The Vengeance of the Tau (35 page)

“Bad comparison.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. Maybe you’re forgetting ’bout the big fella’s cop friend or the fact that they went after the big fella himself. You never killed anyone who wasn’t in a position to do likewise to you. The Tau don’t fit your style in the slightest.”

“I’ve been trying to tell myself that. I keep thinking that the key to this is what happened all those years ago in that chamber Melissa and I uncovered. One of the original Tau’s been waiting a long time to make a comeback. He could have done it at any time, but he chose now. Why? Only thing I can figure is it took this long for the technology to become available to reproduce the White Death in the quantities he needed for multiple dispersals. Livermore Air Force Base must be his primary distribution point.”

“And you just solved your own problem, boss.”

“How?”

“This White Death shit, maybe it’d be okay in the Tau’s hands if we left things alone. Maybe. But somebody else gets their hands on it might have a different agenda. You told me yourself that’s why you wanted to keep our trip to Livermore in the family. So it ain’t really the Tau we’re after, it’s the White Death.”

The way Belamo put it made Blaine feel instantly lighter and more relaxed. “So let’s go find it.”

“Can you fix it?” Sheriff Tyrell Loon asked Toothless Jim Jackson, as Johnny Wareagle looked on.

“Engine block’s got a crack in it wider than the Liberty Bell’s and the fuel line looks like she’s been chewed by a gator,” Jackson replied. “I’ll fetch me my toolbox and give it my best shot.”

“How long?”

“Anywheres between an hour and never, Tyrell.”

The stink of something burning had Toothless Jim easing Blue Thunder over even before the first of the black smoke began to show itself from under the hood. Of course, the signs had been there two states back. Blue Thunder had covered the second half of its journey grudgingly, in fits and starts, each corner and road bringing a new adventure. By northern Texas the clanking and clamoring had given way to a constant rattle that the passengers from Tyrell Loon on back felt down to the pits of their stomachs. Through Oklahoma the old bus was drinking a quart of oil every hundred miles and belching black smoke from its tailpipe. And halfway into Kansas Blue Thunder’s shocks had given up, so every uneven patch of road sent the occupants lurching upward in their seats. Four of its tires were losing air as fast as the engine was bleeding oil. A bit farther north, the rear emergency exit had sprung permanently open, causing an ear-wrenching buzz that had the makeshift army covering their ears to stifle the noise. It wasn’t until Toothless Jim Jackson figured out the right wire to cut that they could relax again.

As he watched Toothless Jim emerge from Blue Thunder carrying his toolbox, Johnny Wareagle found himself still surprisingly calm. He knew no matter how bad things got for Blue Thunder that the old bus would get them to their destination. Mechanically it should never have made it out of No Town, much less Louisiana. But the ceremony the Old One had supervised was better than any tune-up or engine replacement. The magic of No Town passed like glue through Blue Thunder’s gas line and stuck tight to those parts of it that had long since lost their seals. In one of the towns they had stopped in, the mechanic feeding Blue Thunder oil had looked at its engine the way he would if his dead uncle drove up to the pump and said “Fill her up.”

Such stops had served as the only breaks in their constant journey through Saturday night and into Sunday morning. Toothless Jim stopped not far from Johnny and threw open his toolbox. Wareagle knew tools fairly well and engines a little better, well enough anyway to tell him that nothing in this box was even remotely related to repairing the kind of problem Blue Thunder had come down with.

Toothless Jim grabbed some duct tape and a small plastic container. He held these items in one hand, while he rummaged with the other through the box’s contents and finally came up with what he was looking for: a thin, dried-out paintbrush.

“Here we go,” he said, flashing his gums.

Wareagle watched as he moved to the cooling engine and wedged a hand in deep.

“Bigger than I thought,” he said, as he fingered the crack. “I best clean it first. Sheriff, bring me that bottle I got tucked under my seat.”

Loon came back seconds later with a bottle of homemade whiskey corked at the top and half-empty. Johnny hadn’t seen Toothless Jim take a single swig on the journey, but he was certain all the same that the bottle had been full when they’d left No Town. Toothless Jim poured a hefty portion on an old rag and felt for the crack again.

