Alpha Kat

Fifteen

Kimball had been a little more relaxed in New Delhi, Jimmy Gander thought. He and Hamilton had handled the brass and delivered the product presentations. And Hamilton, in fact, was becoming pretty proficient at the public relations thing from the way Kimball had praised him afterward.

Which was all right with Gander. He didn’t want to be pressed into service as a glad-hander; he wanted to fly the missions, even if he had to play mama in the Kappa Kat as he had in India.

From the post-demonstration briefings conducted by whoever had served in the presentation role in Chad, Pakistan, and India, it was apparent that the Alpha Kat/Kappa Kat combination had impressed the observers for the most part. They oohed and aahed over the stealth and propulsion technology. Many appreciated the maneuver specifications and the vertical combat ability. Still, there seemed to be some reservations on the part of old-time air force commanders in regard to the tactical requirements, just as there was back in the U.S.

People, whether they were military aviators or not, were always resistant to change. When the F-4 Phantom was introduced, pilots generally reacted negatively. They didn’t like the thought of the guy in the back seat (GIB). Pilots wanted to do it all; particularly not share victories with some navigator, but the reality was that the increased sophistication of the radars and weapons systems meant that the pilot didn’t have time to do it all. He needed someone else to handle radar and weapons. And after they acclimated to it, the pilots came to love McDonnell Douglas’s F-4, the American fighter with the highest production record of any American strike aircraft.

For those accustomed to two-seat Phantoms and the Navy’s F-14 Tomcats, however, no one seemed to appreciate the efficiency of having one backseater in the Kappa Kat serving six to twelve fighters.

What was more, as far as the Phantom was concerned, the F-4 was utilized by the United States Air Force, Navy, and Marines. That was almost unheard of; the three military services normally fought like bear cubs to have their own distinctive, mission-dedicated aircraft.

The Alpha Kat and the Kappa Kat had been designed to take the stress of shipboard catapult launches and arrested landings, though they had not yet built a naval prototype. The airplanes were intended, like the Phantom, to be tri-service. And that capability, because of the in-born interservice jealousies, was a negative.

Another negative, as far as the reviewing committees had fed back to them, was that the Alpha Kat could not stand alone. They liked the price, but they didn’t like the lack of electronics. The Indian Air Force, a large one with forty-five squadrons, had experience with Sukhoi Su-7, French SEPECAT Jaguar, and MiG-21 fighters. Pilots and commanders who liked the idea of solo flight wouldn’t take kindly to the Alpha Kat’s reliance on an airborne control craft.

Hamilton had found one sympathetic ear in an Indian Navy admiral. India was the first country on the tour which operated an aircraft carrier, the INS Vikrant, with a current aircraft complement of Hawker Siddeley Sea Hawks and Harriers. While the admiral appeared excited, Kimball and McEntire had been less so. A sale of, say, two squadrons of Alpha Kats to the Navy might undermine any sales to the Indian Air Force if the normal interservice rivalries were maintained.

Kimball and McEntire, and all of them for that matter, were banking on the downsizing of defense forces and the shrinking of budgets to overcome tradition, rivalry, and customary operational tactics to sell the Alpha Kat concept. All of those traits of air defense organizations were deeply ingrained and would be difficult to combat.

“Bengals, Hawkeye,” Soames called on Tac Two, jolting Gander into a quick scan of his panel and the autopilot.

The five Alpha Kats chanted their numbers.

“Let’s take it down to angels six and make a right turn to one-three-five.”

Gander clicked his mike twice, reduced his throttle setting, and eased the controller over. On his right, Keeper, as Bengal Four, matched his turn.

The Kappa Kat and the two C-141s were ahead of him and lower by a thousand feet.

He assumed that somewhere along the way, Soames had received permission to enter Bangladesh’s air space because the wide expanse of the Brahmaputra River could be seen about five miles away. The sun reflected nicely off the water’s surface, and the jungle along its banks was a deep green.

Hiding the real Bengal tigers, no doubt. They’d be calling for Bengals Six through Ninety-Nine.

The two squadrons of the Bangladesh Defense Force (Air Wing) were based at Tezgaon and Jessore, but the demonstrations were scheduled to be mounted out of Dacca. Gander figured the Air Wing didn’t want the visitors to see anything supersecret, but doubted that Kimball would be shooting photos of ancient Shenyang F-4s or MiG-19s.

The letdown and approach into Dacca was uneventful, and by eleven o’clock, all of the tour aircraft were parked, as had become customary, in a separate section of the airport. There were some military brass on hand to greet them, and Kimball, McEntire, Soames, and Hamilton were whisked away. Gander didn’t think they were going bar-hopping.

Everyone pitched in to tie down the airplanes and run post-flight checks.

Everyone was subdued. The normal horseplay and macho jokes were absent.

Everyone knew this was the twenty-sixth of July.

Combat night.

Even Jimmy Gander was nervous.

Henry Loh sat alone in his office in the Quonset hut. In the outer office, he could hear Jake Switzer talking to his pilots, laying out their patrols for tomorrow morning. They would take off at six o’clock. Arrangements had already been made for them to land for refueling in Mandalay.

He picked up the telephone and asked the switchboard to get a number in Rangoon.

It was Mauk’s home telephone, and he answered on the third ring.

“Good day, Colonel.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Our preparations are complete.”

“That is excellent,” Mauk said. “And timely. The anticipation has created something of a morale problem. It will be rectified by action.”

“At five o’clock in the morning,” Loh said, “I will call you with the final signal.”

“I will be waiting.”

Loh depressed the cancel bar, then told the switchboard to get him the number in Bangkok.

Lon Pot, also, was waiting by the telephone.

“We are ready,” Loh reported.

“I have talked to the other chiefs,” Lon Pot said, “and they also are prepared. We will proceed.”

“After so many months of preparation, I am relieved.”

“As am I, my friend. I will be near this telephone if anything unexpected should arise. On the morning of the twenty-eighth, I will be at Don Muang Airport.”

“And I will pick you up there,” Loh promised.

He hung up and sighed deeply. He really did not know how well the operation would develop. Colonel Mauk was not to be trusted fully. If the man wanted the remaining four hundred thousand dollars committed to him, he would deliver the Union of Burma Air Force.

If Mauk betrayed Lon Pot, he would eventually die, and slowly. If Loh’s squadrons were ambushed by UBAF fighters, Loh would simply disappear.

And arise in Australia, or perhaps Tahiti, taking his long-deserved vacation. Later, he would find additional action elsewhere in the world.

The telephone rang and he picked it up.

As ever, he did not identify himself. “Yes?”

“I thought of one more thing,” Mauk said.

“What is that?”

“The defense ministry, purely without the consent of the air force, has scheduled a demonstration flight on the twenty-eighth.”

“A demonstration of what?” Loh asked.

“An American fighter called the Alpha Kat.”

“I have never heard of it.”

“It is a stealth-technology airplane. I have seen the specifications.”

“Why did you not tell me of this earlier?”

“It did not seem important,” Mauk said. “The country cannot afford new aircraft anyway.”

While Loh considered the timing, he asked, “How many aircraft are involved?”

“From the schedule I received from the ministry, six fighter planes and one AWACS aircraft.”

“They are to arrive on the twenty-eighth?”

“In the morning, yes. In Rangoon.”

“Very well,” Loh said, “if they do not cancel after the news breaks, let them come. We can always nationalize them and add them to our inventory.”

“Excellent,” Mauk said. “That is excellent.”

For the afternoon portion of the presentation, Kimball sat in the audience of air force officers and defense ministry officials and let Alex Hamilton carry the ball.

Hamilton had missed his calling, Kimball thought. His professorial air gave him a facade of competence and knowledge, and yet, he didn’t flaunt it. No arrogance, there. He had lost nearly twelve pounds since leaving the states, probably from lack of donuts and Danish as much as the heat, and in New Delhi, had had to have his suit taken in.

He looked smooth, and he spoke with a quiet, assured voice. He maintained nice eye contact with the audience, and even Kimball felt like he was welcome to buy a couple Alpha Kats. No rush, though. No pressure.

They were several miles north of Dacca, transported to the site by buses. Their rows of folding chairs were lined up under the fringe of jungle canopy, facing an open field. Several stewards moved about, offering cold drinks.

Out in the field, Walt Hammond and Elliot Stott had inflated one of the weather balloons from a helium cylinder. As he watched, the balloon lifted away, trailing its target package and a thousand-foot, slim nylon tether. The foot-square box suspended from the balloon contained a simple radio that emitted signals on the radar K-band, giving the radar-guided missiles something to home on. Additionally, the box contained a remotely fired flare, providing heat for the infrared seekers.

Kimball’s portable radio burped with static, then reported, “Lion, Hawkeye.”

Kimball raised the radio as a couple of his neighbors watched and said, “Go, Papa.”

“Any time you’re ready.”

“Stand by.”

Kimball signalled Hamilton, who departed from the holding pattern he had maintained with his presentation.

“As I mentioned a little earlier, gentlemen, the price of the Alpha Kat is kept as low as it is as a result of moving all of the high-cost electronics to the Kappa Kat. The fighter is, if we get down to earth about it, nothing more than a very maneuverable weapons platform. All it does is deliver the weapons. In the ground attack role, it can aim and release on its own.

“In the aerial defense role, however, in order to maintain its stealthy characteristics, there are shortcomings designed into the performance. Those shortcomings are made up in the control craft.

“The purpose of the exercise this afternoon, gentlemen, is to prove to you that two Alpha Kats can deliver missiles against an aerial target, utilizing the data links from the Kappa Kat. The weapons system officer is aboard the command craft, and he will make the target acquisition. That data is then fed to the attack aircraft, which will deliver the ordnance.

