Alpha Kat

Five

On Tuesday morning, A.J. Soames hit the ground running, feeling better about himself and the choices he had made than he had felt in some time. Kimball’s announcement on Monday had made the difference.

Soames was one of two pilots at Kimball Aero Tech who had retired from the Air Force before following Bryce Kimball out to Phoenix. He was forty-five and something of a father or uncle figure to many of the younger men. His last assignment on active duty as a lieutenant colonel had been as a deputy wing commander in the Tactical Air Command, at Langley Air Force Base. In fact, Kimball and McEntire had flown for him.

Soames’s love of flight had been tempered in his later years by enforced desk duty and slowed reflexes. He was not as idealistic as he had been in his earlier years, or as some of his younger colleagues still were. Experience had taught him many things, the chief one being that one doesn’t often or successfully buck the establishment.

Kimball had spoken to him frequently about his disenchantments and frustrations with the Air Force’s traditions and expectations, and when Kimball actually carried through with his threat to resign, Soames had taken a close look at himself. His hair was already graying at the temples, his green eyes had taken on a washed-out appearance and weren’t nearly as sharp as they had once been, his face was fuller and more mature, and his body was following suit. Having been passed over once for promotion to full colonel, the odds in a downsizing organization were increasingly likely that he would be passed over again. He put in his papers, and he and Miriam left verdant Virginia for beige Arizona.

Soames had less to worry about than most of KAT’s employees. He was drawing his military retirement check, and his only son had already completed college and entered the arcane world of computer systems analysis. Like others in the company, though, Soames wore several hats. He was a pilot, though he put in less air time than the others. Because of his background, Kimball had installed him as Vice President of Administration. In that position, he supervised all of KAT’s logistics — supplies and materiel flow, the physical plant, and personnel — and oversaw the front office, which included Andrea Deacon and Susan McEntire, who was the comptroller.

Under his third hat, Soames had come to learn that he was a damned good airborne air controller. His reflexes didn’t matter, someone else was at the controls of the Kappa Kat. But in the backseat at his radar console, his mind could grasp the entire theater of combat, read the radar screen efficiently, and make the necessary snap decisions. It helped, too, that his experience and command presence brought instant trust and respect from the pilots who relied on his decisions. They had given him the code name “Papa,” somewhat different from the “Bronco Rider” he had carried in his Air Force fighter days.

In the tactical simulations they had run hundreds of times, with one Kappa Kat controlling six Alpha Kats, Soames found he could steadily visualize the three-dimensional arena of combat, separate in his mind the dozens of radio calls coming in, and still create order out of chaos.

It didn’t surprise him that Conrad Billingsly, also an older veteran and retiree, and a former Strategic Air Command B-52 pilot, had also gravitated toward the air controller position.

All of the pilots did time in air control, but few had the discipline and calm which would be necessary in a time of moving, jumbled, erratic confusion.

Soames was righteously, and quietly, proud of the fact that he had found a niche for himself outside of his academic and military training.

He parked his Volvo in the lot outside the KAT hangar and unlocked the front door to let himself in. There were always early birds, and he heard their voices coming from the coffee room just behind the front office.

He walked back to find Tex Brabham and Alex Hamilton, a pilot and air frame engineer, sitting in two of the four chairs at the single small table. The coffee pot gurgled in the corner, and one of the two had brought in a foot-high heap of breakfast rolls.

Hamilton would be the guilty party. He was barely over thirty, but fighting an expanding waist. Bland-faced, with blond hair, he had a professorial appearance. With a mind as keen as he had, and with his penchant for getting along with people, he should probably have been teaching physics and stress engineering over at Arizona State in Tempe.

“Mornin’, A.J.” Very few people knew the A.J. stood for Albert Johann, and Soames intended to keep it that way.

“Hello, Alex. You made it back all right, Tex?”

“Damned sight earlier than I planned on. Had me a nice thing going in Cheyenne.”

Soames got himself a mug of coffee, and after delicate deliberation, picked up a chocolate donut. “Miriam will kill you for this, Alex.”

“Only if she finds out,” Hamilton assured him.

“Anybody going to tell me what’s going on?” Brabham asked. “Alex tells me his lips are locked.”

“Sealed, I said.”

“What-the-hell-ever.”

Soames was the personnel manager, and he knew that whatever else Kimball might have in mind about ground crew, Brabham would be his first choice. There was no sense in holding back with the old veteran, and after cautioning him about the confidentiality required, laid out the whole plan.

“No shit?”

“No shit, Tex. What do you think?”

“I think me and my boys got a hell of a lot of prepping to do in the next ten days. My birds got neglected while we were traipsing all over hell, playing barnstormer.”

“Keep in mind, Tex, that all of the Alphas have to be flying in the meantime, while we bring everyone up on their time.”

Brabham got up and refilled his mug. “I’m going to go over time logs now, and set up a schedule.”

He hadn’t reacted verbally, one way or the other, to the news, but the light in his eyes and the lively movement of his booted feet told the story.

Soames watched him leave, sipped from his mug, and said, “It’s a changing world, isn’t it, Alex?”

“Sure enough. I’m glad I got out when I did.”

“Me, too. I talked to my old wing commander a few days ago. I don’t think he likes the new organization much.”

“Where’s he at now?”

“Still at Langley, which is headquarters for the new Air Combat Command,” Soames said.

Langley previously headquartered the Tactical Air Command, while Offut AFB in Omaha headquartered the SAC. In the reorganization of the Air Force, much of it still under way, TAC evaporated, becoming part of the old Strategic Air Command under the new unified command. The new titles and acronyms replaced organizations that had been around for over forty years, and most of the good old boys didn’t like it.

“I was at Scott in Illinois when I got out,” Hamilton said. “It’s now the base for the Air Mobility Command.”

“I heard Offut lost twenty-five percent of its personnel,” Soames said. “That has to have a hell of an impact on the local economy. Omaha will be reeling for years.”

The number of operational aircraft was being reduced also, with different reductions assigned to different types of aircraft, and as a result, the pilot corps was going through a planned attrition.

“Hurts a lot of people.”

“A reduction in force affects everyone, civilians included,” Soames said.

“That’s another reason I’m glad I got out on my own. With my luck, I’d have been fired.”

“I doubt that, Alex.”

“That was my luck before KAT, A.J. It’s changed now.”

“It’s changed for all of us,” Soames agreed.

“What I can’t believe is the way the Pentagon is covering its ass. You see the quotes. ‘Air power should be treated as a unified whole,’ the Air Force Chief of Staff said. ‘Desert Storm taught us what Air Force leaders have believed for years.’”

“And spent most of their time resisting,” Soames added. “Still, I can’t fault the Billy Mitchells and Curtis LeMays.” Lemay had shaped the Strategic Air Command. “They did the right thing for their time.”

“It’s a new time, A.J. Wait’ll we show them what the Alpha Kat can do. She’ll be something else they’ve believed in for years.”

Jimmy Gander and Mel Vrdlicka arrived at Miami International Airport at noon and went down to the baggage carousel to retrieve their flight gear. They ate hamburgers and French fries in a concourse lounge before hauling their duffle bags outside and flagging a cab.

The cabbie, probably Cuban, liked the size of the fare, and cheerfully catapulted his wheeled wreck out of the terminal area, heading for Coral Gables and then Homestead.

“Jesus, Jimmy, I didn’t know I’d become so acclimated to the desert. This humidity’s going to do me in.”

Vrdlicka was originally from Montana. Gander wouldn’t guess at the nationality of the name, but the man sported neat, clipped hair that was brick red and eyes green as unripened apples. He was fit, of medium stature, and had well-developed shoulders and arms. Gander thought he had taken to lifting weights. He had been a first lieutenant, overdue for captain, when he got out. Like himself, Vrdlicka had both jet ratings and multi-engine ratings. He was the communications specialist for KAT, and Gander had always thought that appropriate. Anyone lacking a necessary vowel in their name ought to be a communications specialist.

“You’re almost thirty, Mel. You don’t notice the climate until you’re thirty.”

“I’m aging fast, in that case.”

In the Operations Office at Homestead, they ran into the bureaucratic wall that Gander had expected.

The duty officer was a major named Blankenship. When Gander finally got him to the counter, he said, “I’m here to pick up a C-141.”

The major looked him over, almost leaning over the counter to take in the jeans and cowboy boots. He took a long, not appreciative, look at the Stetson hat. “You’re an Air Force pilot?”

“Not any longer, Major. You should have orders that were forwarded to you yesterday. A copy went to your flight line people, and the airplane should be ready to go.”

“We don’t allow civilians to fly our aircraft,” the major said.

Gander was struggling to be polite. “First time for everything, Major. Maybe the Air Force needs the rental income, huh?”

Blankenship took ten minutes to search through in-baskets before he found the orders, and despite their origination in the office of the Chief of Staff, had difficulty believing them. He called in a colonel who was the operations officer.

The colonel called in a general, who wound up calling the Pentagon.

The orders verified, another carnival ensued in which Gander’s and Vrdlicka’s licenses and flying logs had to be confirmed through the FAA and which, after forty-five minutes of phone calls, were.

“Insurance,” Blankenship said. “You don’t have insurance for that bird.”

Gander produced the quickly purchased policy. A damned expensive one, too.

“This doesn’t have a tail number,” the colonel said. “It just says a C-141B.”

A half-hour of phone calls and faxing around with the insurance carrier produced an insert for the policy which had the correct tail number. The major photocopied the policy.

With extremely obvious misgivings, Major Blankenship allowed them to file a flight plan and leave his office for the flight line.

Walking across the hot tarmac, Vrdlicka said, “Just like the old days, hey?”

“The good old days.”

Their C-141 Starlifter had a gaggle of ground crewmen surrounding it, and Gander located a master sergeant who spent twenty minutes with him, going over the logs and paperwork, then touring the monster for a visual inspection.

The wingspan was 159 feet, supporting four 21,000-pound thrust Pratt and Whitney turbofans. At 168 feet, the B-model’s extended fuselage seemed to go on forever. The cargo bay could accept loads up to seventy feet long and ten feet wide, and the second model of the airplane had been the primary transport for the Minuteman IGBM.

Gander climbed through the entry hatch just aft of the cockpit and took a look through the doorway back into the cargo bay and found it empty. The compartment behind the cockpit had a few bunks in it for extended flights that required relief crews, and Vrdlicka was sitting on one of the bunks, changing into his flight gear. His duffle bag was open on the deck at his feet, his personal oxygen mask and helmet on top. The helmet was silver blue, with “Downhill” handpainted in red script across the front of it. Vrdlicka was an avid skier.

“You want to drive, or should I?” Vrdlicka asked. “You go ahead. Bus-driving bores the hell out of me.” Gander didn’t bother donning his flight overalls. He did change out of his high-heeled cowboy boots and retrieved his helmet and mask from his duffle bag.

He climbed the ladder and settled himself into the copilot’s seat, pulled his helmet on, and plugged the communications cable into its receptacle. He hooked up the oxygen line, also. The transport was pressurized, but emergencies were always possible.

The checklist was on a clipboard hanging from the center pedestal, and he called it off as Vrdlicka scanned the instrument and switch settings. They were operating without a flight engineer, and Gander handled those duties also. Finally, communicating with the crew chief hooked in by cable to an exterior connector, Vrdlicka fired up the turbofans.

