Текст книги "Fangs Out"

Автор книги: David Freed

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David Freed
Fangs Out

For Elizabeth

Acknowledgements

My thanks to master aircraft mechanics Dan and Brian Torrey for their insights on all things mechanical, and to editors Barbara Baker, Barb Hallett, and Joslyn Pine for their expertise. Thanks also to esteemed writer and friend Sara J. Henry for helping keep my prose honest. To cover designer Lon Kirschner, website guru Kevin Pacotti, my agent extraordinaire Jill Marr, and publishers Judith and Martin Shepard, I am deeply indebted, as I am to the many family members and good friends who have opened their hearts, doors, and, not infrequently, wallets, in my pursuit of the writer’s life. My gratitude also to those anonymous intelligence professionals, true heroes all, who each day help keep us safe without expectation of reward. You know who you are.

Epigraph

Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.

– NEIL ARMSTRONG

Prologue

The dead man wanted Lobster Thermidor and a good bottle of Pinot Noir.

“Who does he think he is,” the warden said, “Wolfgang Puck?”

They compromised on a bacon cheeseburger, onion rings, and two cans of cold Pepsi from the roach coach parked out in the visitors’ lot, the aroma of sizzling grease wafting through the exercise yard like a tantalizing reminder of freedom itself. Thankful at having avoided a dust-up over last meal menus, the warden threw in what remained of a carrot cake left over from his executive assistant’s baby shower.

“The upside of capital punishment,” the dead man said as he licked cream cheese frosting from his fingertips. “No more worrying about bad cholesterol.”

Dinner concluded at 5:30 P.M. Last rites were performed half an hour later, courtesy of a junior priest from one of Terre Haute’s lesser parishes who’d volunteered for the task. The rest of the evening was spent writing farewell letters and playing five-card stud with the earnest young cleric, who would’ve lost his collar in smokes that night had the wagering been for keeps.

At 10:30 P.M., a nurse practitioner exuding all the warmth of a turnpike toll booth collector arrived from the prison infirmary with a syringe of diazepam. “To relax you,” she said.

The dead man refused the injection. Few people, he said, can ever know in advance the precise moment at which they will cease producing carbon dioxide. He had every intention of experiencing it with a clear head. Besides, he quipped, he was scared to death of needles. Nobody laughed.

The captain of the guards appeared at 11 P.M., flanked by two underlings garbed in riot gear and built like the junior college offensive linemen they’d once been. The dead man was made to stand. They manacled his ankles, strung a chain through the belt loops of his prison-issued khakis, then locked his wrists to his waist.

“We’re good to go,” one of the correctional officers said when they were finished.

“Easy for you to say,” the dead man said on legs turned suddenly to rubber.

With chains jangling and the priest reciting the Lord’s Prayer in his wake, he shuffled through the otherwise tomb-silent penitentiary, officers steadying him, to a small, nondescript building outside the cellblocks. The death house.

“You can dispense with the holy roller nonsense, father,” the dead man said. “I stopped believing a long time ago.”

“It’s OK, my son. We’re all God’s children.”

“Yeah? Tell it to the FBI. They think I’m Ted Bundy.”

The execution chamber was hospital antiseptic, its walls tiled in a soothing asparagus green. Guards hoisted him onto a futuristic gurney padded black and bolted to the floor in the center of the room. They unhooked his wrists, then strapped him down with five Velcro restraints, lashing his arms, palms up, to two perpendicular extensions, like a horizontal Christ on the cross.

The nurse practitioner reappeared wearing latex gloves. The dead man watched with strained bemusement as she tied off his forearms with surgical tubing, found two good veins, and expertly slid a needle into each wrist.

“No alcohol wipe? What if I get an infection?”

“The least of your problems right now,” the nurse practitioner said, taping down the catheters through which the chemical cocktail would soon flow, stopping his heart.

The dead man tried to smile but couldn’t. Gone, finally, was the false bravado. He would take his last breath one minute after midnight, on May 28—Amnesty International Day, it said on the wall calendar they’d allowed him to keep in his cell. The irony of it, dying by the government’s hand on a day honoring human rights. Tears sluiced down his cheeks.

