Thomas Harris - Black Sunday

He rolled over and looked into her face. There were red pillow marks on his cheek. “You’ll have to get the shot bags out of the back of the gondola fast. The ones beneath the backseat. We can trim it up when we’re off. You can go.”

She held him very close and they did not talk anymore.

At eleven thirty Lander rose and Dahlia helped him dress. His cheeks were hollow, but the tanning lotion she had used on his face helped disguise the pallor. At eleven fifty she took a syringe of Novacaine from her medical kit. She rolled up Lander’s sleeve and deadened a small patch on his forearm. Then she took out another, smaller hypodermic syringe. It was a flexible plastic squeeze tube with a needle attached, and it was filled with a thirty milligram solution of Ritalin.

“You may feel talkative after you use this, Michael. Very up. You’ll have to compensate for that. Don’t use it unless you feel yourself losing strength.”

“All right, just put it on.”

She inserted the needle in the deadened patch on his forearm and taped the small syringe firmly in place, flat on his arm. On either side of the squeeze tube was a short length of pencil to keep the tube from being squeezed by accident. “Just feel through your sleeve and press the tube with your thumb when you need it.”

“I know, I know.”

She kissed him on the forehead. “If I shouldn’t make it to the airport with the truck, if they are waiting for me—”

“I’ll just drop the blimp into the stadium,” he said. “It will mash quite a few. But don’t think about the bad possibilities. We’ve been lucky so far, right?”

“You have been very clever so far.”

“I’ll see you at the airport at two fifteen.”

She walked him to the elevator, and then she returned to the room and sat on the bed. It was not yet time to go for the truck.

Lander spotted the blimp crew standing near the desk in the lobby. There was Simmons, Farley’s copilot, and two network cameramen. He walked over, exerting himself to put on a brisk manner.

I’ll rest in the bus, he thought.

“My God, it’s Mike,” Simmons said. “I thought you were out sick. Where’s Farley? We called his room. We were waiting for him.”

“Farley had a rough night. Some drunk girl stuck her finger in his eye.”

“Jesus.”

“He’s all right, but he’s getting it looked at. I fly today.”

“When did you get in?”

“This morning. That bastard Farley called me at four a.m. Let’s go. We’re late now.”

“You don’t look too good, Mike.”

“I look better than you do. Let’s go.”

At the Lakefront Airport gate, the driver could not find his vehicle pass and they all had to show their credentials. Three squad cars were parked near the tower.

The blimp, 225 feet of silver, red, and blue, rested in a grassy triangle between the runways. Unlike the airplanes squatting on the ground before the hangars, the airship gave the impression of flight even when at rest. Poised lightly on its single wheel, nose against the mooring mast, it pointed to the northeast like a giant weathervane. Near it were the big bus that transported the ground crew and the tractor-trailer that housed the mobile maintenance shop. The vehicles and the men were dwarfed by the silver airship.

Vickers, the crew chief, wiped his hands on a rag. “Glad you’re back, Captain Lander. She’s ready.”

“Thank you.” Lander began the traditional walk-around inspection. Everything was in order, as he knew it would be. The blimp was clean. He had always liked the cleanliness of the blimp. “You guys ready?” he called.

Lander and Simmons ran down the rest of the preflight checklist in the gondola.

Vickers was berating the two TV cameramen. “Captain Video, will you and your assistant kindly get your asses in that gondola so we can weigh off?”

The ground crew took hold of the handrail around the gondola and bounced the airship on its landing wheel. Vickers removed several of the twenty-five-pound bags of shot that hung from the rail. The crew bounced the airship again.

“She’s just a hair heavy. That’s good.” Vickers liked the blimp to take off heavy; fuel consumption would lighten it later.

“Where are the Cokes? Have we got the Cokes?” Simmons said. He thought they would be airborne for at least three hours, possibly longer. “Yeah, here they are.”

“Take it, Simmons,” Lander said.

“Okay.” Simmons slid into the single pilot’s seat on the left side of the gondola. He waved through the windshield. The crewmen at the mooring mast tripped the release, and eight men on the nose ropes pulled the blimp around. “Here we go.” Simmons rolled back the elevator wheel, pushed in the throttles, and the great airship rose at a steep angle.

Lander leaned back in the passenger seat beside the pilot. The flight to the stadium, with the tailwind, took nine and a half minutes. Lander figured that, wide open, it could be done in a shade over seven minutes, if the wind held.

Beneath them, a solid stream of traffic jammed the expressway near the Tulane exit.

“Some of those people are gonna miss the kickoff,” Simmons said.

“Yeah, I expect so,” Lander said. They would all miss half time, he thought. It was one ten p.m. He had almost an hour to wait.

Dahlia Iyad got out of the taxi near the Galvez Street wharf and walked quickly down the block toward the garage. The bomb was there, or it was not. The police were waiting or they were not. She had not noticed before how cracked and tilted the sidewalk was. She looked at the cracks as she walked along. A group of small children were playing stickball in the street. The batter, no more than three and a half feet tall, whistled at her as she went by.

A police car made the players scatter and passed Dahlia at fifteen miles an hour. She turned her face away from it as though she were looking for an address. The squad car turned at the next corner. She fished in her purse for the keys and walked up the alley to the garage. Here were the locks. She opened them and slipped inside, closing the door behind her. It was semidark in the garage. A few shafts of sunshine came in through nailholes in the walls. The truck appeared undisturbed.

She climbed into the back and switched on the dim light. There was a thin film of dust on the nacelle. It was all right. If the place were staked out, they would never have let her get to the bomb. She changed into a pair of coveralls marked with the initials of the television network and stripped the vinyl panels off the sides of the truck, revealing the network emblem in bright colors.

She found the checklist taped to the nacelle. She read it over quickly. First the detonators. She removed them from their packing and, reaching into the middle of the nacelle, she slid them into place, one in the exact center of each side of the charge. The wires from the detonators plugged into the wiring harness with its lead-in to the airship’s power supply. Now the fuse and its detonator were plugged into place.

She cut all the rope lashings except two. Check the bag for Lander. One .38 caliber revolver with silencer, one pair of cable cutters, both in a paper sack. Her Schmeisser machine pistol with six extra clips and an AK-47 automatic rifle with dips were in a duffle bag.

Getting out, she laid the Schmeisser on the floor of the truck cab and covered it with a blanket. There was dust on the truck seat. She took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped it carefully. She tucked her hair into a Big Apple cap.

One fifty. Time to go. She swung open the garage doors and drove outside, blinking in the sunshine, and left the truck idling as she closed the garage doors.

Driving toward the airport, she had an odd, happy feeling of falling, falling.