Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving. — John Dewey
Wild Blue Yonder
27 SEPTEMBER 2007
MIDAIR BEARING EAST FROM ST. PETERSBURG
14:31 GET
It wasn't so bad, flying. The initial lift-off was even thrilling, certainly different from being stuck inside of a 747 and watching through a tiny window. In the Cessna, they were like a fly batted upwards rather than the huge, ugly birds of prey that Jumbo Jets resembled. He might, Chuck acknowledged with the open-eyed pragmatism his one-time-therapist would have celebrated, have had trouble with the tiny plane pre-Siberia. But claustrophobia was apparently a thing of the past, even if he was hyper-aware of the woman to his left for the whole trip, the way she looked and smelled, and now, because the cockpit was small enough that their thighs brushed, how she felt. He tried to focus past that, and not only the sky, but the way she handled the controls. Confidently. Easily. Okay, so the woman was more than just a great pilot. She could fight, throw a knife (he'd seen some security footage working tech support for the power team of Bryce and Sarah), fly, shoot, be a secret agent, and rescue geeks in distress.
"I'm rapidly changing my mind about this whole Bond thing," Chuck admitted when it looked like they'd reached some sort of cruising altitude and the heavy lifting was done. "I'm starting to think you're way cooler than Bond."
Sarah grinned. "I had Jean-Claude pick some clothes up for you—they're in the back. I told him you were tall, but I…don't know exactly how well they'll fit."
"Fantastic." Chuck studied the cabin, just a tiny room with four seats, to figure out how best to go about this. In such a cramped space, it was an adventure, but he managed to squeeze past Sarah without causing her to crash the plane. Jean-Claude had apparently packed a duffel bag with several options—jeans, sweaters, a few T-shirts in the mix. Yuppie brands, mostly, Chuck saw. After assuring himself that Sarah wasn't peeking, Chuck began the arduous process of stripping out of his Siberian gear.
He took a deep breath, reminded himself that he was in a plane several thousand feet above the ground, and that Sarah had sworn she would protect him. First went the heavy parka, peeled off because it stuck to the homemade padding beneath, padding that had become a bit ripe due to all of the flop sweat. Chuck took his time unwinding this, unraveling it slowly, layer by layer, so that it revealed an old gray T-shirt. After checking again to make sure Sarah still had her eyes forward, he peeled out of this and gagged. It had been awhile since the improvised sponge bath on the train in Moscow. He quickly yanked off the thermal undershirt and pawed through his own parka pockets for deodorant. It didn't entirely kill the smell, but it helped.
"I think we may need to toss my old gear out the window," he called to Sarah as he pulled a dark red sweater, the only thing that looked like it might fit, from the duffel.
"We'll burn it when we get to Athens," she promised without looking back.
Most of the clothing in the bag was simply huge. Apparently, Jean-Claude had been preparing for somebody much larger. The jeans bagged, but at least there was a belt. He rooted out a pair of socks.
"There's shoes, too," Sarah called over the engine noise.
Chuck unearthed them and stared for a full minute before he burst out laughing.
"What? What is it?" Sarah craned to get a good look, panic evident.
"Your friend has a sense of humor." Chuck waggled a shoe at her. "He gave me chucks. Black ones. What is it?"
Sarah, perhaps realizing that she'd been staring, jolted. "Nothing."
"You're staring." Chuck began donning the shoes.
"No I wasn't."
"Oh, come on. You totally were."
Even sitting diagonally behind her, he could see the smile start to curl up at the corner of her mouth. "I wasn't staring. Precisely. I've just—I've never seen you without the Eskimo gear."
Chuck automatically glanced down. "Oh. Oh, right. Yeah, I guess it's been a few years since I've worn anything else." He ran a hand down the front of the sweater. "Soft. Heh."
"You're thinner than I expected." Sarah kept her eyes on the open sky.
Chuck, mid-clamber into the passenger seat, grinned. "Admiring my manly physique, were we?"
"You're thinner than I expected. That's all."
"Oh-ho-ho," Chuck said, laughing. "Well, get a good look. The gun show will probably have to don the parka again soon." He made a show of flexing his biceps.
"No time." Sarah pulled off her headset. "I've got to get changed."
When she stared to rise, Chuck grabbed her arm. "What are you doing?"
"I said I have to get changed."
"No, no, no, you have to fly the plane. I can't fly this thing, I never made it to the flight segment of spy training, and I'm really, really not qualified for this—"
"Chuck. Relax." Sarah actually grabbed the sides of his face to ensure that he looked at her. "I put it on autopilot while you were changing. Keep an eye out, make sure nothing's coming, okay? It'll just take me a minute."