The witnesses were ushered into two rooms flanking the execution chamber. They would watch him die through bulletproof glass – his defense attorney, eight federal agents, five pool journalists, and the three-member U.S. Justice Department team that had prosecuted him. Family members of his former girlfriend, a lithe, brilliant Annapolis graduate he’d been convicted of butchering nearly a decade earlier, would look on via a closed-circuit video feed from more than 2,000 miles away, in San Diego, not far from the beach where her body had been found.

The warden, a one-time rodeo rider, entered as if on cue at 11:55 P.M. Those who worked for him said his weathered features resembled a used sheet of sandpaper, though never to his face. From the breast pocket of his suit he removed an index card, cleared his throat, and read aloud in a keening tenor.

“Dorian Nathan Munz, you’ve been found guilty of the crime of capital murder and condemned to death by order of the court. Is there anything you wish to say before your sentence is carried out?”

The dead man slowly gazed up at the video camera aimed down at him from the ceiling.

“Funny,” he said in a voice tremulous with rising fear, “you should ask.”

One

A pilot was in trouble. For once, it wasn’t me.

He’d radioed approach control that his vacuum pump had quit, rendering his directional and attitude indicators useless. He was also running precariously low on fuel. Probably no more than ten minutes of flying time left.

None of that would’ve mattered much had Rancho Bonita been enjoying its usual postcard-perfect weather. You don’t need many gauges or even a working engine to land an airplane safely when the skies are crystalline and you can see the runway from miles out. You simply glide in. But this was June, and June on California’s central coast means fog, along with 300-foot cloud ceilings that can hang around for weeks like your couch-surfing, unemployed brother-in-law.

The airport was socked in.

“Mooney Seven Seven Delta, do you wish to declare an emergency at this time?” the controller asked over the radio like it was just another day at the office.

“Affirmative,” the pilot responded calmly in a slow Georgia drawl.

My eyes no longer tested 20/10 like they did when I was on active duty, but the old peepers were still plenty good enough to spot his airplane from afar. He was at one o’clock high and about three miles off the nose of the Ruptured Duck, my scruffy Cessna 172—a dark speck that stood out against the unbroken batting of soft white stratus like the mole on Marilyn Monroe’s cheek. The carpet of clouds stretched horizon to horizon beneath our two small ships. To survive his predicament, the Mooney pilot would have to descend through that half-mile-thick overcast – no easy task without fully functional flight instruments. Even the most skilled airman can become disoriented when his eyes are deprived of the ability to distinguish heaven from earth, up from down. A touch of vertigo and pretty soon they’re digging your charred carcass out of the abstract sculpture that used to be an airframe.

Nobody said it, but everybody listening in on the radio, including the Mooney pilot, knew that there was a fair chance he might soon be participating in that process known uniquely to aviators and agricultural brokers alike as “buying the farm.”

I was in no mood to play Good Samaritan. What I wanted to do more than anything was land, then go chill out with a long walk on the beach after an emotionally taxing weekend discussing possible reconciliation with my ex-wife at her home down the coast in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, given the urgent needs of a fellow airman, not to mention the Buddha’s insistence that true contentment can never be realized without embracing a reverence for all humanity, I suppose somebody had to goddamn do something.

“Rancho Bonita Approach, Four Charlie Lima has a visual on the Mooney,” I said, pressing the push-to-talk mic button on my control yoke. “I can shepherd him in.”

Static in my headset. The Ruptured Duck’s radios were acting squirrelly again. Small wonder considering they were ancient enough that Marconi probably designed them himself. I smacked the audio panel where I always smacked it and tried radioing again.

“Approach, Cessna Four Charlie Lima, how do you hear?”

“Four Charlie Lima, Approach. Loud and clear. How me?”

“Loud and clear. Four Charlie Lima has the Mooney traffic in sight. If he orbits left and throttles back, we can form up and he can follow me down on the ILS.”

