Clementine

9. OUR PLAYERS COME TO AN AGREEMENT

Hainey hoisted Maria with a jerk and a backwards stumble that drew her up out of the hole left by the former glass ball turret; and although the sucking vortex left by the circular absence roared with broken, swirling wind, they were safely away from its reach. For a few seconds, Maria lay panting on the metal floor-and then she sat up, letting the wild, intruding air flay her hair to pieces.

She said, “Oh no. My underthings.”

“Your what?”

“My…never mind.” She leaned forward just enough to see over the edge just a little bit, and she spied the undergarments floating happily down to Missouri. “Are we safe? Did we get them all?”

The captain stood up, swung his head slowly back and forth, and backed away-urging her to do likewise. He said, “You got the last of them. Goddamn, woman. You almost got yourself killed.”

“Well, I didn’t. And…well, I think it’s only clear and honest to point out, I owe that to you.” She rubbed at her wrists, where the red marks of his grasp were flushing into a pattern of hands. “Why did you do that? You could’ve let me fall. Maybe you should have. It might’ve been more convenient for you to do so.”

He stared down into the hole and told her, “Just reflex, I guess. It’s not every day I see a half-dressed woman falling out of a ball turret.” He turned to climb the three or four steps up into the bridge, and she rose to follow behind him. Over his shoulder he added, “And anyway, you took down the cruiser.”

Once they were away from the whistling void, Maria didn’t have to shout when she said, “I didn’t have much choice. I thought we’d worked that out.”

Again, without looking at her, he said, “Maybe. But I don’t know too many men who’d have reached for that last shot.”

On the bridge, he pointed at her previous seat and said, “Buckle yourself in.”

Lamar had been closest to the cargo hold, so he was the one who asked, “Sir, what happened back there? What’s that noise?”

“We lost the left ball turret,” he answered, but didn’t tell him more. “I don’t know what kind of disturbance it’ll make in the steering, but if you find this bird pulling or bucking, it’s a big hole and we don’t have any good way to cover it right this moment, so we’re going to live with it.”

“It’s tugging back and down a little, but not too bad. We can live with it, sure. Maybe when we stop we can shove a crate over it or something,” Simeon proposed, trying very hard not to watch Maria with one eye.

“If we can find one big enough,” Hainey said. “But for now, we’ve got to…” he rubbed wearily at his forehead. “God Almighty.”

Simeon asked, “Captain?”

And Lamar gazed up expectantly.

“We’ve got to…” he tried again. “Christ knows how far ahead of us they are. We’ve given them a devil of a head start, but at least we know where they’re headed. So here’s what I want to do-I want to head north a bit, out over godforsaken noplace; we’ll check through the cargo and see if there’s anything we want; and if there’s anything we don’t want, we’re going to pitch it. We need to lighten this thing, because we can maybe catch up to them before they reach Louisville.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Maria was out of her seat again.

Without any malice or even impatience, Hainey said, “You wait a minute, woman. Simeon, take us north a few miles and maybe even lean us west since they think we’ve been going east; get us outside Kansas City’s airspace, and if you can find a low cloud to hide us in, so much the better.”

“The sky’s clear as a bell; I wouldn’t give us good odds on that one.”

“Then keep your eyes open for anything big enough to cover this thing for half an hour. We won’t have any longer than that to get ourselves together before we have to make a run for it. And of course, we’ve got a lady passenger to debark. You can walk a couple of miles back to town, can’t you?”

“Captain,” Maria was standing beside him, and when he turn-ed, she was right under his nose. Then she asked with some doubt, “This ship was going to Louisville before you commandeered it. Wasn’t it?”

His forehead wrinkled. “This ship? I don’t know where it was going. But within an hour it’s going to be headed to Louisville as fast as its hydrogen can carry it. Why did you think the Valkyrie was Kentucky-bound?”

She didn’t answer his question, but she asked him another one. “Why are you Kentucky-bound? Why the eastward course? You know as well as I do that south and east is not the safest direction you could choose. So tell me, please. Why are you chasing the Clementine? What’s on board that you want so badly?”

“Not a goddamned thing,” he told her. “I don’t want anything that ship’s carrying. I want the ship itself, because it’s mine.”

“Yours?”

