Alpha Kat

One

The earth was upside down.

As it should be.

When Kimball glanced to his right, he saw the foothills of the Rockies descending to their rugged and majestic peaks. Far away, there were still a few snowcapped pinnacles backed by low cumulus clouds. On his left were cultivated green fields, creamy squares of wheat, the twin ribbons of Interstate 25 clogged with Saturday drivers, and Sam Eddy McEntire.

Half a mile ahead, and above him, was the landing strip, starkly dark gray next to weed-cluttered fields and white and tan industrial buildings. The July sun glinted off the Plexiglas and the aluminum skins of thirty parked aircraft. A flight of six F-16 Falcons were lined up on the taxiway, waiting for their chance at the runway.

A gravel road passed over him, a hundred feet away. He continued to lose altitude. The earth pulled him closer. His engine screamed pleasantly, and the wind streaming past the open cockpit whistled at the edges of his helmet.

The two Pitt Special biplanes passed over the boundary markers and then the end of the runway with thirty feet of clearance between the asphalt and their stubby wings. Kimball concentrated on staying aligned with the western side of the strip. A touch of right rudder moved him to the left.

When he saw the crowd of tanned faces, sunglasses, and vibrant T-shirts in his peripheral vision, Kimball clicked the mike button on the stick once.

McEntire clicked back twice.

Kimball snap-rolled left at the same time McEntire rolled to the right. The wingtips cleared the runway surface by less than five feet. As soon as he came level, he neutralized the controls and pulled the throttle full back, and the engine roar died away.

The main gear touched down with a chirp of rubber on asphalt. McEntire was right beside him, a couple feet back.

The speed bled off quickly, and Kimball allowed the tail to settle. It bounced twice.

At the end of the runway, McEntire pulled off onto the taxi strip, and Kimball turned in behind him. In consort with McEntire, he goosed the throttle a tad, and the two biplanes raced back toward the aircraft park.

Two of the F-16s shot past him, their turbofans wailing, lifted off, and retracted gear immediately. Two more Falcons were right behind them. The biplanes bobbled in the turbulence of the passing fighters.

McEntire’s voice sounded in his helmet, “Miss it, Kim?”

Kimball had once flown with the Air Force Thunder-birds. He keyed the mike, “Only difference, Sam, they go faster.”

“You’re so very damned good at answering a question.”

“I don’t miss it.”

Maybe just a little. It was easily suppressed, however, when he tempered the longing with memories of mind-numbing regulations, social and career expectations, and brassy-voiced, narrow-minded commanders. Not all of them, he reminded himself. There were a few with wider minds.

The apron in front of the main hangar and the airport operator’s office was roped off with orange nylon line and yellow flags to contain the spectators, and Kimball estimated the crowd size at around seven or eight thousand people. That would be enough to ensure their minimum cut of the gate receipts.

Tex Brabham waved Sam Eddy, then Kimball, into a line of parked airplanes and gave them a cut-throat signal. Brabham was a scaled-down man, barely touching five feet four inches, weather-wrinkled and tanned the color of old brown boots. His boots were, in fact, old and brown and run-over at the heels, but polished to a high luster. He wore what Kimball called a seven-gallon hat to protect his completely bald head. He was the best all-around aircraft mechanic that Kimball had ever met.

Kimball switched off the ignition and killed the power to the radios. He disconnected the helmet’s communication cord, removed the helmet, and placed it on the floor of the cockpit. Unbuckling his parachute and seat harness, he stood up, then stepped up on the seat and stretched. Bryce Kimball’s six feet two inch height, broad chest, and wide shoulders made many of the cockpits he inhabited overly cramped.

“Nice routine, boss,” Brabham said.

“That’s because everything worked better than it was supposed to, Tex. The power plant sang happy tunes.” He swung a leg outboard, found the step plate with his toe, and descended to the asphalt. It was hot, but the sun felt good on his face. He had come to prefer the warmer climes.

The announcer on the PA system turned it over to an Air Force major who introduced the crowd to the Thunderbird pilots in a soothing, public relations voice.

… the third aircraft is piloted by Captain Bryce Kimball of Tulsa, Oklahoma. His wingman, from Boston, Massachusetts…

Kimball walked around the wing, patting it with affection. Both biplanes were finished in white with orange scallops topside and white with yellow on the underside. The color differentiation helped the spectators on the ground follow the attitude of the airplanes during acrobatic maneuvers.

Sam Eddy McEntire joined them at the nose of Kimball’s plane. Kimball could hear the engine popping as it cooled, until a noisy Falcon shot down the length of the runway doing a four-point roll.

“Nice technique,” McEntire said, his eyes following the General Dynamics F-16. Perhaps with some longing.

“You talking about us or the Air Force?”

“Us.”

“I agree with you.”

“You guys ready for lunch?” McEntire asked. He was usually fond of food, no matter the origin or preparation.

“You two go on in,” Brabham said. “I’m going to tie down the birds and prep ‘em for morning, then drive on up to Cheyenne. I’ll meet you there tomorrow.”

“Ah, ah!” McEntire said. “Chickie-poo?”

“Knew a couple gals when I was stationed at Warren. Maybe they’re still around and still single.”

Tex Brabham was a dedicated bachelor close to sixty years old, but he kept looking for companionship. As far as Kimball had ever determined, he had a pretty fair success ratio.

“Okay, Tex. Be good to her.”

“Or them,” Brabham said, turning to walk over to his van parked off the asphalt.

The Chevy mini-van was cream-colored, with a pale blue stripe that expanded as it flowed back from the front end, then broke up into the stylized logo, “KAT.” The van belonged to the company, but by reason of possession, it was Brabham’s, and it was crammed with his own specialized tools.

Kimball and McEntire left the aircraft park, ducked under the orange nylon rope, and headed out to the field where the rented car was parked. The field was weedy and dry, and dust soon coated Kimball’s Wellington boots. He unzipped and shrugged out of his flying jacket.

Sam Eddy drove. He drove or piloted whenever he was allowed. He hated getting his hands greasy under a car or in an engine compartment, but he loved being in control of anything mechanical. McEntire, like Kimball, had been a major in the Air Force when they both departed the service ten years before their retirement checks had been scheduled for printing. He was a couple inches shorter than Kimball, fair-skinned and dark-haired, and he wore a Boston Blackie moustache that was always carefully trimmed. Sam Eddy said he had forgotten how many times he had been married, but Kimball was pretty sure the count was now at three. All three of them were exes.

He pulled out of the industrial park that was springing up around the Fort Collins-Loveland Airport, followed the frontage road north until he could cross over the interstate and join its northbound lanes. Traffic was heavy, which McEntire always took as a personal combat challenge, but he didn’t push the rental Olds hard today.

“You suppose we’re going to be hopping around to air shows the rest of our lives, Kim?”

The dream had been much grander when they had bailed out of the Air Force, and Kimball had begun to worry about the dream in earnest in the last six months.

