Deuces Down Read online

  “How many, uh, staff, are you going to have?” I asked, smelling mildew and seeing rust and dirt wherever I looked.

  “Perhaps three dozen. Perhaps more.”

  Were forty people enough to build a spaceship that could fly to the Moon? I doubted that.

  “Before we proceed, I must ask…” His voice trailed off as he pulled a two-paged typed document out of the drawer of a battered metal desk. “This is a non-disclosure agreement certifying that you will keep what you are about to see confidential, until such time as it becomes public.”

  I looked around at the cold, unused office with its peeling paint, and tried not to laugh. And signed. “How much is this all costing?” I said, handing the document back to Tominbang.

  “The final price tag will be close to ten million dollars US,” he said casually, as if he were disclosing the price of a new suit of clothes.

  He opened one last door, and we emerged into a rather different space: a huge space probably three stories tall. Bing, bing, bing, on went the lights.

  And sitting in the middle of this space was a strange vehicle I can only describe as stubby-winged and shaped like a pumpkin-seed. “This is Quicksilver,” Tominbang said, proudly waving me toward it. “A prototype space plane developed at Tomlin four years ago.”

  Not the X-11A. “Never heard of it.”

  “It was secret.”

  “Then what’s it doing here?” And in the hands of a shady foreign national?

  “The Quicksilver program was cancelled last year. It proved to be technically feasible to fly it from the surface of the earth into orbit and return, but at a much higher cost than the Pentagon was willing to pay. Especially with a war going on. This Quicksilver is supposedly being stored until the day it can be displayed in the Air Force Museum.”

  “How the hell did you even hear about it?”

  “Ah,” Tominbang said, very pleased with himself, “my business is computers and telecommunications. One of my subsidiaries had the contract for the Quicksilver ground stations.”

  So he knew about it legitimately. Well, semi-legitimately.

  Up close Quicksilver looked used: the paint was faded. There were what appeared to be scorch marks on its skin. Of course, those were just the superficial details. “It was flown into orbit,” Tominbang said.

  “Earth orbit is a long way from the Moon.”

  “That’s where you come in,” a new voice said.

  Out of the shadows lurched a slim, weathered man of sixty. Or, once he stepped into the light, a hard forty. His hair was gray and ragged, like a military crewcut gone to weed. His eyes were pale blue. It was the web of lines around them that made him seem old.

  “Ah!” Tominbang said, with the sort of enthusiasm I used to have for Christmas morning, “Commander Al Dearborn, I have found Mr. Cash Mitchell.” Tominbang turned to me. “Commander Dearborn is a Quicksilver pilot.”

  We shook hands. His grip was surprisingly limp. “Call me Al. All my ex wives do.” He smiled. “Though they usually add ‘that cheating son of a bitch’.”

  “I’ll skip that part until I know you better.”

  Dearborn laughed, perhaps a bit too hard. “That’s good. You’re gonna need a sense of humor on this thing.”

  That statement alarmed me, and Tominbang noted my reaction. “Commander Dearborn is a noted humorist,” he said. And drunkard, I wanted to add. “He was the primary test pilot for Quicksilver.”

  “Actually, I was a Navy exchange test pilot for the bird at Tomlin. The Air Force project pilot was a buddy of mine, Mike Sampson.”

  I didn’t like Dearborn ’s smell and boozy appearance, so my normal sociability was strained. “So why don’t we have Sampson here?”

  “Major Sampson is still on active duty at Tomlin,” Tominbang said, quickly, and with a nervous glance at Dearborn. Obviously this was a delicate subject.

  Dearborn peered at me as if we had not just been introduced. “I can’t decide whether I’m gonna like you or want to kill you.”

  Ultimately, he did neither. What he did was throw up on my feet.

  I’m not a fastidious man; I generally wear T-shirts and jeans, to the annoyance of Mr. Skalko, who clings to the sport coat look and seems to want a “team uniform” for his associates. I also wear sandals, generally a wise choice in the desert heat.