“For reasons of our visibility, the first fighter in will launch the AIM-9L missile from two miles, although as you know, the range could be up to eleven miles.”

Kimball watched Hammond and Stott preparing the second balloon for launch.

“The second strike aircraft will launch the AMRAAM active radar-targeting missile, which has an effective range of seventy miles. Again, so that we may see the performance, the launch will be made from two miles out.”

Hamilton raised a forefinger in Kimball’s direction.

“Hawkeye, Lion. Send Bengal One.”

“Roger that, Lion. I’ve already acquired the target.”

Hamilton swung an arm toward the east. “Gentlemen, you’ll have to watch closely since the Alpha Kat’s coloring is difficult to see even in daylight. You will want to watch the area of sky to your two o’clock, and in perspective, about three meters above the top of the jungle.”

Kimball spoke to Hammond on the radio. “Kickapoo, light the candle.”

“Roger, Lion.”

Out in the field, Hammond used his remote control to set off the flare. Abruptly, a bright white fluorescence blossomed below the balloon, which was high above them.

“Don’t look directly at the flare, gentlemen,” Hamilton cautioned. “It may affect your vision for a moment. There! We have visual on the incoming airplane.”

“What? Where… I don’t”

“Look slightly to the right, around two-thirty on our clock face,” Hamilton said.

Kimball spotted the Alpha Kat and heard others speak up as they finally found it. It was low, two thousand feet off the ground, and moving slowly, at around four hundred knots. They had decided to keep the speed down, to give the audience more than a couple of seconds of visual contact.

“The aircraft is moving at four hundred knots, gentlemen. The altitude is two thousand feet above ground level.”

The fighter was a pimple on the sky for several seconds, visible because she allowed herself to be backlit against the clear sky, then she rapidly grew in size. At two miles of distance, her canted rudders became discernible.

And two missiles lanced away from her, streaking thin white plumes of vapor behind them.

Both missiles appeared to spiral for a moment, as if their heat-seeking heads had lost contact with the target, then they locked on and whistled straight across the sky, rapidly accelerating to their top end of Mach 3.

They didn’t have to hit the target actually. The proximity detectors would detonate them within twenty feet of the objective if they didn’t hit.

One struck the box, and the other went off a few yards away.

A thousand feet up, with thirty pairs of eyes watching, the Sidewinders exploded.

There was only six ounces of explosive in the plastic case of each warhead, and not much of the detonation sound reached the audience. The balloon absorbed a few thousand plastic splinters, lost its buoyancy, and took a dive toward the far side of the field.

The Alpha Kat passed over a second later, already beginning a vertical climb.

Damn, she’s beautiful!

Hammond let go of the second balloon.

“Once again, gentlemen, if you’ll look to the east, we’ll find our second fighter.”

“Hawkeye, Lion. Number two,” Kimball said into the radio.

“Roger that, Lion. Bengal Two’s on the way.”

The launch of the radar-seeking AMRAAMs went off without a hitch, and Alex Hamilton pointed out to the audience the fact that, immediately on launch, the Alpha Kat turned off and headed north.

“The AMRAAM has an active radar-seeker,” Hamilton explained, “rather than semi-active. The missile is Fire-and-Forget. Our Alpha Kat is already looking for her next target while the AMRAAMs are taking care of this one.”

The second balloon also took two hits.

As they headed back toward the buses, one general asked Kimball if he could take another close look at the Alpha Kat, to assure himself that it did not have targeting radar. Kimball promised him that he could poke all over the plane. And he would stay close beside the man.

Climbing the steps into the bus, Kimball told Hamilton, “Nicely done, Alex.”

“Think so?”

“Damned right. You’re a natural.”

“That’s good, because I’m considering going into a television ministry.”

Kimball grinned at him. “Which one?”

“MLBM Club.”

“What’s that?”

“My Lord has Bigger Missiles.”

Six-and-a-half miles north of Dacca Airport, Derek Crider, Wheeler, Del Gart, Corey O’Brian, and Alan Adage worked quietly in the dark.

Gart opened both of the back doors of the rented van, climbed inside, and pushed the elongated canvas bags out to his cohorts.

Crider took his bag, weighing thirty-two pounds, found the canvas handles, and carried it off the road, down through a drainage ditch, and into the trees. The undergrowth grabbed at his ankles as he trudged along.

He could not see much, and he banged into the boles of several trees before he reached the tiny clearing thirty yards from the road.

The clearing was less than twenty feet across, but the stars were visible, and that was all that mattered.

The rest of the team emerged from the trees, and as his night vision became better, Crider could see their outlines as they knelt in the mixed grass and weeds and dirt and opened the bags.

Crider went to his own knees, found the big zipper with his hand, and pulled it open the length of the oblong case. Reaching inside, he withdrew the Stinger carefully.

He heard jet engines approaching and looked up. The clearance and strobe warning lights of an airliner appeared suddenly over the clearing. The silhouette blocked out the stars. That made it a clear enough target.

Having a couple of days planning time made all the difference. He had been able to reach his contact in Sri Lanka, and by the time Lujan put the Lear down at Dacca, the shoulder-fired Stinger surface-to-air missiles were already in-country.

He had used them before, as had Wheeler, Gart, and Adage. The whole unit weighed thirty-one pounds, and the missile itself weighed only twenty-two pounds. It carried a smooth-cased fragmentation charge, and it was guided by passive infrared targeting. The effective range was three miles.

He removed the protective covers and pressed a button to test the battery circuit. A green light told him the weapon was ready.

“You’re absolutely sure we’re in the right place?” Wheeler asked.

“Wind’s out of the north, and will be all night long,” Crider said. “They’ll take off right over us. You saw the commercial airliner.”

“We don’t want to shoot down anything with three hundred people on it,” Wheeler said.

“Why not?” O’Brian asked. “The panic would help us disappear.”

“I’ll tell you when to fire,” Crider said.

Crider spread them out in a long row, Adage on the far left, and they all sat down to wait. Crider took the right end of the row and cradled the Stinger across his lap.

“This sure as hell won’t look like equipment failure,” Gart said. “If we manage to hit all five of them.”

“They’ll take off the same way they did in New Delhi,” Crider said. “The command craft will go first, and we let it go. The fighters will take off as a pair, followed by three more. Alan, you and Del take the first two. Wait as long as you can, so the second flight doesn’t scramble on us.”

“It’s not going to look like an aircraft failure,” Gart repeated.

“At this point, I don’t give a shit. But to get down to it, Del, it’s a system failure. The infrared radiation on these planes is supposed to be low. When we hit them, they’ve failed, and no one’s going to buy a plane that can be taken out that easily.”

“You sure we can hit them, Crider?”

“The wavelength on these babies is less than four-point-four microns,” Crider said. “They track on an exhaust plume, rather than hot metal. The other thing to remember, they’ll be taking off under full power, producing more heat than they would at cruise. Another thing, on takeoff, I’m pretty sure they won’t have activated the infrared threat receivers. We’ll hit them. I want at least three of them to feel good.”

“That’s it? We’re getting paid to make you feel good?” O’Brian asked.

“Fuckin-A.”

Plus, he’d come out of it nearly a million ahead. That had made him feel good already.

The Kappa Kat had disappeared by the time Kimball received his takeoff clearances from Dacca Control. He was lined up on Zero-One Right, with Halek on his right wing.

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

Two clicks in reply.

Kimball shoved the throttle to the forward stop, watched his RPMs come up, then released the brakes.

The fighter slammed him back in the seat and played tricks with his facial muscles as it shot forward.

The HUD airspeed readout climbed quickly, and though he was loaded to the max with fuel and ordnance, he still got off the ground way short of the runway’s end.

Halek was right beside him, his left wingtip light less than twenty feet away.

Passing over the outer boundary markers, Kimball retracted his flaps and landing gear. The airspeed rose quickly to 350 knots.

“Bengal Three rolling,” McEntire reported on Tac Two as he started his takeoff run with a flight of three.

Kimball kept his rate of climb nominal, reading 150 feet per minute, as the lights of Dacca fell behind.

“Kill the lights, Two,” he ordered, and he and Halek shut down their running lights and anti-collision strobes. They would continue transmitting their IFF signals for the next five minutes.

Kimball was trimming his elevator and ailerons when Billingsly’s deep voice calmly reported, “All Bengals, IR threat. Go passive.”

Sixteen

“Son of a bitch!” Wheeler yelled.

Crider could not believe it.

He had seen the shadows of the first two planes blot out the stars. As soon as the next three appeared, he had soberly said, “Fire.”

He had had the Stinger trained on the far right aircraft in the second flight. The earphones chimed a lock-on, and he squeezed the trigger. The missile had leaped from the launch tube, hesitated a microsecond, and then the solid rocket engine ignited.

It had zoomed away, homing on the invisible vapor trail of the fighter.

Then began an erratic dance.

Five red dots of Stinger exhausts whipped haphazardly around the sky, looking for something to home on.

Then, one by one, they had exploded harmlessly as their rocket motors were spent.

The Alpha Kats were no longer there.

The shadows had evaporated.

Gone.

He leaped to his feet and started running through the trees back toward the road and the van.

“Come on, goddamn it!” he yelled at the others. He heard feet pounding behind him.

And slammed into the trunk of a tree.

With Hawkeye’s warning, Kimball had automatically pulled the throttle back, immediately reducing the turbofan’s heat output to nearly nil.