He said, “Hell, no, Sam. Just to tide us over.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

McEntire took the Harmony Road exit west and kept the speed at fifty-five as they passed the sprawling Hewlett-Packard plants. Kimball thought his friend was being very reserved today. Maybe thinking about his future, which he had never thought about before. Maybe he had lined up another job? That added to Kimball’s worry. He didn’t want to lose his chief pilot, primary propulsion engineer, company vice president, large stockholder, and most importantly, friend.

Five miles later, McEntire took Lemay Avenue over to Horsetooth Road, then continued west until he reached the Fort Collins Marriott and pulled into the lot. The foothills to the west were a brownish gray. The notched gap called Horsetooth Rock was clearly visible. There was a lot of nice greenage — cottonwoods and aspens and pines — to the south.

Kimball kept waiting for Sam Eddy to break the bad news, or some kind of news, to him, and Kimball certainly knew that he, himself, wasn’t going to open the subject.

Twenty minutes later in the hotel’s restaurant, with a club sandwich and a Michelob in front of him, McEntire’s mood had not improved. That was contrary to his relationship with food.

Kimball used his fork to pick desultorily at a plate he had heaped high at the salad bar and wondered if he would get through half of it.

“Bryce Kimball?”

He looked up. The man standing next to the table was in his fifties, smooth-cheeked and a bit jowly, with graying hair and soft hazel eyes. To many of the younger people in the dining room, he’d have been an ideal daddy. Instinctively, Kimball felt the eyes and the easy smile on his face were deceptive. He wasn’t dressed for the casual West. His blue suit was summer weight, dimly striped in silver, and expensive. He wore a brilliantly white shirt with a widespread collar and a dark red tie.

“Have we met?”

“No. But we were both in Bangkok at the same time once. The name’s Ben Wilcox.”

That introduction made Kimball immediately suspicious, but he didn’t want to antagonize a potential client. “Have a seat, Mr. Wilcox.”

Wilcox pulled out a chair and sat down. “You’re a hard man to run down, Mr. Kimball. Your office in Phoenix led me in this direction, and I drove up from Denver this morning, but I missed you at the airport.”

“You didn’t see us fly?” McEntire asked with disbelief overriding his tone.

“Sorry, I missed it.”

“Damn, you sure did,” Sam Eddy said. “Would have made your whole day.”

Was this something that couldn’t be taken care of on the phone? Creditor?

Kimball lowered his fork to the plate. “Who do you represent, Mr. Wilcox?”

The man reached inside his jacket and withdrew a leather folder. He flipped it open, and Kimball saw the shield with the sunburst, the eagle head in profile. It was a familiar logo to Kimball.

Central Intelligence Agency.

“I don’t want any part of this,” Kimball said. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Wilcox. I’m truly sorry you couldn’t stay around and talk.”

“Now, hold on a minute, Kim,” Sam Eddy McEntire said. “Let’s not jump to any expensive conclusions.”

Two

Major General Brock Dixon drummed his fingers on his desk top, thinking. It was an old, large, and solid walnut desk, and drumming his fingers was an ingrained habit; the varnish coat near the telephone was eroding after three years of Dixon’s thinking.

Dixon was a big man, barrel-chested. His hair was blondish gray and clipped to near-baldness. There were Vietnam and Panama service ribbons among the six rows of ribbons above the breast pocket on his blue uniform coat. He wore the jacket at all times, even when at his desk thinking and drumming his fingers.

In his thirty-two years in the Air Force, whatever the geography might have been, Dixon’s assignments had consisted of a country paying him to mull over difficult topics, to plan countermeasures, and to execute operations. He was not very active, and the sedentary life-style had gone to his waist, which is why he kept his coat on.

Finally, he gave up drumming and used his stubby forefinger to punch the private line on his telephone console and then hit one of the memory buttons.

“Weapons Procurement, this is Linda.”

“Linda, Brock Dixon here. Let me talk to General Ailesworth.”

Ailesworth came on the line a couple of minutes later. “What’s up, Brock?”

“Wilcox.”

“What about him?”

“He flew out to Denver early this morning, then rented a car and drove to Fort Collins.”

Ailesworth laughed. “Goddamn, Brock. Doesn’t Air Force Intelligence have anything better to do these days than spy on the CIA?”

“Jack, you know damned well that all the funny proposals showing up in the National Security Council meetings are coming off Wilcox’s desk. The man’s a menace.”

“Hey, Brock. The Agency’s in the same boat Defense is. With all of the bad guys in the world turning in their black hats, everyone’s looking for new ways to justify their existence.”

“You don’t believe that, Jack.”

“About the bad guys? Of course not. There’s always going to be a few around. Check the Middle East, South America, and Asia. But the public thinks it’s getting better, and they love it. Face it, we’re cutting back, and so is the Agency. Wilcox wants to redirect some of his resources into new areas, just so he can hang onto the resources. He and his buddies over in operations have got a hell of a budget they don’t want to lose. You blame him?”

“No, I guess not,” Dixon said.

“Then why are you following him around? To see if he has a scheme you can steal?”

“You’re going to be damned glad I had him watched.”

“Why?”

“He went to Colorado to meet Bryce Kimball.”

“Shit! He didn’t.”

“He did. Kimball and McEntire are flying acrobatics in some air show up there. My man called from the hotel where they’re meeting.”

“Ah, damn. I’m going to have to make some calls.”

“Yeah, I thought you might.”

“And Brock, you find out what they’re talking about.”

“I’ll do that,” Dixon said.

They went up to Kimball’s room to talk, and McEntire brought along a six-pack of Michelob and a big bunch of small bags of potato chips and Fritos. His appetite was returning.

Wilcox draped his suitcoat over the end of the bed and sat down next to it. McEntire twisted the caps off three bottles and passed them around, then sat in a chair at the small table next to Kimball. He tore off the top of a bag of chips and began to crunch them.

“I want to tell you about Kimball Aero Technology,” Wilcox said.

“I know all about it,” Kimball told him.

“You don’t know my version of the story.”

Kimball shrugged. He was going to have to sit through it because Sam Eddy was intrigued.

Wilcox put his bottle on the nightstand and leaned back on straightened arms. He appeared completely at ease, and Kimball wasn’t happy with that appearance either. The man had a salesman’s face, and Kimball wasn’t in the mood to be sold, either up or down the river.

“Back in the beginning,” the CIA man said, “Bryce Kimball got himself a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Air Force Academy down in the Springs, but that was just dressing. He was in it to fly, and fly he did. All kinds of airplanes. Top man at the Red Flag aggressor exercises. T-bird team. Instructor. Aviation advisor in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand.”

“This is already getting boring,” Kimball told him. “I’ve read the book.”

“It gets better. For both of you, because McEntire has most of the same experiences.”

Sam Eddy grinned and swigged from his bottle.

“Major Kimball had a bright, bright, soaring future in the Air Force. If he could just toe the line, he’d probably make general officer. But he fucked it up.”

