Libra - Don Delillo [55]
Ozzie had the clap.
The pilot arrives in an ambulance, with armed guards. He wears a white helmet that is sealed to his airtight suit and he strides to the unmarked plane without delay. The ground crew and guards back off as the engine emits, the high-pitched signal that always brings a few men slouching out of the radar shack to watch the black-bandit jet streak down the runway. It’s over almost at once, the shrill sound rising, the strut-and-wheel devices keeping the long wings level until flying speed is reached. Then the plane is up, the pogos drop off, the men try to keep track of the fast steep climb, the brilliant leap into another skin. They scrunch up their faces, peering into the haze. But the object is already gone, part of the high quiet, the flat and seamless sky out there, leaving behind a string of soft drawled curses and murmurs of disbelief.
The pilot, sooner or later, whoever he is, whatever his base or his mission, thinks about the items stored in his seat pack. Water, field rations, flares, a first-aid kit; a hunting knife and pistol; a needle tipped with lethal shellfish toxin and concealed in a fake silver dollar. (“We’d just as soon they didn’t get a chance to interrogate you guys, not that we think you’d breathe a word. ”) There is also the delicate charge of cyclonite that will pulverize the camera and electronic equipment an undetermined number of seconds after the pilot activates the timer and gets his feet into the stirrups of the ejection seat, should the remote possibility arise that any such maneuver is necessary. (“Now, you people understand the ejection seat can cause amputation of the limbs if things don’t work just perfect, so maybe you ought to figure on slipping quietly over the side, like you don’t want to wake the kids.”) He can’t help thinking, sooner or later, about the worst that could happen. A stall at extreme altitudes. Or an SA-2 missile just happens to detonate nearby, knocking out a stabilizer. (“Not that the bastards have the know-how to go that high. ”) Next thing he knows he is out in the stratosphere, sky-hiking with a pack on his back, and he tries to convince a somewhat dreamy hand to jerk the pull-ring. At fifteen thousand feet it happens automatically, swat, the orange plume streaming out of his shoulder blades. It becomes a matter of dignified descent. He comes floating down out of the endless pale, struck simultaneously by the beauty of the earth and a need to ask forgiveness. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling. People come into view, farm hands, children racing toward the spot where the wind will set him down. Their rough caps are tilted back. He is near enough to hear them calling, the words bounced and steered and elongated by the contours of the land. The land smells fresh. He is coming down to springtime in the Urals and he finds that this privileged vision of the earth is an inducement to truth. He wants to tell the truth. He wants to live another kind of life, outside secrecy and guilt and the pull of grave events. This is what the pilot thinks, rocking softly down to the tawny fields of a landscape so gentle and welcoming it might almost be home.
20 May
Laurence Parmenter booked a seat on the daily flight to the Farm, the CIA’s secret training base in Virginia. The flight was operated under military cover and used mainly by Agency people with short-term business at the base.
The Farm was known officially by the cryptonym ISOLATION. The names of places and operations were a special language in the Agency. Parmenter was interested in the way this language constantly found a deeper level, a secret level where those outside the