He watched the airspeed readout and eased the controller forward, putting the nose down in an attempt to maintain airspeed.

Counting.

Losing altitude fast.

Flipped on the infrared threat receiver.

Heard nothing.

No blinking visual alarms on the HUD.

Counting.

No one saying anything.

Reached fifteen in his count and began to increase power.

His altitude was down to three hundred feet above the jungle canopy.

Slowly, the nose came up. He added more power.

“Bengals, Hawkeye. I read five explosions. Give me a count.”

Kimball keyed the transmit button. “One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

“Four.”

“Five.”

The relief coursed through him.

“They were surface-to-air, infrared-tracking,” Billingsly said. “Probably infantry weapons.”

“One, Two here. I want to go back and plant a missile up their asses,” Halek said.

“Negative,” Kimball said. “You’d give us away.”

“Shit.”

“Maintain protocol, Two,” Billingsly said. “Let’s go hot mike.”

Kimball locked in his transmit mode.

“What do you think, Cheetah?” McEntire asked.

“Same bunch that has been playing tag with us. They’re getting more aggressive.”

“Getting desperate, you think?” Billingsly asked.

“Looks that way,” Kimball said, scanning the HUD to see that he was climbing through eight thousand feet. His speed was up to five hundred knots.

“One thing we know,” McEntire said, “there’s at least five of them.”

“We want to do anything about it?” Billingsly asked.

“Not now, Papa. We’ve got an exercise to run.”

“Roger that. Bengals, go to zero-eight-five, continue climbing to angels two-zero. At altitude, take it to Mach 1.5. I read you in close proximity to each other at this time. Now, kill the IFF.”

Kimball checked both sides of his canopy, blinked his wingtip guidelights once, and saw four low-wattage blinks in reply. Halek was on his right wing, and McEntire had brought his flight, with Gander and Makura, up on the left side.

“Roger that, Papa.” He shut down the IFF transponder.

“I’m taking my radar off the air,” Billingsly said. “Dart, take it to angels three-zero. Bengals, maintain course, altitude, and speed.”

The target was 435 miles away. At Mach 1.5, approximately 1,100 miles per hour at their altitude, the target was 23 minutes away. With a decrease in speed for the approach to the target, and a time on target of less than thirty seconds, the round trip was going to take them about fifty minutes.

Kimball checked his watch. A.J. Soames and Alex Hamilton would just now be headed to the Bangladesh target area to brief the observers. He could count on Hamilton to while away the time in an interesting fashion.

The strategy for this demonstration had been changed. They had taken off an hour before the planned strike on the dummy target in order to give the Bangladesh air force a large block of time to try and find them.

He could imagine the F-6s and MiG-19 Farmers taking off from Tezgaon and Jessore right now. They would blunder around the Bangladesh skies, hoping to bump into their adversaries, if only by accident.

The adversaries, however, were no longer in Bangladesh air space.

Kimball checked the fuel load. Fuel consumption was right on the money. They had much more fuel than necessary for the mission, but he liked to keep tabs on it.

“Bengals, go to one-one-five.”

“Roger one-one-five, Papa.” Kimball eased the controller over, and when the new heading came up on the HUD, locked in the autopilot.

The course change meant they were now over Indian territory once again.

Seventy miles to the south-south-west would be the Bay of Bengal. He checked over his shoulder, but it was too dark on a moonless night to make out water. There were clouds to the south, too, but he couldn’t see them.

He checked the armaments panel. He had two Mk 84 five-hundred-pound bombs on the centerline hardpoints. On the inboard pylons were four Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, and on the outboard pylons were four Sidewinders.

The other four aircraft were armed identically.

With the panel selectors, he chose the aft bomb and Hellfires one and three. Carl Dent had very carefully loaded the simulator weapons labeled Mk 84B and System Two in those positions. Two of the Sidewinders on the outboard pylons were also live weapons, just in case they ran into opposition from interceptors.

“Bengals, we’re at eight minutes and counting,” Billingsly said.

“Bengals, One. Select weapons.”

Kimball received four affirmative responses.

“Papa,” he said, “I want weapons release.”

“Bengals, weapons are released.”

Kimball armed his selected weapons, then deployed the laser and infrared targeting lens. He selected both the night vision and infrared modes. At six minutes out, he pulled the infrared reader down over his visor. The irritating yellow square appeared in his vision. “Bengals, One. Trail formation.”

Kimball switched off the autopilot and turned on his wingtip guidelights for a minute, to allow the others to fall into a single line behind him.

Billingsly would be double-checking his navigation equipment now, feeding in the coordinates that Wilcox had given them. The supposedly hidden airfield that Lon Pot called Shan Base had at least four Maruts, one Mirage, two Aerospatiale choppers, and five or six transports in residence. According to Wilcox’s sources, the commander was an American deserter named Switzer. His record as an Air Force pilot stateside and in Vietnam was dismal, and Kimball didn’t give a damn whether the man survived the raid or not. He and Sam Eddy had discussed the advisability of telling the others they knew about Switzer, then decided against it.

“Bengals, Hawkeye. I’m giving you a data-link.” Kimball switched on his primary receiver and took a few seconds to orient himself with the display on the CRT. His blinking blue blip was centered on the screen. Near the top was the target, shown in orange.

They did not have map overlays for this part of the world, but Billingsly had programmed the target’s coordinates into the computer and the GPS navigation data placed the target in the correct location on the screen.

Kimball turned slightly to the right, centering his path toward the target.

“Bengals, no airborne traffic to speak of.”

A minute went by.

Very slowly.

“Bengal One, Hawkeye. Begin your approach. We want four-zero-zero knots. Start your dive.”

Every step of the attack had been planned during the briefing, but Billingsly would keep them on track with a checklist.

“Roger, Papa. Initiating approach.”

Kimball retarded his throttle, and when the airspeed indicator dropped out of the Mach numbers, eased the nose over and deployed the speed brakes.

A glance through the canopy gave him only the impression of jungle. He couldn’t really see it.

“Bengals, Hawkeye. Select sequence.”

On the armaments panel, he set up the sequence of weapons selection, the two Hellfires first and the bomb last.

The orange dot moved down the CRT.

“Bengals, one minute,” Billingsly said. “I’m going active for two sweeps.”

The air controller checked the immediate air space with his radar, then switched it back to passive.

“Two unidentifieds to the south, six-zero miles,” he reported. “Nothing airborne in the immediate vicinity.”

Kimball switched the screen to night vision.

His blip and the target blip disappeared, replaced by a green-hued image of the jungle top. He raised his head, moving the lens upward, seeking something.

He eased the controller backward, pulling slowly out of his dive.

Flashed his wingtip guidelights once.

There.

A rent in the jungle.

Lighter green on the screen.

Coming up fast.

Checked his rate of descent.

Jinked to the left.

Behind him, Halek would be going to the right a trifle, to attack the right side of the field.

With a thumb wheel on the control stick, he magnified the camera’s image.

The clearing in the jungle leaped at him.

Aircraft parked along both sides of the pierced steel plank runway.

He dropped his head slightly. The yellow square found a fighter.

Marut.

Fingered the commit button.

LOCK-ON flashed on the HUD.

Raised his head.

C-123?

Commit.

LOCK-ON.

The first Hellfire leaped from its rail, trailing a white hot exhaust that would have dimmed his vision if he had been looking through the canopy.

He eased to the right, centering on the runway.

The second Hellfire whooshed away.

He centered the yellow square on the middle of the steel plank airstrip.

Commit the Mk 84.

Ease back on the control stick.

The clearing, the runway, everything disappeared from the screen.

“One’s clear.”

As he pulled the nose up and advanced the throttle, the jungle in his rearview mirror erupted.

Pinpricks of yellow-red light. Bright spouts of yellow-blue-orange. Very quiet. He couldn’t hear the detonations.

“Two’s clear.”

He dropped his right wing and went into a shallow right turn, peering out the right side of the canopy.

There were more explosions shattering the deadly darkness of the jungle.

“Three’s clear.”

Fires began to rage out of control. He saw streaks of white light as more Hellfires poured into the clearing.

“Four’s clear.”

A tremendous volcano of red and yellow spouted near the east end of the runway. Probably fuel storage.

“Five’s clear.”

The HUD compass reading came up on 280, the heading selected at the briefing for the climb out, and Kimball leveled his wings, then added more power.

“Let me have a light, One,” Halek called out.

Kimball gave him two flashes, and he sensed, more than saw Halek closing up on his right wing.

“Well done, Bengals,” Billingsly said. “Now, let’s go see if we can’t show our hosts what the Alpha Kat can do.”

Jimmy Gander, as Bengal Five, had been the last one through. He pulled out of his turn, calling to Makura, “How about a hint, Falcon?”

As soon as Ito Makura flashed a light for him, he eased up behind and above Makura’s wing, then jockeyed the throttle until his speed matched.

“Bengals, Hawkeye. Sitrep.”

One by one, they reported fuel and weapons status. All of the planned ordnance had gotten off, and none of the five reported damage of any kind.

Gander couldn’t wait. He rewound the video tape for the nightsight camera and played it back at half-speed. The CRT gave him his moment in history.

He didn’t remember seeing half of what the camera said he saw. His adrenaline had been as high as the first time he had soloed.

“Hawkeye, Five.”

“Go Five.”

“You want a bomb damage report?”

“Damned right,” Billingsly said. “It’s tough being in the dark up here. First, everyone up to Mach 1.5?”

After they all checked off on the speed, Gander said, “I’m on the replay. Coming in. Freeze. Before I let go, I see… well hell, there’s a lot of smoke, fire everywhere… a 123 with a wing blown off; one, no two Maruts in flames; a truck in pieces. Advancing tape.”