She brushed a hand over his hair as she climbed past him.
He didn't blink. His eyes remained wide open, always darting, seeking, searching every corner of the sky—a cloudless, pristine, autumnal sky—for any possible danger. Other airplanes. Geese. Meteorites, Superman, dragons, anything that could possibly signal an oncoming apocalypse or death. Even when his eyes burned and began to itch, he didn't blink.
Nor did he look behind him, even though the rustling noises sounded…interesting.
An eternity later, Sarah climbed back into the pilot seat. She'd shucked off the unobtrusive sweater and dark pants for a much sportier outfit. "Extreme sports loving wife, remember," she said at his wordless look.
To cover his gaffe, Chuck forced a laugh. "You're thinner than I expected," he mimicked.
She punched his shoulder. "Shut up."
"So what now?" Chuck asked, rubbing his aching eyes. "We fly all the way back to the States? Cos I gotta tell you, I'm a little nervous at the thought."
"No. The trick is to keep moving, to keep changing modes of transportation and identities as often as we can. Since I only had time to arrange Jean-Claude and a couple of things, we'll be flying mostly under the radar—"
"Pun intended?"
"And we'll stay Pete and Diana until we reach Athens."
"We're going to Athens?"
"Eventually. I've got a contact there that can help us." Sarah slanted a sideways look at Chuck. "Bryce never knew about him. He's an…"
"Ex?" Chuck guessed.
"Yeah."
"So how come Bryce doesn't know about him?"
Sarah moved a shoulder. "Bryce and I didn't tell each other everything. Obviously."
The sting of Bryce's betrayal hit all over again. Chuck cleared his throat, wanted to hunch his shoulders. But he'd already shown off his un-manliness enough for a day, though, he just shook his head. "Sorry, didn't mean to bring it up."
"It's okay."
Chuck glanced at the control panel, recognizing a few gauges from video games. "How much gas does this thing hold, anyway? And how far can we go on one tank of gas?"
"Two tanks," Sarah corrected. "And we're going about four hundred miles. We'll be crash-landing in about two hours."
"Um, what?" Chuck twisted in his seat, positive that he had misheard. "You said what now?"
"You trust me, right?"
He didn't really have a choice now that he'd stepped from the bunker and into the wilderness with her. But there was, his brain piped in from the rational corner, a long way between trust and crash-landing planes. He began to hyperventilate.
Sarah just smacked him between the shoulder blades with the flat of her hand. He could have sworn that was a smirk threatening to blossom on her face. "We're not actually going to crash, Chuck."
"Then why put it like that?" His breathing slowed, but only a little. It was hard to get past the deluge of planes-blowing-up images flashing through his head. He wondered, briefly, if any were from the Intersect, but they all seemed to be coming from his imagination. Fantastic.
"Because it's more fun. Now, you might want to catch a nap because once we land, we'll need to move fast."
He had no idea why she thought he might be capable of sleeping in the wake of the announcement that they would soon be crash-landing. "Better idea. Why don't you teach me how to fly instead?"
"So you can grab the controls away from me when you get scared?" Sarah gave him a sardonic "not happening" look.
Chuck held up both hands, innocently. "I won't. I swear. There's just no way I'm going to be able to sleep right now."
"Really? You look exhausted."
"I'm trying to bring the look back into style. I promise I'm a quick learner."
After a long moment, Sarah shrugged. "I guess it can't hurt." She began pointing at the various dials and gauges, explaining the purpose of each. Chuck paid close attention, storing as much away as he could—
He felt his eyelids begin to droop after twenty minutes.
After thirty, he was sound asleep.
27 SEPTEMBER, 2007
10 KM NORTH OF RADOMSKO, POLAND
18:45 CEST
"Crash-landing" the plane meant landing on a dirt road adjoining a field. It was horribly anticlimactic. In fact, the most exciting part was that Sarah made him get out while the engine was still running, and hurry to open a set of barn doors so that she could taxi the plane inside. Dusk was approaching by this point, tinting the sky with melting pinks and purples around the edges. Chuck took a minute to admire it before he turned and scrambled back into the darkness of the barn. In the cockpit, Sarah pulled off her headphones and shut everything down, her movements considerably slower than they'd been earlier. It was when she alit—and stumbled upon landing—that Chuck lifted his eyebrows.
"You doing okay?"
"I'm fine." The words were bit off.
Chuck raised both hands defensively. "Sorry. Just making sure."
The wounded look on his face made Sarah sigh. "I've been traveling for over forty-eight hours on half an hour of sleep. I'm a little tired."
Chuck goggled at her. "You mean I let you fly a plane when you haven't slept at all? Why didn't you sleep on the train? I thought you were sleeping!"
