Read Online The Signal by Ron Carlson - Free Book Online

“How’s that place, cowboy?”
    “Rented out for now,” Mack said.
    “It’s a tough country on ranches,” Chester said. “You ought to get back out there and run it.” Yarnell stepped over and Chester handed him the control unit.
    “I might. And now you’re a pilot?”
    “Yes sir. I went to airplane school,” Chester said. “You’d like flying.”
    “There’s too many mountains in my life to put an airplane in it.”
    Yarnell handed Mack the control to examine and took the T-bar from Chester and straightened out the little plane, handing the bar back to Chester without looking.
    “This gentleman has some airplanes. Some don’t need a pilot; that right there tells you how hard flying is.”
    A bright blue six-wheel tank truck entered the far yard. Chester stepped up and took Mack’s hand again. “I’m glad to see you. I’m going to get over and take delivery on some fuel. Say hey to Vonnie and get back with your horses, you cowboy.”
    “Will do, Chester.”
    Yarnell showed Mack the hand controller for the aircraft and then led him over to four white Adirondack chairs in the shade of the hangar. He had Mack press the switch and then hold the red button which ignited the jet, more of a hiss than a roar. Yarnell took the controller back and used the simple joystick to send the plane forward in a sudden rush, like a thrown thing, instantly in the sky and a moment later out of sight. They had coffee for twenty minutes there and Mack scanned the bulbous cumulus cloudbank running along the blue-sky horizon like a hedgerow for the craft the whole time. Yarnell had made a show of putting the controller on the ground.
    “There,” the man said, pointing.
    Mack saw the gray dot again, remarkably small, now descending slowly like a toy and banking at the end of the strip for a turn, coming in for a landing in soft bumps with the engine off. “Hands off,” Charley said.
    “Where’d it go?”
    Yarnell looked at him. “You tell me. I loan these to the government.”
    “Don’t they have their own?” Mack had asked.
    “That there is a mystery,” Charley had said. “I wanted you to see what we’re doing is all.” Mack looked across at Chester atop the fuel truck with his wrench and he did feel a little better about the whole deal.
    In Yarnell’s Rover in the parking lot of the Tropical, Mack asked, “What’s the job?”
    “We lost part of something. It fell from a plane. It’s about the size of a book.”
    “In the mountains?”
    “In the Winds.”
    “Some kind of secret?” Mack said.
    “Some kind.”
    “Is it radioactive?”
    “No. It’s too hard to explain,” Yarnell said. “But it’s like a trigger, a fingerprint. And they need it. It’s the linchpin, the prototype.”
    “There’s a new drone.”
    “There is.”
    Mack asked, “This trigger. Whose is it?”
    “Ours,” Yarnell said.
    “ Ours as in us, ” Mack said. “Who?”
    “It’s worth ten thousand dollars to you, if you can hand it to me.” Mack watched the big bowling pin tumble through its stations. Behind it the night was lit by the bar lights of Jackson, and the outline of the two-story town was cut against the mountain. Looking over the buildings had always confounded Mack. It wasn’t just Jackson; it was any town. There was something wrongheaded and sad about the venture to him, something that didn’t fit. He could abide it, but the clock was ticking.
    “What if it’s all broke apart? It’s going to be broken up.”
    “If I knew that for certain, that too would be worth some money.”
    “Who else wants it?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know who knows about this.”
    “I mean like the Chinese? Are they going to be crawling around the hills?”
    “I can’t imagine,” Yarnell said.
    “Who else have you hired?”
    “No one.”
    “And you can’t say one thing.”
    “That would not be safe,” he said.
    “Who else in this part of the country knows about it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Mack was thinking