A Feast Unknown (25 page)

“There’s a small airport at Penrith,” I said. “That’s about five miles from Grandrith. The port doesn’t have radar instruments to guide us in; we’ll have to make a visual landing.”

“And there’s no visibility except when the lightning flashes,” she said, peering through the rain at a massive upthrust revealed by a streak of whiteness. Thunder bellowed; the plane rocked.

She said, “Penrith. Is that name related to Grandrith?”

“No. Penrith is Celtic, one of the few Welsh place names in the Lake District. Grandrith, if you’ll remember, comes from the Norse Randgrith.”

She was trying to make small talk to cover up her nervousness. I went along with her to help her.

“Once we land,” I said, “we have to move fast. There’s no use in trying to convince the port authorities of a false identity. We’ll just get out and into the closest available car and leave. If somebody recognizes me, I’ll have to explain later.”

She checked our automatics, my .38, her .32, the breakdown .22, six hand grenades, and a small crossbow. I wore a knife in a sheath back of my neck. She was similarly armed. In addition, she had a two-barreled derringer.

She put screwdrivers, pliers, and a jumper cable in the pocket of my raincoat.

“We could parachute down,” Trish said. “The country is unpopulated back of your estate, you said. There’d be no danger of the plane crashing into a house.”

“There are too many trees around there,” I said. “Moreover, Noli will be looking for us to do just that, you can bet. And if I were able to make a landing on the road near Cloamby in this rain, you can bet that Noli would know it before we landed. He’s listening in to the radar reports on us. He must have short-wave equipment. He’d have a car down on the road with his thugs and be ready for us.”

“Then he’ll have men waiting at Penrith for us.”

“He won’t know I’m going there until the last minute, if I have anything to say about it. He’ll be able to send men then, but they’ll be too late then, I hope.”

“He may have figured out that that’s the only place you
can
land,” she said. “In which case, his men will be on the way now.”

“That’s possible. We’ll see.”

The radio reported that visibility was still zero but that the winds had dropped to twenty miles per hour. The airports in the entire county were closed except for emergency landings.

The military might be thinking like Noli and also have men waiting at Penrith. I did not tell Trish that; she was nervous enough.

I went by Keswick city somewhere in the blackness below and over the lower edge of the great Skiddaw Forest and probably over Burnt Horse and then the Mungrisdale Common. The Bowscale Fell (peak height of 2,306 feet) was beneath us, if I reckoned correctly and if my own radar was functioning correctly. Then I was over my own estates but could see nothing,
of course. I had taken this route instead of going directly to Penrith because I wanted to throw both Noli and the military off.

I cut in again to the frequency on which my presumed agent had been operating. I said, “Start signaling.”

He sounded nervous. He said, “Surely, m’lord, you’re not going to land here! It’s impossible! You’ll get killed!”

Noli and Caliban would say the same thing. Noli would want me alive for the elixir (unless Caliban had told him that the elixir could only be gotten from the Nine, and he was not likely to do that). Caliban would not want his cousin killed (if he knew that she was with me). Nor would he want me killed, since he intended to do that with his bare hands.

I wondered what the Nine would think if one of us died an accidental death? Would the survivor then have to fight the next candidate? Or did the Nine want one of us dead for some unknown reason?

I replied to the man whom, by now, I was convinced was pretending to be the agent.

I said, “What do you advise?”

“The airport at Penrith is by far your best chance,” he replied eagerly.

“I think I’ll land on the road into Mungrisdale,” I said. “I’ll get a car there.”

“You can’t do that, m’lord!” he said. “It’d be suicide! At least Penrith has landing lights!”

“Mungrisdale it is, anyway,” I said.

However, I agreed with him. My plan had been to lure Noli or Caliban into sending men down the road from Cloamby to Mungrisdale and detouring them from Penrith until it was
too late. If Noli was intelligent, however, he would send men to Penrith anyway, if he had not done so already.

I realized then that I was convinced that it was Noli down there. Caliban might be close, but he was only on his way to, not in, Grandrith. The time element made this seem likely.

I put the plane into a steep dive from five thousand feet and did not begin to level out until the radar showed that I was five hundred feet above ground level. Actually, we were probably much closer. There was just enough visibility for me to see several hundred feet ahead. Since the topography varied much within a short time, our progress resembled that of a very irregular sine wave. Trish gasped once and then closed her eyes. A moment later, she said, “I’m all right now. I just put my fate in the hands of the great god Old Crow.”

I did not have much time to indulge in conversation. Nevertheless, I said, “Old Crow?”

“Yes. When I was very little, I heard my father say, more than once, that the greatest thing in the world was Old Crow. In my child’s mind, I thought that Old Crow must be a great Indian chief, like Sitting Bull or Hiawatha. Then I thought that it must be the Great Spirit of the Indians and that my father had a place reserved for him in the Happy Hunting Grounds. So I started to pray to Old Crow. Later, when I found out that it wasn’t an Indian god but a whiskey, I refused to admit my mistake. A god was created in my mind, and it has stayed there since. And I am especially honored above all humankind, because only I have been admitted to the worship of the great god Old Crow.”

