Clyde slowed, pulled over into the right lane, eased the wagon into the median, and executed a perfect cop turn, rumbling up into the northbound lanes with enough turbulence to bounce Maggie around in her seat but not enough to wake her. He followed the skid marks on the pavement to the gouges in the ditch, and the gouges to the gap in the fence, parked the wagon on the shoulder, and set the emergency flashers. He took a flashlight and some flares out of the glove compartment, fired up the flares, and tossed them onto the road. He took Maggie, still in her child seat, out of the car, and set her up on a fence post well away from the highway, in case the Murder Car got rear-ended by a semi while he was investigating.
The occupants of the car had been lucky that it had not flipped over and suffered much worse damage. Instead it had remained on its wheels and burned off kinetic energy by boring a surprisingly long tunnel through the corn. Along the way it deposited a trail of Marlboro cartons, like Hansel and Gretel dropping bread crumbs. Apparently the trunk had been full of them and had popped open as the car had been wrenched this way and that in the ditch. As Clyde followed the trail of white-and-red cartons glowing brilliantly in the beam of his flashlight, he could hear low voices conversing. The car’s wild trajectory had scared him half out of his wits, and he was irked to find that the actual occupants of the car were now laughing. He could not make out what they were saying, and as he drew closer, he realized that they were speaking in an unfamiliar language.
“Hello!” he called.
The voices became quiet for a moment. “Hyello?” someone answered carefully.
Finally he could see the car. They had turned the headlights on, illuminating a solid wall of corn plants, shoved all four doors open, knocking down more corn in the process, and had gathered in the car’s wake, which was the only clear place they could stand. There were several of them. Clyde twisted the bezel of his flashlight to get a wide-angle beam and gave the scene a careful look before coming any closer. It was a big, new Buick LeSabre with a Hertz sticker.
He counted five men. All of them were smoking, which struck him as poor judgment in the present circumstances.
They all held their cigarettes between thumb and index finger, like darts. They stood there smoking and bleeding and looking ridiculously nonchalant. One of them stepped forward. He was tall and blond and had a very thin, hatchetlike face and gray-green eyes. At first glance he looked like a teenager, but as time went on, Clyde’s estimate of his age steadily climbed all the way up to about forty.
“Sheriff,” Clyde said.
“Zdraustvui,” the man answered. “This means ‘Greetings, friend!’ in Russian. I am Vitaly. God bless you for coming to save us, Mr. Sheriff.” He stepped forward and shook Clyde’s hand limply.
“Clyde Banks,” Clyde said. He realized that the odor he’d been smelling wasn’t gasohol from their fuel tank. It was booze on their breaths.
Another man came forward with a fresh Marlboro carton in each hand, holding them out as gifts. Clyde politely turned him down.
“How ’bout if we get you guys to the hospital?” Clyde said.
“Not important, my friend. We go to the airport.” Vitaly tapped his watch.
“There’s plenty of time. The flight to Chicago leaves at eight A.M.”
Vitaly seemed to find this funny and spoke to his cohorts in Russian. Clyde heard the word “Chicago” in there and realized that Vitaly was translating. The men all laughed.
“My friend, the flight to Kazakhstan leaves as soon as we get to the airport,” Vitaly said.
Clyde finally figured it out at that moment and felt stupid for not having figured it out before.
The Forks County Airport served as home base for an Iowa Air National Guard unit that specialized in heavy transport. Its twelve-thousand-foot runway happened to be perfect for the unbelievably large Soviet-built transport planes known as Antonovs, and there were a couple of companies in Nishnabotna that occasionally used them. One was Nishnabotna Forge, ninety percent of which had gone out of business in the seventies, but which still operated a small production line in one corner of their empty, echoing plant. They made a type of steel tubing much prized by oil drillers in distant, godforsaken parts of the globe, who sporadically felt a frantic demand for the product. So the Forge would occasionally call in the Antonov, load it with steel tube, and send it off to the Brooks Range or to Central Asia. The Antonov would come larruping across the skies of eastern Iowa, triggering tornado sirens and spraying the corn with a fine mist of oily soot, kick out its giant landing gear—multiple long rows of fat black tires—and slam down on that big runway to pick up its load.
Clyde had never met or even seen the crew before. It was rumored that they slept on the plane.
“Maybe someone ought to have a look at that before you take off,” Clyde said, nodding at the one with the crooked arm.
“We must get back to Perestroika,” Vitaly said. “You see, that is the name of our airplane, in honor of Gorbachev. Myi biznesmeny—we are businessmen. We are afraid—your hospital—too expensive.”