“That oughta do her,” he said, sliding his hand back out. “Time for some black magic now.”

In this case the “black magic” referred to a thick tarlike epoxy substance that Toothless Jim spooned out of the plastic container and smoothed out in one of his hands. The other hand pushed the brush down into the flattened lump and forced as much black magic on as the bristles would hold. Then his right hand disappeared back into the engine, toward the crack.

“Where are you?” Toothless Jim muttered, as he probed about. “Come out, come out wherever you are. …”

He smiled again at Loon and Wareagle. They could see his forearm flexing, the crack being found, and the homemade epoxy filler being worked home.

“Be an hour, if I can seal the fuel line,” he said, grimacing from the exertion. “Never, if I can’t.”

Chapter 33

POP KELLER SAT
in the only bar Hanover, Kansas, had to offer, sipping club soda and doing the best he could to shell the peanuts before him. Not so long ago, his drink would have been considerably stronger than club soda, and the peanuts would have been long gone. But the increasing severity of his arthritis had sworn him off booze and made cracking shells an act that he could perform only with gaps in between to let the pain go away.

If this didn’t beat the fuck out of life …

After all he had been through, all he had survived, to be done in by something the doctors said was out of his control. It had gotten bad in a hurry and worse even faster. Shit-rotten timing, with his road show hitting peak season and attendance records shattered everywhere he had been. While Pop sipped club soda, his people were setting up for next weekend’s show in the five-hundred-acre remains of a leveled amusement park.

Not that Pop was one to shy away from work—far from it. It was just since the arthritis had gotten really bad, he wasn’t much good helping out anymore. And Pop had always been one to figure that if you couldn’t pull your weight, it was best to stay away. Besides, the setup had always been his favorite part of the gig, full of anticipation, trying to guess the crowd and sniffing the air to smell for the weather. Now all the setup did was serve as a reminder that his body had turned against him. Be better once Friday rolled along, though, with a three-day weekend gig expected to draw upwards of two hundred thousand people. Christ, during the last stretch of the Flying Devils in his former life he hadn’t seen that many people in a year. Hell, probably closer to two or three.

Still, there had been some grand times back then, with no arthritis to mar them. What the fuck good was money when it hurt like a bastard to count it? It just wasn’t fair, as plenty hadn’t been in his life, so far as Pop Keller was concerned.

His former life in the World War II air-show business had begun early, before the full-blown warbird craze caught on. He bought most of his fighters for the Flying Devils in the fifties and sixties at rock-bottom prices. Through the seventies, the Devils had been the best in the business. They had barnstormed the country with their Piper L-4s, T-6 Texas trainers, P-51 Mustangs, and P-40 Warhawks, just to name a few. Their specialty was mock air battles that flat-out thrilled their audiences. No jet-powered engines, no gymnastic circles in the air. Just plain old gutsy flying in reconditioned fighters.

The planes carried live ammunition in their front-mounted machine guns. The highlight of the exhibition had often been Pop himself putting on an amazing display of target practice from a thousand feet. He’d been able to shoot the horns off a bull, until his eyes went, that is, and that was long before his joints had gone south.

He should have gotten glasses, but the truth was they looked lousy under his leather flying goggles. A dozen years ago now he had been squinting to focus when his fighter had taken a sudden dip and scraped the wing of another. The collision had torn the wing off his buddy’s plane, and a moderate crowd of 1,200 had watched the man crash to his death in a nearby field.

That hadn’t been what ended Pop Keller’s former life, but it came close. He had escaped jail but not scandal. The insurance company had laid into him heavy, and there were so many lawsuits, he had figured he might as well move a cot into Superior Court. Then his best fliers, the young ones, had fled the Devils for the Confederate Air Force or the Valiant Air Command and had taken their planes with them, leaving him with a ragtag unit of both men and machines.

Pop had stuck it out as much for them as for himself, even when pranksters regularly changed the first “e” in his name to an “i” on the billboards, proclaiming him Pop “Killer.” In the end he had been down to thirty-seven fighters, and there had seldom been a day when more than twenty of them were able to take the air. Pop had hired mechanics to patch his fleet together with Scotch tape, Elmer’s glue, whatever it took.

