Saucer: Savage Planet

10

After dinner everyone took turns examining Solo’s scalp by firelight. The wound was completely healed, leaving only an angry red scar, which would probably disappear soon.

“Amazing,” Egg said.

Charley and Rip had no comment. They looked askance at each other, then wandered toward the Viking ship.

“Oh, man,” Charley moaned softly. “Oh, man! If you thought eternal life got them lathered up, imagine what will happen when they hear about enhancing the body’s ability to recover from wounds. The military will pull out all the stops. Gotta have it, gotta have it, gotta have it.”

“No one will believe that you and I know nothing about this.”

“Even if there is one chance in a million that we have the formula for antiaging, or body quick-repair, we’re toast. Even if the Americans leave us alone, there are the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans and Muslim fanatics. With eternal life and a quick fix for wounds, the diaper-heads would be Allah’s supermen.”

“So what do we do?”

Before Charley could answer, the faint hum of a passing airplane sounded in the cave. The sound waves were muted, because they entered through the crevice to the outside world, and through the stone, which was not a good conductor.

Rip and Charley stood frozen. A minute passed, then two. As one, they broke and ran for the crevice so they could hear better.

They raced through the stone crack into the cold evening air. Twilight, a hint of breeze …

They heard the plane. Then they saw it, circling over the lake and starting back this way. A Beaver on floats.

“Infrared,” Charley said. “They’ve seen the heat from the fire coming out of this cleft in the rock.”

Rip said a dirty word and went running back into the cave. Charley followed.

“Pack up and saddle up,” Rip shouted to Egg and Solo. “They’ve found us.”

“We got ’em, Mr. Murkowsky,” the pilot said. “A heat plume where there shouldn’t be one.”

Dr. Harrison Douglas looked at the screen of the portable infrared radiation detector, which was sitting on the empty seat beside the pilot, where the copilot would sit if there were one. There was only the one hot spot on the screen, and it was a plume, indicating the gases from a fire. A small fire. “Gotta be it,” he agreed.

Sitting shoulder to shoulder with him, Murkowsky grinned. He nodded at the pilot, who dialed in a frequency and started talking.

Johnny Murk spoke to the pilot. “Land as close as you can.”

“Gonna be tough, Mr. Murkowsky. We can land in the water, but you’ll have to swim ashore. And the water is very cold.”

“The other Beaver. It’s on wheels. Find a place for it to land.”

Murkowsky and Douglas were so excited they could barely contain themselves. The second Beaver fifteen minutes behind them contained four gunmen as passengers. Their job, if they could be placed on the ground, was to capture Adam Solo. Well, not really. Their job was to get him dead or alive. After all, the drug moguls believed, Solo’s body held valuable secrets that would improve the life of every person on earth — and, incidentally, make them filthy rich. Solo was being “unreasonable.” Too bad for him.

The pilot was an old hand at bush flying. He scanned the beaches, which were reasonably flat. All he needed was a straight stretch of a thousand feet or so without rocks or trees or a creek.

He found just the place, less that a mile from the heat plume, pointed it out to his passengers and began talking to the other Beaver. Johnny Murk enthusiastically pounded Douglas on the back. Oh boy, oh boy!

“Mr. President,” the aide said excitedly, “the pharma people have found the saucer in Canada.”

“How?” P. J. O’Reilly demanded.

“Two Beavers were searching the shore of Hudson’s Bay and discovered a heat plume. One is going to land. We’re picking up their radio transmissions on the satellite and have them triangulated.”

The president nodded. P. J. O’Reilly swung into action. He had two C-130s sitting on the ramp at Duluth with mountain-trained paratroops aboard, ready to go with five minutes’ notice. The C-130s were equipped with wheels and skis, so they could land on runways or snow or frozen lakes, if a place could be found. If not, the paratroopers could jump.

O’Reilly issued the orders, and the aide hurried off to the situation room to pass them on.

Of course, the Canadian government didn’t know of the planned invasion by U.S. military forces. Sometimes it is easier to ask forgiveness than get permission, and this was one of them. Those confounded Ottawa politicians were still huffing and puffing about sovereignty.

“Murkowsky and Douglas,” the president fretted aloud. Now there was a pair.

When the aide strode back into the room, he asked him, “How long until the C-130s get to Hudson’s Bay?”

“Over two hours,” the aide said.

“Get some fighters up there ASAP. Have them make life difficult for Murkowsky and Douglas. Set up a shuttle and keep a couple fighters on top of that location until the paratroopers get there.”

“It’s getting dark up there, sir, and the Canadians—”

A glare from the president shut him off. The aide charged out of the room again.

The Beaver on wheels landed in the twilight on the beach. The pilot was an old hand; he had his bird completely stalled just as all three wheels touched the sand. When the plane stopped, the four gunmen leaped out with their weapons and set off on a trot for the rocky promontory a mile away along the beach.

Above them in the other Beaver, Harrison Douglas and Johnny Murk monitored their progress.

“How long can we stay?” Douglas asked his pilot.

“Another hour, then we have to head back to base. “

“An hour should be enough,” Johnny Murk cackled gleefully. “I’ll bet Solo and the Cantrells don’t even know we’re coming. Tough for them, great for us.”

Douglas told the pilot, “Radio the guys on the beach. It’s Solo we want. Ignore anyone else they find.”

The pilot nodded and keyed his lip mike.

Charley Pine was in the pilot’s seat of the saucer when the others got aboard and Rip closed the hatch. She already had the computer running, had run the built-in-tests and was ready. As everyone else strapped in, she lifted the saucer, snapped up the landing gear, and spun the saucer so that it was pointed toward the underwater cave entrance.

