began to move, slowly at first, then faster and faster.
The Intruder came over the swell in the runway accelerating quickly. A river of hot, shimmering air poured down and away behind the bird.
He pressed his fingers in his ears as the sound swelled in volume and intensity. The nose wheel rose a foot or so above the concrete. With a delicate wiggle the bird of prey lifted itself free of the earth and continued toward him in a gentle climb as the wheels retracted into the body of the beast. The howl of the engines grew until it was intolerable.
Now the machine was passing just overhead, roaring a thunder- ous song that enveloped him with an intensity beyond imagination. He glimpsed the helmeted figure of Rita Moravia in the cockpit with her left hand on the throttles, looking forward, toward the open sky.
He buried his face in his shoulder as the plane swept past and waves of hot jet exhaust and disturbed air cascaded over him.
When the gale subsided the noise was fading too, so he looked again for the Intruder. It was climbing steeply into the blue ocean above, its engine noise now a deep, resonant, subsiding roar.
He got down from the truck hood and seated himself behind the wheel. The birds in the scrub were still singing and the jackrabbit was still watching suspiciously.
Grinning to himself, Jake Grafton started the engine of the pickup and drove away.
18
The day Terry Franklin died was a beautiful day, “the finest day this year” according to a TV weath- erman on one of Washington’s local breakfast shows. The sun crept over the edge of the earth into a cloudless sky as a warm, gentle zephyr from the west stirred the new foliage. The weather reader promised a high temperature of seventy-four. Humidity was low. This was the day everyone had dreamed of while they endured the cold, humid winter and the wet, miserable spring. Now, at last, it was here. And on this day sent from heaven Terry Franklin died.
He certainly didn’t expect to die today, of course, or any other day in the foreseeable future. For him this was just another day to be endured, another day to live through on his way to the life of gleeful indolence he was earning with his treason.
He awoke when his alarm went off. If he beard the birds singing outside his window he showed no sign. He used his electric razor on his face and gave his teeth a very quick pass with the cordless toothbrush he received for Christmas from his kids, whom he hadn’t seen or heard from for three weeks and, truthfully, hoped he wouldn’t hear from. If he heard from the kids he would also hear from Lucy, and she would want money. He assumed that she was back in California with her mother, the wicked witch of the west. If so, Lucy didn’t need any money: her father the tooth mechanic could pay the grocery bill and buy the kids new shoes.
He put on his uniform while the coffee brewed. The coffee he drank black, just the way he had learned to like it on his first cruise, which he had made to the Med aboard a guided-missile frigate.
He paused automatically on the front stoop and looked around for the morning newspaper, then remembered that there wouldn’t be one and pulled the door closed and tried it to ensure it was locked. He had canceled the paper a week after Lucy left. He never read it and Lucy only scanned the front page and read the funnies. She always wanted it for the crossword puzzle, which she worked every morning while watching Oprah. Twenty-five cents a day for a fucking crossword puzzle. He had relished that call to the circu- lation office.
The Datsun started on the first crank. He backed out of the drive and roiled down his window as he drove toward the stop sign at the corner. He fastened his seat belt, punched up the Top 40 station on the stereo and rolled. He only had three miles to go to the Park’N'Ride, but still he enjoyed the private little world of his car. These few minutes in the car, with the music he liked adjusted to the volume he liked, he cherished as the best part of the day.
He hadn’t heard from the Russians since his talk with that Yuri fellow, and he had mixed emotions about that. In a way it was quite pleasant not sweating drop trips or clandestine computer time or the slim chance of being searched leaving the Pentagon. Yet every day that went by without a call was another day he had to waste on his dreary, humdrum job, on this humdrum bus ride, on this humdrum colorless suburb. Every day he spent here was a day he wasn’t there, lying in the sun, fucking the beach bunnies, drinking Cuba Libres and enjoying life.
His fantasy was there, waiting, and he was firmly and hopelessly planted here. What made the waiting so frustrating was the money he already had in the bank. That he had committed a variety of serious crimes to obtain the money troubled him not a whit. He had never given it a moment’s thought. In fact, he felt exactly like all the other people who see a large sum of unearned money come their way — lottery winners, traffic accident victims, legatees, swin- dlers, personal injury lawyers and so on — the money was his by divine right. Somehow, some way, the rulers of the universe had decreed that he deserved the good things and good times that big money will buy because he wasn’t like all those schmucks who flog it eight to five. He was different. Special. The money made him special. The unique and wonderful emissions given off by large quantities of money made him tingle.
Perhaps because he felt so good about himself, Terry Franklin took the time this morning, the last morning of his life, to smile at the bus driver as he boarded and to nod at a woman he recognized as he went down the aisle.
As the bus threaded its way through rush hour traffic, he watched the scenery roll by without seeing a thing. He rode lost in reverie, already enjoying his fantasy.
The morning was spent cleaning and repairing a computer key- board on which a secretary had spilled coffee. She also had a taste for doughnuts and potato chips, he noted with a sneer as he worked with a toothbrush to rid the mechanism of soggy crumbs. He could just picture her still young but already overweight, al- ways dieting or talking to her fellow airheads about dieting as she munches yet another doughnut and swills yet another cup of coffee loaded with sugar. She must have had at least three lumps in this stuff she spilled. Lucy’s clone.
He almost decided to tell the chief to trash this keyboard, then changed his mind. The chief had cut him a lot of slack these past three weeks: he should try to prove to the chief that he could still carry his share of the load. He put more WD-40 on the keyboard and reattacked the sticky mess with the toothbrush.
Terry Franklin’s last meal was a hot dog with mustard, catsup and relish, a small order of fries and a medium Sprite. He ate it with another sailor from his section in the main cafeteria. They discussed the new secretary in the division office — was she really a blonde, would she or wouldn’t she, was it worth trying to find out, and so on.
The afternoon went quickly. The chief sent him with one other man to work on a balky tape drive in the enlisted manpower sec- tion, and the afternoon flew by. They had found the problem but had not yet repaired it when quitting time rolled around.
So he carried his tools back to the shop and exchanged guffaws with his shipmates, then walked to the bus stop outside and found a place in the usual line.
Had he known what was coming, one wonders what he would have done differently. No doubt a larger man who knew the end was nigh might have lived his last day pretty much as he had all his others, but Terry Franklin was not a big man in any sense of the word, and he had come to realize that in the last three weeks, since the fiasco of the bungled drop. He knew he was a coward, a weak- ling without backbone or character, but, he thought, only he knew, and so what? Superman lives in Metropolis and Batman lives in Gotham. The rest of us just try to get along.
Yet, given who he was and what he was, should he have known he might be approaching the end of his string? The signs were certainly there if he had thought it through dispassionately, with some detachment. He didn’t, of course.
He used most of his last hour on earth to stare out the bus window and think about the feel of the sun on his back and sand between his bare toes, and to daydream of a hard young female body under him mingling her sweat with his. She didn’t have a face, this girl in his dreams, but she had firm brown tits and a flat stomach and long brown legs with taut thighs.
When he turned the key in the car ignition the radio boomed to life as the engine caught. “… like a bat outta hell, ba-dupe, ba- dupey…”
He rolled the window down and fastened his seat belt and patted the steering wheel with his hands in time