“You ever done any formation work, Charlie Lima?” the Mooney pilot asked me.

“Some,” I radioed back. “I flew A-10’s in the Air Force.”

“A Warthog driver?” He said it like it was some kind of disease. “Y’all’re into close-air support, not precision flyin’.”

“That’s true. But the way I see it, you’ve got two choices. You can wait for the Blue Angels to show up, or you can live to tell the tale. Your call.”

He chuckled. “Well, when you put it that way, I suppose I’ll just have to take what I can get. Tell you what, Charlie Lima, you get me and my wife down in one piece, the drinks are on us.”

“Unable,” I responded. “Demon rum turns me into the Incredible Hulk and green’s definitely not my color. My makeup consultant says I’m much more of a winter palette.”

“All right then, how ’bout dinner?”

I’ve never turned down a free meal in my life. I wasn’t about to start now, not with the sad state of my bank account.

“You’re on,” I said.

I glimpsed his face as I maneuvered alongside his airplane a mile above the earth. He looked to be about fifteen years my senior, around sixty, graying and gaunt, wearing a sky-blue windbreaker. Rimless reading glasses perched on the end of a long, bony nose. His wife, a sultry blonde who appeared closer to my age than his, rode copilot and gave me a nervous, Queen of England-type wave. I nodded in response. She looked familiar. They both did. But there was no time to play place-the-face. I had to get two people on the ground, quickly, or they would soon be in it.

The pilot angled his Mooney in behind the Ruptured Duck’s left side and held it there. Our wingtips were separated by less than five feet, as if our two ships were one.

“Looks like you’ve done a bit of formation work yourself,” I radioed.

“Been awhile.”

The controller’s voice crackled in my headset. “Cessna Four Charlie Lima, flight of two, four miles outside of Jared intersection. Turn right, heading zero-six-five, vectors to final approach course. Maintain 2,000 feet until established. Cleared to land, ILS runway 8. We’ve rolled the equipment for you, just in case.”

I repeated the instructions to the controller, leaving out the part about the “equipment,” also known as the airport crash trucks, whose crews rarely get any real action to speak of and were probably salivating at the possibility.

The Mooney pilot repeated that his fuel gauge needles were bouncing on empty.

“Think positive,” I radioed him. “We’ll be down soon.”

“Hopefully not too soon,” he said.

We started down through the soup.

I wish I could say that it was a descent into hell. That flying blind, we iced up and spiraled out of control, managing to pull out only inches from impact. Or that visibility was so limited, we nearly collided and only by some miracle cheated death. But that would’ve been the Hollywood version. This wasn’t. With the Mooney a wispy ghost glued to my left wing, I centered the localizer and glide slope needles on my VOR and rode them down like I’d done on countless other instrument approaches under far lousier conditions. At 300 feet, the clouds gave way and there was the runway, half a mile dead ahead.

Booyah.

“That’s one I owe you,” the Mooney pilot radioed.

“Rock on.”

I shoved my throttle to the firewall, informed the tower I was initiating a missed approach and climbed back into the soup.

* * *

The pilot and his wife were standing beside their airplane outside mechanic Larry Kropf’s hangar as I taxied in. Larry, a hirsute man-mountain from whom I sublet a glorified storage closet that I had the temerity to call an “international flight school,” already had the Mooney’s cowling open and was noodling around inside the engine compartment. He was wearing his usual low-riding, blue Dickies work pants, revealing his usual six inches of butt crack, and a faded, oil-smeared gray T-shirt that said on the back, “In dog years, I’m dead.”

I toggled off the Ruptured Duck’s avionics master switch and pulled the mixture control. The Mooney pilot had my door open and was shaking my hand almost before the propeller had stopped spinning.

“You’re one helluva stick, fella,” he said.

“If I was, I’d definitely be making more money than I am.”

He grinned. “You must be flying for a regional carrier.”

“He’s a flight instructor,” Larry said. “A broke one at that.”

“Thanks, Larry. I love you, too.”

