Red Thunder (38 page)

Strickland didn't notice, and I breathed a little easier when I
could be sure he had swallowed our cover story. Our biggest advantage
in preserving our secret was that no sensible person could look at
Red Thunder
and deduce we were going to fly in it. She was too big, too awkward, and she had no engine.

We got rid of him as soon as we could, and I hurried to Kelly's office, knowing how badly he could affect her.

I found her on the phone, and she seemed to be doing fine.

"Who're you calling?"

"Locksmith. I'm changing the locks on all the doors." Sounded good to me.

THE NEXT DAY we got another visit from the FBI, Agents Dallas and Lubbock.

I was closest to the door when the bell rang, so I went there and
saw them on the television screen. My heart skipped a beat... but as I
turned the camera, I couldn't see any SWAT team or uniformed Daytona
police. I couldn't see anyone at all except Dallas and Lubbock. I
called Travis and told him who was here. He was at my side within a
minute, and everybody else was following him. He smiled at me and
opened the door just enough to slip outside. The rest of us clustered
around the little television screen.

There wasn't much to see. Travis did his loud redneck act, and the
agents stood rigid as mannequins. Their lips barely moved when they
talked.

Then they were getting back into their Feebmobile and driving away.
Travis watched them, waved, then came back through the door. He was
drenched in sweat. He pulled at his shirt, getting the cool air of the
warehouse circulating.

"Man, could I use a drink." Alicia ran to get him a cold lemonade.

"They're pissed off, boys and girls," he said. "They must be, to
tell me about it. Whoever's in charge of the search must be one
stubborn cop, because now he's got his agents going back over old
ground."

"They told you that?" Dak asked.

"Not in so many words. But FBI agents see themselves as an elite.
They're not supposed to have to pound the pavement like beat cops. They
were hot—the air conditioner in their car broke down—and
they're tired, and they're fed up with the FBI and the search for a
flying saucer. So they said a few things they normally wouldn't have.
They're looking into my neighbor now, the Jesus freak. He hasn't let
them in to tour his compound—and why should he? He's no David
Koresh, but he hates guv'mint men."

"So you think we're okay?" Kelly asked. Alicia came back with a tall glass of lemonade. Travis drank half of it at once.

"Okay? I won't feel okay until we're out of the atmosphere."

M-DAY MINUS FIVE, and the four of us went up the ramp,
into the lock, and sealed it behind us. For the next five days we'd
eat, drink, and breathe only what was stored inside
Red Thunder.
We were all pumped.

We didn't stay that way too long. There were tests to run, drills to
go through. Each of us had to be checked out on getting into a suit and
down the ladder to the lock. Then the hours began to stretch. Soon we
broke out the Monopoly board there in the systems control deck and
began a game we figured would last the whole five days.

We should have known Travis wasn't going to let us just sit and vegetate, not when there was more training he could hit us with.

At hour thirteen an alarm bell began ringing on every deck, and a
voice began intoning, "Pressure breach, Module Two, this is not a
drill, this is not a drill." It was Kelly's voice, stored in the
computer. Somehow, that made it even scarier. We knocked the Monopoly
board over scrambling to our assigned stations.

Tank two was my department, so when we got to the center crossroads
Dak grabbed the emergency suit from a locker as I leaned in and closed
and dogged the outer air-lock hatch. I could hear a whistling sound but
didn't feel any rush of wind. We'd had
Red Thunder
dogged
down tight with an overpressure of one-quarter of an atmosphere for a
full week, using the main air lock to enter and leave, and she'd been
tight as a drum.

Dak had the emergency suit unzipped and held up in front of him with
the zippered side to me, just as we'd practiced a dozen times. This
suit was another Russian surplus item Travis had brought back from Star
City, not nearly as expensive as the other suits had been. He had
bought four of them. It was nothing but a clear plastic bag in the
shape of a human being, one size fits all. There was a small oxygen
bottle mounted on the chest. The hands were mittens instead of gloves.
When you were inside one, you looked like somebody's dry cleaning, in a
plastic wrapper.