“How do they look, Jimmy?”

Gander checked the pertinent pressure and temperature gauges. “Four’s lagging a little, still cold. All of them are in the green, though.”

“Go ahead and call us in.”

Gander dialed in the Nav/Coms for ground control. “Homestead Ground, this is Starlifter six nine.”

“Six nine, Homestead.”

“Six nine, requesting permission to taxi.”

“Six nine, you may proceed to runway two seven left and hold. Go to Air Control now.”

“Thank you, Homestead Ground. Six nine changing to Air Control.”

Vrdlicka waved to the ground crew, then advanced the inboard throttles. The huge plane began to roll.

Gander watched the gauges on number four, but by the time they reached the runway and braked short of it, the exhaust temperatures and pressures, as well as the oil pressure, had risen to match the other three jet engines.

He called Air Control, and after a C-130 Hercules landed, they were given permission to take off.

“Can I have some flaps?” Vrdlicka asked.

“Whatever your little heart desires.” He lowered the flaps and checked the warning light panel for open hatches, clamshell doors, and the like. “Okay by me, Mel.”

“Punching it.”

Vrdlicka advanced the throttles to full ahead, and the RPMs came roaring up the scale. Without a load, they needed less than half the runway, and Vrdlicka rotated into a steep climb.

When the end of the runway passed several hundred feet below them, the pilot said, “Gear and flaps.”

Gander retracted both and got green lights. He cleared with Homestead Control, then said, “She’s all yours, Mel. I’m catching some Z’s.”

“So much for decent company,” Vrdlicka complained.

Bryce Kimball sat in the right seat of CX-41, N17732, the second Kappa Kat off the assembly line. CX-41, N17668, the first Kappa Kat, had been selected by Tex Brabham as the tour craft, and it was undergoing a thorough maintenance checkup. Three Two would be used for the training sequences.

Kimball couldn’t quite believe, as he was sure the others couldn’t quite believe, that they were training for a combat mission. When they had formed KAT, the idea had been to create a better multi-role fighter and, personally for each of them, to keep up their flying skills in a hot fighter available to civilians. They had intended to train themselves for demonstrations and to utilize the secondary academic and engineering talents each of them professed to have.

The risk factors of engaging hostile aircraft had been left behind them, Kimball had thought. Now, those factors were back in place, and as far as he could tell, no one was unhappy about the change. They were as eager as dogs in heat.

In the left seat, as command pilot, was Sam Miller, a former captain and F-111 driver, and a current systems engineer. His undergraduate education had been accomplished at Dartmouth, the source of his nickname, “Dart.” Beneath the raised visor of his helmet, his face was beefy and sported a Pancho Villa-shaped, utterly black moustache. He had the Kappa Kat at 32,000 feet over the desert floor south of Casa Grande. The Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was thirty miles ahead, and beyond that was the Mexican border. The Papago Indian Reservation was directly below.

In the back, beneath a separately sectioned canopy, at the twin radar consoles, were Phillipe “Speedy” Contrarez and Conrad “Frog” Billingsly. Contrarez, an ex-major who had spent most of his time as a navigator on fuel tankers, was a hydraulics engineer who was so happy most of the time, it was ridiculous. His controller colleague on this flight had retired as a full colonel and was Director of Flight Operations for Kimball Aero Tech. Billingsly had gone prematurely gray in his mid-thirties, and now at forty-eight, featured fluffy, pure white hair. His eyes were warm and sincere, and he had a deep, throaty voice. He sang bass with a pick-up quartet on weekends. Billingsly was a widower and empty-nester, having had cancer strike both his wife and his daughter.

Kimball had already decided that Soames and Billingsly would be his air controllers, with Contrarez and Dave Metger as backups. The four of them would get the most rehearsal time in the backseat of the Kappa Kat.

The Airborne Warning and Control craft was a larger version of the Alpha Kat. The modified delta wing configuration was the same, though fifteen feet greater in span, and she had the same twin, inward-canted rudders. The fuselage was longer and wider, to accommodate twin turbofans, and the nose was wide and flattened, allowing for the four seats and the package of ultra high-tech avionics, electronic countermeasures gear, and radars. Except for her stealth characteristics and her decoys like chaff and flares, she was pretty much defenseless. The Kappa Kat carried no ordnance, and her centerline hard-point was utilized for a conformal fuel tank that gave her two-and-a-half hours more endurance than the Alpha Kats. Her weight kept her top speed almost 400 knots slower than the fighters.

Since she mounted all of the high-cost electronics, the Kappa Kat was the most expensive craft in the KAT fleet, delivered to any purchaser for a mere twenty-four million dollars each. The basic configuration of an Alpha/Kappa tactical unit called for one Kappa Kat and six Alpha Kats, though the Kappa Kat controllers could handle up to twenty-four fighters. The Kimball Aero Technology brochures recommended one backup Kappa Kat for each one to three tactical units since the Alpha Kats were pretty much useless without a controller craft available.

With the unit price of an Alpha set at 3.5 million dollars, one minimal tactical unit of six Alpha Kats and a Kappa Kat ran to a total of forty-five million dollars. That compared to seven F-15 Eagles for 140 million. Because of the sliding scale of manufacturing and raw material costs, Kimball could offer discounts on larger orders. The cost per tactical unit dropped substantially as more Alpha Kats were added to each Kappa Kat.

The cost efficiency on the more sobering side, of course, was that losing one Alpha Kat to hostile fire was considerably cheaper than losing one F-15.

One of the great selling points, or so Kimball had thought until making his pitch to the American air services, was that the odds of losing an Alpha Kat were considerably less than those of losing a conventional fighter. The stealth characteristics were responsible for that. One couldn’t shoot down what one couldn’t see.

Billingsly’s voice sounded in his earphones. “Two and Three, go HICAP.”

“Ah, Frog!” Jay “Barnfire” Halek came back.

“Maintain radio discipline, Two. Execute.”

Kimball turned slightly sideways to look back at Billingsly. He had his eyes locked onto the screen of the AN/APG-67 radar as if it pictured his whole world, which Kimball was certain that it did. The advanced radar of the Kappa Kat was an all-digital pulse-Doppler and allowed the detection and tracking of targets at all altitudes. Each set, and there were two aboard the Kappa Kat, was capable of identifying and tracking sixty targets at up to 150 miles away. Unwanted targets and debris were filtered out, leaving the screen’s display clearly defined.

Halek, who was something of a firebrand, was objecting to Billingsly’s random selection of himself as one of the high-level Combat Air Patrol pilots. Billingsly was fond of shaking up the order of things, giving different pilots different assignments as CAP, as wingmen, and as flight leaders at any given time. Kimball agreed with him; he wanted all of his pilots capable in all roles.

He rotated his head back to the front, checked his Head-up Display, which repeated the same targets Billingsly had on his scope, and then leaned forward and sideways to peer through the canopy.

The six Alpha Kats were in a diamond formation, with two of the craft trailing in staggered echelon, two thousand feet below the Kappa Kat. As he watched, numbers two and three rose out of the diamond and climbed quickly. The trailing aircraft moved up and filled in the diamond.

Far below, the earth was beige and tan and barren. There was no welcome glint of sun reflecting off water.

Halek and Ito Makura, flying the second CAP aircraft, spread apart as they climbed and finally assumed stations a thousand feet above, and a half-mile off each side, of the Kappa Kat. They served as the defensive cover for the Kappa Kat and were also a reserve against unexpected emergencies.

“Hawkeye, Bengal Two on station,” Halek reported. Kimball had assigned the codenames for the demonstration tour.

“Bengal Three ditto,” Makura said.

“Roger that,” Billingsly replied. “Four, take the lead. One, you’re on his wing. Bengal Five, you have the second element.”

A chorus of “rogers” replied on the radio.

“We have two intruders,” the air controller said. “I designate them Tango and Sierra. Four, go to one-seven-four. Tango is on a heading of zero-zero-nine, speed four-five-zero knots, angels one-two, three-two miles. Five, your target is Sierra. He is heading three-one-five at four-two-five knots, altitude two-six-thousand, distance four-one miles. Hawkeye Four, take the second element.”

“Roger, I have the second element. Five, go to Tac Three,” Contrarez said.

Aboard the Kappa Kat, the pilot was Hawkeye One, the navigator (Kimball today) Hawkeye Two, and the controllers were Three and Four. Contrarez had just taken control of Bengals Five and Six and moved them to another scrambled radio channel in order to separate his and Billingsly’s dialogue with the fighters.

Since he wanted to monitor both actions, Kimball keyed in a second receiver and listened to the conversations on both Tac Two and Tac Three.

On the Head-up Display (HUD), Kimball picked out the blips of Bengals Four and One turning to the left and accelerating. Next to the blips were numbers that kept decreasing — 291… 289… 286. The numbers represented the altitude of the aircraft, 28,600 feet and falling off rapidly as the two Alpha Kats dove toward an interception with their target. The aggressors, Tango and Sierra, had not yet changed their courses.

Bengals Five and Six were also turning, to the right, and gaining speed, intent on Sierra. Their quarry was headed north, forty miles away.

“Four, turn left to one-seven-zero. Hold altitude,” Billingsly ordered.

“Roger, Frog.”

On Tac Three, Bengal Five, piloted by Thomas Keeper, asked, “Hey, Speedy, you sure I’m aimed right?”

“Right on, Miner Forty-niner. Intercept in four minutes.”

“I trust you, guy.”

The fighter pilots had to trust their controllers implicitly and totally for the fighters did not carry search and attack radar. The lack of radar aboard the attack craft served several purposes. It saved weight and cost, of course, but it also kept the stealth aircraft stealthy. One drawback to radar was that, when it was radiating energy, it was identifiable to hostile forces. Since they never transmitted search radar emissions, the Alpha Kats could move unseen into firing positions on their targets. All they needed was clear directions from the Kappa Kat controllers and active data links.

The tactic had presented two problems. The communications problem had been solved by Mel Vrdlicka’s adaptation of existing radios with new technology. His black boxes for the tactical channels two through eight in both controller and fighter aircraft scrambled voice transmissions and changed radio frequencies every second. If the black boxes sensed electronic countermeasures in the form of jamming, the jammed frequencies were avoided as the radios leapt from one frequency to another.

The second problem was unavoidable. Though they were stealthy and undetectable on enemy radars, the Kappa Kats were required to utilize their search radars almost continuously if they were to direct the attack planes. The strategy was to keep them high, with more time to detect surface-to-air missile launches, and a suitable distance from the action of the fighters. An enemy aircraft or radar site which detected the Kappa Kat was not therefore guaranteed the location of the Alpha Kats.

“Dart, let’s do a one-eighty,” Billingsly said over the intercom.

“One-eighty coming up,” Miller said, and banked the Kappa Kat into a right turn.

The maneuver not only sought to disrupt any tracking of them by hostile radars, but in this case was practical. They didn’t want to enter the Mexican ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone).

“Frog, Sierra’s picked up our emissions,” Contrarez said on the intercom.

“Jolly good,” Billingsly replied.

Both hostile aircraft were F-16 Falcons which belonged to the Arizona Air National Guard. They had been reluctantly loaned to KAT, after some telephone calls from Washington, to serve as aggressor aircraft.