“How?” McEntire asked.

Wilcox paused to sip from his bottle, then leaned forward and reached across to the table for a bag of potato chips. “I missed lunch.”

“Let’s miss dinner next time. How about sometime next year?” Kimball asked.

Wilcox grinned. “This Kimball guy? He kept getting upset about Air Force procedures and inflexibility. He thought he could do it better than the Air Force could do it.”

“I’ve shown that I can.” Despite a desire to stay out of a debate, Kimball couldn’t resist defending himself.

“To yourself, perhaps. You haven’t proved a damned thing to anyone who counts, that is, the people who control the bucks. Can I finish my story?”

“Shoot,” McEntire said. “I like a good story.”

“So along the way, Kimball gets a file jacket full of letters of reprimand. Mild insubordination, ignoring the regulations, going around the chain of command. Bitching to some key congressional people, which is a real down-to-earth, glaring no-no. There’s enough in the file to be irritating to promotion boards, and he’s pretty sure he won’t make lieutenant colonel, much less brigadier. He’s young, and he’s still got a chance to mend his ways, but do you think he’d do that?”

“Hell, no!” McEntire responded. “I can tell this guy’s a real loser.”

“In his spare time, he’s been doodling little blueprints that don’t interest his bosses or anyone else who hangs around the Pentagon. So Kimball gets fed up with the whole thing, resigns his commission and starts an airplane design and fabrication outfit.”

“Good for him!” Sam Eddy shouted.

“I’ll admit, Kimball, when I was researching this, you surprised the hell out of me. You raised forty-five million dollars in financing just like that.” Wilcox snapped his fingers.

Kimball didn’t say anything.

“But I looked around some, and I saw that your old man was in the oil business at one time, and I’ll bet he had lots of friends with money just reeking of high-grade crude. I figure you took a few trips to Tulsa, Houston, and Denver, then stuffed your bank account. Good deal.”

“My business is none of yours,” Kimball said, regretting his need to spout the obvious.

“You did some other things. Fourteen highly trained and expensive pilots, not including Sam Eddy here, followed you out of the Air Force. You took along twenty-some damned good technical people, too. I’ll bet Air Force Personnel was pissed at you for a long time. I’ll also bet they didn’t see the other angle, like I did. It takes some leadership qualities to talk forty people into giving up an assured pension.”

“You getting to the end of this, Wilcox?”

“Easy up, Kim,” McEntire said. “As a vice president of the company, I want to listen to the pitch.”

“I’m getting to the best part now,” Wilcox said. “You actually built eight airplanes…”

“Seventeen.”

“I’m only talking about the ones that you can actually get in the air,” Wilcox grinned. “Personally, though I’m just a layman, you understand, they look pretty good to me. They met the specifications right down the line, and there’s a very nice per-unit cost. Super-nice. But let’s talk about cost. All the high-tech materials were expensive as hell. Your legal expenses must have been a bitch, getting the licenses to buy classified electronics from the biggies in the defense industry, but they were happy to sell to you. They knew you were going under anyway.”

“Now, goddamn it…”

Wilcox held up a hand, palm out. “We’re getting there. Besides the production and design overhead, you’ve had a hell of a salary load for the past three years. In fact, I happen to know that you might as well close your bank accounts. Any cash you have, you could carry in your hip pocket.”

Kimball didn’t think it was that bad. The cash flow would last for another few months.

“That’s why you leased all of the aerobatic aircraft and put your pilots on the barnstorming trail. You’re hunting for cash any way you can.”

“Maybe we just like to fly,” McEntire said, reaching for a fresh bottle of beer.

“Yeah, sure,” Wilcox said, signalling for another bottle for himself.

“You ready, Kim?” McEntire asked.

“Not yet.”

“In the last year, you’ve demonstrated your airplanes to the Air Force, Navy, and Marines,” Wilcox continued. “And nobody was interested.”

“You know why?” Kimball asked.

“Sure. First, the tactical organization is strange to them. Just because they’ve done it their way for so long, they think they like airplanes that can go independent. Second, they don’t like the idea of publicity that suggests their planning has been all wrong. Third, if the public found out that the Air Force could buy one of your Alpha Kats for half the cost…”

“One-sixth,” Kimball corrected.

“…of an F-15, John Q. Public would start climbing the Pentagon walls. The good old boys who’ve been leading the defense effort sure as hell don’t want anyone to think they’ve been leading it in the wrong direction.”

“You’re aware of what the US and AF is now doing, I take it?” Kimball asked.

“Sure. They’re reorganizing. Hanging onto all of their old assets, but managing it in a different way. Big damned deal.”

“That’s what I thought,” McEntire said.

“What’s this got to do with us?” Kimball asked, not really wanting to know. His curiosity level didn’t run as high as McEntire’s.

“How would the Central Intelligence Agency like to buy some airplanes?” Sam Eddy asked. “We could work out a favorable discount, maybe. If there’s a real national security angle.”

“I’ve got one more point to make, then I’ll buy the airplanes.”

That made Kimball sit up. He finished his beer and slapped the bottle down on the table.

“You’ve got more lines in your face than the last picture I saw of you, Kimball. High stress, you think?”

The pilot’s squint lines at the corners of Kimball’s blue eyes had deepened in the past couple of years, and the flecks of gray in his umber hair were spreading fast. Back in the old Air Force days, he had been accustomed to smiling a lot, too, but the smiles were less frequent now. The go-to-hell attitude had evaporated.

“That’s your point? Come on. Let’s get to it.”

“Okay. Let’s see. You can’t sell your fighter aircraft and its required AWACS to the Pentagon, so naturally you take aim at some of the friendly third world and developing nation markets. And what happened there?”

“You’ve done the research,” Kimball said.

“State, Commerce, and Transportation all denied permission to either export the aircraft or to take them out of the country for demonstrations. Apparently, they don’t have as much faith in your little airplanes as you do.”

“Bullshit,” Kimball said. “They were pressured by our competition.”

“Aw, you don’t mean there’s a conspiracy to run you out of business?”

“You’re damned right there is. Like you said, the military services don’t want to be proven wrong, and they’re in bed with the aerospace conglomerates who don’t want to lose their markets, even the downsized markets that are going to be left after the end of the Cold War. If Kimball Aero makes one good sale, we’ll undermine what Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas and everybody else has been doing. They’ll be forced to redesign and retool in order to compete. That’s damned expensive for outfits the size of Lockheed. Hell, they’re already trying to contract their size.”

“I don’t think there’s a conspiracy,” Wilcox said, smiling a little smile.

“And you’re the Deputy Director of Intelligence?” Sam Eddy asked. “That confirms an opinion I’ve always held about the Agency.”

“I don’t think there’s a conspiracy that I want to try to prove. Or could prove. Try it that way.”

“That’s the point?” McEntire asked. “Okay, good point. Now buy the airplanes.”

“Actually, I don’t want to buy your planes. I want to lease them.”