  It was not wise on that day. Having my bare feet splashed with vomit violated even my loose standards of hygiene. I practically screamed in disgust. Then, with Tominbang’s help, I found a men’s room and managed to rinse off. Repeatedly. The sickening odor, combined with the ancient fetor of the men’s room, almost made me pass out.

  Tominbang was more upset than I was. He kept apologizing for Dearborn. “He has a drinking problem. But he is very capable. He has been logged two hundred hours of Quicksilver test time, and made three orbital flights.”

  “Can he stay sober long enough to do the job?”

  “It was my impression that he only drinks when he doesn’t have a mission.”

  “You’d better get him to work faster,” I said. “If he throws up on me again, I’m walking out.”

  If I expected an apology from Dearborn, it would have to wait. He was passed out-let’s say sleeping-on a pile of canvas formerly used to protect the Quicksilver vehicle. This gave me my chance to pin Tominbang down. “So, what exactly is the plan here? Can you really fly a spaceplane to the Moon?”

  “Oh, yes. With your assistance, Mr. Mitchell.”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “Since Quicksilver is capable of orbital flight, it only requires minor modifications for landing on the Moon. A landing gear must be added. Communications gear has to be beefed up. We need to obtain suitable space suits. And the life support fittings need to be changed to accommodate a crew of three.”

  Everything was making sense up to the last point. “Why do you need three people? Isn’t this a one-man vehicle?”

  Tominbang looked at the floor, as if he were embarrassed. “We will need the pilot- Dearborn. We will need a spacecraft specialist. And I wish to go along.”

  That was alarming. “You’re spending all this money just so you can fly to the Moon?”

  “No, Mr. Mitchell, that would be crazy,” he said, meaning nothing of the sort. “I have a practical reason. I have made a fortune in allowing certain electronic financial transactions to pass through the off-shore offices of my communications firm. But governments have been making that sort of work more difficult, and it will soon be impossible. I hope to set up the ultimate offshore data recording and retransmitting station.”

  I was about to say that that idea sounded crazier than simply spending $10 million for a ride to the Moon. But Tominbang leaned close again. “This is the information you must keep confidential.”

  “No problem,” I said, wondering just what subject I could bring up that would lead to my immediate departure from the hangar. I might even be able to stop at Haugen’s and resume that interrupted flirtation with Eva-Lynne. “You were about to explain why you needed me.”

  “Because of your unique lifting ability, Mr. Mitchell. Quicksilver’s power plant can’t blast it out of earth orbit, or off the surface of the Moon. Unless, at a key moment, we can somehow reduce its mass to a fraction.”

  I opened my mouth to laugh, then closed it. The biggest object I had ever lifted was a semi-trailer full of Johnny Walker and other fine beverages. (Mr. Skalko was unhappy with certain tariffs due him from the passage of this truck through his territory.) That semi dwarfed Quicksilver.

  So the gig seemed possible, in theory. Which is all I’ve ever had. (As my father used to say, “Cash, you violate the laws of gravitation.” To which I usually answered: “I never studied law.”) Nevertheless, the very idea of performing a lift while in space and sitting on a rocket-well, it made me feel as faint as when I was washing Dearborn ’s vomit off my flesh.

  “I don’t know about this,” I said, perhaps more than once. It was one thing to fantasize about
kicking up the dust of Mars with your boots. It was quite another to entrust your life to a crazy foreign man with more money than sense, and a drunken pilot. Oh, yes, on a flight to the Moon!

  “The compensation would be of the highest degree,” Tominbang was saying, perhaps more than once and in different ways.

  I have many faults, among them slovenliness and laziness, but the greatest of these is greed. So I said, “How much?”

  And then he mentioned a figure that would not only buy my cooperation, but my silence and enthusiasm and that of everyone I know for at least a year. “Mr. Tominbang,” I said. “You’ve got a deal.”

  (If you’re thinking that I thought I would find Eva-Lynne easier to impress if were a moderately richer man, you would be correct.)

  Dearborn uttered a snort at this point, forcing me to look his way. “And what about him?”

  “He has already agreed to the terms.” He shook his head. “He really just wants to fly Quicksilver again.”

