Toad dumped everything into a pile in the middle of the bed and examined the lining of the suitcase. He and Jake Grafton had been through Herb’s stuff once before, but it wouldn’t hurt to do it again. Carefully and thoroughly.
Underwear, socks, shirts, trousers, a sweater. A spare can of shaving cream. Toad squirted some onto the carpet. Yep, shaving cream.
The closet held several suits, ties, white shirts and a spare pair of shoes. Toad examined the shoes. He got out his penknife and pried off the heels. Nothing. He felt the suits carefully and threw them on the floor. Except for a spare pen and a pack of matches that Herb had overlooked, the pockets were empty.
Now he turned his attention to the room, systematically taking everything apart. As he worked he thought about Rita.
Pregnant. Refusing to stop flying.
If he were her, he would… But he wasn’t Rita. Rita was Rita and that was why he married her.
You just have to take women as they come. It’s hard to do at times, considering. Amazing that hormone chemistry could make such a big difference in the way men and women’s brains worked. It was like they were a different species, or creatures from another planet.
He threw himself into the chair and sat staring morosely at the mess in front of him. There was nothing here to be found, of that he was sure. So he thought some more about Rita in the cockpit of that jet, flying through a strange sky over a radioactive landscape, nursing the stick and throttles and dropping bombs and fighting the Gs.
There were so many things that could go wrong. And a Russian jet for chrissake, designed, built and maintained by a bunch of vodka-swilling sots.
She can handle it, he told himself, wanting to believe. She’ll get back all right. She’s with Jake Grafton. I mean, she’s good and he’s great. They’re a good team. They’ll make it.
Fuck, they’d better! He wasn’t up to losing Rita just now. She had damn near died in a crash a few years back — just the memory of those days made him nauseated.
And he didn’t want to lose Jake Grafton either. Grafton told him to snag Herb Tenney, and if Grafton didn’t come back, Toad was going to have to figure out what to do next. Not that he had a lot of options. One thing sure, though — Herb was going to be finishing off his supply of happy pills if Jake Grafton didn’t make it.
When he opened the door to the apartment, the first thing he saw was Jack Yocke’s pasty face, then the Browning Hi-Power which he held with both hands. It was pointed askew at nothing at all.
Toad locked the door behind him and took a look at Herb, who was pretending to sleep.
Yocke held the pistol out to Toad butt-first. Toad took it and stuffed it into his waistband. “Thanks,” he said. “I kept waiting to hear the shots.”
Yocke didn’t think that comment worth a reply.
“Would you have used this?” Toad wanted to know.
“I don’t know.”
After they had sat Herb Tenney on the ceramic convenience in the bathroom, then fixed a can of chili for lunch, Yocke asked, “How can you just walk around sticking pistols in people’s faces?”
Toad looked mildly surprised. “I’m in the military. Jake Grafton gives orders, I obey them.”
“This isn’t a movie, you know. That’s a real gun with real bullets.” Toad helped himself to another spoonful of chili. When it was on its way south he said, “You keep looking for moral absolutes, Jack. There aren’t any. Not in this life. All we can do is the best we can.”
“But how do you know you’re doing the right thing?”
“I don’t. But Jake Grafton does. It’s uncanny. He’ll do the right thing regardless of the consequences, regardless of how the chips fall. I’ll take that. I do what I’m told knowing that the CAG is trying to do right.” Even as he said it his mind jumped to Rita. He had bowed to Rita’s decision to fly while pregnant based on faith in her judgment. Now the chili made a lump in his stomach. He dropped the spoon into the bowl and shoved it away. “You gotta believe in people or you’re in a hell of a fix,” he said slowly.
“You answer a question, Toad, by evading it. What is right? Why do you think Grafton knows what right is?”
Toad was no longer paying attention. He was staring at his watch, watching the second hand sweep. They should be on the ground by now…if they were still alive. Why hadn’t they called? Did he really trust her judgment, or was he a coward not to assert himself? If anything happened to her…
Jake Grafton saw the smoke column twenty miles away. The black smoke towered like a giant chimney at least three thousand feet into the atmosphere. As he got closer he could see that the wind had tilted the column, which was visibly growing taller, mushrooming into the upper atmosphere.
Creeping up to two hundred feet to avoid the dust being sucked into the inferno raging at the base of the smoke, he bounced in turbulence even here on the up-wind side of the fire. The turbulence made his bowels feel watery: that damaged wing might have a broken spar. As the plane bucked the stick felt sloppy and the secondary hydraulic system pressure dropped. He must be oh so careful.
The hangar was ablaze. Rita.
Ten or fifteen minutes ago?
Something silver on the mat? A wing?
It couldn’t be a wing from Rita’s plane, could it? Could it?
He edged in for a closer look. No. It was a big wing, attached to a transport that was also on fire. She caught someone parked on the mat and shot them apart.
He turned away from the blaze and consulted his fuel gauge. Fuel would have been okay plus a bunch if he hadn’t spent all that time maneuvering at full throttle and let that jerk shoot up his plane. Going to be tight.
Right engine was still alive and pulling hard — no more warning lights. The slop in the controls when operating on the backup hydraulic system was acceptable as long as he didn’t have to defend himself, as long as the secondary pump held together, as long as he could make his aching right leg work. The plane flew okay on one engine if he held in forty pounds or so of right rudder. The rudder trim wasn’t working. Sorry about that!
He had about forty miles of radioactive terrain to cross before he could get out and walk. It was a little like flying over a shark-infested ocean — you prayed for the engine to keep running, counted every mile, watched the minute hand of the panel clock with intense interest.
Jake Grafton’s eyes scanned the vast distances between the horizon and the bottom of the cumulonimbus clouds. He gazed up into the gaps between the clouds, searched behind him and out to both sides. The sky appeared to be empty. Because he knew how difficult another aircraft was to spot in a huge, indefinite sky, he kept looking. And occasionally his eyes came inside to check the clock.
So she made it to here and took out the hangar and that transport on the mat. He hadn’t seen any craters on the mat that would mark misses. Apparently she put all her ordnance into the bucket, a neat, professional job.
Thank you, Rita, wherever you are.
He listened to the engine. He watched the clock hand sweep. He unhooked his oxygen mask and swabbed the sweat from his eyes.
Forty miles of terrain required about ten minutes of flying to cross. When the ten minutes had passed Jake began to relax. His right leg was hurting since he had to maintain constant pressure on the rudder, but he felt better. It was goofy when you thought about it — Captain Collins said about forty miles, and of course the fallout zone had no definite boundary. The intensity of the radiation would just decrease as the miles went by. Knowing all this and feeling slightly silly, Jake still felt better with each passing mile.
If this shot-up jet would just hold together…