The motion of the Valkyrie’s new course made the floor under their feet swing slightly, and they both swayed as they spoke. “Yes,” he said. “It’s mine. I stole it fair and square, years ago, and I want it back.”

She looked frankly puzzled, and she admitted as much. “I’m not sure I understand. It’s only a ship, and as I understand it, it’s not half as nice as this one. You’ve got this one now; why not turn around, call off the chase, and call it a day?”

He nearly bellowed. “Because I don’t want this one!” He kept the volume up when he continued, “And now, since we’re both feeling so chatty-why did Pinkerton send you after us? Who paid them to do it, and why?”

“The Union Army,” she said. “And now you likely know more about the situation than I do. I’ll admit, I got a bit sidetracked from my initial task. Look, I had no idea you had any interest in this ship whatsoever until I heard your men aboard it. As far as I knew, it was transporting some kind of supplies to a sanatorium in Louisville, though the sanatorium is actually a front for a weapons laboratory.”

With a puzzled expression that mirrored Maria’s, Hainey said, “Then there’s been a mix-up in your telegrams. Because it’s my former ship that’s making the weapons run, not this shiny black bird. The Valkyrie was on her way to New York City-she’s going to be fitted with a new ball turret.” He quickly clarified, “They were going to stick one on top, up front I suppose. Though now, if it ever makes it that far north and east I guess they’ll have to fix the bottom left one first.”

Following another moment of mutual uncertainty, their faces both went crafty.

Hainey said, “You fellows keep her flying straight, and when you think she’s safely over nothing at all, pull us to a stop and hover. Me and Maria Boyd here are going to dig around in the cargo hold and see what we can find.”

Simeon and Lamar shrugged at each other, and Simeon’s eyebrow pointed a vigorous indication of confusion.

But the runaway slave and the ex-spy retreated to the cargo hold, where the wind from the busted ball turret nearby was loud and the air was even colder than the un-warmed bridge. Hainey rummaged around in the storage locker and turned up a pair of prybars, one of which he tossed to Maria.

He said to her, “I swear on my mother’s life, I don’t know what’s in any damn one of these boxes. So be careful with the bar. God knows what we’ll turn up.”

“The need for caution is duly noted,” she said, and then she said, “I’ll start at this end. You start at that end. We’ll work our way toward the middle.”

He grunted a general agreement and began at the far corner. The captain brought his prybar down into the cracks of the nearest crate’s lid, and Maria did likewise on her end of the hold.

One after another, they bashed and pried their way through the stacks, and when they were finished they’d unveiled a vast assortment of wonders. Their haul included four loads of boot polish, a stash of rough-woven linens, enough lye soap to fill a wagon, some dried and smoked fish and pork, an engineer’s assortment of bolts, screws, and washers, a tobacco pouch that had probably been dropped by a laborer…and two dead mice.

They also found three crates of ammunition, some of which was strung to fuel the ball turret guns. The rest looked ordinary enough, and when Maria stood over this final crate she said, “This can’t possibly be it. This is stocked like a ship that was loaded out of convenience, because it was headed the right direction. There’s nothing special or important about any of it.”

Hainey nodded. “We’ll keep the ammunition and the foodstuffs, and the rest can go overboard when we stop and hang.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“Surprised about what?”

“That we didn’t find anything significant on board?”

He said, “Nope. Because I’ve already got a real good idea of what the sanatorium’s got on order-and what Pinkerton’s been paid to protect. That’s the point, isn’t it? You’re supposed to distract us long enough to let the Clementine get to Louisville to make this delivery?”

“Pretty much. But in Kansas City I met an old friend, a fellow Confederate who possessed, shall we say, somewhat incorrect information. He told me about a weapon being built, something made to fire on Danville…and…and…old loyalties took precedence,” she said defensively.

Hainey said, “Old loyalties. I know what those are like.”

“Really? And to whom might you be loyal?”

“Nobody you’d know,” he said. “And nothing I care to elaborate upon. None of it matters, because right now we’ve got an interesting situation between the two of us, don’t you think?”

“I beg your pardon? A situation?”

“Yes, a situation,” he said grouchily, with a hint of false cheer. “You know about half of what’s going on, and I know about half of what’s going on, and there are spots where our information…” he hunted for a phrase. “Fails to overlap.”

“That seems to be the case, yes.” She was half a head shorter than him, and a hundred pounds smaller, but she met his gaze over the contents of the last crate, and she didn’t flinch or retreat.