“For what?” Kimball asked.

“For how much?” McEntire asked.

“I like the way Vice President McEntire thinks,” Wilcox said, shifting his position on the edge of the bed. “He’s a bottom-line man.”

“So am I. But my bottom line doesn’t necessarily revolve around dollars.”

“I’m well aware that your principles are high, Kimball, and I don’t doubt your patriotism for one tiny minute. But what if it’s more than dollars?”

“If it’s a covert operation, it’s probably not worth talking about,” Kimball said.

“Let’s talk about what I’ll do for you. I’ll give you three million dollars. The three million buys you a few more months more of cash flow and it underwrites a foreign demonstration tour.”

Sam Eddy stuffed potato chips into his mouth.

“We can’t”

“And additionally, I’ll arrange all of the permits you need to take the aircraft out of the country.”

McEntire grinned. “That’s worth more than the three mil, Kim.”

Kimball waited.

Wilcox stood up and began to pace. He said, “Now let’s talk about what you’ll do for me.”

Three

Down in the wide corridor off the lobby of the Marriott, Benjamin Wilcox picked up a phone, dialed the number at Langley, then punched in his credit card number.

Ted Simonson answered his own private line. Simonson was the Deputy Director of Operations, and Wilcox had known him for over twenty-five years, most of them as a friend as well as a colleague.

“This is Ben.”

“Where in the hell are you? You didn’t even tell your secretary you were leaving.”

“It was a spur of the moment thing, Ted.” Wilcox turned and leaned against the wall. The guy in the black suit and blue tie was still sitting in the lobby. He was a patient type, probably suited to intelligence work.

“You know that idea we were kicking around a couple of weeks ago?”

“Which idea? You’ve got too many plots going, Ben.”

“Well, I’m not going to mention it on the phone. I’ve got a friend sitting close by.”

“Good friend?” Simonson asked.

“No.”

“What day did you mention this?”

“It was a Thursday evening. We went to the Sans Souci. You had the lobster.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember.”

“I just talked to Kimball.”

“No lie? And what did Kimball say?”

“He hasn’t yet, but he’ll go for it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. I looked deep into his background and his business, and he’s out of choices. The main thing I’m calling about, I want you to tag the dollars in your contingency fund. Don’t go spending them elsewhere.” Wilcox looked back toward the lobby at the man in the black suit, and the name finally came to him.

“How many dollars?”

“Three big ones.”

“You’re going to have to come up with some of your own.”

“Yeah, I can take part of it, I guess,” Wilcox agreed. “Even though it’s rightly in your directorate, rather than mine. For my contribution, I want to control it.”

“Missing the good old days, are you, Ben?”

“Not so you’d notice. I’ve just got a vested interest in this project. It’s also damned important.”

“Have you forgotten, Ben, that we don’t have approval for this? Hell, I haven’t even mentioned it to the DCI.”

“You told me you would.”

“Yes, but it slipped my mind.”

“The White House is fully aware of the problem,” Wilcox said. “We’ve been highlighting it in the intelligence estimates.”

“I read them.”

“We’re running out of time, Ted. It used to be months. Now it’s weeks.”

“I’m well aware of it, Ben.”

“So you don’t think it’s worth the gray matter I printed it on?”

“No, that’s not it. I can buy it. My question: does Kimball buy it?”

“He will because it’s got a national interest ring to it. The Secretary of Defense himself said that drug interdiction was a priority defense consideration,” Wilcox said. “Kimball doesn’t say it out loud, but he’s a patriot at heart.”

“You didn’t tell him the whole story, then?”

“If I told him the whole story, it wouldn’t sound so demanding of his patriotic fervor, would it?”

“Are you going to? Tell him?”

“Maybe. We’ll just have to see how it goes.”

“Well, hell, as long as he’s in, I don’t see how we can pass on this project.”

“Damn right,” Wilcox said. “Where else are we going to find a private air force?”

“Is it a capable air force?” Simonson asked.

“I’ll be damned if I know about that, Ted. It looks good on paper, but I don’t know how it performs. We’re talking both hardware, which appears up to snuff, and people. My office is checking out his people, now. I tried to flatter him without being too obvious about it. Negative persuasion, you might call it.”

“If the airplane doesn’t perform as promoted?”

“I have a feeling the aircraft will be all right. But the pilots have been too long away from the discipline.”

“So if they don’t fit together?”

“Then we have us a sacrificial lamb, Ted. But we may still accomplish the goal. We do still have the same goal?” After a long pause, Simonson said, “Yeah, you’re right.” “Get hopping, then. We’re going to have to ram it through back channels and try to keep it out of the NSC. We can have an okay before anyone even thinks about the ramifications.”

“And the Senate and House Oversight Committees? I can already count the votes.”

“Use a Presidential Finding. Tell the committees after it’s all over,” Wilcox suggested.

“The backlash on the Agency could be devastating.”

“I don’t think so. I think we might pass some of our secret medals around.”

“You’re getting awfully damned optimistic in your old age, Ben.”

“Are we going to worry about the way the liberals vote, or are we going to take one little step for the country? For the world, for that matter.”

“I’ll go up and see the Director.”

“Hey, Ted, you want to call Melinda for me?” Melinda Mears was Wilcox’s secretary.

“You’re saving on long-distance calls, right?”

“Tell her I’ll be in Cheyenne, somewhere.”

Wilcox hung up the phone and headed for the sunlit glass doors of the entrance. As he passed the man in the black suit, he stopped and bent over the back of the couch to tap him on the shoulder.

“Enjoying your vacation, Major Nash?”

Kimball stood at the window, swirling the beer in the bottom of his bottle. There was a lake on the other side of Horsetooth Road, and he saw a small flight of Canadian geese approach from the south, passing over residential homes, to settle on its surface. A lone eagle presided over the lake, circling high to the east.

He felt pretty much like the eagle. All alone, searching for a decision that wouldn’t endanger the geese in his pond.

“There’s a risk factor,” he said.

“Since the day you and I went down to Lackland and started playing airplane jocks, there’s always been a risk factor,” Sam Eddy said. “There’s always been high stakes, too, but never higher than they are now.”

“We’d be committing a lot of good people we haven’t talked to, yet.”

“Name me some names.”

“What names?”

“Of anyone who won’t go where you go.”

Kimball couldn’t think of anyone. The trouble was that his life, or his outlook on it, had changed considerably in the last three years. In the Air Force, he had worried about his wingman, and to a slightly lesser extent, the men in his squadron. As President of Kimball Aero Tech, he worried about a great deal more. The people were the most important to him. He had enticed many of them away from the security of the service, and they depended upon him making the right decisions. Except for a few people they had hired locally to work in fabrication and assembly, they were almost family. A hell of a lot of brothers and sisters replacing his biological family.

Then, beyond his company family were the investors who had trusted him. They deserved the best he had to give, and they didn’t deserve the condemnation that might come out of this soiree.

