“Jerry.  Jerry, what’re you gonna do about this?”

He looked up, bleary-eyed, at his wife.  “What the hell am I supposed to do about it, Gillian?  It’s more money than I can raise right now.  You know that.”

Gillian Secord, in a dressing gown and bare feet, threw the ransom note down on the coffee table.  “We can get more, Jerry.  You know that.  I’ve got friends.  You’ve got friends.”

“We’ve both got friends,” said her husband, sitting there glumly in lounging pants and bare chest.  “But we can’t get it together within 24 hours.  You know that.”

“I will not leave my daughter to die!”

“She’s not going to die,” said Jerry, taking his wife in his arms.  “You know that, darling.  The cops won’t let her die.  God won’t let her die.”

“Jerry, don’t be stupid,” she said.  “And don’t expect me to, dammit.”

“Well, what do you want me to say?  That Tony Boyle is going to just let her go?  Is that what you want me to say?”

She grabbed his shoulders and shook them.  “I want to see my daughter come through that door, Jerry.  I want to see her and have her here in my arms.  That’s the only thing I want, Jerry.  That’s the only thing I want.”

“All right, dammit!  If there’s anything I can do...I don’t know what else I can.  We’ve been cooperating with the cops.  I’ve tried to raise the money.  But you know how little we have now.”

She did.  Jerry’s dot-com venture hadn’t gone well, and it had been a long time since she’d modeled bikinis in her native Britain.  Gillian had sunk a lot of her savings in the company, and had lost it, as Jerry had most of his savings.  So did a lot of investors, although the investigation showed that the money had at least been honestly lost.  That put him ahead of a lot of other dot-commers.

The problem was that Jerry didn’t have control over who invested in his company.  One of those investors was Tony Boyle, a low-level front man for the Mob.  Now that he’d lost them money as well, Boyle wanted cash to get out of the country, fast.  Cash that Jerry Secord just didn’t have.

Yesterday afternoon, the school had called.  Jerry’s and Gillian’s daughter, Charlene, hadn’t come back from lunch.  A few kids had reported seeing two men hustle her into a brown car of uncertain make, and nobody got the license number.  Hearing this, the two of them entered hell, and got hold of the police just a few minutes before they had gotten a call themselves.  He recognized the voice as that of Tony Boyle.

“It’s me,” he said.  “But you won’t know where to find me.  Here’s what I want.  Here’s where to send it.  If I see cops, or smell them, you’ll never see the kid this side of the grave.  If you don’t come through in 48 hours, I take her, and leave you a souvenir.  Like an ear.”

They couldn’t get more than thirty grand together in the time given, and padding the package out with newspaper would ensure Charlene’s death once it was found out.  The only thing they could do was go with the thirty grand.  The police tried, he’d give them that.  But they weren’t able to find Boyle in the time given, or even trace the calls to anything but pay phones at convenience stores.

A briefcase was stuffed with the contents of their emptied bank account.  It would be taken to the designated site.  Whether or not the cops could trail it when in motion, or Boyle would accept the payment $20,000 short, remained to be seen.

As did Charlene.

Jerry snapped his thoughts back to the present.  Less than five hours remained till the payoff had to be made.  He already felt as though the only way he’d ever see his eleven-year-old daughter again was in the family album.

The kid had inherited his brown hair and most of her mother’s looks.  He didn’t doubt but that she could make it as a model or actress, if she only lived.  If she only lived.

And then the little white phone on the kitchen counter top rang again.  He was after it like a shot, banging the on button as hard as he could with his thumb.  “What?  What!”

“Jerry?  It’s me.  You know, Steve?”

“Oh, God.  Dad.  I’m sorry.  I just...”

“I want to talk to you about something, and you have to be over here for me to do it.”

“Are you crazy?  My daughter’s been kidnaped!”

“That’s part of what I want to talk to you about.  It can’t be over the phone.”

“Dad.”

“You have to come alone.”

“DAD.”

“Well, son?”

“I’ll be there.”

 -R-

Steve Secord’s home was in a decent section of town, but it was a twenty-minute drive.  He’d been an engineer and retired early, on the strength of patents and investments.  Jerry thought that was a smarter way of making money than he’d known, but he found it out too late.

Ringing the bell was an effort.  He wanted to just push through the door.  But Dad was near enough to open it within ten seconds.  “Hello, son,” he said, and put an arm around Jerry’s shoulder, drawing him inside.

Jerry Secord’s mouth was open.  He wanted to vent all the frustration and fear he’d been harboring for hours upon his father, but he just couldn’t.  The older man was too good to him.  Steve’s hair was receding and gray at the temples, and it looked as though he hadn’t shaved that day.  He wore a blue checked shirt and dark blue trousers, plus some corduroy house shoes.

He still had the same medium but powerful build that was the heritage of the Secord family.

“Dad,” said Jerry, trying to keep his voice from cracking as he walked into the den with his father, “I can’t stay.  You know that.  Charlene’s been kidnapped, and...”

“I know, son, I know,” said Jerry, raising a hand to stop his son.  “What I have to show you may not help, but it can’t hurt.  And it’s crazy.   Take it from me, son, it’s crazy.”

“How crazy?  What are you talking about?”

The older man said, “Follow me,” and took him out to the garage.  There he pulled a cord to a ceiling panel that let down a series of folding steps which he ascended to the attic.  Jerry went after him.

The two of them were in the attic of Stephen Secord’s home, a roomy enough place where he stored that of his life which was inactive and which wouldn’t fit in the storeroom off the garage or in the house itself.  There were relics of the family’s generations before him, too.  Jerry used to like to come up here when he was a kid and poke into everything that wasn’t locked down.  Now, it just seemed hot and dusty.  His father was talking.