“He’s gone supersonic, thinks he can reach us,” Contrarez reported.

“Just do your thing, Speedy,” Billingsly told him.

On Tac Three, Contrarez said, “Five, Hawkeye.”

“Five.”

“Sierra’s turning into you and climbing. He’s at Mach one-point-three.”

“Copy.”

“Climb to angels two-zero, execute Immelmann, and come down on his six o’clock when he passes under you.”

“Five.”

“Six,” George Wagers, Bengal Six, acknowledged.

A similar scenario was occurring on Tac Two, where the target aircraft had also established a contact on the Kappa Kat. Because he was listening to two channels at once, Kimball missed some of the dialogue which overlapped, but he had a sense of the action.

“Four?” Billingsly queried.

“Go Hawkeye.”

“You should have a visual in thirty seconds. Tango is bearing two-eight-two, altitude two-one-thousand and climbing, velocity Mach one-point-four.”

“Tally ho,” the catchword for a visual sighting, came twenty seconds later.

“Weapons released, Four. Fire at will.”

Tango, intent upon reaching the Kappa Kat, still had no idea where the Alpha Kats were, that they were swinging in behind him, coming up from below.

“Infrared lock-on,” Bengal Four said.

Kimball switched to the Tac Five channel they were sharing with the aggressors and keyed the microphone built into his helmet, “Tango, bang, bang!”

“Shit!” Gaston Greer replied. “I’m taking my airplane and going home.”

“Bye-bye,” Kimball told him.

He switched back to Tac Three, where the intercept hadn’t been as successful. Bengal Five reported that he and Six had lost too much speed on their climb out, and by the time they rolled upright at the top of their loop, they had been unable to catch the hostile plane.

“Okay, Hawkeye Four, I’ve got it. Barnfire, here’s your chance,” Billingsly said in his deep, unperturbable voice.

“Two.”

“Sierra’s closing on us at Mach one-point-five, your heading two-zero-four. Contact in forty seconds. Take him out.”

“Two.”

The Alpha Kat above them on the left raised its right wing and peeled off.

The HUD radar display in front of Kimball disappeared as Billingsly switched the radar to passive.

“Do something other than what we’re doing, Dart,” Billingsly suggested.

Sam Miller dropped his right wing, and the Kappa Kat rolled over, under Bengal Three, into a descending right turn, spiralling downward. Bengal Three rolled on her right wing and stayed with them. With their emissions halted, the aggressor would lose track of them quickly.

“Tally ho!” Halek reported.

“Tell me, Two.”

“I’ve got him head-on.”

“Wrong,” Billingsly said, but added, “Weapons released.”

“Phoenix is gone,” Halek said.

Kimball hoped fervently that it wasn’t so. The propulsion systems on the missiles hadn’t had their safeties removed.

“Hell, he shut down on me,” Halek complained.

“Is it a hit, or not?” Billingsly asked.

“Wham! He just went by me,” Halek reported. “I don’t know about the hit.”

“I give it fifty-fifty,” Kimball said on the intercom.

“I agree,” Billingsly said, then keyed in his tactical radio, “Go Three.”

Bengal Three left them as Miller pulled the Kappa Kat out of its dive, now heading almost directly east at an altitude of 16,000 feet.

“Three. I’ve got a visual. Damn it!”

“That doesn’t tell me anything,” Billingsly said.

“I almost couldn’t turn in on him, Hawkeye. Got him, now. Infrared lock-on. Released.”

“We’ll scratch that one, Three,” Billingsly told him. “You didn’t have weapons permission.”

Kimball jotted the item on his clipboard. He had a full clipboard of errors and omissions for the debriefing session.

He switched to Tac Five and said, “Sierra, I’ll give you fifteen seconds to spot us.”

After the countdown ran out, Sierra reported, “Negative, Hawkeye. You people are gone.”

“At least the stealth part works, Cheetah,” Sam Miller said.

Ben Wilcox waited until the jet engines shut down, then walked across the cooling concrete toward the C-141. Except for a few floodlights, it was dark, but to the northeast, the lights of San Antonio brightened the horizon. The headlights of traffic on Highway 90 and the 410 bypass were still tightly clustered at nine o’clock at night.

The big transport was parked with other aircraft, but was the only one with any activity around it. Ground crewmen swarmed over it, and a fuel tanker pulled up beneath the left wing.

As he watched, the big clamshell doors on the back end parted and the airplane’s ramp lowered to the ground. The interior lighting seeped outward. Two figures descended the ramp.

Wilcox approached them, carrying his thin attaché case. “Good evening, Sam Eddy.”

“Howdy there, Mr. Washington. This is Howard Cadwell.”

Cadwell was a stocky, heavyset man who looked as if he might be a retired defensive lineman for the Dallas Cowboys. In the light spilling from the cargo bay, Wilcox saw thinning brown hair with a pronounced widow’s peak, but couldn’t see his eyes clearly.

“Mr. Cadwell.” He offered a hand.

Cadwell shook it. “Mr. Washington.”

He peered upward into the cavernous and empty cargo compartment. “Just the two of you?”

“We’re the whole show,” McEntire said.

Wilcox raised his arm and rotated his hand in a large circle. Close to a nearby hangar, the headlights of two semi-tractors illuminated, and one after the other, they shifted into gear and headed toward the plane.

“You didn’t have any trouble in Charleston, did you?” Wilcox asked.

“Not after all of the right telephone calls were made,” McEntire said. “Suspicious damned Air Force we got.”

“With no Soviet Union, we’ve got to be careful about everyone else,” Wilcox said.

McEntire patted the skin of the clamshell door next to him. “I’ll bet you people didn’t tell the Chief of Staff that these planes were going to KAT. Otherwise, we’d have payed hell getting them.”

“Seemed an unnecessary admission at the time,” Wilcox conceded.

The first semi-truck pulled up near the ramp. It was followed by a forklift.

“We got us two whole truckloads of dummy missiles?” McEntire asked. With an ear-to-ear grin, he said, “We can practice right into the next century.”

Wilcox stepped away from the ramp, drawing McEntire and Cadwell with him. The back doors of the trailer were tugged open to reveal narrow crates stacked almost to the ceiling.

“Those crates are labeled ‘Hughes/Raytheon AMRAAM, Simulated Warhead,’ ‘Ford Aerospace/Raytheon AIM-9L, Simulated Warhead,’ and ‘Rockwell Hell-fire, Simulated Warhead,’” Wilcox said. “Same thing for the twenty millimeter rounds and five-hundred-pounders.”

“Our active radar seeker and the Sidewinder infrared homing missile. Air-to-ground. Nice going,” McEntire said. “I’m changing my mind about you.”

“About half of those AMRAAM crates are tagged, ‘Simulated Warhead, Model 2C.’ For the Sidewinders, look for labeling that says ‘Mark VI.’ The Hellfires are ‘System Two.’ On the bombs, you’ll want to watch for the Mark 84s that read Mk 84B. Half the cannon rounds are ‘Blank Firing — Series Two.’” Wilcox told him.

“These are new training systems? If there’s so many new dummies around, how come we haven’t heard about them?”

“They’re not so dumb,” Wilcox said.

“Oh, shit! We’re getting the live stuff here?”

“I wouldn’t fly that airplane over heavily populated areas,” Wilcox cautioned.

“What are they doing on a training base?”

“We brought them over from Randolph. Anything more, you don’t want to know.”

Wilcox unlatched his attaché case and gave McEntire a thick file folder. “That’s the export and transportation licenses for your cargo, Sam Eddy. Be careful, will you?”

“On tippy toes.”

“Anything more you need?”

“You going to buy us dinner?” McEntire asked.

Major General Brock Dixon was dressed in a nicely tailored civilian suit that had set him back seven hundred dollars, standing at the public telephone attached to the side wall of a 7-Eleven store in Alexandria.

“I talked to quite a few people,” Jack Ailesworth told him.

“And they said?”

“They didn’t have to say much. All of them were disappointed, to say the least.”

Dixon drummed his fingernails against the small plastic shelf under the phone. “And what is Procurement’s position?”

“Naturally, we hold the position we’ve always held. We want what’s in the national interest.”

Dixon mulled that very general statement for awhile. Every conversation tended to be abstract. No one was going to mention specifics, and the interpretations had to be exact. Then he asked, “How far do we want to go with this?”

“I believe the consensus is that the nth degree is out, is not desirable. But some kind of flanking action would be helpful.”

“Jesus, Jack. That’s pretty abstract.”

“We, that is, they trust your judgment.”

“Resources?”

“I can get you two million right away. More later, if required.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Dixon said and hung up.

From his inside coat pocket, he withdrew a small notebook. He thumbed through it until he found the right page, which he ripped out. It took him several minutes to memorize the number, then he used his cigarette lighter to burn the page. He would not be using this number again.

Placing a stack of quarters on the shelf, Dixon dialed the number, then fed quarters into the phone.

The phone rang three times before it was answered. “Crider.”

“I’ve got a job for you, if you’re interested.”

“Who is this?”

“That will remain unknown.”

“I’m not interested.”

“There’s a code,” Dixon said. “Alligator meat.”

“New phone number,” Crider said. “Give me ten minutes to get there.”

Dixon waited eleven minutes, smoking Marlboros, before he dialed the pre-arranged number, which was probably another public telephone. He deposited the required number of quarters.

“Tell me about the money,” Crider said.

“A million up front, more if it’s necessary.”

“I’m interested.”

Six

“I’m nervous as hell,” Sam Eddy McEntire said. “You ever see me nervous before?”

No one had, so no one said anything.

Wednesday morning was bright outside the front windows of the office. The July heat wavered over the parking lots in mirage-like images. By noon, everyone and everything would be well-baked.

The pilots gathered in the room weren’t as nervous as McEntire professed to be. Their faces reflected confidence and eagerness, Kimball thought. Tex Brabham, who had been invited to join them, only reflected Tex Brabham.

If he moved close to the side window and looked down the alleyway between hangars, Kimball could see the tall tail of the C-141 carrying the ordnance. He figured he was more nervous than McEntire. All that high explosive sitting out in the sun.

“You talk to the man from Washington yet?” Sam Eddy asked.

“He’s not in his office. I’ll be seeing him tomorrow, according to the message I got.”

“I’m not absolutely fond of him changing the schedule on us. Jesus Christ, Kim! Traipsing around the country with a few tons of high explosives on board wasn’t on the agenda.”

“Probably illegal,” Jimmy Gander observed.

“Tell you how nervous Sam Eddy was,” Howard Cadwell said, “he wouldn’t let me touch the controls. The landing here was so soft, I didn’t wake up until we were parked.”

Kimball didn’t like having Wilcox spring surprises on him, either. The missiles and bombs were safe enough, unless some errant airplane or pickup truck crashed into them, but his mind had been wrapped around picking up the live missiles in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Somewhere else, and overseas, anyway. Like McEntire, he was nervous, and also like McEntire, he suspected, less nervous about the ordnance than the unexpected change in plans.

“Well, we’ve got it, and we’re stuck with it,” he said. “Have you checked it out, Tex?”

“Yeah, Kim, I did. What I could see without unloading the damned plane. Looks all right.”

“Who do you want to put on it?”

“Carl Dent should be in charge,” Brabham said. “He was an F-15 weapons specialist.”