“My name’s Walker,” the Mooney pilot said, still pumping my hand.

“Cordell Logan.”

“Well, it’s a damn pleasure, Mr. Logan.”

He volunteered that he and his wife were flying home to San Diego after attending a charity fund-raiser in Carmel when his vacuum pump gave up the ghost. Larry had already concluded that the pump was beyond repair and would need replacing. There was also a problem apparently with the fuel sensors on Walker’s plane. Even though the gauges had indicated his wing tanks were all but dry, the Mooney, as it turned out, still had plenty of gas left.

“How long you figure it’ll take to fix everything?” Walker’s wife asked Larry.

“I get the parts in, you’ll be on your way tomorrow afternoon.”

“Guess it looks like we’re laying over in Rancho Bonita.” Walker turned to me. “I’d appreciate a hotel recommendation. Something reasonably priced, if there is such a thing around these parts.”

“Good luck with that,” I said, almost laughing as I climbed out of my plane.

Dwarfed on one side by verdant, 4,000-foot mountains, and cuddled on the other by the Pacific, Rancho Bonita perches on a hilly, south-facing strip of earth that is among the most picturesque and least affordable locales in all of America. An average two-bedroom fixer can run close to $1 million. A gallon of gas costs twenty-five cents more than anywhere else on the mainland. Everything is more expensive in “California’s Monaco,” as the city’s landed gentry like to call it. But the trust fund babies and reclusive show biz luminaries who make up a disproportionate percentage of its population rarely complain. Nor, for that matter, do Rancho Bonita’s many other, lesser residents. Surrounded by natural beauty and graced with arguably the most perfect weather on the planet, everybody smiles a lot and counts their blessings, even if it means scrounging for work and slowly draining their life savings in the process.

“I know where there’s a flophouse downtown,” Larry said, his head still buried in the Mooney’s engine compartment. “Put my in-laws up there last time they were in town. It’s clean and cheap. They even have Magic Fingers.”

Walker’s wife gave a quizzical look. “Magic Fingers?”

“You stick a quarter in a machine,” I said, “and the bed vibrates your fillings while you tell yourself it feels like a real massage.”

She smiled and took my hand firmly. “You saved our lives today. How can we ever repay you?”

A few methods came readily to mind. Amply proportioned in all the right places, Mrs. Walker was dressed in black silk slacks, glossy black pumps with high heels, and a scoop-neck, long-sleeved knit top that matched the honeyed hue of her shoulder-length tresses. She wore a small fortune in gold along with the air of an exceptionally attractive, middle-age woman long accustomed to men drooling over her.

“It was my pleasure, Mrs. Walker,” I said, reminding myself she was married and that part of me wished I still was. “I was just happy to help.”

“Call me Crissy, please.”

Larry yanked his head out of the Mooney’s engine compartment like it was on fire. He scrunched up his veined, bulbous nose and gaped at her through the half-inch-thick lenses of his Buddy Holly glasses.

“Crissy Walker? Playmate of the Year? That Crissy Walker?”

The smile drained from her face. “You must have me confused with someone else.”

“C’mon, I know it’s you. It is you, isn’t it?”

She exhaled. “I haven’t been that Crissy Walker in over twenty years.”

“I knew it.” Larry squealed like a kid come Christmas morning, which would’ve sounded cute had he actually been a kid. Not so cute coming from a guy who looks like the “before” picture in a Lap-Band infomercial. He wiped his greasy paw on his T-shirt, then offered it to her. “I’m a huge fan,” he said. “I used to look at your photo spread all the time. Sometimes three, four times a day.”

“Way too much information, Larry,” I said.

Crissy shook his hand tepidly.

Truth be told, I’d spent a little time myself admiring Crissy Walker’s pictures back in the day. We all did, my fellow Air Force Academy cadets and I. Who could blame us? There she was, stretched out on the wing of a B-17, wearing nothing more than a World War II bomber pilot’s cap and a smoldering, come-fly-with-me smile. The years had done little to diminish her emerald-eyed sensuality. But unlike my lascivious friend Larry, I was less awed by the former centerfold than I was by her husband. For the first time I could ever remember, I was truly starstruck.

