first that the hellbug’s nose would settle too far, and if the forward exhaust diverter entered the water he was in serious trouble. But with nobody aboard, I could cut brush and shove it beneath to free the diverter. Still he held his breath as the impeller spooled down, waiting for a jolting slap into salt water. When that did not happen, he set the pixel program to fool a watcher from near the road, and smiled at the result. Amid this thicket, the chameleon effect was startlingly good.
He took the old Westclox and two small wire-filled cardboard tubes from his bag, rewinding the clock, then smashing the cover glass. He removed the minute hand because it would only get in the way. He slipped folded bundles of insulated wire from the protective cardboard tubes, working quickly because he did not want time to regret what he was doing, and uncovered pencil-thin copper dynamite caps from inside the wire bundles. One cap, marked for a two-second delay, he placed behind his seat track. The other, which would detonate with no delay, he wedged between the base of the fuel tank and the flexible cockpit housing after he broke its wires off to the lengths he needed. It was always possible that the first cap would split the tank without igniting its fuel, but the second would detonate into a mist of fuel and fumes. The devastation that would follow was not an event Corbett wanted to think about.
After trimming the wire ends, he spliced the cap wires together and wrapped one long lead gently around the clock’s hour hand so that the bare end would move imperceptibly with each stolid tick of the clock. Then, using spare wire he had broken off, he jammed one wire end into the energized side of the circuitbreaker panel and routed its other end to the clock, which he shoved carefully beneath the copilot’s seat. The final adjustment of that energized wire was not a thing to be done until he was ready to leave the hellbug. He decided that three hours would be enough. Whatever happened, no damned Russian would ever find more than debris from Black Stealth One.
The cockpit had not been designed to let a man remove his shoes, socks, and trousers, but he managed. He had a moment of near-panic when, after counting four mauled but serviceable cigarettes in their packet, he could not at first locate the paper matches Elfego Velarde had given him. Finally he found them, stuffed everything into his leather bag, but left his wallet. He gave special thought to his ammunition, dropping one round into each jacket pocket because Dar Weston had once recounted field agent tricks to him. The Weston giveth, and the Weston taketh away. The son of a bitch.
He placed the leather bag and his plastic fuel bladder in the footwell, made a final placement of the energized wire with utmost caution, then eased himself down outside to avoid grass cuts on his naked legs, the hellbug rocking gently. Silted water lapped at his knees, and the patina of gray salt on grass stalks told him this was not high tide. Christ, that’s all you need, to have this thing float out to the sandbar, he thought. One thing you never thought you’d need was a bloody boat anchor.
He solved his problem with most of his remaining duct tape, begrudging every inch he had to use. Torn lengthwise and spliced, it reached from the thrust diverter pivot to a group of stalks he bound together as a living anchor. It did not look any too dependable to Corbett. From this point onward, life itself would not be all that dependable.
He reached over the cockpit sill and retrieved the bag, then the fuel-filled bladder, using them to shield his face as he moved to shore. A tuft of the rattan-stiff grass made a passable broom, sweeping away his footprints at the water’s verge. Yeah, but it still looks funny. However, from a hundred feet away the hellbug itself was visible only as a vagrant gleam of canopy, which might have been water reflection, and outlines that appeared as wire-thin dotted lines among the luxuriant growth of marsh grass.
Within minutes his legs had dried, and he donned his trousers. He brushed away his tracks again one-handed as he moved steadily toward hummocks topped by lower, stiff beach grass. Once there, he put on his socks and shoes, then looked himself over. This is not a man who has waded ashore, he decided, and moved from hummock to driftwood to hummock until he reached turf that did not accept a footprint.
The twin-rutted path of the road curved around the shoulder of the rise of dunelike mounds that lay between him and the landing strip. Moving cautiously forward, sweating with his thirty-pound fuel load, he began to hunker down when he saw the outlines of the long-abandoned Chevrolet near the road. The bad news was that its seats were gone. The good news lay in the ceiling and rear seatback upholstery, strips and tufts of stuff that he could gather with ease.
Best of all, the Chevy’s fuel tank did not leak as he poured a few cupfuls of fuel in. He could see fumes rising from the sunbaked tank as he began moving away from the hulk, strewing bits of upholstery below the spiny underbrush, trying to follow the outline of a swept, sixty-foot wing. Much of the brush was crackling dry, and that would help too. Before dousing that same area with his remaining gasoline, he sat down and built his timers.
He tore the paper match packet into two roughly equal packets, laying one match aside, then bent the protective covers backward, each lower flap standing edge-on against the heads of the matches. When he grasped each pack by its striker strip, match heads downward, the outline of each was a perfect numeral 4 in cardboard. He did not use the spare match to light cigarettes yet, but spent two minutes feverishly dousing all the shreds of upholstery and leafy shrubs in a shallow, sixty-foot V. He wanted a half-hour to circle around the airstrip but knew the cigarettes would burn down in less time than that.
Placing a small pile of cloth shreds on the Chevy’s trunk near the tank opening, he wetted them thoroughly, cursing as he waved to dry a splash of fuel from one hand. Then he moved away with his figure-4 timers, lit two cigarettes, and wedged the unlit ends between the match-heads and the impinging covers. He approached from upwind, then, setting the deadly little timers within inches of the fuel-soaked detritus so that the cigarettes pointed toward the sky. One timer, he knew, was 90 percent certain. Two provided extra assurance. While a cigarette’s glow rarely ignited liquid fuels, the sudden flare of a dozen paper matches almost always did.
Corbett did not realize he had been trembling until he began to run, bent almost double, through the thorny brush. More than once he stopped, then stood up slowly and carefully to check his position with respect to the distant shed. Sudden movement on his part when standing erect, he knew, might be disastrous.
When he was still a half-mile from the shed, he saw that the little team was leaving it, spreading out into the brush on recon. Evidently they were more interested in the sky than their immediate surroundings, for the blond man stopped several times as he moved off in the general direction of the shoreline, shading his eyes, scanning the heavens as he disappeared into the underbrush. Getting nervous, pal? Wondering if the bird will make another pass? Making just one more little patrol? Well, you just keep going while I have a look around.
Corbett had lost sight of the other men long before and realized that they must all be out of touch with each other. Another five minutes, he begged, already nearer that shed than any of thembut his own diversion put an end to that, when the old Chevy’s gas tank went up with a mighty, subterranean cough that was not quite an explosion.
Almost instantly, he saw the lick of flames above heavy brush and heard someone whistle once, twice. He began moving directly toward the shed now, hoping to see men converging toward the distant flames that grew more smoky as he watched. He froze in dismay and astonishment, then dropped to a squat, as he heard footsteps and heavy breathing very near and getting nearer by the second. The man was running hard, his gaze on the smoke, and he held an Uzi before him to sweep branches from his face as he appeared. Intent on his horizon, the lean, swarthy man burst into Corbett’s view only five paces away. He must have seen Corbett squatting because he tried to snap the Uzi around as Kyle Corbett leaped into him in a dusty collision.