“Fine by me. You pick out the rest of your crew?” Brabham handed him a sheet of paper ripped out of a notebook, and Kimball looked it over:

“You haven’t mentioned our secondary venture to any of them?”

Brabham snorted. “Hey, boss!”

“Sorry. Is this going to be enough manpower, Tex?” Kimball Aero had about thirty top mechanics they could draw from, all of them with experience in the Air Force or one of the other services, and all of them serving in supervisory roles for the rest of the workforce. He passed the list around for the pilots to scan.

“They all have at least two specialties,” Brabham said. “I’d put one man as chief on each plane, plus ordnance, electronics, communications, and computers. Everybody can shift around where help is needed. Thing is, boss, I don’t even have to ask these guys to volunteer. They’ll go, soon as I drop the hat.”

“Plus,” Sam Eddy said, “we’ve got you.”

“Plus, we’ve got me,” Brabham agreed matter-of-factly, inching his hat up a fraction on his forehead.

“You the loadmaster, too?” A.J. Soames asked.

“Yeah. What I’m going to do, I’m going to pull the dummy missiles off the plane that we need for the rest of the training mission here. Then I’m going to split up what’s left between both transports. Tools, supplies, spare parts, and ground crew get spread between both planes, too.”

In case one of the C-141s went down or was grounded for maintenance somewhere along the line, Kimball knew, but didn’t say. No one else voiced the obvious, either.

“We got us one spare turbofan,” Brabham added, “and if no one cares, I’m going to take it along, too.”

“Do it,” Kimball said.

The recommended list of mechanics had made its way around the room.

“Any objections?” Kimball asked.

No one complained, and Kimball said, “Okay, Tex. You can tell them now. Families and girlfriends have to stay in the dark. We’ll ship out on the fifteenth. You’ve got my new training schedule?”

Brabham nodded and left the room, closing the door behind him.

“All right, next item. Have we got any problems with the transports?”

Gander and Vrdlicka both shook their heads negatively, as did McEntire.

“Next. Yesterday’s exercise.”

There were a couple of moans.

“I know we’ve been away from the discipline and the training for a long time, guys, but this was miserable.” Kimball moved across the room and leaned against Susan McEntire’s desk. He scanned the clipboard he was holding.

“Jay.”

Halek grimaced, crunching the unlit cigar in his mouth. He liked cigars, but never lit them.

“When the AC tells you to move somewhere, you move. No bitching about it.”

“Gotcha, Kim.”

“Warren,” Kimball said.

The black pilot grinned at him. Mabry had been Bengal Four the day before.

“Nice engagement.”

“Thanks, Kim.”

“Fred.”

Fred Nackerman, who had flown Bengal One, said, “Yo.”

“Warren lost you on the final turn.”

“Damn, Kim, he was pulling G’s as if they were a dime a dozen.”

“I know you’ve got a lot of time as a flight leader, but when you’re the wingman, stay on the wing.”

“Roger that, Kim.”

Kimball went to his next note. “Tom and George.”

Keeper and Wagers, Bengals Five and Six, sat straighter on the sofa. Tom Keeper was one of the two pilots who weren’t ex-Air Force. He wasn’t even a pilot, if service definitions were acknowledged. An ex-Navy lieutenant, he was an aviator, and his experience was in F-4 Phantoms. The fluorescent lights glinted off Wagers’s balding head.

“My fault, there,” Billingsly broke in. “I initiated the action too late, and they didn’t have a chance to catch the Falcon.”

“I may have carried my climb out for too long,” Keeper said. “I wanted too much altitude, and I dropped the speed under three hundred knots.”

“Let’s keep working on that maneuver then,” Kimball said. “Back to Jay.”

“I know,” Halek said, removing his cigar and rolling it between his thumb and fingers. “I took him head-on with an AMRAAM on attack data link and shouldn’t have. He didn’t present enough of a target for the missile, and I likely had a miss. With his closing rate on Hawkeye, I should have used active radar.”

The Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, designated the AMRAAM-II for the model they were utilizing, was targeted in either of two modes. The Kappa Kat could illuminate the target and transfer the target information by data link to the missile aboard the Alpha Kat. When the fighter pilot heard the lock-on in his earphones, he released the missile, which would also home on the target’s emitting radar. In the other mode, which might make the Alpha Kat a radar-visible target, the pilot initiated the missile’s own radar and then fired it when the missile had contact. The AMRAAM’s radar guided it to the target, whether or not the target radar was emitting.

“Correct,” Conrad Billingsly said. “I shut down our radars to protect Hawkeye at the same time the Falcon radar went passive, and the missile had data that was out of date.”

“Let’s not be so eager to get into action, Jay, that we forget to think,” Kimball said.

Halek stuck his cigar back in his teeth and clamped it tight.

“And Ito, we scratched your hit because you released weapons without permission.”

Makura nodded. “I know. I am sorry, Bryce.”

“When we get where we’re going, there’s a chance for a lot of traffic. If somebody fires without a positive ID or weapons permission from Hawkeye, we could down, say, an Air India 747. Anybody want to live with that?” The silence was answer enough.

“Okay, I’ve got a final training schedule, and I’ve named the controllers. A.J. and Connie will be the lead controllers, backed up by Phillipe and Dave.”

Except for Phillipe Contrarez and Dave Metger, the others appeared happy enough with that decision.

“Phillipe and Dave, you’ll be on the Alpha Kat training schedule, also.”

That revived half-smiles.

“We’re going around the clock. Four fighters at a time, with two undergoing maintenance according to Tex’s schedule. If anyone asks you about the intense schedule, we’re preparing for our demonstration tour.

“During the day, the routine is the same one we’ll actually use for demos. Night flights are different.”

“You find a bombing range?” McEntire asked.

“We contributed ten thousand bucks to the Papago Indian Reservation Educational Fund, and they’re letting us use some empty desert.”

“You did that?” Sam Eddy asked.

“Susan worked it out. We rented a recreational vehicle, and Tex is sending two men south to camp out and set up ground targets for us.”

“I could do that,” McEntire volunteered.

“It’s not a big RV, Sam Eddy. It won’t carry a lot of beer.”

“Maybe I won’t, in that case.”

“The schedule has your flight times and your sleep times listed. I want you to get used to sleeping during the day,” Kimball told them.

“Alone?” Sam Eddy asked.

“There wasn’t room on the schedule for recreation, Sam Eddy.”

The group broke up, more somber than when they had assembled at nine o’clock. They were learning that, anywhere from three to four years out of military training, they weren’t quite the hotshot pilots they remembered themselves as being.

Kimball was well aware of his own deficiencies. He had placed himself prominently in the training schedule.

Susan McEntire and Andrea Deacon returned as the last of the pilots filtered out. Andrea, a petite and pert blonde just out of her teens, with a refreshing dose of naivete, was in jeans and a boat-necked blue blouse that intrigued most of the men in the building. She was good on the phone, worming her way past receptionists, secretaries, and minor bureaucrats. Susan was wearing her customary short white skirt and a blouse that featured Indian motifs.

“Mornin’, Susie,” Sam Eddy said.

“Good morning,” she replied formally.

“You want coffee later?”

“No. Goodbye, Sam Eddy.”

McEntire looked across the room at Kimball, shrugged, and went out.

Kimball settled onto the sofa while the women reclaimed their desks.

“You’re going to have to build a conference room, Kim,” Andrea told him, “if you’re going to have all these meetings that keep us away from work.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d complain about that. But it won’t be for long, Andy. How are the reservations going?”

She picked up a legal tablet. “You gave me confirmed dates for Riyadh and New Delhi, and I’ve got tentative reservations for hotels in both cities. Landing fees, fuel, and aircraft parking are set. Until you set up the other stops, I can’t do much more. And if you have to skip some country, I’ll have to redo the whole thing.”

“Got the message, Andy. I’ll get on the phone.”

Susan motioned toward the doorway with a shake of her head, and left the room.

Puzzled, Kimball followed and found her standing in the hallway.

“Something wrong, Susan?”

“I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I think somebody’s following me.”

“What!”

“You go out in the parking lot and look for a white Oldsmobile. There’s a man sitting in it.”

“He followed you from home?”

“I don’t know. I just saw him as I came to work, and he drove into the lot after I did.”

Kimball studied her face. Susan McEntire didn’t often get upset, but there was some fright showing in her big green eyes and a twitch at the corner of her mouth. “I’ll go take a look.”

“Be careful, Kim.”

“Give me a cigarette.”

“You don’t smoke,” she reminded him.

“It’s cover.”

She frowned, but went back into the office and came back with her purse. She rummaged around in it and found him a cigarette and butane lighter.

Kimball took them, went down the corridor, and let himself out the front door.

He stood beside the door, on the narrow strip of grass someone had high hopes for, between the hangar and the parking lot sidewalk, and lit up.

Guy taking a break, right?

The sun beat on him, raising globules of perspiration on his forehead. The air was dry, and the reflections off chrome and glass in the lot hurt his eyes. He stood there, smoking and looking around.

He found the Oldsmobile five spaces back in the second row, but there was no one in it.

Susan was probably being a little paranoid.

Turning toward the east, he sauntered down the grass strip, passing the corner of his hangar. The space between it and the next hangar was blocked by an eight-foot-high chain link fence. He stared down the opening, but there was nothing between the two hangars except dirt and a few weeds the defoliant hadn’t been able to conquer.

The next hangar was vacant, the owners waiting out the period until his option expired before attempting to rent it. Kimball had about two months before he lost his option money. He almost reversed course then and headed back to his office, trying to come up with a gentle way to tell Susan she was hallucinating.

Something prodded him to take a look, and he kept sauntering until he reached the first door into the next hangar. He tried the door handle, and it turned.

It shouldn’t have.

Shoving the heavy door inward, Kimball stepped inside.

The cavernous structure was empty, dimly lit by the sunlight forcing itself through the rows of grimy windows high overhead. The concrete floor had been swept, but was mottled with old oil, grease, and fuel stains. The far sidewall had several small office and storage spaces abutted to it.

The Oldsmobile man was at the far, runway end of the hangar, standing on an upturned wooden crate, snapping photographs rapidly through one window in the sliding hangar door.

The clicking of his camera shutter echoed across the concrete. Kimball could hear the tiny whir of the film advance motor after each click.

The man was so intent on his photography that he didn’t hear the padded footfalls until Kimball was ten feet away.

Startled, he whirled around.

His face was wide, made wider by large ears, and there was a thin, white scar running across the right side of his forehead, disappearing into thick umber hair. The face was less grainy than the faxed photo Kimball had seen.

“Doctor Nash, I presume?”

He came off the crate in a rush, his camera swinging at the far end of its neck strap.

Kimball hadn’t expected an attack.

He threw up his left arm.

His forearm blocked the strap, but the camera whipped around his arm and slapped him in the forehead.

Stunned, Kimball went to his knees, his arm reflexively jerking back against his shoulder, trapping the camera’s strap and ripping it out of Nash’s hand.

Nash didn’t wait around.

He kept on running, heading for the door.

Kimball knelt on the concrete, shaking his head until the little black dots in his vision went away.

Henry Loh put the C-123 Provider into a gentle left bank and circled the airfield at a thousand feet of altitude.

