A Rocket for Dimitrios
Novella 18,876 words Recommended by 5 award/anthology sources
"Alvin was slumped in the passenger seat of the open-top Willys terraplane. Two thousand feet below us, the Black Sea lived up to its name: a sheet of ebony darker than the sky above, its featureless surface relieved only by the scattered flecks of night trawlers and freighters. The bad stabilizer on the Willys kept pulling its nose down."
Quasar links out; the story lives on Asimov's, where the author gets the click.