As Wilcox had figured out, his father had provided him with the list of investment contacts to make. Even today, he felt guilty about not calling or visiting his parents when he had had the chance.

Wilcox had probably figured out some other things also. “The company people all have a stake, too,” McEntire reminded him. “Not only in their jobs, but in their investments of time, money, expertise, and trust.”

All of the KAT employees were shareholders in the company to some degree. Kimball owned the biggest block (thirty percent) because the designs were his and had been fleshed out while he was still in the service. But he had passed out stock to those who had joined him.

He turned around, went to the bed, and stretched out on it. “I don’t like government contracts.”

“You mean, like the ones we’ve been trying to sell?”

“No, damn it. Like working for Washington. Jesus Christ! The CIA! No one works for the CIA, Sam Eddy.”

“Betcha we never see anything in writing,” McEntire said as he walked to the nightstand and picked up the phone. “Room Service? This is Mr. Kimball in 312. I could sure use a six-pack of Michelob and maybe some nachos. You have nachos? Great! Send up two orders.”

“I don’t want anything,” Kimball said as Sam Eddy replaced the receiver.

“I didn’t order you anything. Look, Kim, this is just what we need to get us out of this great big hole we dug for ourselves.”

“It’s a big carrot, yes. Wilcox knew it would be.”

“You bothered by the mission?”

Kimball thought about the briefing Wilcox had given them. After listening to the man for awhile, it had not been as farfetched as it had sounded in the beginning. “No, no I’m not. The objective is all right. Hell, the objective is fine.”

It was better than Sam Eddy would ever know.

“All we have to do is blow this Wop Bop…”

“Lon Pot.”

“Lon Pot guy out of existence.”

“And work for the CIA,” Kimball reminded him.

“And take their bucks and licenses and visas and transport permits.”

“And expect that Lon Pot won’t fight back? You heard what Wilcox said about the guy’s defensive posture. He won’t go easy.”

“Fuck him. Can the Alpha Kat do it or not? What the hell do we think we’re selling?”

“Throw me the damned phone.”

Grinning, McEntire dialed the number, then handed the phone to Kimball.

Susan McEntire answered promptly in Phoenix. She was Sam Eddy’s third ex-wife.

“Hi, Susie.”

“Kim? Anything wrong?”

“Should there be?”

“Is Sam Eddy all right?”

“Everybody’s fine. Quit worrying. We’ve got some schedule changes to make.”

He heard paper rustling. “Okay, tell me.”

“Sam Eddy and I will make the show in Cheyenne tomorrow, but we’ll return to Phoenix just as soon as it’s over. I want you to call around and cancel the rest of our tour.”

“What!”

“And then start tracking everyone else down and call them back to Phoenix. I want pilots at nine o’clock in the morning, the day after tomorrow. We’ll need to call around and cancel their schedules, also.”

“Damn it, Kim! You’re talking about cutting off a lot of income.”

“We’re finalizing another contract.”

“It better be out of this world.” Susan McEntire handled all of the accounting for Kimball Aero.

“Three million.”

“Hurry back,” she said.

There was a knock on the door, and McEntire got up to open it and take the tray from the waiter. Kimball watched him sign the tab and figured he had added a big tip, then signed Kimball’s name.

He sat up and said, “Let me have my nachos while they’re hot.”

“You didn’t order any.”

“I changed my mind.”

They were accompanied with a dirty look from McEntire.

Jimmy Gander figured he was the first one back. He had only gone down to Tucson for a one-day show, and he landed his Beechcraft Staggerwing at Sky Harbor International Airport at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon.

The big radial engine purred as he turned off the runway used by the noncommercial air traffic onto the taxiway leading to the general aviation section. Some of the Air National Guard guys were getting their flying hours in, he could tell, since there were gaps in the rows of parked ANG aircraft.

“Beech one nine, you’re purtier than any seven-sixty-seven,” Phoenix Tower told him.

The big passenger-cabined biplane was a full restoration, finished in yellow, with every detail crafted to match the original. Even the more modern Nav/Com radios were mounted in a temporary rack on the floor so they could be removed for air shows.

Gander grabbed the mike resting in his lap. “Thank you, Phoenix, I feel purty. One nine out.”

James Alan Gander was an Arizona boy, born and raised in Phoenix. He loved the hot, dry environment, and he even liked Barry Goldwater. KAT’s decision to locate in the capital city was one of the reasons he had given up his captaincy after seven years in the Air Force. He was twenty-nine years old and lanky: body, face, and limp brown hair. He had held at 166 pounds since his junior year of high school, when he was on the chubby side, but his height had climbed from five foot two inches to six foot two inches by the time he took his master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

He rolled the Staggerwing off the taxiway toward the big hangar leased by KAT. It was painted cream, and “Kimball Aero Tech” was lettered in blue above the big doors. Because of the size of the lettering, there hadn’t been room for the “nology” part of the company name.

Gander turned into the aisle behind the second row of aircraft in front of the hangar, then turned again to aim the nose toward the runway and park the Beech next to one of the three Kappa Kats. Only two of the Kappa Kats were operational; the third was just a shell without engines, instrumentation, or avionics. The eight Alpha Kats parked in the first row were also shells awaiting power and electronic components, but they were parked out in front for advertising reasons. The six operational Alphas were tied down in the third row.

Those airplanes were the second, and higher, reason Gander had left the service. Gander thought that, like Ford had once claimed, Bryce Kimball had a better idea.

They looked like a private air force parked there, identified only by the small “KAT” logo on the rudders, the FX-41 or CX-41 model number below the canopies, and the Federal Aviation Administration-assigned N-numbers on the fuselages. All of them were finished in a matte midnight blue which made them difficult to see at night or on clear days, but then, they weren’t designed to be seen.

Gander shut down the Beechcraft, popped open the door, and got out with his flight bag. He dropped the bag on the tarmac and spent some time chocking the wheels and tying the airplane down. He liked the Staggerwing almost as well as he liked the Alpha Kat and wished that he, or the company, owned it, rather than leased it.

Flying the Beech or the Alpha Kat was a pilot’s dream. He was totally in control of his aircraft. It was back to the basics, and there was nothing wrong with the basics. Gander had flown F-15 Eagles for the Air Force, which was kind of like supervising an automated roller coaster. There were lots of times, of course, when he had been allowed to do his own thing, but mostly the Eagle’s computers ran the show: do this, do that, turn here, lock on target, let go and let me fly it, you jerk.

Looking between the wings of the Beechcraft at the row of Alpha Kats, Gander was very aware of sixty years of evolution. The Alpha Kat was small. At twenty-six feet, the wingspan was five feet less than an F-16 Falcon. It was a semi-delta wing, each wing deprived of being a full right-angled triangle by the forward sweep of the wing from the tail to the wingtip. The wings were thin and, from this distance, looked like razor blades. The four weapons pylons could handle a wide variety of missiles, and the tandem centerline hardpoints were designed to accept external fuel storage, electronics pods, ordnance, or a mix of the three.