The Provider had probably once belonged to the U.S. military, before it was left behind in their hurried flight from Vietnam. It had had a half-dozen owners since, but after a thorough overhaul of the twin 2500 horsepower Pratt and Whitney radial engines, the fuselage had been stenciled for Air Jungle Ltd., chartered as a cargo and occasional passenger hauler. Air Jungle owned one C-123, two old Douglas DC-3s, and a DC-6 that had once been an American Airways passenger liner.

Henry Loh was a match for the beat-up transport. He had been born and educated in Taiwan, but gotten his world reality drummed in as a mercenary, a Nung Guard, working for the Americans in Vietnam. Since his personal pullout from the war-torn nation in 1972, he had learned to fly practically anything with wings, and he too had had a half-dozen owners.

He was big for a Chinese. Weighing 170 pounds, he stood five feet, eleven inches tall. He had massive shoulders and a strong upper body and arms. His chest and face were laced with scars resulting from run-ins with shrapnel, broken beer bottles in bar brawls, and one long, long session at the hands of an avid Khmer Rouge torturer. His dark hair was lanky and long, and he had the habit of whipping his head to fling the hair away from his eyes.

His copilot was a Frenchman going by the current name of Jean Franc. He had a mean, red mouth and narrow yellowed eyes. Both physical traits were probably the legacy of many battles with malaria, dysentery, and other diseases common to Westerners stuck in Asian jungles.

Henry Loh saw nothing unusual taking place in the immediate vicinity of the airstrip. It was located sixty klicks south of the village of Keng Hkam on the Salween River, and was comprised of the short dirt runway, one tin-roofed shack, one canvas-roofed warehouse, and one stack of fifty-five-gallon drums.

“Do you see anything you do not like, Jean?”

“No. Still, we should prepare.”

“Yes. Do that.”

Franc crawled out of his seat, edged back to the hatchway, and lowered himself down the ladder to the cargo deck. He and the three Thai cargo handlers would arm themselves with Kalashnikov AK-47s and be ready for anything that appeared once the ramp was lowered.

The airstrip disappeared into the jungle canopy as Loh leveled his wings and headed east. He flew five miles, then turned back to recross the river. It was shallow and muddy in the broad curve it made through the jungle.

To the north and west, the high plateau country was spotted with jungle, hills rising above it. It was not a welcome landscape, but Henry Loh had never known a landscape that thrilled him particularly.

As the river passed under, he retarded his throttles, then reached down for the lever controlling the flaps and deployed them.

The Provider bounced upward with its new lift, and Loh eased the control column forward to counter it.

The airstrip appeared again, revealed as he approached the lip of the jungle clearing.

Loh lowered the landing gear, then idled the engines. The medium transport settled downward slowly, and the big tires grabbed the ground and bounced once. As soon as it settled the second time, he ran the engines into reverse thrust and felt himself shoved forward against his seat harness as the airplane slowed itself.

The two simple structures were at the far end of the runway. Loh taxied toward them, noting the ramp warning light come on. Franc had lowered it partially.

When he reached the end of the runway, he used the left brake and ran up the right engine. The plane turned quickly, almost 270 degrees, so that the ramp was aimed at the warehouse.

Speaking into his cantilevered microphone, he asked, “Jean?”

“Looks okay, Henry,” Franc told him over the intercom.

Loh locked the brakes down, idled the engines, and unstrapped from his seat. Working his way back to the hatch, he watched the cargo handlers labor, shoving three goats down the ramp, untying crates marked Carnation Foods, General Mills, and Hong Kong Enterprises. Others were labeled in Chinese, Thai, Russian, and Laotian letters and phrases.

The men pushed and shoved the crates and cardboard boxes toward the rear of the plane, setting them down on the rollers of the ramp, letting them slide on out the back.

Nine people, all small men belonging to some tribe he did not care about, had appeared from nowhere, but probably from the shack. No one said anything, just began to pick up the crates and haul them toward the warehouse.

Franc stepped off the ramp to the ground, carrying his assault rifle at port arms, and walked off toward the warehouse. He came back five minutes later, climbed the ramp, and worked his way around the cargo to reach Loh.

Loh raised an eyebrow.

“Syrup. Fifteen drums of it.”

“Let’s get it aboard and get the hell out of here.”

Derek Crider had been a Green Beret major during the last years of the Vietnam circus. Closing on forty-eight years of age now, he did not show it. People would guess him for, maybe, his late thirties because of his wedge-shaped figure, shoulders that stretched to both sides of a doorway, and musculature that gave him a neck like that of Dick Butkus. He could have been bald, his fair hair was shorn so close to his skull. His skin was tanned the color of deer hide that had been stretched in the sun for three weeks. The gray eyes probing from deep-set eye sockets rendered the more meek speechless for a few seconds.

Two months after the fall of Saigon, in June, Crider had resigned his commission in disgust with the politicians and dedicated himself to helping people who really cared, like Angolans, Salvadorans, and Contra rebels. For a price, of course. Crider liked to take vacations in nice places.

He met Emilio Lujan in the lounge of the Airport Holiday Inn in Miami. It was gloomy in the lounge, and Lujan disappeared into the gloom. He was a short man with long, curly black hair and dark brown eyes. His complexion blended in with the brown Naugahyde covering the benches of the booth, and only the quick, nervous movement of his hands caught the light from the candle.

“Want a beer, Emilio?”

“Sure, man, why not?”

Crider signalled the waitress, who was not all that busy in mid-afternoon, anyway, and they soon had Carta Blancas on the faked walnut Formica in front of them.

“Hey, man, I ain’t heard from you in three years. What’s up?”

Crider took a long pull at his beer, then asked, “Where you been working, Emilio?”

“Around. Here. There.”

“Been flying out of Colombia?”

“No way, man. You can get locked in tight.”

“No drugs at all?”

“Maybe a run or two. Panama, Mexico. Small-time dealers, you know?”

“I need a plane and a pilot,” Crider said.

“Where, and how long?” Lujan asked, his eyes held steady on Crider’s, though his hands continued to fondle nervously his icy bottle.

“Africa and maybe the subcontinent. Not over a month.”

“Shit. I ain’t flown that area in ten years.”

Crider sipped and considered. Finally, he said, “You get 150 grand, flat, for you and the airplane. I want a business jet of some kind.”

“United’s cheaper.”

“United’s got a schedule to follow. I need mobility.”

“What’s the op?” the Mexican asked.

“Need to know basis only. You wouldn’t be directly involved.”

“For 150 big ones?”

“Something might come up. Call it contingency pay.”

“You ain’t calling it hostile fire pay?”

“Not right now.”

“You going to be alone?”

“There’ll be a few others, maybe six of us all together. The plane has to handle that.”

“Heavy luggage?”

“Nothing that won’t slide through customs like it was greased,” Crider told him.

“My picture’s been around, man.”

“Part of the deal, you get a new passport.”

“I need two, three days to find the plane.”

“Call me when you’ve got it,” Crider said and finished the last drops in his bottle.

Kimball had a lump the size of a walnut high on his left temple, but he owned a new Nikon 35-millimeter camera with automatic film advance. He had dropped the film off at Fotomat for developing on his way home.

He had come home early in the afternoon to dust and vacuum and take care of some chores that had fallen by the wayside during the month he and McEntire had been touring the Pitts Specials. Then he had showered, changed clothes to a light gray suit with a striped tie, and taken Cathy Colby over to Scottsdale for dinner.

They were back in his condo by eight o’clock. Kimball tossed his suitcoat on a chair in the living room, poured her a cognac, and fixed himself a soda water with a wedge of lime in it.

“You aren’t drinking?” she asked.

“I’m flying at midnight.”

He pulled open the sliding glass door to the balcony, and they went out to sit on the beige cushions of his wrought iron chairs. It was still warm out, but not uncomfortably so. The fiery highlights of sunset were just dying and the pathway lamps below began to flicker into life.

Cathy Colby placed her glass on the table between the chairs, and drew her legs up under her. She wore a pale aqua cocktail dress with a Chinese collar decorated with dark blue scrolling. Five years younger than Kimball, she had been married once, to a venture capitalist who lost a bundle in the Keating affair. Now she was doing well for herself as the publisher of a business magazine which her former husband had underwritten. They had first met when she did a feature story on the start-up Kimball Aero Technology.

She was tall and slim, with delicate facial features under styled platinum hair. Her china blue eyes were direct, always questioning. Her skin was smooth and gave the impression of being porcelainized. In the right light, Kimball had noted that he could practically see through her earlobes.

“Aren’t you overdoing the training bit a little?”

“It’s a stealth airplane, hon. The customers… potential customers… will want to see it operate at night.”

“They can’t see it at night.”

“That’s the point,” he assured her.

She shook her head and the dim light from below reflected off her eyes.

“Are you going to be able to pull it out, Kim?”

She was a bright woman. Her magazine closely followed the rise and fall of business fortunes in the Phoenix area, and while she might not know the details, she knew KAT was faltering.

“Damned right,” he said, though with less conviction than he had a year or two before.

“You need a big sale to the Air Force.”

“Or a few small sales to the third world. It would be nice to have the Alpha Kats in an operational role for awhile. The Air Force would come around after watching it for a period of time.”

“Isn’t that being overly optimistic? This is the age of downsizing, Kim. And especially in the military. I don’t see this Congress allocating big budget dollars for a new weapons package.”

“That’s the point, Cathy. They don’t have to. We don’t want new dollars. We want to be in the replacement schedule, using dollars that are already dedicated. Hell, why replace one F-16 or F-15 with the same aircraft, at an inflation-driven higher cost, when you can retire six old Eagles and replace them with six Alphas and a Kappa, and save the taxpayer fifty million dollars? We can replace the entire air superiority fighter fleet in ten years.”

“You sound just like an aerospace CEO,” she said with a smile.

“On top of that, they’d need fewer airplanes than they have now. The Alpha Kat has a limited ground attack role, and the Beta Kat” (then on the drawing-board) “even better serves the ground attack role. A hell of a lot cheaper than the F-117 or the A6, which is way, way past its prime, anyway. Christ, a dozen Beta Kats and a Kappa Kat can replace a whole wing of B-52s or B-ls. And the half-billion dollar B-2 Stealth bomber? Scratch that. Twenty years from now, the entire Air Force, Navy, and Marine fleets could be based on three aircraft types, all of them with interchangeable parts. Think of the savings in spare parts inventory alone.”

“You don’t have to be so fervent with me, Kim. I’m a believer.”

“Sorry. I get damned angry when I think about what the military bureaucracy and the defense industry is foisting off on us.”

“Plus, you’d like to keep KAT solvent,” she said with customary practicality.

“It’s a good concept,” he defended.

Cathy picked up her snifter and swirled the liquid in it. “I just had another thought, Kim. Without new dollars from Congress, you wouldn’t recover your research and development costs.”

“We’ve built that into the per-unit pricing. It’s identified, and we’re not hiding anything. As the R&D costs are recovered, the price goes down.”

“The plane gets cheaper?”

“Well,” he admitted, “maybe not. It depends upon inflation rates. Still, as manufacturing costs go up, the R&D cost lowers. At worst estimate, the price stays the same for eight or nine years.”

“I think your problem is that you’re approaching the military without being devious. They don’t know how to deal with that.”

“Maybe.”