"Let me?" Sarah crossed her arms.
It occurred to him that bossing around an armed woman had its drawbacks. "I didn't mean it like that. But if you keep going like this, you're going to collapse or die, and trust me, you're no use to either of us if you're dead."
"Use?" Her voice had gone soft, dangerously so.
"Again, not what I meant." Chuck held up both hands—a futile peacekeeping gesture. "I appreciate what you're doing, saving me like this and staying in my corner. Helping out. But I can't have it on my conscience that you're pushing yourself this hard."
"Ever think maybe that's up to me?"
"Completely, but you're going on next to no sleep over forty-eight hours, and I'm worried you're not thinking rationally." Chuck put a note of conviction in his voice. "Is six hours going to make that much of a difference?"
"I told you, we have to move quickly—"
"And how's that going to work when you pass out from exhaustion?" Chuck mirrored her stance perfectly. "I don't see any other form of transportation here, so we're clearly walking. I can carry you maybe…" Not far at all. He'd only had to carry a woman a couple of times—and it had been Jill, who was considerably shorter than Sarah. And even then, only for a few feet at most. "Seriously. Just six hours. You can see if the plane seats recline—"
"They don't."
"Or we can just sleep up in the hayloft, out of sight, giving us plenty of time to get away. We can rappel down the side of the barn or something if we hear somebody coming."
With every word, Chuck could see the crack in Sarah's resolve deepening. So he kept talking—it was an old trick, he knew, but it worked. "We'll move faster if we're refreshed—and fed. I haven't eaten since the Sapsan and, you know us growing boys, we need our food. So we rest, eat, and set out. It'll be full dark by then. Better cover, right? I assume you know where we're going, so…."
"I do," Sarah admitted slowly. She glanced at the hayloft. Chuck wondered if she knew that she was beginning to sway a little in the breeze. When she looked back at him, the stony mask was back in place. "Four."
"Four? What?"
"Four hours to sleep, and then we move out. The plane took a little less time than I anticipated—the headwinds weren't as strong as I thought they might have been. We'll only be losing about two hours."
"And we'll make those up," Chuck said quickly, relief nearly making him dizzy. "You get the rope and the food or whatever, and I'll set up a perimeter."
Sarah stopped. "You'll do what now?"
"I attended a little bit of spy training before they locked me away. Enough to know how to set up a perimeter." Chuck opened the passenger door of the plane and snatched his parka. He flipped it inside out, digging through the pockets and unearthing three objects the size of credit cards.
"What're those?"
"Sensors. Two to set the perimeter, and one to serve as the receiver for the alert." Holding two of the flat navy blue sensors between his teeth like a debit card, Chuck fiddled with the third, sliding thin compartments away so that it formed a rudimentary speaker. "I spent my free time modifying circuitry in the bunker. I'll go set these up inside the door—lucky there's only one entrance to this place, isn't it?"
"Kind of why I picked it," Sarah muttered under her breath, though Chuck heard her perfectly.
Once his sensors had been set up on a level surface so that the lasers would rebound back and forth, providing an intangible trip wire, Chuck shut the barn door, plunging the entire place into gloom. "Sarah?"
"Up here!" came the call from the hayloft.
It was an interesting lesson in fear of heights to climb the rickety ladder, but Chuck managed. The hayloft was apparently where the barn's owner stored not only ancient, musty bales of hay, but broken down machinery. Given time, Chuck would have liked to poke through it, but the exhaustion was too prevalent. Because of the machinery, there was only a limited space where he and Sarah could hole up. He dropped onto the floor next to her, taking the sandwich Sarah held out and biting in without tasting it.
"Here," he said, tossing Sarah the receiver. "You're probably better off with that."
"Thanks." She clipped it to her vest. "Handy."
Chuck, too busy inhaling a sandwich to talk, gave a modest shrug. With his free hand, he began yanking out handfuls of hay—but Sarah grabbed his arm, stopping him.
"We're going to have to rough it. No making it look like two people crashed up here. Here." She tossed his parka into his lap. "You can use that as a pillow."
Chuck finished off the sandwich. "Gotcha. What're you going to use?"
"This isn't the first time I've slept on a barn floor, Chuck." Sarah, her own sandwich long gone, proved it by lying down. "I just set my watch, so—four hours."
"Good-night, then." Chuck took a little longer to lie down, stretching out on his stomach. Everything ached—his butt, his bones, his muscles, his face, his whole head. It was nothing but relief he felt at finally getting to lie on a flat, unmoving surface. He could even ignore the hot blonde woman sleeping a little over a foot away.
Almost.
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