He sounded almost optimistic when he said, “We could work together, you and me. I could tell you some useful things, and you have permission to go to places I’m not allowed.”

“You can take me to Louisville.”

“I’m headed that direction anyway.”

“And I can tell you where your ship is.”

He was startled, despite himself. “You can what?”

“It’s parked at a transient dock outside the city. It may be gone now, but it was there last I heard, maybe an hour or two ago. I don’t think your quarry has quite the lead you think it does.”

Hainey turned on his heels, crossed the cargo bay, and leaned himself through the doorway that led to the bridge. “Simeon! Where are the nearest transient docks?”

“Nearest…to here?”

“Nearest to Kansas City!”

The first mate thought about it, then said, “East of here, a little ways. At least, that’s where they used to park and set up. Why?”

“Because the Free Crow’s there-or she was quite recently. Adjust course!”

Lamar said, “But sir, we’re still riding heavy. You going to toss the cargo, or what?”

He said, “Yeah, I’ll toss it. Are we over anything or anybody important?”

Simeon said, “No, but we will be soon if we adjust course. So get to dropping sooner, rather than later.”

The captain didn’t answer except to dash back to the hold and say to Maria, “Give that lever over there a yank!”

She grabbed it with both hands and hauled it down; when it clicked at the bottom part of its track, a set of sliding doors retracted in the floor at the back of the hold. “Are we discarding the cargo now? I thought we were going to go low and hover?”

“Change of plans. We’re going east, to the only transient docks my first mate knows. On the way, you and me are going to toss this stuff out of the Valkyrie. Sim says we shouldn’t hit anything or anybody important for the next few minutes, so give me a hand. Except for what we talked about, grab anything you can move and kick it out, fast as you can.”

Maria pressed herself between the crate of linens and the wall, and she used her back and legs to shove it out into the middle of the room.

Hainey met her there and ushered her aside; he cast the crate over the lip of the retracted door and let it tumble out, down to the prairie below. Then he reached for the next box, which held part of the soap shipment. He swung it and dragged it over to the edge and this too went freefalling to the dry, brown ground half a mile below.

Maria took the next box of linens and worked them over the edge. She went back for a cache of polish, which was almost more than she could move, but she took it and she wiggled it, and skidded it until it was teetering-and she tipped it overboard.

“Help me with this one,” the captain said like it was an order, but Maria was getting the impression that this was simply how he talked.

“Coming,” she said, and she joined him.

Side by side, their backs pressed against the metal-stuffed crate of small tools and hardware. This one dug into the paint on the floor but it moved in jerks and inch-long shrugs until finally it too crashed heavily over the lip and into the sky.

“Back to the bridge,” the captain said when the last of the expendable boxes had been expended.

Arms aching and back throbbing, Maria tagged behind him and took up her familiar seat. She dropped herself down and reached for the straps that would fasten her into place.

Hainey took up his position with similar haste, asking for a time estimate from his first mate. “How long before the docks are in sight?”

“Five minutes. Ten, at the outside,” Simeon said. “But how do we want to approach?”

“Guns blazing,” Hainey growled. “We’ve still got a right-side ball turret and I’ll take it up myself, if you two can fly us.”

“I’m getting the hang of it, sir,” Lamar said helpfully.

The first mate added, “I’ve found everything I need to steer alone, if I have to. But do you really want to shoot the Crow out of the sky?”

“I don’t mind doing her a little damage if it helps us get her back. She’ll forgive us in the morning; she always does.”

“What about her?” Simeon asked, aiming an eyebrow in Maria’s direction.

“What about her? She needs a ride to Louisville, and we’re going to give her one. She’ll behave herself, I bet. It turns out, we have more in common than we thought. Our goals…overlap,” he used that word again. “We want the Free Crow, she wants what it’s carrying, even if it costs her the shiny new job she’s landed.”

“That’s true,” she said from her seat. “And I’ll be damned if I even know what the cargo is.”

Hainey’s bright white grin spread so far that the scar on his cheek crinkled up to his ear. “It’s a diamond.”

“A diamond?” Maria exclaimed. “All this trouble for a diamond?”

The captain said, “Not just any diamond. An orange diamond the size of a plum. The man who cut the thing called it the ‘clementine,’ so I guess the boys who stole our ship thought they were being funny when they renamed her.”