The green tinted images were difficult to interpret with the thick haze of green smoke swirling around. He saw men running, some as if they were in panic. He hadn’t noticed them at all on his run. After glancing ahead at the dim outline of Makura’s Alpha Kat, he looked back to his CRT and continued, “There’s a Mirage on the south side of the strip with its nose blown off, flaming. C-47 on fire. There’s a DC-6 that looks okay, but I fired on it. My Hellfire’s frozen just before impact. Jeep on its top. Big damned holes in the runway, debris still flying through the air. Advancing tape. The Hellfire hit the DC-6. Another Marut on fire. Small single engine, maybe an old Aeronica, in flames. Aerospatiale that I launched on. Another chopper in pieces. Jesus! They were shooting at us!”

“Who?” Kimball asked.

“Couple guys with rifles. Maybe they saw us in the light of the flames. I don’t think I was hit. Coming on through. Whoo! That had to be a fuel depot. Nice shot, Falcon. I went through the flames, so they must have been a couple hundred feet high. That’s it.”

“I count three Maruts, a Mirage, two choppers, three transports,” Billingsly said. “That’s an expensive night for someone.”

“Think we put a crimp in their plans, Cheetah?” McEntire asked.

“If I was in charge back there, Irish, I’d spend the rest of the night reevaluating.”

“Bengals, Hawkeye. We’re fifteen minutes away from the target. I want everyone to pull the audio and video cassettes and store them. Insert fresh cassettes. Do it now.”

After Billingsly received affirmative responses, he said, “Secure the two Mod-two Sidewinders now. I won’t allow accidents.”

Gander checked his armaments panel and de-selected the live AIM-9s.

“All right, Bengals. One, take your element to two-six-five. Three, go to three-one-zero.”

“One, roger two-six-five.”

“Three going three-one-zero.”

Gander counted to two, then banked right into the new heading.

The excitation level of his blood had just about come back to normal. This was going to be a boring run.

A.J. Soames and Alex Hamilton were at the demonstration site with around twenty Bangladesh air force officers and two civilians. They were under a large canopy illuminated with red lights. Most of the observers were gathered around two large tables loaded with sandwiches.

Hamilton seemed to be at ease as he mingled in the crowd, talking to anyone who wanted to talk.

Soames was fidgety. The portable radio was slippery in his hands, coated with his own sweat.

The radio came to life. “Lion, Hawkeye.”

He raised it to his face and said, “Lion.”

“I think we’ve given them enough time to try and find us. We’re commencing the exercise with five.”

At the crackle of radio static, Hamilton had looked over at him.

Soames smiled and nodded.

“Gentlemen,” Hamilton said, “I hate to disrupt the excellent meal, but I believe we’re under attack.”

He got some smiles in return.

“If you all would like to step outside and look toward the target, I can promise you that in a few minutes, there will not be a target.”

The fires were out.

Except for the raging flames rising from the destroyed fuel tanks at the northeast end of the field.

Six hundred thousand imperial gallons would burn for a long time.

The thick, acrid smoke hung heavily in the windless clearing. Henry Loh had ordered the engines of the two undamaged aircraft, a Cessna 310 and a Douglas DC-4, started, and the planes had been turned in place in the attempt to fan the smoke with the propellers.

A dozen men toured the mounds of wreckage with fire extinguishers, searching out hot spots. At Shan Base, water was in short supply, and they did not have an effective fire control plan.

In fact, no plan had ever been developed for an attack on Shan Base. It was too well disguised. It would never happen. Henry Loh had known that.

Henry Loh was stunned.

He and Jean Franc, who served as his executive officer, walked the southern side of the strip, examining the remains of the First Squadron. As far as he could tell, less than ten percent would be salvageable as spare parts. No airplane that had been hit would fly again.

Halfway down the airstrip, they met Jake Switzer coming toward them. Like themselves, he was carrying a six-cell flashlight.

Switzer was chanting drawn-out repetitions of American obscenities.

“Jake?” he asked.

“I just cannot fucking believe this, Henry. We’re wiped out.”

Franc waved at the two aircraft whose engines were roaring at half-power settings. “Just the two left?”

“That’s the sum of it,” Switzer said. “You get a casualty count?”

“There are four dead and three wounded,” Franc said. “One pilot lost, as well as three technicians.”

“Fuck. Who’s my pilot?”

“Lung. He was sleeping in a hammock under his Marut.”

“Dumb shit.”

“The ordnance dump?” Loh asked. It was located on the east end of the field, a half-kilometer to the south.

“It’s all right. We’ve got more fucking missiles than we need. We can’t deliver them anywhere.”

He did not need to ask about the fuel stores. He thought of the endless trips they had made with the tankers, amassing their supply of aviation gasoline and JP-4 jet fuel.

Loh trained his light on the center of the runway. Pierced steel planking had been ripped out of the surface. Splinters and shards of bent steel were everywhere. A crater three meters deep and ten meters in diameter was carved almost exactly in the center of the runway.

“It’ll take us two fucking days to repair the runway,” Switzer said.

“We will recruit from the Hsong tribe,” Loh told him. “It must be done in one day.”

“Shit! Have you talked to Burov or Chung? If they got hit, too, we’re done for.”

“Not yet. The telephone lines are being repaired. I do not wish to use the radio.”

The three pilots turned around and began walking to the west, crossing the runway between two craters. They entered the trees, trudging toward Loh’s Quonset hut. Farther back in the jungle were hooches and tents utilized by the pilots and ground support people. None of them had been damaged.

As they entered the Quonset, their boots beating on the wooden floor, an Indian communications technician told Loh that the telephone line had been repaired.

He went straight back to his office, sat at the small wooden desk, and lifted the telephone.

He called Chung first.

The commander of the Third Squadron was not in bed.

“We are almost ready to launch aircraft, Henry.”

“You may put them on standby, Kao.” He briefly reported on the attack at Shan Base.

“No! It is impossible! Who?”

“I do not know, Kao. There were five aircraft. They fired ten missiles and dropped five bombs, probably five-hundred pound bombs. That would make them light ground assault craft. Two of my men saw the fifth airplane, but they describe it only as a delta-winged fighter. There were no markings that they recognized, or could see.”

“Mauk? Would he have betrayed us?”

“He would be my first suspect,” Loh said. “It is likely that he knows the location of Shan Base. I do not know where he would obtain the aircraft my men described.”

“I will launch aircraft now and obliterate our fine Colonel Mauk,” Chung said.

“No. Let me first make telephone calls. And send me one of your helicopters immediately.”

Loh hung up, then called Burov. Their conversation was a copy of the one he had just held with Chung.

When he had finished with the ex-Soviet, he said, “Jake, you and Jean should start making calls around the province. Tell everyone to hold in place until they hear from me. Jake, call Micah Chao and Vol Soon, first.”

“You will call the Prince?” Switzer asked.

“I will call the Prince,” Loh said.

When the telephone rang, Lon Pot was sound asleep.

He awoke, but stayed warm on his side of the bed while Mai got up and went to the living room.

She came back quickly. “Master, it is Henry Loh.”

Rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of his fists, Pot slipped out of the bed and walked naked into the living room. He picked up the receiver resting on the sideboard.

“There has been a setback, Prince.”

That woke him up.

“Setback! What is this of a setback?”

“The First Squadron has been totally demolished.”

“That is not true.”

“It is unfortunately true, Prince.” Loh quickly detailed the attack.

“Mauk. It must be Mauk.” Pot felt the anger building deep in his stomach, spreading throughout his body. He would have heads impaled on poles. They would be carried through every village.

“That is possible, but not yet proven.”

“Send Chung against him.”

“We must not react just yet, Prince. A commander does not make decisions on impulse. We must have more information before deciding on a course of action.”

“But we are to make the transition today,” Pot insisted. He rubbed the center of his chest. His heart felt as if it were on fire.

“It must be delayed.”

“I will not tolerate delay. Today is the day I become Prince of Burma.”

He could hear Loh’s sigh.

“Is that not so?” Pot demanded.

“If Mauk has betrayed us, then all of the Burmese army and air force may be waiting in ambush, Prince. I must go to Rangoon and learn what I can. I must meet with Micah Chao.”

“How long must this delay take?” Pot asked, his aspirations sinking.

“At least two days, I think. The morning of the twenty-ninth.”

“Make it so,” Pot said and slammed the telephone down.

He turned toward the bedroom, feeling the heat suffusing his face.

Mai waited in the hallway for him.

“Master? Is —”

The flat of his palm caught her on the low side of her neck, and the blow smashed her against the wall.

“Goddamn it!” Wilcox shouted over the phone. “They were supposed to attack Chiang Base.”

“They didn’t,” Simonson told him. “I’ve got the satellite photos on the desk right in front of me, Ben.”

“That sonovabitching Kimball pulled a switch on me!”

“Tit for tat, I’d guess,” Simonson said.

“Jesus!”

Wilcox was up and dressed. He had been waiting in the secure room of the American Embassy in New Delhi for Simonson’s call. The Deputy Director of Operations was monitoring the action in Burma through the National Security Agency’s overhead reconnaissance.

“What’s the damage?” Wilcox asked.

“Damned near total, from what we can interpret of the photos. The jungle overhangs the area along the strip, and we don’t get a clear view, but it looks as if there were a hell of a lot of airplanes on fire. That would be the whole First Squadron of the Dragon Wing, from what you told me. Almost a third of Pot’s air force.”

“You think that’ll cancel his coup, Ted?”