“You never knew your great-grandfather, Jerry,” said Steve.  “But I did, while he was still alive.  I knew your great-grandmother, too.  Their names were Cliff and Betty.  She kept her stage name of Betty Page in her professional life.  You know what happened to them in the war, don’t you?”

“I’ve heard about it, yeah,” said Jerry, impatiently.  “Great-grandad signed up for the big one, ended up with Jimmy Doolittle’s outfit, flying raids on Tokyo.  Got a bunch of medals, turned into a test pilot, and opened up an aircraft company with a guy named Peavy.  Sold it to the Hughes boys later and retired.  Am I right so far?”

“So far, right,” Steve Secord confirmed.  “Betty was a USO entertainer.  I showed you some of the pictures they took of her, and I’d be surprised if you didn’t remember her.”

“Oh, I remember her, all right.”

“After that she broke into acting, more dancing and looking good than anything else, for RKO and some others,” Steve went on.  “Gave it all up to raise the family with Cliff.  They had my father, David.  He married Iris McCall, a model like your great-grandma, hell, like your wife, and they had me, and I got married and had you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Jerry.  “What’s the point, Dad?  What the hell is the point?”

Steve held up a single key from a ring he had taken from his pocket.  “This is the point,” he said.  He applied the key to the lock of an Army storage box that young Jerry Secord had never been able to open, and it popped open.  There were a few articles of clothing on top, dating from the Forties, Jerry guessed.  Steve threw these on the floor.  Then he stepped back and gestured to the box.

“There,” he said.

Jerry Secord bent over the box to have a look.

What was resting inside looked like something out of an old black-and-white movie serial.  Literally.

A brown leather jacket, the kind that had a brass-buttoned flap on the front.  A pair of light brown jodhpurs, the belt still in the loops.  Black leather boots that looked worn, but not worn out.  But those weren’t the items that drew his attention first.

There was a gold, full-face helmet, with a fin on top, glassed-in eyelets, and a grille of sorts where the mouth would go, sitting on the top of the jacket.  On the pants was something that looked like an engine, with a large opening in back and leather straps with which to buckle it on.

“What’s that supposed to be?”

Steve Secord said, “The Rocketeer.”

Jerry looked at his father curiously.  “What in blazes is the Rocketeer?”

“Your great-grandfather was the Rocketeer.”

He wasn’t quite sure why, but Jerry Secord suddenly found he had to sit down.

“I didn’t find out until I was even older than you,” said Steve.  “Cliff Secord told me himself, not long before he died.  He wanted me to know about our heritage.  He was a hero, son.  He got this engine here when the Nazis stole it and lost it at the aerodrome where he used to work.  When he fueled it up, it made him able to fly.”

“Now, wait a minute—“

“He used it to save his girlfriend Betty.  Your great-grandmother.  She got kidnapped, too.  He had to fight Krauts and gangsters to get to her, but he did it.  He couldn’t have done it without the rocket.  But he kept his identity secret.  That’s why he became the Rocketeer.”

Jerry was speechless.  Vaguely, he remembered having heard of the Rocketeer in his American history courses, when the professor did a run-through of some of the more colorful figures of the Roosevelt era.  But his great-grandfather?  Was his dad for real?

The uniform was there.  He reached out and touched it.  Touched the engine and the helmet, too.  They were real.

“I’ve checked the engine, made sure it’s all right, even fueled it,” said Steve.  “I’m too old for this sort of stuff.  And it’s springing it on you without much notice.  If you wanted to do something, you’d have to do it cold, by guess and by God.”

“Dad.  Tell me straight out.  What the heck do you want me to do?”

Steve Secord took the helmet from the box, regarded it for a second, and looked at Jerry.  “Think this’d fit you?”

 -R-

There weren’t more than a couple of photos, but that turned out to be enough.

When the story came out, John Q. Public learned of a strange flying figure who had trailed the pickup men from high above when they came to get the briefcase full of $30,000.  The flying man had broken into the safe house where Tony Boyle and his men were staying, fought them, beaten them, and rescued the little girl they were holding, flying off with her into the sky.  The cops saw that he had Charlene Secord in tow, and didn’t shoot at him.  They did send some cars to track him, though.

The flying man landed on the lawn of the place Charlene called home.  Mrs. Secord burst out of the house, running towards the two of them.  When Charlene asked the man who he was, he had time enough to say, “The Rocketeer”, before jetting off into the sky.

Later, Jerry Secord had come home with a strangely-shaped bundle under his arm, took Charlene with a big hug from his free arm, and reunited with his wife.  After Charlene told her tale again, and after much affection was showered on her, she said, “Daddy, do you think we’ll ever see the flying man again?  The Rocket Ear?”

“I think it’s been a long time since he’s been in these parts, Char,” allowed Jerry.  “But you never know.”

Gillian, eyeing the bundle Jerry had left beside the couch, said, “And we hope we never have to know.  Don’t we, Jerry?”

He raised his eyebrows and tried to look noncommittal.

“You never know, Gillian,” he said.  “You just really never know.”

***********

The Rocketeer is copyright Dave Stevens.  No money is being made from this story, no infringement is intended.  But I was kind of intrigued about what happened to the characters after the comics and movie ended, and thought I’d try to answer the question my way.

In case anybody’s interested, Iris McCall is named after 50's cheesecake model and Sheena actress Irish McCalla.  Gillian is named for Gillian Duxbury, a British bathing suit model of the Christie Brinkley / Cheryl Tiegs stripe who was mostly active in the 70's, I think.  Wanted to keep the Betty Page tradition alive, I guess.  Hope you enjoyed it.

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