Truth was, he’d been ready to pack it in even before that day his former life had ended eight years before when a stranger had walked into the Texas bar he’d been drinking in. Turned out the man was fighting a war to save the whole goddamn country. By enlisting the aid of Pop and the Flying Devils, who won a battle in the skies over Keysar Flats, the man had succeeded in saving the good ole U.S. of A. But the remainder of the Devils’ fleet was lost in the process. A grateful government wanted to make amends, but they couldn’t replace the only thing Pop cared about: his glorious warbirds. Think of something else, they told him.

Pop thought about it and told them he wanted to establish the nation’s first artillery show. He saw it all in his head, and the sight had him excited. Artillery pieces from past and present blowing the shit out of targets for ninety minutes. Call it something like the National Artillery Brigade. Yeah, the NAB. Government went for it. Set Pop up with the equipment for free and agreed to supply ammo on request.

His present life had begun.

Right now his truck was parked outside in the lot with the National Artillery Brigade’s smoke-and-barrel logo stenciled across both its sides.

And the people loved it. The NAB performed to packed crowds at every stop for its first four years, and things went off generally without a hitch. Then the war in the Gulf had given the nation new pride and a fresh fascination with the weapons of war. After seeing it on television, live seemed even better. Capacity crowds had become jam-packed ones. A few times Pop had
turned away
more folks for one performance than the Flying Devils had performed before in a month. Extra shows were added. Pop had to hire drivers just to keep him supplied with ammo. He figured he should take a trip to Iraq and buy Saddam Hussein a beer. Shake his hand right before he stuck a Patriot missile up his ass and fired.

Patriot missile …

The thought had given Pop an idea, and he’d called his friends in Washington one more time. Any chance he could add a Patriot missile battery to his show for just a little while? The answer had been no, and it had stayed no until quite recently, when the Patriot ran into some unwelcome publicity. The good PR certainly couldn’t hurt, and three months later the NAB had its Patriots—for a while, anyway.

The battery, complete with its own heavy security, had joined up with the NAB for this Kansas performance, assuring attendance records that might never be broken. Of course, the battery wasn’t really going to do anything except sit there on display, and patrons who wanted a view would only be able to get one from a hundred feet away. Pop was charging ten bucks a head, and that meant two million dollars for a weekend’s work, the NAB well on its way to becoming the hottest attraction in the country.

Move over, Ice Capades.

Give it up, Ringling Brothers.

Pop would have enjoyed it a lot more if his hands didn’t ache so much. A few drinks would briefly drown the pain, but he’d pay for it tomorrow, and tomorrow was getting too close to opening day. So he nursed his club soda and cracked peanuts as best he could to kill the time that it took for the NAB to set up shop. He had the bar to himself, except for a nervous-looking woman sitting in one of its three booths. She’d been staring into a cup of coffee that had long lost its steam, and Pop had looked toward her a few times to see if what she needed was a friend. He always looked away, though, before she had a chance to return his stare. Pop had gotten burned enough times helping out strangers; boy, had he ever. Nope, he was gonna sit this one out. Spend the rest of his downtime doing what he used to do best and remembering what it felt like.

“Give me another, Jimmy.”

But Pop Keller couldn’t resist staring the woman’s way, turning on his stool so he was facing in her direction. The bartender set the club soda down on the bar, and Pop reached back for it. He’d give himself as much time as it took to finish it and then, what the hell, he’d join the woman in her booth.

“Livermore Air Force Base,” Blaine said, and he handed the binoculars to Sal Belamo.

Sal pressed them against his eyes and spun the focusing wheels. From their position atop a hill, they had a clear vantage point of the base across a double-laned highway. They had taken off from Kennedy six hours earlier, half of that time spent getting here from the small airport in Hastings, Nebraska. This time Blaine had insisted that Melissa not accompany them. In spite of her determined protests, she was waiting things out in nearby Hanover, Kansas.

“They got the right uniforms, guns, jeeps, the whole works,” Sal Belamo was saying. “Shit, place doesn’t look like it was ever even closed down.”