The fuel bladders were mounted inside the fuselage with the single Kimball/McEntire turbofan engine. The KM-121 developed 38,000 pounds of thrust, 14,000 pounds more than either of the engines in McDonnell Douglas’s F-15. The KM-121 had no afterburner to promote an infrared signature and high fuel consumption, though the lack did cut into its acceleration. The engine casing was primarily a ceramic casting to reduce the RCS (radar cross section). Even the turbine blades were manufactured from carbon-impregnated plastic for the same reason. Elongated and variable engine intakes were mounted to either side of the fuselage, slightly forward of the wing. Intake air was channeled internally in a slight inward curve toward the centerline-mounted engine. That prevented radar signals from “seeing” the spinning turbine blades through the intakes. To drastically reduce the infrared exhaust signature, the tail pipe was longer than normal.

The wide, squat fuselage was mostly fuel storage, and the Alpha Kat had a ferry range, in a straight line, of 3,700 miles, one hundred more than an Eagle and nearly 1,400 more than a Falcon at the Alpha Kat’s economy cruise speed of Mach 1.2. It wasn’t as fast as the Eagle or Falcon, but Gander didn’t think the top end of Mach 1.9 was a crawl.

The twin rudders, mounted close to the wide fuselage, were canted inward at the top, designed to also camouflage any heat from the engine that might create an infrared signature. The single small canopy, barely a bulge over the down-sloping nose, was tinted a dark bronze to eliminate sun glint and infrared return.

Every leading or trailing edge had a slight curve to it, again to foil searching radars.

It looked tiny, lean, mean, agile, and quite deadly. And it was.

And parked beside him, the Alpha Kat’s bigger sister, the Kappa Kat command craft had a similar appearance. The wingspan was fifteen feet greater, and the fuselage was longer and wider in order to accommodate twin turbofan engines and four ejection seats. The Kappa Kat seated a pilot and a navigator/copilot side by side and two air controllers at matching consoles behind them.

At Lockheed’s famous “Skunk Works” design center in Burbank, now phased out, such aircraft would have been cloaked in secrecy. At Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona, Kim Kimball parked them in the open for the world, and the competition to see. He wanted to advertise, and besides, the hangar would only accommodate two aircraft simultaneously because it was also crammed with alignment jigs, casting machines, calibration equipment, machine tools, and stored airframe and turbofan parts.

Gander picked up his flight bag, with “Gandy Dancer” stenciled on the side of it, and started walking toward the hangar.

An optimistic Kimball had taken lease options on the three hangars to the east for expansion.

Jimmy Gander knew Kimball was less optimistic now. In fact, the main reason Gander had given up the security of the Air Force was Bryce Kimball, but he had changed dramatically in the last six or seven months.

He dragged. There was less spring in his step. The smiles were forced. His normally spontaneous good humor had vanished. Kimball had never been married, and he carried something of a subdued reputation as a ladies’ man. Had carried. Gander didn’t think his boss had dated anyone in four months. Mollie Gander, his wife, had mentioned it, too.

It was going bad.

Gander figured tomorrow morning’s meeting had been scheduled to tell them that loans had been called, that Federal Aviation Administration airworthiness certificates had been withdrawn, that test flights were to be further curtailed to cut the fuel bills, that…

…that something, anything, everything was wrong.

He could feel it in his bones. The company was peering over the edge.

The outlook for himself wasn’t great, either. The Air Force and the other services were cutting back, dumping pilots on the job market. And subsequently, the defense contractors were also reducing their payrolls.

As a pilot and an electrical engineer, Gander might have to look for work in a restaurant.

The security guard, who was stationed in a small corner office looking out on the tarmac and a few million dollars’ worth of aircraft, let him into the building. They exchanged pleasantries, and Gander went on down the hall toward the front door and the parking lot. The east side of the hangar had been subdivided into a hallway with small offices, restrooms, a dressing room, and a front office sectioned against the outer wall.

A complete aerospace defense industry in sixty thousand square feet. It felt empty and forlorn.

Sometimes, Jimmy Gander wished he was back in an Eagle, looking for something to shoot down.

Four

Kimball and McEntire had landed their Pitts Specials at Sky Harbor late on Sunday night. Judging by the wide variety of aircraft parked on the apron in front of the Kimball Aero hangar (Staggerwing, P-51 Mustang, P-38 Lightning, Stearmans), Kimball thought most of the pilots had already made it back. The ground crews who had accompanied them in vans, both owned and rented, would be dragging in throughout the night and Monday morning.

Kimball drove his restored ‘68 Camaro convertible north on 32nd Street to his small condo off Camelback Road. He was almost eagerly prepared for deep sleep, but after he had showered, found himself wide awake. He pulled on a pair of faded jeans, opened a bottle of Dos Equis, and went out onto his balcony. The night was warm, but the stars were crisp, even with the glow of downtown Phoenix interfering with vision. The lamps along the sidewalk between the rows of condominiums spilled soft light on the yellowing grass and the gravelled sections containing several varieties of cacti. There were two mammoth saguaros, the familiar sentinel of Arizona. They were becoming an endangered species, with people sneaking out into the desert to steal them for home improvement projects.

Kimball wasn’t sure how he felt. Much as he hated the CIA, and didn’t much care for Ben Wilcox, he was looking forward to the tour they were funding. Action of any kind was better than beating himself to death trying to reach Defense Department weapons procurement people or Transportation and State Department bureaucrats. He had been fighting that battle for over a year and had almost reached the last resort, which was going to court. Even then, the odds of forcing the government to pay attention to him were barely fifty-fifty. On top of which, he couldn’t afford the justice system, for both financial and publicity reasons. It wouldn’t help to publicize in the media the fact that the United States government didn’t think his airplanes should fly overseas.

He decided he felt alive again.

Or maybe just restless.

After an hour of jumbled thoughts, Kimball finished his beer and went back inside. It was after midnight, but he toyed with the idea of calling Cathy before deciding to skip it. He had not talked to her in so long, she would probably hang up on him. And she had to go to work in the morning, anyway.

He went to bed, woke at 4:30 A.M., and showered again, then shaved. He thought his eyes looked brighter, bluer, in the mirror. His face, with its flat planes and high cheekbones and deep tan, appeared healthier. The skeletal substructure was there for a purpose, rather than just to keep his skin from sinking farther. He needed to get a haircut.

At five o’clock in the morning, he called Wilcox and found him already in his office.

“Well?”

“You on your office phone?” the DDI asked.

“No, home.”

“That should be all right for now. We’ll meet personally in the future. The Director and the National Security Advisor met with the man at Camp David yesterday afternoon. He signed off, and it’s a go.”

Kimball breathed a sigh of relief or anxiety. He wasn’t certain which. “The money?”

“The money will be transferred to your Phoenix account this afternoon. It will be followed in the overnight mail by a consultation contract for you to sign.”