“I’ve never even heard of a diamond that big. And why do you know this?”

“I’ve got a friend back west, a fellow captain and a man of fine character. When the Free Crow was first boosted out from under us, this friend helped us try to retrieve her.”

“That’s a good friend indeed,” Maria said.

Hainey agreed. “I owe him one. Or two, or ten. And now I owe him double. Down in Tacoma he found a fellow to tell him what my ship is carrying. He sent a telegram to fill me in. That’s how I know about the diamond. And now I know why my ship was stolen.”

“To transport a diamond?”

“To transport a diamond and a two-thousand-pound corpse. There’s an old story that floated around for years, and everyone always thought it was a tall tale-even though every man who ever repeated it swore it was the truth.” As he spoke, Hainey gave the throttle a deeper nudge, urging the ship faster, farther, towards the transient docks.

He continued, “There was a certain lady of…leisure. Her name was Conklin, but everyone called her ‘Damnable.’ She was the richest woman west of the Mississippi and maybe east of it too, for all anybody knows. She had plenty of money, at any rate, and she spent a great wad of it on a diamond found a hundred years ago in India. She wore it set in a necklace, almost all the time.”

Lamar piped up. “I heard she shot a dozen men who tried to steal it from her, and one woman too.”

The captain said, “It’s possible. She was a real piece of work, and when she died, she took the diamond with her. The funeral man dressed her in her finest, hung the diamond around her neck, and filled her coffin with every drop of cement it would hold-just like she asked him to. Then the gravedigger made a hole twice as big as he needed, and once the coffin was lowered down inside, they filled up the hole with cement too, in order to keep out anybody who wanted what she was wearing.”

“And no one ever bothered her body?”

“Not until my Free Crow was stolen. Not another ship west of the river could’ve lifted her up, carried her over the mountains, and gotten her into bluegrass country-”

Maria said, “No ship except for yours? She must be nearly as powerful as this one, then.”

“Nearly,” he said. “But not quite, and this one wasn’t anywhere handy-so some bastard Union man paid a bastard pirate named Felton Brink to steal my Free Crow, dig up old Madam Damnable, and tote her to Kentucky.”

“But I still don’t understand,” Maria insisted, “what a scientist needs with a diamond.”

Hainey held up one finger. “I have a theory about it, and I’ll explain it to you just as soon as we address what’s…” he sagged. “What’s not right over there, at those transient docks. Do you see them?”

She craned her neck to see out the windshield, and then said, “Yes, I see them. I’ve never seen a set of transient docks before.”

“Don’t know nothing about dirigibles, don’t know nothing about docks. Where you been all your life?” Simeon asked.

“East, mostly. The docks there are all pretty permanent, and the war doesn’t allow for much passenger activity. Mostly I’ve been moving around by train, coach, and carriage. But it’s quite a crash course I’ve gotten lately.”

Lamar said, “And she knew about the ball turret gun; she knew how to use it.”

The captain explained before Maria could do so. “It’s just a modified land model. I expect she’s seen them in combat.”

“You are correct,” she told him. “And I could become accustomed to this flying business. It’s all rather exciting.”

“It’d be more exciting if the Free Crow was still docked there,” Hainey very nearly sulked.

Maria asked, “Are there any other transient docks, anywhere around the city? I’m sorry, I wish I could’ve been more specific. But I didn’t know the information would prove valuable, and I didn’t press for details.”

Simeon answered. “This is the only one I ever heard of. They break it down sometimes if there’s trouble, but they usually put it right back up again, right here. If this isn’t it, then we could spend another day or two flying around, looking for another one, but I don’t think we’d have much luck.”

Lamar asked, “So what do we do, then?”

The captain took a deep sigh and straightened his shoulders. He turned his head to give Maria a look that was half promise, and half a nod of conspiracy. “Top speed, as fast as this thing will carry us. We make for Louisville.”

The trip was long and the terrain below was an uninspiring rollick of river and hills, and trees peeled bare by the season. Maria gazed out the window and sometimes wondered why no one was following them; and then she’d remember the flaming dirigibles sweeping in their spinning, pendulum-swinging arcs down to make craters in the grasslands of Kansas, and she didn’t wonder anymore.