She tilted the balloon glass and finished the last drops of cognac.

“You want another one of those, Cath?”

“No. I want to stop talking business, go inside with the air conditioning, and possibly shed this hot dress.” She grinned impishly. “You still have your tie on, you know?”

Kimball tugged at the knot of his tie as he stood up. “That’s how bad it’s been. I hate ties.”

He took her hand, pulled her out of the chair, and ushered her inside. As he slid the door shut, the phone rang.

“Damn it.”

“Don’t take it.”

“I’d better.”

He grabbed the phone from the counter between the dining room and the kitchenette.

“Kim, it’s Susan.”

“Hi. Problem? Are you still working?”

“Still here,” she said.

“Are you alone?” he asked, thinking about Major Nash.

“No. There’s fifteen or twenty people around.”

“Don’t go outside by yourself.”

“I won’t. Look, Kim, I’ve got all the numbers together, and we’ve got to spend some time on them.”

“You sign all the checks, Susan. Go ahead.”

“Not this time. I want your okay on them.”

Kimball looked over at Cathy, who was toying with the buttons of her Chinese collar. She ran her tongue across her upper lip. He glanced at his watch. “All right. I’m flying at twelve, but I’ll get out there an hour early.”

“Good enough, boss,” she said and hung up.

“That was Susan,” he told Cathy.

“I picked up on that right away,” she said, her slim fingers undoing the hooks of her collar. “She knew you were seeing me tonight.”

It was a statement, not a question.

“What?”

“She took the message when I called you back this afternoon.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” he asked.

“She’s in love with you.”

Kimball was dumbfounded. “That’s nuts.”

“Not so. I’ve seen her around you.”

“Crazy.”

“Uh huh. She’s checking up on you.”

Cathy led the way toward the bedroom, and Kimball followed, suddenly unsure of a lot of things.

Seven

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Susan McEntire asked.

“Like what?”

“Like that.”

Kimball was searching her face and eyes for the tell-tale emotions that Cathy Colby had attributed to her.

Nothing.

He couldn’t see anything in her eyes or face or manner that suggested she thought anything more of him than as a somewhat slipshod employer.

Women! They were super-sensitive to nuances that were undetectable to male radar. Talk about stealth.

“You look tired,” he told her.

“I am tired. It’s been a damned long day.”

They were seated in the front office, Kimball in a straight chair pulled up alongside her desk. The chief executive officer of Kimball Aero Technology didn’t have a desk or chair of his own.

There were lights on in the corridor and back in the hangar proper, and Kimball heard people barking at each other as they prepared the aircraft for the second round of night flights. Lack of sleep was making some tempers shorter than normal.

“Okay,” Kimball said, “let’s get it over with, so you can go home.”

She shoved a small stack of financial spreadsheets toward him. He noticed a smudge of ink on her chin. After a fifteen-hour day, her blouse was wilted, and her auburn hair was in some disarray. It put him in mind of Rita Hayworth for some reason. Some old bedroom scene, hair tousled, eyes inviting. There was a touch of redness around her green eyes, and the tiny silver flecks in them appeared dulled.

He hadn’t really noticed the silver flecks radiating from the irises before.

“The first sheet is the overall view, and the rest of these outline the details of the impact of three million in revenues. We’ve never had three million in revenue before.”

KAT did have some income, from various federal research grants, and from licensing some of their patented designs, but in the global scheme of things, the income was not significant.

“Let’s just deal with the overview,” Kimball said. “The details are up to you.”

“That’s just the way you and Sam Eddy approach everything.”

“We get extremely involved in the design details,” he defended. “We’re engineers, not accountants.”

“My degree’s in history, remember?”

“Yeah, but you’re so good at taking on new challenges.”

“The last three years has certainly been a challenge, Kim. You’re right about that.”

With the tip of a ballpoint pen, she stabbed at a top number on her own spreadsheet. “There’s the three million. Added to our cash on hand, it gave us three-point-five-five mil.”

They had not quite been down to what was in their pockets, as Wilcox had insisted. Kimball found the number on his spreadsheet.

“I’m with you.”

“With our tax loss carry-forward from last year, which is stupendous and our expected deductions for this year, our estimated corporate tax will be around two hundred thousand. I transferred that amount to our tax escrow account.”

“Good girl.”

She wrinkled her nose at him.

“Sounds better than good woman,” he said.

“The estimated cost of the demonstration tour is now at four hundred and sixty thousand,” she said.

“I thought it’d be more.”

“Andrea booked you into cheaper hotels than you’re used to,” she grinned, “but I’ve set aside another forty thousand as a contingency fund.”

“Don’t use it, you mean?”

“You’re the boss, Kim. It’s your decision.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got the recommendation from the comptroller, right?”

“Right.”

“You know we’ll be getting an Air Force billing for the dummy missiles?”

“Damn it!” she said. “How much?”

“Probably close to four hundred thou.”

“Oh, shit!”

“It’s a bargain, Susie. It really is. Probably a fourth of what we’d normally pay.”

Susan knew that the C-141 parked on the tarmac was loaded for bear. She hadn’t said a thing, one way or the other about it, to either Kimball or McEntire. She didn’t mention it now, just moved her penpoint to the next line.

“The payroll coming up amounts to 246 thousand.”

“That’s with our half-time people?” Kimball asked. For the last four months, almost everyone in the manufacturing area had been working half-time. They were struggling with their monthly bills, and he knew it.

“When everyone’s on full-time, the monthly payroll is 380 thousand, Kim.”

“Let’s take them back to full-time.”

“To build airplanes we may not sell?”

“They need the money,” he insisted.

“Three-quarter time.”

“Well do it your way. Just tell A.J.”

She made a notation in the margin of her spreadsheet.

“Now, on our ninety-day credit accounts, we owe slightly over three hundred thousand. For the shorter-time accounts, it’s around another two-eighty. We can satisfy them if we cover half of it.”

“Do it all,” Kimball said. “If we go under, I don’t want to take a couple dozen subcontractors and suppliers with us. They’ve been straight with us, so let’s reciprocate.”

“God. And you thought you were tough enough to run a major corporation?”

He smiled at her. “They’ll feel better about us, and A.J. can give them enough orders for materials to complete three more Alpha Kats. That’ll keep our three-quarter time work force busy while we’re gone.” Shaking her head, Susan worked her nimble fingers over the keys of a small calculator. She had very deft fingers, Kimball noticed. Her nails were coated with a pale cinnamon color. The nail of her right forefinger had a chip in it.

He found himself examining the tautness of her wilted blouse. Guiltily, he lifted his eyes back to her face. For some reason, he was just beginning really to notice her, and with his luck of late, he’d be slapped with sexual harassment charges.

“That’ll leave us with enough to meet overhead and payroll for five months,” she said.

Kimball saw a quick mental image of himself laying people off as Christmas presents. High-tech Scrooge.

“That’s great! Last week, we could only last a month and a half,” he said.

“So, this is progress?”

“Damned right.”

She wrote the new numbers on her spreadsheet, then dated it. Spinning the page around, she shoved it toward him and handed him the pen.

“Sign it.”

He did.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“Not particularly. But I want some protection from the shareholders on these kinds of decisions.”

“The shareholders are all our friends.”

“I’m a shareholder, and I question our ability to survive.”

“Not me,” he said, trying to be optimistic for her. “We’ve got ‘em right where we want ‘em. Just like Elway with ninety-eight yards and a couple minutes to go at Cleveland.”

“Uh huh. This may be our last drive, Kim.”

Tex Brabham stuck his head through the doorway. “You leading this picnic or not, boss?”

“Coming, Tex.”

Kimball picked up his helmet from the floor and stood up. He was already in his flight suit and gravity suit and sweating a bit despite the air conditioning.

“I know I don’t say this often enough, Susan. I appreciate what you do for us more than you know.”

She rose from her chair, facing him. “I’m doomed to believing in what you’re doing, Kim.”

He grinned. “Doomed? Come on, honey, let’s be optimistic. Think on the bright side.”

She was six inches shorter than Kimball, and she looked up at him. Her eyes were large, and with the redness, somehow sad. The silver flecks were prominent at this range.

He still couldn’t read any signals.

“Boss?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.”

Susan reached out and gripped his wrist, looked pointedly at the discolored lump on his forehead. “Be careful.”

“It’s a training mission.”

“But for what?” she asked, then released his wrist and turned back to her desk.

He studied the back of her head for a moment. The fluorescent lights put shiny streaks in the dark auburn. Several strands of hair stood out from static electricity.

Kimball left the office, and he and Brabham headed for the back of the hangar.

“How are the birds, Tex?”

“Tip-top. Hell, with the workout they’ve been getting, it only reinforces the claims we’re making about maintenance. We haven’t had a major systems malfunction yet.”

“And minor?”

“You always get the minor stuff, boss. Trim tab solenoid. Left wing speed brake failure on two-one. We changed out a Nav/Com on one-five.”

They passed through the brightly lit hangar on their way to the tarmac. One Alpha Kat was parked inside, with all of her access doors open. Seven technicians had their heads or hands tucked inside.

“We’re going to get what we need to complete three more, Tex.”

“Good fucking deal.”

“You’ll need to set up a work schedule before we go.”

“No sweat. Full-time?”

“Three-quarter.”

“That’s better, anyway.”

They stepped over the sill of the pedestrian door in the huge sliding hangar door and out onto the flood-lit apron. The four Alpha Kats were parked close by, in a single row. A Texaco tanker was just driving away.

“Keeper just took off in the Kappa Kat,” Brabham said.

“A.J.’s the AC?”

“Right.”

Standing in a group by the first aircraft were Mabry, Gander, and Greer. Mabry was juggling his helmet, the ebony skin of his shaved head shining under the lights.

He had sharp, sharp eyes; was as capable as they came; and like Kimball, had once flown with the Thunderbirds demonstration team. Gander always looked a little lost without his cowboy boots, but he was wearing his hat. Gaston Greer was a Floridian who had grown up around boats and kept a thirty-foot sailboat in San Diego. He was a bachelor who had said he admired Tex Brabham’s ability to stay unhitched and intended to follow his fine example.

“I want you in ought-eight, boss.”

Kimball checked the N-numbers on the fuselages. N17708 was third in line.

“There’s a problem, Tex?”

“Sam Eddy complained about the response time on the air intakes. See what you think.”

The large air inlets on the Alpha Kat changed their angles automatically, dependent on the attitude of the aircraft. At high angles of attack, the inlets aimed downward, to keep the flow of air uninterrupted, so the turbojet engine would not become starved for air and stall out.

Kimball joined the pilots. They had briefed together earlier, but he had not given assignments. “Okay, guys. I’ve got the squadron, and Warren, you’re on my wing.”

“Just try and lose me, Cheetah,” Mabry said.

“Jimmy, you have the second element.”

“Fine with me,” Gander said. “Gaston, old hoss, no closer than three feet, got that?”

“It’s night; I’ll give you four,” Greer said. He was a first class aerobatic pilot, and he was known for his ability to stay close.

“Let’s mount up,” Kimball said.

He walked down to ought-eight and did the walk-around with Virgil Thomas, who was the chief mechanic on the plane. Thomas was in his fifties, sprightly, and permed his gray hair into a curly mop. He was ex-Navy, with a lot of experience on Tomcats and Intruders.

