Skyhook

SIXTEEN WEDNESDAY, DAY 3 IN FLIGHT LATE AFTERNOON

General Mac MacAdams waved off the offer of a stiff drink and refocused his attention on dialing the secure satellite call he was placing to the Pentagon.

“Would you like a Coke or something then, sir?” the flight steward asked.

Mac shook his head. “No, thanks. Wait… on second thought, do you have a diet version?”

The sharply dressed young sergeant smiled and flashed him a thumbs-up before turning back to the galley momentarily. The diet Coke appeared within seconds, and the line in D.C. was still ringing.

Mac sighed and looked around the interior of the Air Force Gulfstream 5, one of the newest executive transports assigned to the 89th Presidential Airlift Squadron at Andrews near Washington. It was the closest he’d ever come, he figured, to experiencing the type of plush transportation corporate leaders were so used to. Not that a Gulfstream 5 wasn’t a top-of-the-line corporate-level aircraft, but mere two-star generals had an uphill climb finding major corporate positions after retirement. Board positions in public companies, maybe, but the real plums required four stars on the shoulders of freshly retired general officers, and he just wasn’t sufficiently political to wait around for, or engineer, the extra promotion.

A female voice answered on the other end and Mac pressed the phone closer to his ear and identified himself.

“Yes, sir,” a secretary was saying. “The general’s expecting your call.”

There was a short wait before the familiar tones of his immediate commander, a four-star general, came on the line.

“What’s the story, Mac?”

“We’re fine, Lou,” he said. “I’m not letting Uniwave know that, of course, since there’s still a test flight they’ve got to make, but I’m ready to sign off on Boomerang.”

“All the problems solved?”

Mac chuckled into the phone. “Not by a long shot, but it’ll clean up nicely. We had a weird problem two nights ago that could have been a disaster, but they found the glitch and Davis and his people have finally explained it to my satisfaction. An internal communications thing.”

“We’ve got to be on schedule with this, Mac. The White House is pressing us hard to get it approved and deployed on time, which is a little strange, given the pure military nature of the program.”

“No accounting for the political world, Lou.”

“Amen.”

“I’m in flight right now and hustling my tail back there for that very reason, to get this thing stamped and sealed at the final briefing in the morning. I assume the list of attendees will be the same as we discussed?”

“Bad assumption.”

“Really?”

General Lou Cassidy sighed on the other end. “I just found this out ten minutes ago, Mac, but the Secretary of Defense has postponed the acceptance briefing for two days. It’ll be Friday now.”

“But… that’s right up against the deadline.”

“Can’t be helped. The secretary is requiring everyone to be there, beginning with himself, the joint chiefs, our mild-mannered Air Force secretary, and the other key uniformed players, and they can’t all make it in the morning. In fact, the secretary is in London.”

Mac sat in thought for a few seconds. “Okay, if we’ve got two days, let me keep this plane and crew and take them back home. I can use the time better back in Anchorage.”

“Suit yourself. Just be here on time. I can’t unveil and approve this without my project commander.”

Mac replaced the receiver and got to his feet as the copilot came out of the cockpit. “Ah, just the man I was coming to see.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Turn us around, please, Lieutenant. Back to Elmendorf. You fellows will lay over for forty-eight hours, and then we’ll try it again. The meeting’s been postponed.”

The copilot’s face fell slightly, but he nodded without protest and returned to the cockpit as Mac sat down next to his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Jon Anderson, repeating the news. “I know these boys were expecting to be home tonight, but it can’t be helped.”

“Just as well, sir,” Anderson replied, watching the boss raise an eyebrow. “We’ve got something going on I need to brief you about.”

“What’s up?”

“Sir, do you recall yesterday I mentioned that we had learned of the loss of a civilian aircraft, an old private amphibian, that went down in the general vicinity of where our test flight was Monday night?”

“Yes. And I asked you if we could have had anything to do with it, and you said no. You’re not telling me there’s a change in that assessment?”

“No, sir. But there’s more you need to hear.”

“Go on.”

Anderson outlined the basics of the Albatross’s loss and what the NTSB had discovered so far. “They’re pretty sure the airline pilot who owned it just got sloppy, tried some scud-hopping, got too low, and caught a wingtip.”

“What’s your point, Jon?”

He sighed. “I’m not sure there is one, sir, other than to keep you completely in the loop. But things are unfolding a bit in Anchorage. The man’s daughter flew in yesterday, and so far she’s visited the FAA and the Coast Guard, apparently looking for radar tapes that might show the track of her father’s aircraft.”

Mac sat forward. “Radar tapes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s she trying to prove?”

“That her father wasn’t negligent, I suppose. She thinks one of his propellers may have hit a ship in the fog, causing the crash. That’s why she went to the Coast Guard. They reported that over to us.”

“Did they help her? Did they… give her any tapes?”

He shook his head.

“How about the FAA air traffic control people?”