From her seat by the right glass ball turret, Maria Boyd declared, “Captain, you said you had a theory about why a scientist would need a diamond, but you haven’t yet explained yourself.”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he said, and he didn’t completely sound like he was poking fun at her when he called her “ma’am.” “There’s this fellow back west, name of Minnericht-or, come to think of it, there used to be a fellow named Minnericht. I understand he’s dead now, but that’s a recent development, so you’ll have to pardon me if I misspeak. This Minnericht was an inventor, and he liked to play with weapons. Not long before he shuffled off this mortal coil, he’d been working on a weapon that…it’s hard to describe. It cuts things, or burns them, but it uses light.”

Maria considered this, nodded, and asked, “Like the way a magnifying glass can start a fire?”

“Like that. Only imagine using something much, much stronger than a little piece of curved glass to focus the sunlight.”

“I see what you’re getting at,” she said. “And if you can use a much more concentrated light, with a much stronger focus than glass, you might…well. You might make something terrible.”

Simeon said, “And if it was terrible, you could bet old Minnericht had his fingers in it.”

Lamar murmured, “Truer words were never spoken,” and he fiddled with a lever that would adjust the hydrogen flow to the compression engine. “But he wasn’t a dummy.”

“Hell no, he wasn’t,” the captain agreed. “He was a damn-ed smart son of a gun, but meaner than the good Lord ought to make them. But I tell you that to tell you this: He made a weapon called a solar cannon, and like I heard it, he sold a patent on it to somebody back east. And that was the last I heard of it, except he had a couple early models hanging around inside Seattle. He used to like to sit on the roof of the train station, up in the clock tower, and use it to burn up the rotters like ants on a hill when the weather was clear enough to make it happen.”

“Now I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” Maria said.

Hainey looked like he was trying to figure out how best to tell her something else, or something bigger; but in the end he cocked his head quickly, like he was shooing a fly, and said, “It’s a longer story that you’d care to hear, I bet. Anyway, the one big drawback to his solar cannon was that it needed the sun, and it needed a lot of it-and up in the northwest, there’s not much sun to go around.”

“Especially not where the doctor lived,” Simeon said, and there was a cryptic note to it that Maria couldn’t decipher.

The captain continued, “But back east, where there’s more light, maybe his machine would work better, or be more popular with folks who could use it in a bigger way.”

“Folks like the Union army,” Maria finished for him. “Folks like a man called Ossian Steen.”

Hainey looked over his shoulder and asked, “You know about Steen?”

“Not much.”

“Us either,” Lamar said. “But I wouldn’t mind having a word with him. I’m sure he’s a bastard, but he must be one devil of a scientist.”

“When we get to Louisville, if we can find him, you can ask him anything you want,” Hainey said. “If I don’t feel the need to kill him first.”

Maria asked, “You have a gripe with this Steen?”

“I assume he’s the man who paid Felton Brink to steal my ship,” Hainey said grimly, and with a stormy grumble of intent. “But I might give him a minute to explain himself, just in case I’m wrong.”

“That’s big of you,” Maria said dryly.

“I’m glad you approve,” he responded with equal lack of humidity. “Now if we can only find this place, perhaps we can ask him in person.”

But no one knew which sanatorium was being used for the nefarious Ossian Steen’s frightening plans, and no one even knew where to begin looking-until Maria proposed they stop by the city hospital and ask about another facility. Perhaps they shared doctors, nurses, or other staff. But this plan was whittled into impracticality by inconvenient facts.

The Valkyrie was too notorious to park at the service yard docks down by the river, and it was too large to simply hide behind a warehouse. Furthermore, it was too dangerous-looking by design for the crew to simply strip off a few guns, dab a new name on the side, and call it something innocuous.

The plating, the weaponry, and the overall size of the tremendous craft made these things impractical. There was nowhere to simply “stop” the ship unless they wanted to abandon it outside of town and then walk.

“We could try that,” she said. “But I don’t know if it’s wise.”

Simeon tilted his heavily dreadlocked head back and forth, weighing the options as if his skull was the axis on a set of scales. “I’d hate to toss her,” he said. “She’s a sweet set of wings, and not much in the air would dare try to stick us.”

“You suggesting we keep her, and bail on the Crow?” Hainey asked with warning, but also curiosity.