The Russians had developed these suits for space stations. The idea
was that you could don one in fifteen seconds and then have about
thirty minutes to deal with an emergency after you'd lost all cabin
air. Or, if there was nothing you could do about it, and if you weren't
in direct sunlight and being roasted like a chicken wrapped in tinfoil,
somebody in a proper suit could carry you to a safe environment. There
was a handle right on top where your rescuer could grab you like a
caveman dragging his wife by the hair.

I stepped into the suit legs and Dak shoved the thing over me. I
turned, and he zipped it. It was uncanny, I knew we were in no danger,
we were still right on the ground in Florida, but my imagination was
running away with me. My heart was pounding.

"Twenty-six seconds," Dak shouted. We'd never managed the fifteen
seconds the Russians claimed. Alicia was our record holder at nineteen
seconds.

I twisted the valve on the oxygen bottle and the suit blew up until
I looked like the Michelin Man. I put one foot into the air lock, then
the other foot, and crouched, the air-lock chamber being only four feet
in diameter. Dak closed the hatch behind me, and I heard him latch it
tight. I slammed the CYCLE button with one hand, and in a moment the
green light came on, signaling that pressure was equalized inside the
lock and on the other side. The pressure gauge was reading about 1.20
atmospheres, when it should have been 1.25. Temperature was
seventy-five Fahrenheit, exactly where it should be.

I opened the inner lock, swung out onto the ladder. There was a
locker there, and I opened it and got a pack of sticky patches and a
smoke generator. I broke the generator and held it steady. The smoke
drifted down, slowly, so down the ladder I went. I followed the smoke
all the way to the bottom of the tank, the whistling getting louder as
I descended past the big tanks of pressurized air. I reached the water
bladder and stood on the bottom deck. Beneath was our gray-water tank.
The smoke was moving more rapidly now, swirling around until it found
the breach. I got on my knees.

The hole was perfectly round. Somebody had drilled it.

A cigarette camera lens poked through the hole. Faintly, from outside the ship, I heard Travis's voice.

"I make it three minutes and fifteen seconds," he said. "Some of you might actually have lived."

I shoved the camera back, heard Travis laugh. I took the patch I'd
brought and peeled the backing off the sticky side. It was made of hard
rubber, about the same flexibility as a car tire but more resistant to
heat and cold. The patch stuck in place. It was only an emergency
measure, we had better patches and the tools to apply them, and I'd do
that as soon as I caught my breath.

I tried to be angry at Travis, but what was the point? The systems
test was the perfect time to throw real-world problems at us, things
we'd drilled on using computer simulations. But no simulation could
really duplicate the real world.

And did he ever throw problems at us. There were a hundred practical jokes hidden in
Red Thunder
now, a whoopee cushion under every seat, so to speak. Travis could
activate them from outside and watch us with the cameras that covered
every inch of the ship's interior except the staterooms and heads.

So we got too hot and had to fix it, got cold enough that frost
formed on the walls and we could see our breath, and we fixed that. We
fixed problems, large and small, about once every three or four hours
the entire time we were there. It was exhausting.

But
we fixed
them. We fixed every one of them.

THEN, ON THE fourth day of the test, twenty-four hours
to go, trouble came at us from an entirely unexpected direction. "Like
it always does," as Travis never tired of reminding us.

The phone rang. I picked it up, and it was Travis.

"Y'all have to come out now," he said. "I just got a call from your mother—"

"My... what's wrong? Is she—"

"She's fine, Manny. But we got trouble. We all need to be together
to talk it over. Come on out, leave all systems running, we should
handle this in an hour or so."

We met Travis at the bottom of the ramp. He wouldn't discuss the
problem, just told us all to pile into the Hummer, and he took off for
the motel.

Everybody was gathered in room 101 when we got there. Mom, Maria,
Caleb, Salty, Grace, Billy... and somebody I'd never seen before,
sitting on a chair at the far end of the room. He was short and chubby,
red-faced, mostly bald. He wore a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and it was
soaking. He was smoking a cigarette and he didn't look happy.

"You!"
Kelly shouted as soon as she saw him.