“Tex told you about the air intakes?”

“He did, Virg.”

“Sam Eddy bitches a lot.”

Thomas opened a small hatch on the left side of the fuselage and worked the switches. The canopy rose with a hydraulic hiss, and the single-stemmed boarding ladder lowered from the fuselage, its two steps folding out. In an early design stage, the pilot design team had determined that they didn’t want to have to mess with detachable ladders. The ladder was necessary since the Alpha Kat sat on landing gear that was stilt-like in its height. That allowed a wide variety of ordnance and accessory packages to be suspended from the hard points.

Ought-eight was outfitted with four AMRAAMs, two each on the outboard pylons. The missiles topped Mach 4 in speed and had a range of seventy miles. One inboard pylon carried a pair of AIM-9L Super Sidewinders, with a cruise speed of Mach 3 and a range of 11 miles. The left inboard pylon was mounted with a pod containing an M61A2 20-millimeter, rotating barrel gun and six hundred rounds of ammunition. On the centerline, one behind the other, were two simulated Mark 84 low-profile 500-pound bombs.

“You’ve got a full load, Kim,” Thomas said. “Don’t drop anything until you’re ready.”

“Got it, Virg.”

Kimball gave Thomas his helmet, pushed in a spring-loaded handhold, got a grip, and climbed the ladder. He rotated his hips over the cockpit coaming, levered his legs inside, and stood on the seat. The seat pan was constructed of carbon-reinforced plastic, as were all major components of the aircraft, to reduce radar reflections. With this seat, modified to the Martin-Baker SJU-5/A ejector seat design, only the ejector rails used stainless steel.

Thomas came up the ladder with Kimball’s helmet and parachute pack and helped him into it. The seat pan pack contained the survival gear, including a one-man raft. Thomas stayed long enough to help him strap in, don his helmet, and couple the communications, oxygen, and pressure suit lines, then slid back to the ground.

Kimball powered up the instrument panel and accessory systems, then ran diagnostic checks on each of the major systems, watching for green light-emitting diodes on the instrument panel. The Alpha Kat did have its own radar, but it was a low-power, fifteen-mile range set to be utilized in emergency situations. Since the odds were that the Alpha Kat would not be attacked by radar-guided missiles, there was no radar threat system. The AAR-38 infrared tailwarning system was mounted.

All of the radios and data link receivers came up and announced their availability with green LEDs. On the radio panel above the throttle handle, Kimball dialed the radios into the respective frequencies they would be using. The gyros came up to full speed. The Alpha Kat did not carry expensive navigational systems; it relied on data links to the Kappa Kat for navigation aids that were more exotic than the pilot’s mind.

Kimball stuck his left hand outside the cockpit and rotated his wrist.

Thomas’s crew powered up the start cart, and compressed air was forced into the turbojet intake. The RPM indicator (all readouts were digital) immediately showed the turbine blades beginning to turn. When he had 35 percent RPMs, Kimball initiated fuel flow and ignition.

The turbojet started to whine on its own.

He advanced the throttle slightly, tapping the key on the handle for Tac Two communications. “Bengal One. What have we got?”

“Two. Impatient,” Mabry said.

“Three,” Gander responded.

“And Four,” Greer said.

Keying the button for Tac One, he said, “Uh, Phoenix Ground Control, this is Alpha Kat zero eight.”

“Again, zero eight? You guys are hot on it lately.”

“Got to make sure they work. How about permissions?”

“You’re in good shape. There’s a cargo transport due in about fifteen minutes, otherwise it’s all going to be yours. Proceed to two-seven, zero eight, and go to air control.”

Kimball released the brakes and pulled out of the line, turning right. The others fell in behind him and he left the air park, headed for the east end of the runways.

Changing to the tower frequency, Kimball checked in, “Phoenix Tower, Alpha Kat zero eight with a flight of four.”

They were becoming accustomed to the increased traffic from Kimball Aero.

“Zero eight, Phoenix. You’ve got immediate clearance for two-seven-zero left. Barometric is three-zero-point-one-four.”

Kimball checked to make sure that his altimeter setting agreed with the tower’s.

“Wind is three knots southwest, maybe a thundershower in a few hours.”

“That’s wishful thinking, Phoenix.”

“You’re probably right, zero eight.”

At the end of the taxiway, Kimball turned left, stopped short of the runway, and ran the engine up to full power for a few seconds. It responded immediately, its song vibrating in his ears and in the airframe.

He checked in both directions, lowered the canopy, released the brakes and moved onto the runway. Turning left, he braked until Mabry pulled up alongside him.

Mabry gave him a thumb’s up.

On Tac Two, Kimball said, “Let’s roll.”

And he slammed the throttle to its forward stop.

Even with the full weight of the ordnance load, the Alpha Kat leaped forward. In seconds, the airspeed readout was showing sixty knots.

Mabry was right with him.

At 180 knots, the aircraft felt jittery, and he rotated by easing back on the hand controller.

The Alpha Kat utilized a fly-by-wire control system. The ergonomically-designed controller was located at the forward end of his right armrest and his hand gripped it snugly. Situated on the controller were buttons and keypads with different shapes and textures for controlling weapons release and other aircraft systems.

As soon as he had cleared the ground, Kimball verified the airspeed, then pulled in his flaps and landing gear. Putting the nose down slightly, he brought the speed up quickly.

“Five hundred,” he said on Tac Two.

“Two at five hundred,” Mabry said.

The two aircraft climbed steadily at a shallow five hundred feet per minute.

“Three and Four off,” Gander reported.

By thirty minutes after midnight, they were cruising southwestward at 600 knots, in a loose four-finger echelon formation. The altimeter readout’s blue numerals indicated 26,500 feet.

As they closed on the north end of the reservation, Soames came on the air from the Kappa Kat, which was doing lazy eights at 34,000 feet.

“Bengal One, Hawkeye.”

“One.”

“Squawk me once, so I can find you.”

Kimball tapped in the IFF transponder, counted to five, and shut it down.

“This will be a breeze if you guys just listen close,” Soames said. “Go right to two-one-five.”

“One. Turning right.”

Kimball eased the controller over and added rudder. The compass readout on the Head-Up Display slowly came around to 215. The HUD readouts, directly in front of him so he didn’t have to glance down at the instrument panel, repeated the important information from the panel. The readouts were primarily in blue, though targeting information would appear in red.

Flying the Alpha Kat brought out polarized emotions in her pilots. On the one hand, it was back-to-the-basics flying, augmented by a few technological advances, like the HUD display. Without radar, navigation and advanced computer systems, they could be flying Stearman bipes or Spads. It was exhilarating, out on one’s own on a clear, hot Arizona day, chasing coyotes and diving into arroyos.

Conversely, in an F-15, Kimball had had the ability to accept or reject the data provided by the computers and make his own decisions. In tactical situations with the Alpha Kat, he now had to rely on his air controller. It was difficult for hotshots like Gander and Greer and, he admitted, himself to relinquish that decision making.

Especially when it could mean a life.

“Bengal flight, put it on the deck,” Soames told them. “Let’s call it two thousand.”

“Roger, Hawkeye, going to angels two.”

Kimball eased back on the throttle and nudged the nose down with the hand controller. The airspeed began to increase, and he retarded the throttle some more. Supersonic flight wasn’t programmed for this mission.

The stars were impressively clear tonight; bright, hard twinkles in the black sky. Moonset had occurred earlier, so the desert floor was almost invisible. To his right were the Sand Tank Mountains.

“What have we got for traffic, Hawkeye?” he asked.

“There’s a couple choppers messing around over at Luke. What for, this time of night, I don’t know. That’s it.”

Luke Air Force Range abutted the Papago Indian Reservation. It would have been nice to use their bombing and missile ranges, but Wilcox had vetoed the idea, not wanting to force the USAF any further after already requisitioning so much of their ordnance and gaining control of the two C-141s without identifying KAT as the beneficial party. The request for Luke would have pinpointed Kimball Aero Tech and created a verbal firestorm in the halls of the Pentagon.

The readout wound down to 2000, and Kimball eased the power back in. Checking to his left, he saw Mabry a half-plane back. On the right was Jimmy Gander, and beyond him, Greer. If they hadn’t been operating their low-wattage wingtip guidance lights, he wouldn’t have known they were there.

“Bengals, take spacing and douse the lights,” he ordered.

“Two.”

“Three.”

“Four.”

The aircraft lights blinked out as the planes spread apart.

Tac Two sounded off. “Cheetah, we’ve got a UFO. I want two of your flight.”

“Take whatever you want, Papa.”

“Bengal Three and Four, jettison bomb load and climb to angels one-three, heading zero-nine-eight.”

The intruder was off Kimball’s rear quarter. He decided to let Gander take care of it and not worry about it.

Soames moved Gander and Greer to Tac Three, then said, “Bengal One, you’ve got a short peak coming up, but not short enough. Turn to one-nine-five.”

“Roger, Papa. Going to one-nine-five.”

“I’m going to need a guide, I guess,” Warren Mabry said.

“Coming up, Two.”

Kimball reached for the light panel and turned on his left wingtip guidelight. It was a red light that could be seen for perhaps a mile. The left or right guidelights were utilized by wingmen to keep track of the leader.

He would like to have listened to the dialogue between Soames and Gander, to get a feel for the attack of the aggressor aircraft, but knew that his job was to concentrate on the ground attack.

“One, Hawkeye. You have a visual on ground lights?”

“Roger, Papa. At my ten o’clock.”

They appeared to be a couple of farm yard lights, to be used as the Initial Point in his bomb run.

“That’s the village of Ventana, Cheetah. When they hit your nine o’clock, that’s your IP. Go to one-eight-zero. Target six miles. I’m feeding data now.”

Kimball switched on his primary data receiver.

“Receiving, Hawkeye. How about you, Dingbat?”

“Two.”

Mabry had always wanted a codename of “Othello,” but somewhere along the line, got stuck with “Dingbat,” and couldn’t shake it.

The Alpha Kat computers accepted the data gathered by the Kappa Kat radars, compared it with on-board altitude, speed, and direction data, verified it, and displayed the results on the HUDs.

The center of Kimball’s HUD showed him little spikes of light whenever the earth came closer than 500 feet, the altitude above ground for which he had set a tolerance.

“Bengal One, I’m painting the target now.”

On the upper left of the HUD targeting screen, a red diamond appeared, the initial point to the target selected by Soames.

“Got it, Hawkeye.”

“IP, One,” Mabry reported.

“Roger that,” Kimball said and started a turn to the left. When the HUD readout read 180, he stabilized.

The red diamond was now directly ahead.

“Bengals, Hawkeye. Bengal Three splashed himself a Fighting Falcon.”

“Won’t hear the end of that,” Mabry said.

“Deploy IR,” Kimball ordered.

“Two.”

With his forefinger, Kimball found and depressed a keypad on the control stick. That lowered a gimbal-mounted nightsight lens and infrared targeting lens from below the nose and simultaneously activated the interface with his helmet reader. He reached up and pulled the hinged infrared reader down over the Plexiglas of his helmet visor. He could still read the instruments and the HUD, but he also had an irritating little yellow square in the center of his vision. It moved around whenever he moved his head. It also moved the gimballed lenses jutting from under the nose of the Alpha Kat.