  I said “Oh,” or something equally helpful, then added, “Are we going to dry him out? Seeing as how we’ll be a quarter of a million miles from home and depending on his sobriety?”

  “I am searching for a way. I would take him into my own residence, but my travel schedule does not permit it.”

  “What about Dearborn ’s situation? Does he have a wife?”

  “Sadly, Commander Dearborn needs a place to stay.”

  I don’t want to recount the rest of the conversation. I must have been weakened by dollar signs, because I agreed to take him in.

  Temporarily.

  “Doreen threw me out when I told her I had spent the weekend with Tominbang.” Dearborn and I were headed back down Highway 14 toward Palmdale. It was mid-afternoon, but he had awakened from his nap as fresh and perky as a teenager on a Sunday morning. If he had any reservations about going off to live with a man he had just met, not to mention vomited on, he hid them. “She thought that was some kind of code name for a Thai hooker, and that was it.”

  “Doreen sounds as though she’s a bit suspicious.”

  “Well,” Shoe said. “I may have given her reason to be. On other occasions.” And he laughed. “Hey, does this thing go faster than 55?”

  “Not when I’m driving it,” I said. That was one of the hard lessons I had learned in my association with Mr. Skalko: keep a low profile and avoid even the appearance of breaking the law.

  Dearborn laughed and sat back, his feet up on the dash. “You know, they’ve got this new invention called ‘air conditioning’.”

  “Never saw the need,” I said. The high desert gets hot at mid-day, but one of the side effects of my wild card is a lower body temperature. Except when I’m lifting. And I generally don’t lift when driving.

  “You’re a deuce, huh?”

  “Yeah. Want to get out and walk?”

  He pointed to himself. “I’ve got a touch of it myself,” he said, surprising me for the second time that day. I wondered what his power was? But he offered nothing. “Besides, I’ve worked with many a joker in my day.” He pointed to the south and east, the general direction of Tomlin Air Force Base. “Right over there.”

  “I didn’t know we were allowed in the Air Force.”

  “Well, Crash, there’s allowed, and then there’s ‘allowed’. The policy was certainly against it. But some got in. Stranger things have happened.”

  “Like Tominbang getting hold of Quicksilver.”

  Dearborn started laughing. “Yeah, ain’t that unusual? It’s not as though we have a lot of them sitting around. They built two, and broke one. There was also some kind of ground spare, but that’s it.”

  “So right now, nobody’s missing the Quicksilver.”

  “Nope. She’s all ours, Crash.” He slapped me on the back so hard I almost drove off the road. “Hey,” he said, suddenly serious, “what the hell kind of name is Crash? For a flight project, that is.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re superstitious.”

  “Son, there isn’t a pilot alive who isn’t superstitious.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “The name is ‘Cash,’ not ‘Crash’.”

  I was spared the indignity of adding “cook” to my new role as “host” when Dearborn suggested we make a stop in Lancaster for an early dinner. Naturally, he knew a little place just off the Sierra Highway on Avenue I. I was reluctant, at first, until Dearborn offered to pay. “Just because I’m homeless don’t mean I’m broke.”

  Well, given the fee Tominbang offered, I was far from broke, too, though my riches were still theoretical-which is to say, non-existent. “Besides,” Dearborn added, “I owe you.”

  The restaurant was called Casa Carlos; it was a cinder block structure surrounded by a pitted gravel parking lot. (Actually, that description fits almost any structure in the area.) The jumble of cars spilling beyond the nominal border of the lot testified to the joint’s reputation for fine Mexican cuisine, or possibly the lack of other dining options.

  It was dark, smoky and loud when we walked in. The floor was sawdust. The clientele a mixture of agro workers in stained shirts and cowboy hats, and the local gentry in short-sleeved white shirts and undone ties.

  At first I expected one of those tiresome displays of familiarity, in which Dearborn, the Anglo regular, would embrace Carlos, the Latino owner, exchanging a few laughs and phrases in Spanish. At which point Carlos would snap his fingers at a waitress and order her to bring “Senior Al” the chimichanga special or whatever. It was the sort of arrival staged by Mr. Skalko across the width of the LA basin.