“I’m not signing shit,” Kimball said.

“Hey, Kimball, this is cover. It just says that a Kimball Tech team will advise some company or another out of Atlanta, I think, on aviation matters. I don’t know what company they picked, but it isn’t the Agency. That clears you on your income. Be sure and set aside enough for your taxes.”

“Are you my financial advisor now?”

“No.”

“Okay. Did you find my aircraft for me?”

“Yup. There are two C-141Bs currently on reserve status, and they will be leased to you for three months. One’s at Homestead Air Base in Florida, and the other is at Charleston Air Force Base. This is shaping up like a real travelling circus,” Wilcox told him.

“What about the paperwork?”

“First, I’m going to have to have you fill out all the applications.”

“No damned way. The applications are already completed and sitting in offices all over your fair city. I’m not doing it again.”

“That’s all right. That’s good, in fact. I’ll start making the rounds this morning.”

“And you think you can swing it?” Kimball asked.

Wilcox laughed. “If I can’t, I have this short letter signed by the big boss. What about on your end?”

“I’ve already made contact with the appropriate defense ministers and officers in the countries we want. Hell, I did that over a year ago. There was a lot of interest at the time, and I suspect that I can revive it. But it’s still going to take about a week to put together.”

“Timeline?”

“We can be wheels-up in ten days. Make it July fifteenth.”

“Good by me. I’ll have a package together for you before the twelfth. Let’s meet in Denver.”

“You’re running this?” Kimball asked. Wilcox belonged to the Intelligence side of the CIA.

“Well, it’d normally fall in the operations directorate, yeah, but I’m doing some temporary duty.”

“Is that a good idea?” Kimball was leery of people operating out of their specialties. He wouldn’t put a transport pilot in an FB-111 fighter bomber.

“I was in the field for seventeen years, Kimball.”

“Just checking.”

“You have a fax machine?” Wilcox asked.

“In the office.”

“All right. You’ll get a picture on it sometime this morning.”

“Picture of what?”

“Picture of a who. Guy named Nash, a major. He’s an AFI snoop who was following me for awhile, but now he’s on your tail.”

“What the hell? What’s going on?”

“Hey, Kimball, you think there’s a conspiracy mounted against you? We’ve got our own going, too. It’s all part of the game, so don’t sweat it.”

The meeting started at nine o’clock.

Kimball kicked everyone out of the front office except for the sixteen pilots and closed the doors. Susan McEntire put up a fuss about the exclusion of women, and he had to promise a briefing for her later.

The room wasn’t really big enough for all of them. It was cramped already with Susie’s and the receptionist/secretary Andrea Deacon’s desks, two computer credenzas, an eight-foot couch, and several potted plants. Five oversized color prints of the Alpha Kat and the Kappa Kat in flight were mounted on the walnut-panelled walls.

There were a few fights for possession of chairs. Most of the pilots leaned against the walls, and Sam Eddy McEntire sat in the middle of Andrea’s desk blotter, his legs crossed Indian-fashion.

Kimball stood by the glass front door. “No problems with any of the air shows?”

Sixteen negative responses.

“Good.”

McEntire grinned at him, but it was a sarcastic grin. Sam Eddy had never cared for Air Force briefings, and this was shaping up like one.

“You guys each own five thousand shares of stock in the company,” Kimball said. That was about two percent each. McEntire owned twelve percent because of his rather dedicated and brilliant involvement with the engine designs. “It’s worth maybe a thousand dollars, if you could find anyone who wanted to buy it.”

The morose faces told him they had been expecting something like this.

“It’s not particularly undervalued because we’re showing about thirty-nine million dollars in assets and forty-five million in debt. If we could find someone willing to buy the assets.”

By all that was true and fair, they should have been many more millions in debt. Nothing was cheap in this world, and a shoestring operation in aerospace technology just didn’t survive on less than a hundred million dollars. They had gotten this far only because everyone contributed heavily in expertise and reduced salaries.

Jimmy Gander, sitting on the floor against the far wall, next to Mel Vrdlicka, looked halfway sick.

Kimball grinned at them. “I think that, within the next couple of months, each of your five thousand-share holdings are going to be worth at least fifty thousand dollars, maybe more than that.”

Clothing rustled as they sat up. Backs straightened. Shoulders rose from slumps. Howard Cadwell stuck his two clenched fists in the air and shook them. Warren Mabry’s teeth splashed white against his ebony skin.

McEntire said, “At least.”

“We’re getting our clearances for a foreign demonstration tour.”

“Hot damn!.. ‘bout fuckin’ time… ah, mother… where to, boss?”

“Tentatively, I’m scheduling demonstrations in Chad, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, and Thailand. Those will all have to be confirmed, and there may be a couple more.”

The grins told him they were ready. They had been ready since the first Alpha Kat fighter rolled out of the hangar, eighteen months before.

Kimball slipped the eight-by-twelve photograph from the file folder Wilcox had given him in Cheyenne. He held it up, the face toward them, and said, “There’s one little hitch.”

“Who the hell’s that ugly son of a bitch?” Jay Halek demanded.

The picture was fuzzy, blown up from a telephoto shot, but the man’s features were clear enough. He had thick black hair piled high on his head, heavy brows over narrowed dark eyes, a broad and squashed nose, and a grim gash for a mouth. The visible teeth were jagged. His skin was heavily pocked with smallpox scars.

“This is the hitch. He’s one of Southeast Asia’s leading entrepreneurs and billionaires.”

“You got to be kidding, Cheetah,” Vrdlicka said. “Cheetah” was Kimball’s old Air Force call sign.

“I’m not. His name is Lon Pot, and he’s Cambodian, or Kampuchean as they call it now, though he lives in the Shan State of Burma.”

“I call him ‘Pothead,’” McEntire said.

“That’s the Golden Triangle,” Mabry said. “Heroin billionaire.”

“You got it, Warren.”

“Hang on a minute,” Gander said. “Where’s this going? What hitch?”

“Let me tell you about Lon Pot and his farming venture first, Jimmy. This guy is a major export center for heroin. His collection teams roam the mountains and jungles of Burma, Cambodia, and northern Thailand where the local farmers grow a lot of pretty red and purple flowers. They don’t have to do much cultivation; the flowers grow wild, and they have seed pods full of alkaloid. The sides of the pods are full of thick, sappy, stuff that the farmers dig out. The alkaloid is raw morphine, and the sap is opium gum. Some Liu or Hsong tribe member will get himself a few hundred baht per kilo every April, that’s maybe eighty bucks, just enough to tide him over until the next harvest.

“Lon Pot’s collectors haul packages of the gum to one of his five refining and distribution centers. After the gum is refined into heroin powder, a kilo can bring close to a thousand dollars. That’s a hell of a profit margin.”

“Better than the aerospace industry at the moment,” McEntire said.

“Thanks for the observation, Sam Eddy. Anyway, out there in the jungle, Pot doesn’t have a hell of a lot to spend his money on, so he buys himself an army. He’s got to have it, anyway, to maintain his power.”