“If it doesn’t, it still buys us some time. I’ve told my people to get out and listen for rumors.”

Wilcox couldn’t get over Kimball’s treachery. “Goddamn it. It was supposed to be Chiang Base.”

“What the hell, Ben? He accomplished the purpose. Who gives a shit about Shan Base, anyway?”

“My source does.”

“Why?”

“That’s where he’s supposed to be.”

Seventeen

The Aerospatiale Gazelle five-seater was the helicopter assigned to Henry Loh by Lon Pot. It was painted in ivory with a twin band of red stripes running fore and aft. Lon Pot envisioned the twin red stripes on an ivory background as his eventual flag.

Kao Chung had sent it to Shan Base in the middle of the night, and Henry Loh had commandeered it for his trip to Rangoon, where he landed at four-fifteen in the morning.

Micah Chao was waiting for him.

The Police Chief was obviously not in good humor. In Rangoon, which was not yet officially Lon Pot’s territory, of course, he was not allowed to wear his camouflage uniform and his Sam Browne belt. Without the belt and his huge Colt .45, he did not appear to carry the authority to which he felt he was entitled.

Loh slid out of the pilot’s seat as the rotors ran down and ducked his head against the swirl of heated air. Despite the early morning, it was still sticky lukewarm in Rangoon, and once he left the rotor’s down-wash, the heat licked at him. He crossed the ramp with long strides to where Chao waited beside his Renault sedan.

The storm that covered Chao’s face was reflected in his voice. “Tell me what happened.”

Loh detailed the events quickly and then asked, “Have you suspended your operation?”

Chao nodded, somewhat miserably. “The snipers have all been pulled back.”

Chao had his hand-picked sniper teams placed all over the city, ready to neutralize those high-level police, military, and government officials who did not favor a change in the status quo.

“This is not good for morale,” Chao argued. “Any delay at all makes the men tense and more susceptible to error. We should have proceeded, despite the losses.”

Henry Loh passed the blame to Lon Pot. “It was the Prince’s decision. If Colonel Mauk has betrayed us, then we need to know what other surprises await.”

“Mauk? Why Mauk?”

“Who else controls attack aircraft?”

“Perhaps the Thais. Mauk never left his quarters last night. Two regular patrols of SF.260MBs flew from here last night, nothing more.”

“You are certain of this, Micah?”

“Absolutely. My intelligence network is utterly reliable,” Chao boasted.

The policeman’s certainty undermined Loh’s confidence. He had been positive that Colonel Mauk had changed his mind, or had his mind changed for him, and initiated the surprise raid. In fact, Loh had looked forward to a confrontation with Burma’s ragged air arm. He had always wanted to be an ace, and he had foreseen five or more slow 260MBs falling to the missiles and guns of his Mirage.

“We have a serious problem, Micah, if we do not know our aggressors.”

“That is the first thing you have said with which I agree. Do we have a new date?”

“Yes, the twenty-ninth. But we must first determine the origin of the attack on Shan Base. If not, we may have to delay longer.”

“Lon Pot would not agree,” Chao said.

“If it meant the possible failure of the coup, he would be forced to agree.”

Chao leaned back against the fender of the automobile and considered him with mean eyes.

“You have radar, antiaircraft guns, and surface-to-air units at each of the bases…”

“As well as the Prince’s compound and many of Vol Soon’s army garrisons,” Loh added.

“And yet, your elaborate defenses did not anticipate this attack. How is this possible?”

Loh did not like interrogations. They reminded him of the severe questioning he had once undergone at the hands of a Khmer Rouge maniac. He kept his voice steady, however, in response. “Squadron Commander Switzer is now interviewing the radar and missile crews, but it appears that they saw nothing. That is not impossible, Micah. The hostile aircraft could have flown low enough to evade radar contact.”

“Across several hundred kilometers of Burmese territory? Without being spotted, or heard, by persons on the ground?”

“Difficult, yes. Impossible, no.”

Chao pushed himself away from the fender. “Let us go see Mauk.”

“We should not risk public contact with him,” Loh protested.

“The risks have changed, have they not?”

Henry Loh nodded and crawled into the back of the car. Chao’s driver started the engine and found his way to the airport gate, then into the labyrinth of streets that crisscrossed Rangoon.

Colonel Kun Mauk’s residence was a narrow, two-story, French-styled villa cramped on a small lot overlooking the river. The driver spun the wheel and slid the car into the drive, startling the single guard standing nearly asleep against the trunk of a sugar palm. He came to belated attention, but did not offer a protest as Chao and Loh left the car and climbed the three short steps to the front door of the villa.

The ground floor windows were already illuminated. Mauk would have risen early on this important day.

When he opened the door readily at Chao’s insistent banging, he was already dressed in his uniform. He eyed them both, then nodded them inside with his head.

“There is trouble, then?” Mauk asked.

“You will need to postpone your part of the operation,” Loh said.

“For how long?”

“Two days.”

“I will make a telephone call.”

Loh and Chao followed him from the foyer into a small living room and waited while he made a single telephone call.

He replaced the receiver after issuing curt orders, then turned to Loh. “The nature of the problem?”

Loh explained it to him in detail.

“There were no radar contacts?”

“None. Would the Thais have intervened?”

“I think not,” Mauk said.

“Who then?”

Mauk’s eyes were opaque as he considered the possibilities. “The Americans.”

“That is insane,” Chao insisted.

“Not so,” the colonel said. “They have long been concerned about stability in the region.”

“Not to the point of armed interference,” Chao said. “From where? An aircraft carrier?”

“From Dacca.”

“Dacca! You are insane.”

“There is a demonstration group of stealth aircraft on display there. I told you about them, Henry. The airplanes would be capable of making such a strike,” Mauk said. “The distances are not long.”

Loh was incensed. He had not known that the aircraft were nearby. His intelligence-gathering capabilities were limited.

“You told me they were due in Rangoon on the twenty-eighth, Colonel. You did not tell me they were poised to strike against us.”

“And how would I have known that?” Mauk said. “I know only that this American, Bryce Kimball, will show his airplanes to us.”

“What do they look like?”

Mauk’s eyes focused on something else. “The brochure had a drawing. I think they are smaller than most interceptors. A delta wing, almost. Twin rudders. I remember that it uses a single jet engine.”

Exactly what his man had seen, or thought he had seen. Loh could not understand the treachery. “It is the Americans!”

Micah Chao offered a twisted grin. “To whom will we complain? The United Nations?”

“We will assure that it does not happen again,” Loh said. “I will order Chung’s squadron to attack them in Dacca. The Bangladesh Air Force will not intercede.”

“It is unnecessary,” Mauk said. “They will be here in the morning. Why should we destroy the airplanes when we can use them?”

Both the afternoon aerial demonstration and the night ground attack exercise had gone smoothly, and Kimball was more than satisfied. He, A.J. Soames, and Alex Hamilton had conducted the post-demonstration briefing for three hours in the morning, and the Bangladesh defense establishment had appeared duly impressed. Kimball left the conference feeling that, if they could find the money, they would spring for enough aircraft to complete one or two squadrons.

For a change, their schedule gave them an afternoon free. They weren’t due to fly into Rangoon until morning, and as soon as his cab reached the hotel, Kimball headed for the room he shared with McEntire. Except for the guard contingent at the airport, most of the KAT employees were touring Dacca or sacking out.

Kimball intended to sack out.

Sam Eddy was already in the room, slouched in one of the two chairs at a small table. Two glasses and the bottle of Black Label were on the table in front of him.

Kimball shut the door. “Drinking without me?”

“Just looking at it, waiting for you to get back. How did it go?”

“If it weren’t for the committees that have to get involved, we’d have had some signatures on the dotted line. Sometimes, I wish we were selling used cars.”

“Too easy, Kim. You and me, we’ve always made it more difficult than it had to be. You want?”

“I want.”

McEntire picked up the bottle and poured them each a couple inches of scotch.

Kimball flopped in the chair opposite him and took a sip from the glass. It went down smoothly despite its iceless warmth.

They had been so busy in the last couple of weeks that Kimball hadn’t taken a good look at his best friend for awhile. He was conscious now of a subdued aspect to Sam Eddy that didn’t seem usual.

“You doing all right, Sam Eddy?”

“Me? I’m doing Jim dandy, Kim-O.”

“Any after-effects from the mission?”

McEntire thought about it and then shrugged. “Naw. It felt good. The airplanes did what we knew they’d do. And I’m damned glad everyone came through it clean.”

“Me, too. I was sure the first attack would be a real surprise, and I didn’t expect any ground fire. It looks like there were a few potshots, but we didn’t find any damage to Jimmy’s plane.”

“Next time,” McEntire said, “I want to be the last one through.”

“Next time, we’ll change the tactics.”

McEntire poured them each another half-inch. “Next thing you know, we’ll be out of booze.”

“We can stock up in Bangkok.”

“Yeah, Bangkok. What about Rangoon? You think we can stretch enough time on the night flight to reach, what is it?… Chiang Base?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. Another half hour of flight time. And we want to put a little fear into that army garrison at Mawkmai.”

“Too bad we don’t have something nuclear with us,” Sam Eddy said. “We could waste us a lot of poppies.”

“Next year, on the next tour, we’ll bring defoliants with us.” Kimball wished that someone in world government had the courage to wipe out the production capability of the Golden Triangle.

“Next year, you bring defoliants with you.”

“Retiring, are you?”

“Sure as hell thinking about it,” McEntire said. “I’m getting too old for this shit.”

Kimball sipped his scotch and studied McEntire, then finally decided the man was just tired. They all were. Adapting to a round-the-clock routine wasn’t easy.