“I want weapons, Hawkeye.”

“Free fall weapons cleared,” Hawkeye responded.

Kimball reached for the armaments panel with his right hand, the control stick always stayed in the position in which he left it; lifted the protective plastic cover, and snapped down the toggles for each of his two bombs.

On the bottom right of the HUD, two amber lights labeled “CL-1” and “CL-2” came on.

“I’m hot,” Kimball reported.

“Two’s hot.”

The airspeed was four hundred knots, a bit high for the bomb drop, but they were experimenting a little.

The infrared lens picked up a heat source, and made it a red dot on the transparent screen of his infrared reader.

The landscape outside the canopy was utterly dark.

Kimball moved his head, sliding the yellow square over the red dot. With his forefinger, he pressed another keypad. From that point, the computer would track and stay locked on the red dot. He pressed the bomb release stud twice.

That only committed the drop. The weapons control computer would release the bombs at the optimal moment, considering altitude, speed, weight of the bomb, and the trajectory.

“Committed,” he reported.

“Two, ditto.”

A tall hill on the right penetrated the tolerance level of the computer and appeared on the HUD. He jinked slightly to the left.

“Watch it, One.”

“Sorry, Dingbat.”

One beep, then another, in his earphones signalled bombs away. The Alpha Kat surged upward a little as the weight dropped away.

“Bombs away,” Mabry said.

Kimball eased the stick back and shoved the throttle in, climbing steeply away from the target.

There was no flash and no roar of thunder behind them. The two men tending the target would report the extent of their accuracy later.

“Felt good to me, Dingbat,” Kimball said.

“Something missing though, Cheetah.”

“What’s that?”

“There wasn’t anyone shooting at us. I kind of expect people to shoot at us.”

“Not if we do it right.”

“That one of Murphy’s Laws, Cheetah?”

The compound rested on the brow of the hill, overlooking a deep, flat-floored valley. The view of the valley was not spectacular. There was a thin and meandering stream that eventually joined the Nam Hka. The stream was lined with deciduous trees, pines, and spruce. At two thousand meters of altitude, the jungle was not present.

At the head of the valley was a village composed of two dozen huts, shacks, and sheds. The village was blessed with electricity and a rude hospital, both gifts of the master.

In this part of the world, there was not much for the electricity to do. Each hut had a lightbulb, the hospital had a refrigerator, used by the entire village, and the chieftain’s hut had a radio.

Midway up the valley, a hundred meters from the stream, running parallel to it, was an asphalt runway. It was nearly 4,000 meters long, and it was not particularly level. Along its length, it rose and fell by several meters. It was not crowned well, and in the rainy season, pumps had to be used to drain the water from the pools that appeared. Asphalt was as rare as electricity and bespoke great wealth.

A twin-rutted road that was not asphalted, and which became as slippery as snakes in the rainy season, wove its way from the runway, up the side of the hill, to the compound. There were six trucks that used the road frequently, in addition to occasional forays into the village. The trucks had been brought into the valley by large airplanes and had nowhere else to go but to the runway, to the village, and back to the compound.

It was a large compound, and as it had grown, had amazed the villagers who walked up the valley to personally view the construction. The perimeter was composed of thick walls six meters tall. From the outside, above the walls, could be seen red-tiled roofs which joined to the walls. At intervals along the walls, high up, were small openings that appeared suspiciously to be gun ports. No one in the village had ever seen a fortress.

One villager, who had paced off the perimeter during construction, had professed that the long sides were three hundred paces long, about three hundred meters, and the short sides were two hundred paces long.

Inside, before the massive central doors in the wall had been closed to them, the villagers had seen houses being erected against the outside walls. They were tall houses, narrow, with two floors. Some houses appeared to have been constructed for the trucks.

The trucks went back and forth to the runway, meeting airplanes bringing in the building materials and strange furnishings. Trees and shrubbery in heavy tubs were flown in. The machinery that made electricity was placed in its own house farther up the hill, and eventually the wires that carried the electricity were nailed high on the trees and brought down to the village.

There was a little ceremony in which the chieftain thanked the master of the compound for his largesse.

Bolts of fabric and exotic rugs were carried in on the airplanes. Utensils and china and clothing were reported by the young boys who spied on the airplanes.

And then, several years before, all of the people who had constructed the compound got on the airplanes and left.

But the airplanes continued to come and to go.

And the master was often in residence.

Brock Dixon took the call on his secure line.

“Marvin Nash, General.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“Phoenix.”

“Something wrong?”

“Kimball blew my cover.”

“Shit! What happened?”

Nash reported the set-to with Kimball in the vacant hangar.

“He got the camera?”

“Yes sir, but it only had pictures of his own airplanes. He’s already seen them.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, there’s a few shots of some of his personnel.”

Jesus Christ. All he needed was to have someone make a connection between Nash and the Air Force Intelligence agency. The papers would play it up for all it was worth: “AFI Spying on Civilian Manufacturers.”

“Get the hell out of town, Nash.”

“Yes sir. But you know something, General…”

“What, damn it?”

“That’s a hell of an airplane, sir. I’ve been watching it for two days, and —”

“Back to Washington, Nash. Report to me.”

Kimball landed his Alpha Kat at the Buckley Air National Guard Base east of Denver at three o’clock in the afternoon. He fell in behind a blue Chevy pickup with a “Follow Me” sign on the back, and taxied to an area where a dozen elegant F-4 Phantoms were parked. He had always liked the Phantom, a stalwart of the Vietnam era.

An airman waved him into line, then gave him a cutthroat signal. Kimball shut down the turbofan, then the rest of his systems. Raising the canopy and lowering the ladder, he shrugged out of his harness and parachute, then unstrapped his helmet and placed it on top of the instrument panel.

He stood up in the cockpit and stretched. The flight from Phoenix had taken less than an hour. He had gone supersonic for about half of it.

While a couple of ground crewmen chocked the wheels, he slipped his legs over the coaming, found the spring-loaded toehold doors for his boots, and worked his way down to the ladder, then to the ground.

A beige Plymouth sedan crossed the tarmac and pulled up beside him. The back door opened, and he looked in to see Wilcox.

“Jesus Christ, Kimball! You weren’t supposed to bring the goddamned airplane.”

A crowd was already forming. Puzzled airmen and weekend fighter pilots emerged from hangars and airplanes and gathered to inspect the strange-looking Alpha Kat.

“It’d have been out of character for me not to bring it,” Kimball said. “I advertise, remember? And would I give up a chance to park the Alpha on a military base?”

“Get in.”

Kimball got in and sat next to Wilcox.

The driver kept his eyes trained forward. He was dressed in a dark suit, but he wasn’t a chauffeur by career choice, Kimball guessed.

“We going to get us a drink or dinner?” he asked.

“I was going to, yeah, but now I want you back in that plane and off this base.”

Wilcox handed him a black attaché case.

Kimball rubbed his thumb over the leather. “Nice case.”

“Keep it. The data we have on Lon Pot’s operations is in one folder. All of your clearances and permits are in there. Also duplicate sets of passports and visas.”

“Duplicate?”

“For all of your pilots. If somebody goes down somewhere sensitive, we want him carrying bogus ID.”

“That’s a little silly, isn’t it, Wilcox? All they’d have to do is round up a few pieces of airplane, and they could figure it out.”

“Tomorrow morning, a Federal Express truck will deliver some packages.”

“Christmas, already?”

“They’re self-destruct devices. I want one mounted in every damned plane you’ve got.”

“Ever since I said yes to this little enterprise, you’ve gotten pretty damned bossy, Wilcox.”

“You going to do what I say.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not in this particular case.”

“Then I guess we’ll sabotage the airplanes.”

He was going to do it, anyway. Kimball didn’t want any of his personal high-tech secrets falling into the wrong hands. But if he could irritate the man from the CIA, he didn’t mind doing that, either.

Despite what he had told Emilio Lujan, Derek Crider did not return immediately to Washington. If he could avoid the truth, he always did. It kept people from knowing too much about him or about what he was doing.

He flew to Puerto Rico and checked into the Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan.

After an excellent and leisurely dinner of lobster tails, Crider took a taxi to Old San Juan, then got out and strolled along Avenida Ponce de Leon. The tourists swirled around him, reacting negatively and positively to the chants and promises of the hawkers outside storefronts. Trinkets and T-shirts, scarves and baseball caps were offered at supposedly cutthroat prices. A little something to prove to the neighbors that Thelma and Walter had actually made it to the island.

It was a sultry night, the heat not dissipated by any breeze from offshore. Crider ambled along the sidewalk, letting others dodge him since he was bigger. Everyone was happy. No one seemed to notice the cold gray eyes that swept the street, looking for inconsistencies in the crowd.

He saw no problems for himself, and he turned down a side street to the Avenida Fernandez Juncos and slipped into a small bar. It was smoky and loud. A jukebox thumped hot reggae. The long bar was crowded, and all of the tables were occupied. He found the one he wanted far back, just outside the corridor to the reeking bathrooms.

He walked up to it and looked down at the four men sitting around it, drinking from long-necked bottles of Corona.

“Hey, Crider. Take a load off.”

The man named Wheeler slid his chair sideways and grabbed a fifth chair from the adjacent table.

Crider sat down and nodded at the others. He had met them and fought with them at various times in his life.

Wheeler, the only name he ever gave, was an ex-Navy SEAL. The right side of his face was scarred from a splash of napalm.

Del Gart had been in the Fifth Special Forces at the same time as Crider. He was as hard and tough now as he had been then, though now his skin was tanned the color of deer meat and his fair hair was bleached to white. His specialties were munitions and communications.

Corey O’Brian started out with the Irish Republican Army and, when the manhunt for him became too intense, volunteered elsewhere. Crider had met him in Angola. He was almost as good as Gart with bombs. Almost, since he was missing three fingers on his left hand.

Alan Adage was a hell of a sniper, a trade taught him in the Marines’ First Recon. His dark blue eyes were as cold as an Arctic night, and his nerve was smooth and steady. He wore a full beard which matched the brick red of his hair.

“Everybody must be hungry,” Crider said, “or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Always use a spot o’ cash,” O’Brian told him.

“Anybody to wonder where you went?”

They all shook their heads. They lived in places like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, and their neighbors were probably glad to see them leave.

“You said the money’d be good,” Wheeler said. “How good?”

“Hundred grand apiece. You’re in for the duration, but that’s maybe a month, five weeks. If it goes longer, I’ll boost the money.”

“Who’s the contractor?” Adage asked.

“No need to know,” Crider said. Hell, he didn’t even know, but he had some good ideas. He would never pursue them, of course, because people in his profession did not do that. Not if they wanted future work.

Wheeler asked, “This gonna to be wet work?”

Crider canted his head sideways and raised his hands palms up. “Don’t know about that, yet. Could get that way, but preferably not. If it gets to hostile fire, you get a bonus of twenty thou.”

“I’m in,” Adage said.

“Why not?” O’Brian agreed.

Wheeler nodded his head.

Gart asked, “We get to play with HE?”

Crider said, “High Explosive figures prominently in this job.”

“Yeah, I’ll go along,” Gart said. “What’s the action? Political?”

“There’s probably some politicking involved, but nothing that concerns us. We just guarantee that some airplanes don’t fly.”

“Piece of cake,” Wheeler said.