“How good an army?” Halek asked.

“I don’t know, and it doesn’t affect us.”

“What does affect us?” Gander asked.

“His air force,” McEntire said.

“Shit,” Gander said. “You getting to this little hitch, now?”

“Yes. Sam Eddy and I struck a deal with… a government agency we’ll call Mr. Washington. In exchange for our clearances and some operating cash, we take out Lon Pot as a sideline to our demonstration tour.”

“You might call it an operational demonstration,” Sam Eddy told them.

There were a few moments of silence, though not really stunned silence, Kimball thought.

Finally, Warren Mabry asked, “How big an air force?”

“We’ll have better intelligence later, but right now it looks like he’s got a half-dozen MiGs, four HAL HF-24 Maruts which were built in India, several helicopters, and a bunch of elderly transport aircraft. Anything from DC-3s to C-130s. They’re based at three small and two large fields in northern Burma, Thailand, and Kampuchea. Pot thinks they’re pretty well-hidden, but we’re getting satellite photos of them.”

“Piloted by?” Mabry probed.

“My information is that he’s trying to build up a cadre of his own pilots, Kampuchean or Burmese probably, but that he still relies heavily on mercenaries.”

“That could mean Americans,” Mabry said.

“Yes. Or French, or Aussie, or Vietnamese, or Chinese. Who knows?”

“And who gives a shit?” McEntire said. “Whoever is flying for Pothead, as far as I’m concerned, he’s peddling horse on 42nd Street in New York or Sunset in L.A. or Van Buren in Phoenix. If I down him, I’m not going to grieve. Hell, I’m not even going to think about it.”

Not one of them had ever killed. They had been too young for Vietnam. Two of them had Persian Gulf experience before leaving the Air Force, but the sorties they had participated in had never run into hostile aircraft. Anything they ever shot down had been a remote-controlled target drone or computer-simulated in war games.

“No one here has to go along,” Kimball said.

“Oh, hell, boss,” Gander said. “I’m not worried about going along. I want a shot at these assholes. I want to show off our airplanes. It’s just going to take me a few minutes, or even a few hours, to absorb it.”

Halek rotated his shoulders, stretching. “Kim, are we supposed to assume this will all be covert? I mean, we’re not going to go in blasting in broad daylight?”

“It’s covert, Jay. We’ve got the planes for it.”

“US and AF has the 117s,” Tom Keeper said. “They could make a stealth strike, too.”

McEntire responded. “First, they don’t have any cover, any reason for being in the area, Jay. Second, the US hasn’t yet set a policy that allows the military to take direct action against drug targets.”

“Not without the host country’s cooperation,” Kimball added, “and they’re not getting that in Burma. With the tour, we’ve got a reason to be in Burma, and in the next ten days, we’ll have to plan our tactics.”

“What’s the fallout if it goes public?” Mabry asked.

“It would be similar to Hiroshima, I expect. The liberals will blow up, and the conservatives will dig in for a long siege.”

“Keep in mind that we could be the patsies in this whole thing,” McEntire said. “Kim and I don’t have an abiding faith in Mr. Washington. If we fuck it up, everybody we know, and don’t know, will disown us.”

“That’s the risk,” Kimball said. “Beyond the chance to get shot down or have to eject over some Burmese jungle. We might save the company, or we could blow the whole thing. In addition to the people, we’re also risking most of the prototypes.”

“I’m for saving the company,” McEntire said. “Just so you know my position.”

“We’ve got enough cash to give everyone a combat bonus,” Kimball said. “It’s not much. Ten thousand for pilots, three thousand for ground crewmen.”

“We rescue the company, that’s my bonus,” Mel Vrdlicka said. “I don’t mind being a capitalist.”

“Sam Eddy and I will take a walk in the sun and give you guys a chance to talk it over,” Kimball offered.

“To hell with that!” Gander said. “I’m voting.”

He stuck his arm straight up and was immediately copied by fifteen more arms.

“Damn, I love you guys,” Kimball told them. He didn’t often express an emotion, but when he did, he meant it. “Just don’t get too close to me,” Sam Eddy said.

“Okay, let’s kick it off. First, no one mentions a word to anyone. Not wives, not kids, not girlfriends. We’re simply touring the airplanes. Questions on that?

“Good. I’m going to have Soames set up a flying schedule. Everyone gets time in on the Alpha Kats and the Kappa Kats so we can back each other up. Everyone does time as an air controller. Later, I’ll make seat assignments, both for the demonstrations and the combat sorties.”

“Don’t lock in the seats, Kim,” Halek said. “Let us rotate, will you? I want my shot.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Jay. We’ve got a hell of a lot to accomplish by the fifteenth. Mel, you and Jimmy are leaving by commercial air for Homestead first thing in the morning. Sam Eddy and Howard, you’re headed to South Carolina. We’ve leased ourselves two C-141 Starlifters to haul our act around.”

“First class,” Gander said.

“I’ve got a minor point,” Howard Cadwell said. “What about ordnance?”

“We’ve got the dummy Phoenix and Sidewinder missiles we were going to use for demonstrations. We’ll practice with those until they’re gone. Sam Eddy will pick up more training missiles on his way back from Charleston. We can’t get Phoenix, but we’re supposed to have AIM-9 and the new AMRAAM. For air-to-ground, Mr. Washington’s trying to get us the Rockwell Hellfire.”

“We’ll get to use the laser designators finally,” Conrad Billingsly said.

“Let’s hope so, Connie. We also get some five-hundred pound iron bombs. That gives us a wide range of defensive and strike ordnance for the demonstrations. The arrangement is that we’ll get live missiles and ammo on the other side of the Atlantic.”

The mood was definitely up-tempo when the group broke up, everyone headed back to their particular duties. Kimball Aero Tech’s pilots were not only pilots. Bryce Kimball had selected them for expertise in engineering, ordnance, electronics, controls, and the like. Everyone had a job within the company beyond flying aircraft. Different people were qualified in different types of aircraft, and all of them carried instructor’s ratings.

Kimball had to repress a shudder when he realized he was not only risking his pilots, but also the core of the company’s engineering life.

“Okay,” Susan McEntire said, entering the office, “my turn. Lay it out for me.”

She would be eternally cute, Kimball thought, like Connie Stevens. Big, big green eyes in an open, clear face, and an uptilted nose. Lots of dark red hair framing her face. She was slim and pert and given to short white cotton skirts and blouses stamped with Southwestern prints. Better, she had a mind that could follow intricate engineering blueprints and a maze of financial transactions. She had only been there three weeks before he had named her the company’s comptroller.

“Why’d you give up on Sam Eddy?” he asked.

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Just because.”

“Want to go to lunch?”

“Nope. I’m not having anything to do with pilots in particular anymore. Just pilots in general.”

“I’ll tell you how you can find three million dollars.”

“Just a hamburger, then.”