“What are you thinking now?” he asked.

“I’m thinking they’ll be ready for us next time. We’ll see some SAMs and some triple-A, whether they can track us or not.”

“Probably. You getting worried?” Kimball asked.

“Not me, babe.”

“I know who is. We should make a couple calls.”

“Probably.”

“It’s after midnight in Phoenix. Let’s get Susie out of bed for a change. Go ahead and ring her up.”

“You do it, Kim. She won’t want to talk to me.”

“Sam Eddy, what the hell? Are you —”

“No, Kim. It’s not up for discussion.”

“She still loves you,” Kimball said.

“She’s a beautiful lady,” McEntire said, “in more ways than one. Let’s just say I disappointed her, and now she’s confused. My fault, and I admit it. End of discussion.”

Kimball lifted the receiver from the set on the table, got the switchboard, and placed his transoceanic call. He had to wait six minutes before the call was completed and the operator rang him back.

“Sorry to get you out of bed,” he said.

“I wasn’t in bed,” Susan said. “But I was thinking about it.”

“First of all, everyone’s in great shape.”

“Sam Eddy?”

Kimball looked over at him. “Maybe a little tired. We all are.”

“Did you…”

“Yes. A-okay.”

“It was earlier than planned,” she said.

“Yes. There’s a new situation, but we think we’ve delayed it.”

“Just two to go,” she said, and he knew she was talking about the extracurricular activities.

“That’s all.”

“Give my love to everyone.”

“Everyone will be happy to hear that.”

“And you be careful, Kim.”

“That’s me, thinking about number one.”

“Why don’t you let the others do the flying? You’re the president, and we need…”

“Susie.”

“Sorry. Call me tomorrow.”

Kimball hung up. “The long-distance billing is going to be higher than the fuel bill.”

“She worries about you,” Sam Eddy said.

“I don’t know why.”

“Someday, you’ll have to sit down and think about it. What about Wilcox?”

“I don’t think he’s going to be happy with us.”

“That’ll improve my day,” McEntire said. “I’ll make this call.”

Emilio Lujan landed the Learjet in Rangoon at eleven o’clock in the morning. The six of them cleared the Customs section and were checked into their hotel by 12:30 P.M. They had lunch in the dining room, then gathered in Crider’s room.

“Suggestions?” Crider asked. He rubbed the side of his nose, which was still sore. He had damned near broken it when he ran into the tree. It was swollen and red.

Lujan opened the French doors to the balcony and stepped out onto it. Crider figured the pilot didn’t want to hear, or know, more than it was necessary for him to know.

“The fucking missiles sure as hell didn’t work,” Del Gart said.

“There’s too much we don’t know about those planes,” Wheeler said. “They obviously had some kind of infrared threat warning capability.”

“I’ll bet I could hit a tire or two on takeoff, if I had the right rifle,” Alan Adage said.

“Tires go flat,” Crider said. “That wouldn’t look like a manufacturing problem unique to Kimball Aero.”

“Shooting five planes down with Stingers isn’t much of a manufacturing defect,” Wheeler noted.

“It could have looked like one plane malfunctioning and colliding with the others,” Crider said.

“Not bloody likely,” O’Brian told him.

“Or terrorist hits, showing the planes aren’t as stealthy as Kimball Aero advertises,” Crider added, which had been his scenario from the beginning.

“Let’s get real,” Wheeler said. “Rehashing history isn’t doing the job.”

Crider thought about it for a few minutes, then said, “Maybe we’re going at this the wrong way. The contractor wanted us to make it look like a manufacturing problem, and that’s the route I followed the first couple of times. But then I thought that the contractor may be a little shortsighted, so we tried it as a breakdown in infrared detection. Obviously, that didn’t work either.”

Wheeler licked his lips. With the napalm scars on his right cheek, his lips always looked dry. “What you’re saying, Crider, is that you don’t want the Kimball Aero planes to live up to their billing as stealth planes?”

“Right. Can we make them visible on radar? We could destroy their reputation right there, without having to plant any more explosives.”

Del Gart, who had the most experience with electronics, got out of his chair and wandered around the room. The others watched him.

Finally, Gart said, “Yeah, if I can find the right components, we can rig up something. We could even arrange some other problems.”

“Such as?” Crider asked.

“Missiles or bombs get hung up on the aircraft, for one. Landing gear doesn’t deploy. Things like that.”

“I like it,” Crider said. “But let’s keep it as simple as possible because we don’t have a hell of a lot of time. You sit down, Del, and figure out what you need. When you’ve got a list, the rest of us will get out and find what you need.”

Gart got himself a sheet of stationery and a ballpoint pen from the desk, then sprawled out on the bed.

When Ben Wilcox got back to the Embassy, there was a message for him. The message said, “Stay in your damned room.”

He hadn’t expected to hear from them so soon. He got a Seven-up and took it to the secure room.

He waited nearly an hour, sitting at a scarred table and reading Indian travel brochures, before the communications specialist signalled him and he picked up the phone.

“Yeah?”

“About time you got back,” McEntire said.

“Where are you calling from?”

“My hotel. I’ll play your game; no details.”

“What in the hell were you two thinking about?” Wilcox asked.

“Life. Love. The pursuit of happiness.”

“You picked the wrong place.”

“No, it was delightful, old boy. In the middle of sleepy-time. No one was expecting us.”

“Goddamn it! You’re taking my orders.”

“You get to see the pictures?” McEntire asked, ignoring him. “I’m sure you’ve got pictures.”

Wilcox eyed the stack of satellite photos resting on the corner of the table. Simonson had transmitted them to him early in the morning.

“I saw them.”

“What’s it look like?” McEntire asked, with obvious enthusiasm.

“You levelled the place. There were four KIA.”

“That’s damned good camera resolution says this engineer. You actually saw the dead bodies?”

“I talked to my source.”

“We read the papers this morning,” McEntire said. “Nothing seems to have happened on the twenty-seventh in a certain Southeast Asian nation. Do you think we scared them off, Mr. Washington?”

“It’s been delayed,” Wilcox agreed.

“So it’s safe for us to fly in there tomorrow?”

“It’s been delayed until the twenty-ninth.”

“Hey, at least we had an effect!”

“Not a good one. You endangered my source.”

“Better him than us, right?” McEntire asked with a clear lack of empathy.

“And as a result, the people that count have decided to call it off.”

“Being in the line of fire, as we are, we tend to think of ourselves as the people who count.”

“Forget it,” Wilcox said. “It’s over, and you fucked it up.”

He couldn’t help being bitter. He’d had it so well planned, and now Simonson and the DCI thought Kimball’s people were rogues, uncontrollable. And they were right.

The echo on the line deadened as if McEntire had covered the mouthpiece.

“Hey!” Wilcox shouted.

No response for a second, then McEntire came back and said. “After a quick conversation with my colleague, we’ve decided that we disagree with you.”

“I don’t give a damn what you decide. You just stick to your primary schedule and forget the rest of it.”

“I’m glad you don’t care,” McEntire said. “It makes it easier.”

“Makes what easier?”

“We’re talking in the abstract, remember?”

“You’re not making any sense at all,” Wilcox said.

“Now you’re catching on,” McEntire said. “I knew you could do it.”

And hung up.

Wilcox replaced the receiver very deliberately, then crossed the room to where the communications technician sat at his console. The tech hit the eject button on the recorder and handed him the tape.

At least, Wilcox had his own ass covered.

A.J. Soames and Conrad Billingsly were passengers this trip, sharing a seat on the lower bunk in the crew compartment of the lead C-141. When he heard the engines throttled back, Soames checked his watch: 11:02 A.M.

“Magnificent Burma coming up, Connie.”

“I’m ready for it. I hope it’s ready for us.”

Gander was flying in the left seat and had been bitching about it all the way. But he landed the giant transport as smoothly as if it had been a passenger-laden DC-10.

Soames felt the plane turn off the runway and stood up. He was ready to find his way to the hotel.

“A.J.! Come on up here!” Gander called.

Soames climbed the short ladder, edged past Keeper, who was serving as the flight engineer, and leaned over the control pedestal to peer through the windscreen.

A man on the ground was waving his arms, flagging them into a parking place.

And surrounding the parking area were about a hundred uniformed and armed soldiers.

“I don’t like the looks of this at all, A.J.” Gander told him.

Soames didn’t like the looks of it either. “Think we should turn tail, Jimmy? Try to get back in the air?”

Mel Vrdlicka, riding as copilot, said, “It ain’t going to happen, A.J. They’ve got a tanker truck traipsing along behind us.”

Kimball, flying zero-eight as Bengal One, got the report from Soames on the clear channel.

On his Tac Two, he asked McEntire, “What do you think, Irish?”

After a moment’s chewing of the oral report, Sam Eddy said, “I don’t think they’ve figured out our real game. Not to the point where they could prove it, anyway.”

“All they’d have to do is uncover a few missiles,” Kimball reminded him.

“With the government as shaky as it is, they won’t want an international incident. I don’t think they’re going to go digging up search warrants.”

“I don’t want an international incident either.”

“I think we bluff it out, Cheetah. We’re better off as a group, rather than heading back to Dacca and leaving the transports unprotected.”

“I don’t want to split us up, either. Go ahead and get our clearances, Hawkeye,” Kimball said.

“Roger that, Bengal One,” Contrarez said from the Kappa Kat.

Fifteen minutes later, they let down over the Gulf of Martaban, crossed the delta, and found the concrete of the runway. The five Alpha Kats, followed by the Kappa Kat, taxied behind a white pickup truck, paused to let a Thai Airways International Boeing 727 cross the taxiway, then moved on to parking places opposite the C-141s.

