Brian Garfield: Relentless

When he had a chance he glanced at the Major and saw the thoughtful squint on the Major’s cold hawked features. In back the rest of them began to talk again in harsh snappish voices-they had the sweats, all of them-but the Major held his tongue, squinted forward, worked his jaw from side to side. The Major was thinking, hatching a plan. It would probably be a good one.

In the old days he had known Major Leo Hargit at Tan Son Nhut and Da Nang but they hadn’t been close or anything near it, and when Walker had come back to the States he’d never given the Major another thought until the night the Major had looked him up in Tucson.

The breaks had passed Walker by. He’d been good at war, not so good at much of anything else. In Vietnam the Army had trusted him with a plane worth half a million dollars and ten men’s lives but now, since the Portland accident, it appeared nobody would trust him with a cropduster.

The Army-not the Air Force-had recruited him to fly and he’d flown Med-Evac planes up and down the Indochina peninsula for three years, saving up his back pay and re-upping twice to get the combat bonuses. A few times he’d been shot up by ground fire but he’d never been shot down; he was twenty-nine now and he’d been flying since he was seventeen, he had eleven thousand hours behind him and until Portland he had been rated and certified for instrument flying in anything from single-engine to multiple jet.

When he had enough money saved he had come back to his home town, Sacramento, and bought into a third-level carrier outfit that did air cargo and taxi and business-commuter charter work up and down the west coast, covering all the small towns in northern California and southern Oregon that the scheduled feeder lines missed. Or-Cal Coast Airways had a Lear, two twin Apaches, a Convair and a DC-6B, and when Walker had bought in they had used his capital to pick up an almost new British Dart 500 twin turboprop which carried fifty-six passengers or a prodigious tonnage of cargo. It gave him a one-fifth ownership in a working airline and that was what he had always wanted; that first year was the best year of his life but it was the last good one.

It had started to fall apart when one of the pilots broke his leg in a bowling accident and they had had to hire a temporary replacement on a half-hour’s notice to fly a four-passenger taxi charter to Eugene. The stupid pilot had forgotten to put down his gear at Eugene, gone in with the wheels retracted and ground-looped on his belly, totaled the Apache and killed himself and all four passengers.

That had brought the National Transportation Safety Board down on them and their certifications had been yanked for two weeks, after which they had gone on probationary status with Government snoops hanging around doing constant checks on their safety standards.

They were limping but they were still on their feet, and they might have overcome that, but Walker was having private trouble then.

He had met Carla at a TWA pilot’s party in San Francisco less than a week after he’d become a full partner in Or-Cal; he’d been flushed with success and he’d infected her with it. She had been a stew on Northwest Orient but she hadn’t liked it much-“I’m sort of a cozy quiet girl, Keith, I just didn’t like living in hotel rooms.” When Walker met her she’d been working four months in an airline ticket office in the St. Francis and she admitted frankly she was anxious to settle down and make a home, be a mother, be a wife.

It suited him. She wasn’t gorgeous but she had a cute little face, a triangle of good bones with enormous soft onyx eyes. A small soft cuddly girl, nervously vivacious, with a quick flashing smile and a healthy frank body. He had felt good with her, right from the start.

He hadn’t thought much about whether he loved her; he had never actually seen any love lying around. His romantic dreams had been focused on airplanes from the time he’d built his first model kit plane at the age of nine. But in the Army he’d worked it all out for himself, how he was going to save money and buy into an airline and get married and have kids. That way he’d have the best of both worlds-the kind of success everybody admired, the solid-citizen home and family and free-enterprise ownership of his own business; and at the same time an airplane to fly. The only real freedom was being in motion, piloting yourself across the sky.

Five weeks after he had met Carla he had married her. That had been part of the good year too. It had been a sybaritic year, a lot of drinking and a lot of laughs and a lot of sex. Carla knew airplanes and pilots and she was part of the whole thing, not an outsider.

But she hadn’t got pregnant.

They went to doctors. She took hormones. They had tests. Jesus, the money it all cost. But it didn’t solve anything and finally after a year of specialists and lab analyses the pussyfooting doctor had screwed up courage enough to tell him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Walker. You might try artificial insemination-have you thought of it? It’s probably the only answer if you’re still adamant about not adopting children. You’re sterile, you see. No, don’t worry about your potency, it’s nothing to do with that. But some men have natural antibodies. Something in the chemical make-up of the body-a genetic incompatibility between the genes of your mother and father. The spermatozoa simply don’t function properly, and therefore you can’t impregnate your wife-or any other woman for that matter, it’s not merely a matter of individual sexual partners.” And the sly wink: “In a way you know it gives you a kind of freedom some men would give their right arms for.”

At first it didn’t seem to matter to him all that much. There were plenty of kids around for adoption. But Carla wasn’t having any of that.

She became gloomy, depressed. And his own uncertainty had begun to feed on her despondency. Somehow his manhood had been challenged, denied.

She had turned chilly and sarcastic-angry and moody by turns; he had to tiptoe around her.

Finally the plane had crashed in Eugene and he had had a lot to drink that night when he’d heard about it. The next day she had collapsed in tears: “I just don’t want you near me.”

And she had moved out the same day. Packed all her clothes and left.

In time a lawyer served the divorce notice on him-she’d gone to Reno for six weeks. He had to hock some of his Or-Cal stock to make the settlement. By then he had gone into a kind of emotional anaesthesia and it didn’t seem to matter very much but gradually it had begun to tear at him: grief, the sense of stinging loss. For the first time he realized it: he had loved her.

But she was married again. Another pilot, a United Air Lines captain, twenty years older than she was. And he heard from the airport grapevine that she was pregnant and glowing.

All right; people got along without an arm, without an eye, without their hearing, without both legs. You could get along without love. He had plunged himself into the business; he had flown the maximum number of hours every month that the CAA would permit, and some they didn’t permit. He had gone out on the stump to drum up business, talking up air-freight contracts with coastal fishing outfits and printers and gimcrack cottage industries up in the mountain towns with their ragged-windsock dirt runways.

Then the Post Office Department had started awarding contracts on a low-bid basis to private air-taxi carriers to try for one-day delivery of first class mail in the hick towns. It meant a lot of night flying and a lot of instrument flying because you had to live up to the stupid tradition about the dangers of snow and rain and gloom of night. Walker had sweated blood to get the contract and had started flying the route himself in the Lear-an overnight round-trip from Sacramento to Eureka every twenty-four hours with four stops between, each way-half the time flying blind in bad weather, relying on cockpit instruments and radio ranges. The postal contract left it up to the pilot whether to fly in questionable weather but the point was, if you didn’t fly you didn’t get paid.