Again the lieutenant colonel shook his head, this time with a mild smile. “She hasn’t asked for the Coast Guard tapes directly yet, but we expect she will.”

“What’s her name?”

“April Rosen. She’s an American, living in Vancouver, Canada. Twenty-six years old. A young corporate staff vice-president for one of the U.S. cruise ship lines that’s based there.”

Mac nodded. “And did her dad hit a ship?”

“Probably. But the FAA thinks he was just being reckless.”

“But… what’s worrying you, and now me, is that any of those radar tapes could reveal our test aircraft’s presence in the same area and at a very low altitude. That could spark questions we don’t want, especially not at this late date.”

Jon Anderson was nodding. “Yes, sir. My concern exactly. Our security people have been watching her, and from all indications this young lady is sharp and very persistent, and I believe she poses a threat to the program.”

“That’s a premature conclusion, Jon. I mean, she can think whatever she wants and ask as many questions as she wants. What would worry me is her getting hold of any real evidence leading to some cage rattling and maybe some media action, and before we know it, they’re stumbling onto our sideshow and getting a few foreign intelligence services interested. Can we somehow help this young woman secretly without tipping our hand? You know, silently make sure she gets what she needs in terms of radar tapes without revealing our presence?”

Anderson sighed and chewed his lip. “I don’t know, sir. We don’t know what’s on those tapes. But you need to know that the FAA’s apparently become a wild card in this.” He outlined the hospital-room confrontation between Walter Harrison and Captain Arlie Rosen.

“How do we know about this, Jon?” Mac asked, cocking his head slightly and draining the remainder of the diet Coke. “I assume we don’t have surveillance cameras in every hospital room in Anchorage.”

“That would be an interesting thought, sir. Scary, but interesting.”

“I’m watching you, Anderson,” Mac said, pointing two fingers at him with one eye closed in mock seriousness.

Jon Anderson laughed and shook his head. “We found out by pure chance. The representative of the National Transportation Safety Board is a friend of one of our program security men. They play racquetball together, and I’m told the NTSB guy was very upset about the interview and very talkative.”

“Loose lips.”

“Sorry?”

Mac laughed. “Oh. An old World War Two expression. And before you ask and insult me, the answer is no, I’m far too young to have been in World War Two.”

“I have a career, sir. I wasn’t about to make any snide comments… that your hearing aid might pickup.”

“I heard that! The actual phrase was ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ and it’s still valid. That’s why it’s so damned hard to run a black project in the middle of a civilian community. I’m amazed we’ve done as well as we have in the past three years, with only one significant security breach.”

The cabin steward appeared silently with another diet Coke and Mac took it as he shook his head, his eyes falling on a striking twilight painting of the Washington Monument mounted on the aft bulkhead of the cabin.

“I suppose I don’t have to say, Jon, that we need to watch both this Harrison character and Ms. Rosen very carefully.”

“No, sir, you don’t, and our security people will.”

“I worry about security being handled by our”—he mouthed the words as if they were sour—“office of special investigations. I don’t want any cowboy lieutenant in civilian clothes getting excited and riding off to do something illegal. But… have them harvest each and every one of the original radar tapes from FAA, Coast Guard, Navy, and whoever else might have electronic evidence of our test flight that evening. Set them up in the briefing room back at Elmendorf for tomorrow.”

“General, what do we do if the Gulfstream does show up on one of those radar tapes?”

Mac smiled and shook his head. “Why, there was never any Gulfstream in the area to begin with, was there?”

“Ah, no, sir.”

“Right. So how could it possibly show up on whatever tape we send back?”

Anderson nodded. “Understood.”

“Actually,” Mac added, “we’ll see the raw data radar return on all of them, I suspect, but without a data block generated by a transponder, which we kept off, it’s just another unidentified aircraft flitting around the state. I don’t want to see anything that might lead Ms. Rosen to think we were involved with her father’s plane.” He paused and peered closely at Anderson, who had lowered his eyes. “There isn’t any possibility of that, is there?”

“No, sir, of course not. But I had already figured you’d want those tapes. I’m ready to move on it.” Lieutenant Colonel Anderson began to get up but Mac caught his sleeve, studying his eyes.

“Jon, just a second. You’re sure that we could not have had anything to do with the loss of that Albatross?”

The colonel finished standing and shook his head vigorously. “No, sir. Absolutely not! The coordinates I have for where that ditching, or crash, occurred are a long way away from the surface track of our test Gulfstream.”

“But,” the general said as he raised a finger, “you were concerned enough to check.”

There was a momentary twitch in Anderson’s expression, and Mac noticed. “Jon, look at me. As I told you when you became my aide, I’ve got to know everything you know, without exception. You withhold anything from me, no matter how noble the intent, and I’ll personally ride your shredded ass out of the Air Force. Understood?”

“Honestly, sir, I’m telling you everything I know, and I would never—”

Mac cut him off with a single look of warning and a raised index finger. “Just get the tapes and set up a secure viewing room for zero eight hundred in the morning.”