Kimball shut down the turbofan and auxiliary systems, then opened the canopy.

Soames was right.

Around a hundred armed soldiers spread out and made a perimeter around the KAT aircraft. The rifles were slung over their shoulders, but the sight was menacing nonetheless.

After he shrugged out of his equipment and slipped to the ground, Kimball headed for the transport where Soames and Billingsly were talking to several Burmese officers.

McEntire caught up with him, and they approached the group together.

A short man in an immaculately pressed uniform turned to them. His smile lit up the morning. Kimball likened the smile to that of a used car salesman and Nixon.

“Mr. Kimball! I am happy to meet you. I am Colonel Kun Mauk.”

Kimball shook the proffered and calloused hand, then introduced McEntire.

With an upraised palm, he indicated the ring of soldiers. “To what do we owe the security, Colonel Mauk?”

“You are perhaps aware of some, shall we say, civil disturbances in the north? We merely wish to have you feel completely at ease during your short stay.”

“I see, Colonel. I appreciate your concern.”

“We are eager to see how well your airplanes perform, Mr. Kimball.”

“And we’re eager to show you.”

They spent half-an-hour finalizing the times and locations for the aerial and ground demonstrations, then Mauk and his coterie of subordinates slipped through the cordon and disappeared.

Soames said, “This is a little uncomfortable, Kim.”

“You’re right.”

“But we’re creative, aren’t we, gentlemen?” McEntire said. “At least, I am.”

Jimmy Gander had his head stuck through the hatchway to the compartment. “Create something real quick, would you, Sam Eddy?”

“First of all, I suggest we call the hotel and cancel. Methinks it would be better if we all stayed with the planes today.”

“What about my shower?” Soames said.

“You stand under that wing, A.J.,” Gander said, “and I’ll dump iced tea on you.”

“We going to have to eat MREs?” Billingsly asked.

“We could always tour a Burmese prison,” Kimball said.

Billingsly pushed Gander aside and climbed aboard the Starlifter. “I’m going to see if I can find some beans and franks.”

Eighteen

The telephone this time was in an all-night drugstore on 23rd Street in the District, and the time was 1:20 A.M.

Brock Dixon picked up on the first ring.

“I don’t know what’s happening here,” Derek Crider said, “but the damned Burmese have a security cordon around those planes like you wouldn’t believe. We can’t get within a mile of them.”

Dixon had an idea about that, but held it for the moment. “You’ve got a plan?”

“We’ve got to figure out where the IFF transponder is located on the plane. One of my people is working on a way to alter it.”

Dixon immediately saw the possibilities in that. “Good idea. It’ll be in the cockpit, probably a slide-out unit, and probably small, like a car stereo. Kimball has miniaturized everything.”

“We could slip into the cockpit and just pull it out?”

“Maybe. Depends on the power and antenna connections. But you know what? I’d give odds that they’ve got a couple replacement units with them somewhere.”

“On one of the C-141s?” Crider asked.

“I don’t know the set-up, but it seems likely.”

“Good, that’s great. We’ll check it out.”

“You have a backup plan?” Dixon asked.

“We’ve only got three more shots at them. One of my people suggested putting a rocket into one of the transports. They’ve got enough simulated ordnance aboard to create a lot of fireworks. The way they park them, if a C-141’s fuel went off, they’d lose the whole bunch.”

“That’s way too damned obvious,” Dixon said. “It might look like a terrorist hit, yeah, but it still leaves them in business.”

“If some of their personnel survive.”

“Ease up on that scenario. Work on the transponders. And then there’s something else.”

“What else?” Crider demanded.

“I’ve got some pictures.”

As a normal courtesy, the National Photographic Interpretation Center had provided Air Force Intelligence with a set of satellite photos showing a clandestine Burmese airfield in flames. Since it was not a normal event, Dixon’s analyst had brought them to him. As soon as he saw the photos and read the background info, Dixon had deduced Ben Wilcox’s intent. He was mad as hell that the CIA had not approached the National Security Council with the plan. The DCI had obviously gone around the NSC, directly to the President.

The Agency was getting out of hand again.

He had been thinking about leaking the information to one of the Congressional oversight committees and letting the political process weed out Wilcox, Simonson, and maybe the DCI. It would serve them right.

The problem, of course, was that Wilcox would be at arm’s length with this operation. The General Accounting Office would never trace cash from the Agency’s clandestine funds to Kimball Aero Tech. Even if they could prove Kimball made the raid on Lon Pot’s operations, the civilian auditors would never connect it to the CIA.

Only by innuendo, and that was not enough.

But information was power, and right now, he could use the information in a better way.

“Pictures?” Crider asked.

“You know anything about a man named Lon Pot?”

“Yeah. Runs drugs.”

“Anything else?”

“Not much.”

Dixon briefed him on Pot’s organization, including the names of his key advisors. “Pot moves around a lot. There’s three or more clandestine airfields. He’s got some hideaways in the jungle, up in the hills, and one place in Bangkok we know about, where his wife lives.”

He gave Crider the address.

“Why are you telling me this?” Crider asked.

Dixon detailed the destruction of the airfield named Shan Base.

“I think Kimball’s bunch conducted the air raid,” Dixon said.

“No shit! He’s trying to put the old fart out of business, huh?”

Dixon had also read the intelligence estimates that suggested Lon Pot was attempting to assume political power in the region, first in Burma, but he was not going to pass that on to Crider.

“I think Kimball’s trying, yes. And I think there will be more attempts.”

After a long silence, Crider asked, “So what do you want me to do? This isn’t part of our contract.”

“You’re very creative,” Dixon said. “I want you to use your imagination.”

As soon as Dixon hung up, Crider used his imagination and began calling people he knew. He knew lots of people in Southeast Asia.

By three o’clock, he had a list of weaponry in the region that he could get his hands on quickly, and he had a telephone number.

He called it, but the man was not available. He left his name and a note of urgency.

The telephone rang at 3:40 P.M.

“Mr. Crider?”

“That’s me. You’re Micah Chao?”

“I am. What can I do for you, Mr. Crider?”

“A couple of things, Mr. Chao. First, I’ll give you some phone numbers and names to call, so you can check my background. Second, I want to get together with you and with a friend of yours named Henry Loh.”

“To what purpose, Mr. Crider?”

“Mutual benefit. You wouldn’t want to see a repeat of what happened at Shan Base, would you?”

“I will call you back in a half hour, Mr. Crider.”

Lon Pot had arrived at Fragrant Flower in midafternoon. He had had to run down Kao Chung at Chiang Base and have him send one of the Third Squadron’s Super Frelon helicopters to Bangkok to pick him up. Henry Loh had Lon Pot’s personal helicopter somewhere in southern Burma.

Lon Pot did not appreciate that.

His assistants were telephoning all over the country, attempting to locate Henry Loh and Micah Chao, but with no success.

He had talked to Dao Van Luong who was in Mandalay. He had talked to Vol Soon, who complained that the army was becoming restive. The inaction was destroying their morale.

At five o’clock, Henry Loh called.

“Good afternoon, Prince. I had not known of your return to Fragrant Flower. Is that a good idea?”

“It seems that I must manage the operation myself, Air Force Chief,” Pot said, without attempting to conceal his displeasure. “It all falls apart when I am gone.”

“Still, your safety is my concern, Prince, and Bangkok would be a much safer place until after the transition.”

Pot was mollified somewhat by Loh’s concern. “Where have you been all day? I have tried to find you numerous times.”

“Micah Chao and I have learned many things today, Prince. We have learned, for example, the identity of the force that destroyed Shan Base, and —”

“Who!” Pot demanded.

“An American named Kimball.”

“What! The Americans would not dare to intervene.”

He was forced to keep his temper in check as Loh narrated the story of Bryce Kimball’s aircraft and demonstrations. He interrupted frequently for details about stealth airplanes and capabilities.

“And these airplanes are now in Rangoon?”

“That is correct,” Loh said. “There was a demonstration flight to show aerial capabilities a few hours ago. Colonel Mauk intends to commandeer them in the morning, after tonight’s demonstration, on behalf of the Burmese government.”

“So that they will become ours?”

“That is one possibility, Prince.”

“What is another?”

“They will become Mauk’s airplanes.”

“Ah. And after all we have done for the man.”

“I believe I can hold him in check, Prince, but it is a delicate situation.”

“What do you need?”

“I need six Mirage aircraft that are currently in Sri Lanka, but which I can have here in two days. I have the pilots for them, and they will give us the balance of power we need over Mauk.”

“Delays! Again, delays!”

“We want your transition to power to be successful, do we not, Prince?”

“What day are you suggesting, Henry Loh?”

“August first.”

“It will not be suspended again.”

“No, Prince, it will not.”

“How much do these Mirages cost me?”

“They are used, but in immaculate condition. Sixty million dollars.”

“Buy them. I will call Dao Van Luong.”

Derek Crider watched Del Gart at work.

Gart was hunched over the table in Crider’s hotel room, examining the three transponders that Corey O’Brian had, as O’Brian termed it, filched in the afternoon. As soon as the fighters and command aircraft had taken off for the afternoon demonstration, the Burmese soldiers around the aircraft had been given a rest break and had promptly disappeared. The Americans had gathered in one C-141 to listen to the radio reports of the demonstration, and O’Brian simply climbed into the other transport, spent seven minutes searching through the spare parts boxes, and walked out with three transponders.

