Jack McDevitt - Ancient Shores

White Lightning had a lot of history. Max had tracked it down from Army Air Force records, had interviewed pilots and ground personnel, and now produced a computer disk. “Everything we could find is here. Pilots. Campaigns. Kills. Eight confirmed fighters, by the way. And two Hinkels. Bombers.”

“Good.” Kerr waved it away. “I won’t need it.” He uncapped a gold pen and glanced around for something to lean on. The port side tail boom. “You want this payable to you?”

“To Sundown Aviation.” Max’s company, which restored and traded in antique warbirds.

Kerr wrote the check. Four hundred thousand. The profit to the company would be a hundred and a quarter. Not bad.

The check was green, and the face contained a reproduction of Bronco’s P—38 in flight. Max folded the check and put it in his breast pocket. “Are you going to put it in a museum?” he asked.

The question seemed to surprise Kerr. “No,” he said. “No museum. I’m going to put it on my lawn.”

Max felt a twinge in his stomach. “Your lawn? Mr. Kerr, there are six of these left in the world. It’s fully functional. You can’t just put it on a lawn.”

Kerr looked genuinely amused. “I would think,” he said, “that I can do damn near whatever I want with it. Now, I wonder whether we can get on with this.” He glanced at the folder in Max’s hand, which contained the title documents.

Kerr’s pilot-hero was a congenial, witty, and very human protagonist. Millions of people loved him, and they agreed that his creator had raised the aviation thriller to a new level of sophistication. Yet it struck Max that that same creator was a jerk. How was that possible? “If you just leave it on the lawn,” Max said, “it will get rained on. It will rust.” What he really meant was that this kind of aircraft deserved something far better than being installed as an ornament on a rich man’s property.

“When it does,” said Kerr, “I’ll give you a call and you can come down and touch it up for me. Now, if you will, I have work to do.”

A Brasilia commuter plane was circling the field, getting ready to land. It was red and white against a cloudless sky.

“No,” said Max, retrieving the check. He held it out for Kerr. “I don’t think so.”

“Beg pardon?” Kerr frowned.

“I don’t think we have a deal.”

The two men looked at each other. Kerr shrugged. “Yeah, maybe you’re right, Collingwood,” he said. “Janie didn’t much like the idea, anyway.” He turned on his heel crossed the gravel walkway into the terminal, and never looked back. Max could only guess who Janie was.

Max came from a family of combat pilots. Collingwoods had flown over Baghdad and Hanoi. They’d been with the USS Hornet in the Pacific and with the RAF in the spring of 1940. The family name appears on the 1918 roster of the Ringed Hat squadron.

Max was the exception. He had no taste for military life or for the prospect of getting shot at. His father, Colonel Maxwell E. Collingwood, USAF (retired), to his credit, tried to hide his disappointment in his only son. But it was there nonetheless, and Max had, on more than one occasion, overheard him wondering aloud to Max’s mother whether there was anything at all to genetics.

The remark was prompted by the fact that young Max should have been loaded from both sides of the barrel, so to speak. His mother was Molly Gregory, a former Israeli helicopter pilot, who during the Six-Day War had earned her nickname, Molly Glory, by returning fire at shore batteries during the rescue of a crippled gunboat.

Molly had encouraged him to stay away from the military, and he could not help reading her satisfaction that her son would not deliberately put himself in harm’s way. Her approval under those circumstances, ironically, had hurt him. But Max enjoyed being alive. He enjoyed the play of the senses, he loved the companionship of attractive women, and he had learned to appreciate the simpler pleasures of snowstorms and sunsets. He expected to have only one clear shot at the assorted joys of living, and he had no intention of risking it to meet someone else’s misconceived expectations. Max would take care of Max.

If he’d had any doubts about his character, his suspicions had been confirmed by an incident at Fort Collins when he was twenty-two. He had taken a job flying cargo and passengers to Denver and Colorado Springs for Wildcat Airlines. On a cold mid-November afternoon he had been inspecting his twin-engine Arapaho, standing under one wing with a clipboard, when a commuter flight came in. He never knew what had drawn his attention to the flight, but he paused to watch the plane touch down. The sun was still well above the mountains, the plane a blue-and-white twin-engine Bolo. It rolled down the runway, and he saw the face of a little girl, brown curls, big smile, in the right-hand forward window. The plane slowed and was approaching the terminal when, with only a brief wisp of black smoke as a warning, the port engine burst into flames.

Horrified, Max had started forward. A fuel line must have burst, because the fire roared across the wing and engulfed the cockpit before the pilot had time to react. The little girl with the smile did not even seem to know what was happening.

Someone in a white shirt, with his tie loosened, burst from the terminal and charged the plane. But he was too far away. The fire roared over the fuel tanks. Max had taken only a few steps before he realized it was hopeless. He stopped, waiting for the explosion, knowing it was already too late, almost wishing the blast would come and end it.

The little girl had been watching him, and now she saw the fire. Her expression changed, and she looked back at Max.

Max never forgot those eyes. Then the man with the tie bolted past, his shoes making clacking sounds on the concrete, and Max called after him that he would get killed. He got to the plane, fought the door open, and went inside. Still the girl stared at Max. Then hands drew her away from the window.

And in that moment it went.

The aircraft erupted in a fireball. The blast of heat rolled over him as he fell face down on the apron.

Max had found out who he was.

People rarely recognize the significant moments of their lives without the assistance of hindsight. A trip downtown to buy a book results in a chance meeting that ends at the altar. A late taxi leaves one stranded with a fellow traveler who becomes a friend and who, two years later, offers a career move. You never know.

Max had experienced a turning point shortly after the incident at Fort Collins, when a weekend of planned seduction went wrong and he found himself with nothing to do on an otherwise pleasant spring Sunday. Friends persuaded him to attend a warbirds air show, and he met Tom Lasker and his Avenger torpedo bomber.

Lasker was a flying farmer with several thousand acres up on the border. He had just purchased the Avenger at an auction and was having second thoughts when Max, looking for a lunch partner, came upon him and saw first the plane and then the big weather-beaten man seated beside it, staring at it, his wooden chair turned backward, his rough features creased with concern.

The Avenger was battered; it sagged, and its paint was flaking off. But something about it touched Max. He was a romantic at heart, and the Avenger was pure history, lethal and lovely and in trouble. It was his first intersection with an antique warplane. And it changed his life forever.

“It could use some work,” Max had told him.

Lasker spoke to the plane. “I think I got carried away,” he said.

Which is how Max got into the antique plane business. He cut a deal and spent the next few weeks restoring the Avenger. He subcontracted to replace the engine and tighten up the hydraulics. He installed state-of-the-art electronics, applied fresh gray paint to the aircraft, and gave it a new set of insignia. Battle stars gleamed on its fuselage and wings, and he drew a crowd when he flew it into Fort Moxie to turn it over to its owner.