Carefully, using the landing light, she submerged the saucer in the lagoon as she edged it forward. The water was murky, but she had just enough visibility. She found the entrance and eased the saucer through into the open water of Hudson’s Bay. Keeping the saucer as near to the bottom as possible, she slowly turned it north and proceeded at a walking pace. Too fast, she thought, and the saucer would create a wake in this shallow water.

What is your plan? That was Solo.

I’m going to give these bastards something to think about.

Killing them won’t solve our problem.

That’s rich, coming from you. If these guys were monks in some Irish abbey, you’d chop them up quick enough. And steal their habits, wooden plates and potatoes.

She gradually increased speed as the water appeared to get deeper. The bay was certainly no ocean, so there wasn’t going to be a shelf that allowed her to drop into the depths.

She glanced over her shoulder. All three of the men were strapped into their seats. Their expressions were a study. Solo was expressionless, Egg was calm, and Rip’s face mirrored his excitement.

The gunmen arrived at the rocky promontory eight minutes after they exited the Beaver. They were in excellent physical shape. From the Beaver overhead, Douglas and Johnny Murk described where the crack in the rock face was that the heat was pluming from. Not that the gunmen needed directions; they had found the tracks of Solo and Rip.

In they went, weapons at the ready.

Two minutes later, one of them ran back outside and radioed the Beaver overhead. “They’re gone. No one there. Fire still burning. Marks from the saucer’s gear pads. And you aren’t going to believe this, there’s an old Viking ship in this cave. Been here forever.”

Douglas and Murkowsky looked at each other and both said the same dirty word simultaneously.

After ten seconds or so, Johnny Murk told the pilot, “Have them look around outside. Maybe they sent the saucer somewhere and are hiding.”

The pilot was transmitting this message when the first F-16 fighter made a pass right by his plane. The wash rocked the Beaver viciously.

Another went roaring down the beach toward the bush plane sitting there idling. It cleared the bush plane by no more than ten feet.

As Johnny Murk and Harrison Douglas watched, horrified, the first fighter made a long, lazy turn, then steadied out in a shallow dive toward the Beaver on the beach. The water beside the Beaver boiled furiously.

“He’s shooting, he’s shooting,” the pilot on the beach shouted into his radio. He didn’t wait for another pass. He spun his plane 180 degrees and began his takeoff run. After an amazingly short distance he was airborne.

Another jet was inbound on a strafing run, so the bush pilot laid his Beaver over in a hard right turn and skimmed away over the forest eastward.

“They’ve boogied,” P. J. O’Reilly told the president. The duty officer in the White House command center was giving him the blow-by-blow over a telephone. “Douglas and Murkowsky’s thugs found where they had been, and the marks of the saucer, but the saucer and crew are gone.”

The president indulged himself in the same dirty word the Big Pharma guys had used.

“So we’re back to square one,” the leader of the free world said to no one in particular. “Well, that saucer is somewhere. Tell those satellite people and air force weenies to find the thing or I’m going to start biting heads off.” He grabbed his coffee cup and threw it at the wall.

The saucer broke surface about ten miles from the cave. Charley Pine lit the rockets and took it out over the surface of the bay for another ten miles, accelerating quickly, and turned while still subsonic. A nice, clean four-G turn back toward the cave and the Beavers.

“Charley!” Egg said sharply.

“When you go gallivanting to kidnap and murder people, you gotta expect to find a few potholes in the road,” she replied.

The saucer was now pointing straight at the Beaver circling off the beach. It was about a thousand feet above the water and turning from right to left. Charley adjusted her course as the saucer rocketing toward the Beaver accelerated though Mach 2. The two craft came together almost too quickly for the human eye to follow; then the saucer was by.

Without turning for a look, Charley raised the nose and turned the rockets full on. The nose rose until the saucer was climbing straight up into the dark northern sky on a pillar of fire.

The wash of the saucer hit the Beaver like a punch from God. Only the craftsmanship of the de Havilland engineers who designed her — and a whole lot of luck — kept the bird from losing her wings under the hammer blow. The pilot fought to control his steed even though the instruments vibrated so badly that he couldn’t read them. Just as he realized the bird was responding to his control inputs, the radial engine quit. Dead. A vast silence engulfed the pilot and Johnny Murk and Harrison Douglas.

It was broken by the muted roar of a jet engine. An F-16 was coming in slow, with the gear down, apparently to look them over.

The pilot ignored the fighter. He was pushing levers and pulling knobs and flipping switches and resetting circuit breakers, trying to get the engine to crank. It wouldn’t.

The pharma moguls could hear the whisper of air passing the fuselage.

“It can’t end like this,” Douglas cried. “Oh, God, no!”

Johnny Murk was holding on to the back of the seat in front of him so hard that his knuckles turned white. He rested his head on his hands and closed his eyes.

Down the Beaver came, with a stationary prop. The pilot abandoned his efforts to start the engine and concentrated on finding a place to land. Open water along the beach. He turned hard, got set up, slipped to lose some excess altitude, then straightened her out and flared onto the water. The floats kissed and the bird drifted to a stop.

Another jet went over a few hundred feet above them.

“Now what?” Johnny Murk belligerently demanded of the pilot, who was in no mood to be abused.

“Well, fuck you, asshole,” that craftsman said. “I guess I’ll tinker with the motor while you clean out your underwear.”

“I’ll have your job—”

“Oh, fuck you again. And shut up. If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll throw you in the water and you can swim home. Maybe next spring we’ll find you entombed in a big ice cube.”