“No, I ain’t suggesting that. I’m suggesting we might not want to cut this angel loose until we’re good and certain we’re done with her. We land on the other side of the river, maybe-we start in Indiana and walk our way over-and then what? Maybe we find the Free Crow, and maybe we don’t. Maybe Brink sets our girl on fire and kicks her into the Ohio. Maybe we need to make a getaway fast, and then come back to try again. Maybe a whole lot of things could happen, and we’d need a ship as big and fast as this one to see us safe back west. If we’d taken anything smaller or lighter than this warbird, we’d have never made it out of Missouri, and you know it same as I do.”

“I know it,” Hainey griped. “Nobody’s arguing with you. And it’s a quandary, I know. But Louisville is east, it ain’t west. And I can’t…” he looked at Maria and then frowned in a way that said something she didn’t understand, not at first. “There are places in Kentucky I couldn’t go even if the law wasn’t looking for me.”

Then he turned to Maria and addressed her directly. “Three black men and a white woman walking into town together, that’d go over real well, don’t you think? That wouldn’t raise a lick of suspicion in anyone, anywhere.”

“You have a point.”

“I usually do.”

“But perhaps I can help.”

Hainey almost laughed, but he restrained himself enough to say, “What do you have in mind?”

She said, “Put me down on the far side of the river and wait over there, in the woods if you have to. Tether down, and I’ll catch a ride into the city. I’ll send a few telegrams, ask a few questions, and see if I can’t locate our mysterious sanatorium, which-as you and I both know-is no sanatorium at all.”

Simeon spun around in the first mate’s chair and eyed her angrily. “And then we…we what? We sit like fish in a barrel and wait for the charitable Belle Boyd to return?” He turned to the captain and said, “She’ll leave us here and finish her job, let her Yankee bosses pat her on the head, or maybe she’ll come back over the river with the law, and we’ll all be hung by morning!”

Lamar said with less venom, but more measured concern, “Once we’ve set her down and sent her off…if she finds the sanatorium she’s got no need of us.”

“But I do!” she objected. “Our goals are not so dissimilar, gentlemen,” she cajoled. “You want your ship, I want to stop your ship and destroy this weapons laboratory-by hook or crook if necessary. Perhaps I could do this alone and perhaps I couldn’t, but this ship is the best hope I have for intercepting another vessel, now isn’t it?”

“It’s surely your most obvious,” the captain said before the crew could complain.

Simeon tried to bark an objection regardless. “But Captain, she-”

“Time is of the essence, don’t you think?” he asked the first mate. “We could set the ship down, go our separate ways; and we could try through our connections to learn where the sanatorium lies, or she could try to learn it on her own, through channels that wouldn’t let us pass the front door or the back door, either. Who do you think will learn the most, the fastest?”

“She would,” Simeon scowled. “But we can’t trust her.”

“Who said I trust her?” Lamar sniffed, and the captain said, “I trust her to shoot like an ace, and I trust her to fight for the country that’s turned her away. I trust her to be as sneaky a bitch as ever the South did breed, and I trust her to understand that we’re her best hope every bit as much as she’s ours, because like Minnericht, and like you, and like me, that woman isn’t an idiot and she can see where the sun’s shining today. Now woman,” he said to her, “Did I tell any lies just now?”

She was seated still, hands folded in her lap over the gun she’d drawn from her handbag. Quietly she said, “Every word the gospel truth. I have no reason to lie to you. The captain is right and I am a patriot for my country, and although I generally desire my country’s approval, that goal will be best served by preserving Danville from utter destruction. You’re fugitives, yes, but what good would it do me to hand you over…if there is no nation left to prosecute you?”

Hainey swung a hand out and pointed it at her, as if to say, “See?” but he did not say it aloud. Instead he said, “On your word then, lady. On your word as a Southerner, and a Confederate, and, and,” he searched for something else to bind her. “And a widow. On your husband’s grave, and on your-”

“That’s enough,” she snapped. “On that-all of it. On that and more, I give you my word that if you send me into the city to gather information, I’ll return to you with everything I know.”

One hour later, she was deposited without ceremony beside the road that led to the bridge that would take her into the city.

When Maria returned-and she did return-she brought them the location of a brand new facility south of the city. And she climbed aboard, and neither she nor the captain nor any of the crew said another word until they landed their craft behind the Waverly Hills Sanatorium forty miles outside of town.