By the time she had quit talking, we were close to Penrith. The radio was getting hysterical. Apparently the military had
picked me up, and both frequencies, the port’s and the military’s, were screaming warnings, threats, and pleas at me.

I thought for a moment of crashing the plane on the Penrith golf course, which is a fairly large one, and parachuting in. I abandoned the idea at once, because I did not want to take a chance on killing someone. No, it would have to be the airport.

I dropped down fast, banked, and came in at the port as if I intended to strafe it. The lights suddenly became visible; I was coming in at the correct location and angle, though too swiftly. The lights along the strip were blurs, and the big lights on top of the control tower were diffused stars. I dropped the plane in from too great a height, not caring if I drove the wheels up through the wings. We struck hard but the wheels and gear held, and the tires did not blow. On the second bounce, I straightened her out and cut the engine speed and feathered the props more. The end of the runway still came up too swiftly, and I went past it, across the grass, and was able to stop it only just short of the parking lot fence.

There was no time to sit and gasp in air and take time to unjangle our nerves. We scrambled out with our bundles in our arms, opened them, put on the raincoats, stuck the automatics in our pockets, and ran towards the gate with the rest of the weapons in our arms.

The doors to the control tower and the passenger buildings were open; figures were running through them towards us, wildly waving their arms. The parking lot held six cars, none of them military or police. Perhaps they did not really think we would try to land there after all the foofaraw, or perhaps they had been delayed for some reason.

Trish used her pencil flashlight to light our path as we ran. We got to the cars well ahead of the people from the buildings. Moreover, these at first ran towards the plane; they did not know we were in the parking lot until a few minutes later. The six cars were a Hillman Minx, two Volkswagens, an MG, a Facel-Vega, and an Aston-Martin DB4. All were locked and none had keys in the ignition locks.

I smashed in the window of the Aston-Martin and reached in and unlocked the door. Then I raised the hood and, while Trish held the flashlight, went to work with screwdriver and pliers. It took only a minute to jump the wires, but by then we could hear voices, muffled by the wind and the rain. I completed the connections, put the hood down gently, and we scrambled into the car. At that moment, a pair of headlights swung around the corner of a building at the far end of the street which ended at the gates of the airport.

A man yelled, “Here! I say! What do you think you’re doing there?”

Five men ran towards us. I put the car into gear and took off with a squealing of tires. Wet as the pavement was, the rubber burned. There was a pinging sound as we went through the open gates. A hole appeared in the windshield between us. I shifted to second. A second car had appeared behind the first down the street. In my rear view mirror I could see a pair of headlights come on in the parking lot.

Trish was busy taking the automatic from my pocket and laying it on the seat beside me, breaking open the .22, and assembling it.

Flames spurted from alongside the first auto heading for
us. I began swerving but had little room to maneuver because the hundred-yard gap between us was narrowing swiftly. I was doing 60 mph by then, and the oncoming cars were probably doing 40 mph. It swerved away when I did. The driver had acted defensively; he must have thought I intended to crash him or was playing “chicken” and he did not want a head-on crash with an impact of 100 mph.

In any event, we both skidded. I compensated properly but the Aston-Martin continued to turn, moving forward also and spinning around its vertical axis. The other also turned. Like two waltzers, or ice-skaters, we passed each other, our fronts missing by an inch or so. As we did so, Trish fired her automatic three times.

She said, “I think I got one! A hand flew up and dropped a gun out the window!”

Our car ended its whirl pointed in the right direction, so I just kept on going.

33

The second car must have put on its brakes. It was skidding but the driver apparently got off the brakes in time to regain control. Jets of fire leaped from its side as it went by. And then we were past each other.

Trish, looking through the rear window, said, “The first car has stopped; it’s headed away from us. So’s the other one. They’ll have to turn around. But the one that was in the lot—it’s coming. Watch out!”

The warning was not for me but for the third car. Its driver had tried to stop it when he saw the roadway blocked by the two vehicles. He skidded and slammed into one of the cars, their two sides, right and left, colliding, according to Trish. The lights of one went out.

I took the corner with a minor skid, straightened out, and was on my way for a straight shot for six blocks. I had to go through the “Square.” I was on the A66, my immediate destination was the A594, leading westward out of town. The
six blocks were traversed with no sign of pursuit. Since I slowed down before taking the corner, I did not skid much. Several cars honked angrily as I flew by. I was splashing water on both sides as if I were a motorboat trying for a speed record. Pedestrians, hearing me at a distance, raced for the sides of buildings, against which they flattened themselves. Their efforts to avoid getting hit were successful but they could not dodge the spray. I could imagine the fists and the curses. They were lucky they did not get run over. And, for all I knew, the pursuing cars would hit some.

Just before I turned the next corner for a shot at the central part of town, two cars came in sight behind us. One had only a single headlamp working.

A policeman stepped out of a pub and blew his whistle hysterically. I kept on, and he jumped back into the doorway as a blanket of water rose to cover him. I almost lost control again rounding another corner and then I was two blocks away from Market “Square.” Trish, leaning out of the window, emptied a clip at the pursuers. The lead car swerved, and she exclaimed that she must have shot the driver. But it straightened out and flames jetted in reply from both sides of the car. As far as I knew, no bullets struck our vehicle.