  Nothing of the kind occurred. We slunk into the restaurant like two tourists from Wisconsin, quietly finding a table off in one corner.

  Dearborn did take the seat that would keep his back to the wall, and his eyes on the entrance. I’d seen that maneuver with Mr. Skalko, too. “Expecting someone?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. An old buddy who eats here about four times a week.”

  I let the subject drop as a waiter arrived. We ordered a beer each, then, when the plates arrived almost instantaneously, started in on the food. I should say, I ate; Dearborn devoured a double combination that seemed to consist of a heap of refried beans and cheese the size of a football. At one point he slowed down long enough to say, “Don’t watch too close now, Cash. I only had one meal in the past twenty-four hours, and, as you will recall, I was unable to retain that for long.”

  The beer had mellowed me to the point where I was able to smile at the memory. I got Dearborn talking about himself, partly to avoid having to talk about myself, but also to hear the standard military shit-kicker war story bio. I was surprised, then, when Dearborn told me he was from Chicago and had grown up in a privileged North Shore family. His father had been a senior executive at Sears prior to the wild card, at which point he had been turned, losing his job and his money. Dearborn was lucky enough to win an appointment to the naval academy at Annapolis. After graduating in 1951, he became a naval aviator.

  He won his wings of gold too late to shoot it out over Korea, but served with the fleet in the Mediterranean, then did a year of graduate work in nuclear engineering, before coming to Tomlin in 1958 to attend the test pilot school as a navy exchange pilot. “I had just graduated and joined the project when they had the accident.”

  He meant the X-11A disaster, the spectacular mid-air collision between a prototype space plane and its mother ship that killed pilots Enloe and Guinan, and sparked a wild card hunt that destroyed the home-grown American space program. Or so I’d heard.

  “That was a bad scene, for a long time after. I stayed at Tomlin flying chase and pace on a few other programs. They sure weren’t eager to let the X-11 guys get their hands on new aircraft. We were jinxed.” He smiled. “I missed out on three other accidents. There was quite a bad string there around 1961, ’62.

  “But when General Schriever became head of Systems Command, he rammed through the Quicksilver program. I was the only X-11 pilot around, and being in the r
ight place at the right time, got in on the ground floor.” He smiled. “Ruined my navy career, of course.”

  “Ruined? Being one of the first Americans to fly into orbit? Even if it was secret, you should have had it made!”

  “You don’t know much about the military, do you, Cash? When I joined Quicksilver, I had already spent four years here at Tomlin, which meant I was working for the Air Force, not the Navy. I needed to do a tour at the Pentagon and in ’ Nam, then command a ship. If I ever wanted to command a carrier, which is the whole reason you become a navy aviator.

  “I stayed at Tomlin through the first year of test flights. Me and the prime Air Force guy, my old buddy, Mike Sampson. Then the program got cut back, and both of us were left twisting in the wind. Sampson made out better than me: he went off to drive 105s out of Cam Ranh Bay, and wound up getting a Purple Heart.

  “I was too old to go back to the fleet. Why waste time re-qualifying me for carrier ops? I’d be eligible for retirement before I finished a tour like that. So they assigned me to a missile test squadron at China Lake.” He smiled bitterly. “That’s when I started drinking. And drank myself right out of the cockpit, right out of the Navy, and out of marriage number two.”

  In spite of that, he had ordered a beer, though, to be fair, he had barely sipped it. “I’m guessing Doreen is number three?”

  “Correct. I came back to southern California to work for Lock-heed as a civilian, since they had the support contract for Quicksilver. She was my first secretary…” He laughed at the memory. “Guess I wasn’t cut out to work in an office. Too much opportunity for mischief.”

  I must have been feeling brave. I pointed at the beer on the table. “Are you cut out for Tominbang’s project?”

  Dearborn smiled, picked up the beer and poured it on the saw-dust floor. “Being the first human on the Moon? I can give up drinking for that, no problem!”