of the girl. She was still running but had pulled a stubby weapon out of her suit jacket and now held it in a professional double-handed grip. It had to be a big weapon—looked like an Ingram MAC-10 or an Uzi automatic pistol—to seem that huge at a distance of fifteen feet or so. Something with punch, anyway. I realized that her silhouette had been too good to be true.
“Clear with Air Control and take off,” she said as she scrambled through the doorway and pushed past the baby lawyer, Corbin. “Fly east-southeast, one-twenty degrees.”
“But our flight plan says north.”
“We have changed your flight plan. You will take us to Juwara. In the Sultanate of Oman.” Her English was perfect, lilting and accentless. The weapon she held was really some kind of derringer sawed from the action of a double-barreled shotgun. It would mess up the cockpit badly if she fired it.
But I knew the map. “Juwara is over eight hundred miles from here,” I said carefully. “That is beyond the operational range of this helicopter. There is nothing to the southeast within our range, except the Rub’ al Khali. The Great Sandy Desert.”
“Fly!” She glanced at Faisal. “You will pilot us, or we will fly ourselves.”
I shrugged, picked up the collective, and twisted on the throttle. It was going to be a long flight into nowhere.
Chapter 4
Granville James Corbin: Seeds of Vendetta
By the time I graduated from high school, life in the mock-adobe just outside the Asilomar center was getting pretty raggedy.
That summer, Mother was admitted to the Drylands Farm, a kind of resort up north in the Napa Valley. She referred to her stay as “a rest.” Father called it “dehydration.” Drylands catered to nonviolent alcoholics and drug abusers.
Mother wrote to me faithfully, once a week to start with, mostly about the fog in the hills, the afternoon heat, and the prospects for the wine, uh, grape harvest. Over the years, she faded into a husky voice that whispered from slightly scented letters scrawled in thin blue ink. For some reason, she had a fixation on caterpillars and the birds that ate them. She rarely wrote about butterflies.
That August, as I packed to leave for the University of California at Berkeley, my father was reassigned to the Pacific—Indonesia or Malaysia. Oil at eight dollars a barrel, down from forty-two a year earlier, had knocked the Oil Patch on its tailbone. Petramin was no better off than anyone else. Father’s staff had been cut back to just one man, him, so he was off to taste the drilling mud in Sumatra or wherever.
During the preparations for departure, he sold the mock-adobe right out from under Mother and me. He would be gone for three years, Father said, and to save the high cost of transoceanic air fare, he planned to take his leaves in Sydney and Hong Kong. So he, too, turned into paper for me: a checkbook and a handful of polaroid snaps, some of them decorated with strange, dusky women.
Berkeley may once have been the western world’s center of dissent and anti-fascist, anti-imperialist rhetoric. But by the time I arrived, the careerists and academics were back in control. The Associated Students were again selling book covers illustrated with a winking, grinning humanoid California Bear. The political shouters at Sather Gate were replaced by skateboarders and falafel stands. The coffee houses of South Side, with their beansprout crépes and guerrilla theater, gave way to the nouveau-cuisine delicatessens of North Side’s gourmet ghetto, serving open-face sandwiches of prosciutto and fig jam on seven-grain bread. Radical action was out. Gelato was in.
It was at Berkeley that I first crossed paths with Gordon Pollock.
He was a beautiful young man, tall and well-muscled, with a headful of curly brown hair and with heavy, sleepy eyelids over smoky hazel eyes that missed nothing. He was an athlete, an aesthete, a scholar, a natural attraction. People pooled around him. In three
“Clear with Air Control and take off,” she said as she scrambled through the doorway and pushed past the baby lawyer, Corbin. “Fly east-southeast, one-twenty degrees.”
“But our flight plan says north.”
“We have changed your flight plan. You will take us to Juwara. In the Sultanate of Oman.” Her English was perfect, lilting and accentless. The weapon she held was really some kind of derringer sawed from the action of a double-barreled shotgun. It would mess up the cockpit badly if she fired it.
But I knew the map. “Juwara is over eight hundred miles from here,” I said carefully. “That is beyond the operational range of this helicopter. There is nothing to the southeast within our range, except the Rub’ al Khali. The Great Sandy Desert.”
“Fly!” She glanced at Faisal. “You will pilot us, or we will fly ourselves.”
I shrugged, picked up the collective, and twisted on the throttle. It was going to be a long flight into nowhere.
Chapter 4
Granville James Corbin: Seeds of Vendetta
By the time I graduated from high school, life in the mock-adobe just outside the Asilomar center was getting pretty raggedy.
That summer, Mother was admitted to the Drylands Farm, a kind of resort up north in the Napa Valley. She referred to her stay as “a rest.” Father called it “dehydration.” Drylands catered to nonviolent alcoholics and drug abusers.
Mother wrote to me faithfully, once a week to start with, mostly about the fog in the hills, the afternoon heat, and the prospects for the wine, uh, grape harvest. Over the years, she faded into a husky voice that whispered from slightly scented letters scrawled in thin blue ink. For some reason, she had a fixation on caterpillars and the birds that ate them. She rarely wrote about butterflies.
That August, as I packed to leave for the University of California at Berkeley, my father was reassigned to the Pacific—Indonesia or Malaysia. Oil at eight dollars a barrel, down from forty-two a year earlier, had knocked the Oil Patch on its tailbone. Petramin was no better off than anyone else. Father’s staff had been cut back to just one man, him, so he was off to taste the drilling mud in Sumatra or wherever.
During the preparations for departure, he sold the mock-adobe right out from under Mother and me. He would be gone for three years, Father said, and to save the high cost of transoceanic air fare, he planned to take his leaves in Sydney and Hong Kong. So he, too, turned into paper for me: a checkbook and a handful of polaroid snaps, some of them decorated with strange, dusky women.
Berkeley may once have been the western world’s center of dissent and anti-fascist, anti-imperialist rhetoric. But by the time I arrived, the careerists and academics were back in control. The Associated Students were again selling book covers illustrated with a winking, grinning humanoid California Bear. The political shouters at Sather Gate were replaced by skateboarders and falafel stands. The coffee houses of South Side, with their beansprout crépes and guerrilla theater, gave way to the nouveau-cuisine delicatessens of North Side’s gourmet ghetto, serving open-face sandwiches of prosciutto and fig jam on seven-grain bread. Radical action was out. Gelato was in.
It was at Berkeley that I first crossed paths with Gordon Pollock.
He was a beautiful young man, tall and well-muscled, with a headful of curly brown hair and with heavy, sleepy eyelids over smoky hazel eyes that missed nothing. He was an athlete, an aesthete, a scholar, a natural attraction. People pooled around him. In three
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