“You’re Hub Walker,” I said.

He shrugged and smiled, embarrassed at being recognized.

“Reckon I am.”

I resisted the urge to squeal myself. Not because Walker was a big deal in film or on TV – why the world slathers adoration on mostly short, insecure people who stand in front of cameras pretending to be taller, self-assured people is beyond me. No, the reason I went weak in the knees was because in aviation circles, Hub Walker was nothing short of a living legend.

He was a natural pilot – talented enough to have flown with the Air Force’s Thunderbirds demonstration team. In Vietnam, he’d been a forward air controller, a Southern country boy piloting unarmed O-2 Skymasters at low level over the jungle canopy to purposely draw enemy fire, then directing fighter-bombers in to attack. Twice he’d been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery. In 1972, he’d intentionally crash-landed in a rice paddy to protect a Navy pilot who’d been shot down. Though badly wounded himself, Walker held off an entire NVA platoon for nearly an hour with nothing more than a German Luger pistol his father, a World War I doughboy, had given him. For his pluck, Hub Walker received the Medal of Honor.

Ceremonial jobs with defense contractors soon followed. He got paid big bucks to attend cocktail soirées and play golf with Congressional power brokers. He also grew addicted to prescription painkillers. Guilt-ridden at having survived combat when so many of his squadron mates hadn’t, he married his psychotherapist, who would die during labor less than a year later giving birth to their only child, a girl Walker named Ruth. A few years later, during a Memorial Day barbecue at the Playboy Mansion honoring America’s fighting men and women, he met Crissy.

As I remembered it, she’d grown up Appalachian poor, the tomboy daughter of a veteran Air Force mechanic who’d instilled in her an appreciation of how airplanes worked, and a love of the outdoors. But with the visage of an angel and a body like vice itself, Crissy’s ambitions extended far beyond the humble hollers of her roots. She’d attended beauty college for awhile, dropped out to work as a flight attendant, and ended up posing au naturel on the pages of America’s most popular monthly men’s publication.

Walker would later thank Crissy for helping him beat his drug addiction and rescuing him from thoughts of suicide. She, in turn, would credit Walker for giving her life true purpose. Being the loving, supportive wife of a national icon was more than she ever could have hoped for growing up. They eloped to Las Vegas a month after meeting.

Their fairy-tale romance was profiled in magazines from People to Flying. I remembered reading one especially breathless article in Cosmopolitan between missions in our ready room outside Dammam during Desert Storm. The piece was headlined, “The Hero and the Hottie: A High-Altitude Love Story.” It made the rounds among my fellow sex-starved fighter jocks as quickly as Crissy Walker’s centerfold when I was at the Academy, where those of us on the football team voted her “Most Likely to Make You Feel Funny in Your Jockstrap.”

Larry dug a felt-tip pen out of his own pants, lifted his T-shirt, and asked her to autograph his massive gut.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” she said.

“I’d never kid about what could be the greatest moment of my life.”

“Your wife might not think it’s so great,” I said.

“Mind your own business, Logan. Besides, Doreen’ll never know. She hasn’t seen me in the buff with the lights on for years. She has a heart condition. The shock would probably kill her.”

“I don’t sign body parts,” Crissy said.

“What if I knocked a hundred bucks off that replacement vacuum pump?”

“No.”

“OK. One-fifty. I gotta at least cover my costs.”

“No. And no means no. Not at any price. You got that?” She stormed past us, into the restroom of Larry’s hangar, and slammed the door shut.

Walker shrugged apologetically. “My wife gets a tad embarrassed over some of the decisions she made in her younger days. I’m happy to pay full price for the pump.”

“Suit yourself.”

A dejected Larry stuffed the pen in his pocket and went back to work on Hub Walker’s Mooney.

That night, over dinner on his dime, Walker insisted on telling me about how his daughter had been murdered, then offered me work that made me wish in hindsight I’d been born rich.