"In the flesh, Kitten," the guy said, with a mean smile.

Mom had handed Travis a business card when we arrived. It said:

SEAMUS LAWRENCE
"Seamus the Shamus"
Private Detective

There were phone, fax, and e-mail numbers in the lower left corner.

"He's a private detective," Kelly told us. "My father has had him tailing me, off and on, since I was fourteen. God
damn
you, Lawrence!"

"Is that any way to talk to an old friend?" He was trying to be
glib, but he had to be intimidated by the hostile faces pressing in on
him. He took a puff on his cigarette and looked around for an ashtray,
shrugged, knocked the ash off onto the floor. I moved over closer to
Mom. She was holding her .22 target pistol at her side.

"Is that a bullet hole in his shirt?" I asked her. He must have heard me.

"She shot at me!" he said, and he couldn't quite keep the fear out of his voice.

"If I'd shot at you, Mister Private Dick, I'd of hit you. I shot at
that parrot's eye. I can put a round through your eye, too, if you give
me any more trouble."

He looked down and sure enough, the bullet had gone through a loose
fold of cloth, precisely through the eye of a red and blue macaw. This
evidence of her accuracy didn't seem to reassure him... and it
shouldn't have. Mom was capable of putting a real, nonlethal but very
painful hurtin' on him with that little popgun.

"He came in an hour ago," she told us, "handed me that silly card,
and said we had to talk about some people was planning to go into outer
space."

"Unbelievable!"
Travis said.

"Said to get Kelly here, pronto. Said for a hundred
grand—that's what he said, 'a hundred grand'—somebody's
daddy didn't have to find out about it."

"After all these years, you'd sell out my father?" Kelly sounded scandalized.

"He's sort of pissed," Lawrence said, defensively. "On account of I
ain't been able to dig up dirt on your sp— ...on your boyfriend
there."

"It was real smart of you not to finish that word, Mr. Lawrence,"
Mom said, and you could feel the tension in her trigger finger when she
said it. Lawrence sure felt it; he couldn't take his eyes off the gun,
slapping dangerously against Mom's thigh.

"Unbelievable," Travis said again.

"What do you mean, Travis?" Alicia asked.

"Unbelievable anybody could be so stupid!" He looked around at us. "Don't you see it? Your dad got a tour of
Red Thunder
just a few days ago, and the thought never entered his mind that it
could fly. Because your dad is smart, whatever else he is. He knows a
spaceship has to have a big,
big
engine to take off.
Anybody
with any sense takes a look at
Red Thunder,
they know instantly it couldn't be a real spaceship. Hell, I could have
given those FBI agents the tour, and they'd never have guessed, either."

"But it
can
fly," Dak pointed out.

"Exactly! But to believe it can fly, you have to either postulate an
entirely new technology, or be so stupid, be so totally clueless as to
how things work... it's beautiful when you think of it. He's so dumb he
stumbled onto the truth."

"Hey," Lawrence said, but it was halfhearted.

"I got a rule," Travis said. "I've never had to use it so far in my
life, but I think it's a good rule. Never pay ransoms or blackmail."

"I like that rule, too," Mom said.

Travis had his back to the prisoner, and we all saw him wink.

"Then I guess we gotta kill him."

For a moment I thought he'd gone too far, the guy looked like he
might have a heart attack. He started babbling about how he'd go away,
forever, forget about the whole thing, he'd leave town, he'd leave the
state. He'd do anything.

We all watched him until he ran down.

"Maybe we don't have to, Travis," Caleb said. "All we gotta do is
hold his sorry ass for twenty-four hours, then what can he do?"

"That's kidnapping!" Lawrence said, then realized what the
alternative was. He babbled again about how he'd be happy to stay here,
he wouldn't cause any trouble.

Travis went outside and everybody but Caleb followed him. Kelly spoke first.

"Travis, he's a drunk, he... oh, sorry."

"No offense taken. I was thinking the same thing. Get him liquored
up. Alicia, you got anything in that drug cabinet we could use as a
Mickey Finn?"

"A what?"

"Something to knock him out for a while."

"Oh, sure. No problem."