They were small, about four inches wide by one inch high by nine inches deep. Gart said they were perfect for his purpose because they could be changed out so readily. On the back end of each were power and antenna connectors, and the whole unit slipped into a sleeve in the Alpha Kat’s stack of communications components. Two screws held it in place. With a power screwdriver, Gart estimated that he could change one unit for another in less than a minute.

Blue smoke curled upward from the hot tip of a soldering iron resting in a wire holder next to. Gart’s hand. Alan Adage sat on the other side of the table handing small needle-nosed pliers, solder extractors, and components to Gart as he called for them.

Wheeler had obtained two bottles of Kentucky bourbon on the street somewhere, and everyone had a glass of well-watered whiskey. Crider wouldn’t let them get stronger until the delicate work was done.

He was on the bed, leaning back against the wall, and he was pleased with the day’s developments.

He sipped from his bourbon glass.

The phone rang at his elbow.

He picked it up.

“Mr. Crider,” he said.

“We have a deal,” the voice he recognized as belonging to Henry Loh told him.

“I think it’s a good one.”

“Did you obtain the transponders?” Loh asked.

“We’ve got them. There are only three, but that should be enough for you.”

“Tell me again about the process.”

Crider shifted the phone to his other ear. “The Alpha Kat takes off with the transponder operating, so that the control tower can track it. Before the exercise begins, the pilot shuts off the transponder, entering his stealth mode.”

“Yes, I understand that.”

Crider hoped that he himself did. He wasn’t really sure of the procedures used by Kimball, but he spoke with as much authority as he could muster.

“We have modified the transponders by adding an integrated circuit. As soon as the pilot turns off the power, the unit will wait ten minutes, then begin transmitting again. However, the indicator light on the unit will not warn the pilot. Your radars will see him, plain as day, but he won’t know that.”

“Excellent,” Loh said.

Crider was certain that Loh didn’t give a damn one way or another who was flying the Alpha Kats. If Mauk was successful in grabbing them, Mauk’s pilots would go down. If Loh got hold of them, he could pull the transponders. If nothing else, Kimball’s pilots would bite the dust, proving to the world’s military that the aircraft were vulnerable and negating any sales Kimball might have lined up.

Everyone wins.

“The money?” Crider asked.

“The money will be transferred tonight.”

“Sixty?”

“That is correct. And I am sending six pilots to Sri Lanka on the next flight out of Rangoon.”

“The aircraft will be ready for them.”

“And the other arrangements?”

“As soon as my bank in Grand Cayman receives the electronic funds transfer, I will order the wire transfer to pay for the aircraft. And I will order the other transfers.”

“That is good,” Henry Loh said and hung up. Crider thought so, too. His commission from the weapons broke on the deal was two million, and he would clear eight hundred thousand. He had to spread a couple hundred thousand among his contacts in Southeast Asia, to keep them friendly contacts. And he had to transfer a half million each to Chao’s and Loh’s accounts.

Kimball walked among the pilots on the darkened ramp and handed out their passports. Keeper, Cad well, Metger, and Greer stuffed the fake passports in the pockets of their flight suits. The three appeared subdued in an eager way, if that were possible.

Tonight, as he had done last night, Kimball had drawn names out of Tex Brabham’s seven-gallon hat for the three open spots on the fighter roster. They all wanted to go, but there weren’t enough seats. He and McEntire had decided early on that the two of them would take every mission flight, but tonight McEntire stepped aside and a fourth name was drawn, Greer’s.

“Everybody got it down?” Kimball asked. “Any part of the briefing we need to go over again?”

The fighter pilots shook their heads.

He looked over to Conrad Billingsly who, along with Sam Miller, Fred Nackerman, and Speedy Contrarez, would be aboard the Kappa Kat.

Billingsly held up his clipboard with the checklist. “Got it all here, Kim.”

“Let’s fire them up.”

Kimball turned and headed for ought-eight.

Twelve minutes later, they were lined up on the taxiway, waiting for takeoff clearance. While he waited, Kimball double-checked the coordinates of the target area.

Target areas, he corrected himself.

Jimmy Gander watched as the last three Alpha Kats left the runway, their anti-collision strobes pulsing in the night.

The rest of the group were still huddled around the ramp of the C-141. The ring of Burmese soldiers that had been attending them broke up at some officer’s command and headed somewhere for a rest break.

Coffee, or tea, or opium, whatever they did on rest breaks.

McEntire said, “I need two volunteers. That’s you, A.J., and you, Alex.”

“I’d be happy to volunteer, Sam Eddy,” Soames said.

“I’ve been hoping and praying for this chance to contribute,” Hamilton told him.

“The three of us will go out to the target site for the demonstration, then come back here and sack out in the other Starlifter. In the morning, we’ll conduct the post-demonstration briefing.”

“A.J. and I can handle it,” Hamilton said.

“No. I want the three of us to stick together. Jimmy, you load everyone else in this bird and be off the ground in ten minutes.”

Gander straightened his back, suddenly alert. He wondered if he had missed something during the briefing.

“If the tower gives you any static,” McEntire said, “you tell them you’re part of the demo, monitoring the action. Hell, they don’t know any different.”

“Am I part of the demo?” Gander asked.

“Nah. You head straight for Bangkok. Kim and I want everyone… almost everyone… out of Burma tonight.”

“Sam Eddy,” Tex Brabham drawled, “I’m going to go over to the other transport and camp out in the back until the demonstration’s done.”

“No, Tex…”

“Got to keep the rifles oiled, you know?”

“Okay, Tex. Thanks,” McEntire said. “Jimmy, you hit the road.”

Gander was going to protest, thought about who outranked who, and started up the ramp.

He started barking out his own orders. “Mel, you’re in the right seat. Jay, you’re flight engineer. Walt, pull the chocks and get us cranked up.”

Everyone started moving.

As he pushed open the door into the crew compartment, Gander thought that training and discipline paid off every time.

Chiang Base, as identified on the satellite photographs provided by Wilcox, was located just over the border in northern Thailand, three hundred miles from Rangoon.

It was a mere excursion for the KAT airplanes, barely a thirty-minute round-trip detour from the exercise area at Mach 1.5.

The Golden Triangle was no longer simply the home of poppy growers. It had become a tourist mecca also. While the semiautonomous tribes that inhabited the area still operated under the governance of warlords, much as they had a century before, relationships between Bangkok and the north country had improved. Chiang Mai was essentially the capital of northern Thailand, and Chiang Rai, a hundred miles northeast of Chiang Mai, was the stepping stone into the Triangle for visitors. Deluxe resort hotels had blossomed in Chiang Rai, and another had been constructed in the heart of the Golden Triangle, overlooking Laos and Burma.

The tourists came for the moderate weather, to examine in detail the cultures of the hill tribes, to explore the beauty of the rivers and forests, and maybe to find cheap sources for other nirvanas.

The tourists hadn’t deterred the poppy growers at all. Record productions of processed opium still flowed southward into southern Thailand for export to the United States and Europe.

Lon Pot’s Chiang Base was due west of Chiang Rai, near the base of the 7500-foot mountain dubbed Doi Pha Hom Pak.

That was their only hot target tonight. Kimball had wanted to also hit a Lon Pot army post at Mawkmai, but the distances and extra time and ordnance loads couldn’t be easily explained in their demonstration schedule.

Billingsly had a map overlay for Thailand on disk, and the Kappa Kat’s data-link had displayed it on Kimball’s CRT. Doi Pha Hom Pak was clearly designated. It was at the top of the screen, forty miles away from the blinking blue blip that was Alpha Kat zero-eight. The airspeed readout at the top of the HUD showed Mach 1.4. His altitude was 15,000 feet.

“Hawkeye, One. You want to paint me a target?”

“Coming up, One. Keying it in now.”

Billingsly tapped the coordinates into his keyboard aboard the Kappa Kat, and a red cross suddenly appeared on Kimball’s screen.

“Thanks, Frog.”

“Anytime. Bengals, you’d better shed the speed. One, we’ve got hostiles on the other side of the mountain. Due north of the peak at angels twelve, heading zero-eight-four.”

Kimball eased the throttle back and checked for the wingtip lights on either side of him. Everyone was in place. His altitude began to bleed off slowly.

“You’re sure they’re hostile, Frog?”

“Roger. The infrared signatures say Mirage 2000. Four of them. They’re turning back toward me now.”

“What’s your situation, Hawkeye?”

“I’m at three-nine thousand, fifty-five miles to your northwest.”

“Take one of mine as a CAP.”

“Not just yet, Cheetah. We can go off the air and dodge these puppies for a little while if we have to. If they take me as bait, we’ll be able to pull them off you. You dump the ordnance first.”

“Vector us in, Hawkeye. I’m showing six-zero-zero knots.”

“Bengals Four and Five, go to zero-seven-zero and Tac Three.”

“Four.”

“Five, gone.”

Contrarez took over control of Metger and Greer, who would make their ground attack from the east. The two fighters peeled off Kimball’s right wing, diving hard, and their wingtip guidelights disappeared.

“Bengal One,” Billingsly said, “In two minutes, go to zero-zero-five.”

Kimball tapped two minutes into his instrument panel chronometer and said, “Roger that, two minutes and zero-zero-five.”

In an interlaced pattern, Kimball and his flight of three intended to attack from the south, spaced between the attacks from the east, then climb abruptly to the right to avoid the peak.

“Bengal One, Hawkeye.”

“Go,” Kimball said.

“I just went to the two-two-oh radar scan and checked Muang Base. They’re flying a four-plane formation there, too.”

“Waiting for us, you think?”

“Roger, Cheetah. Ambush city. The hostiles here have turned back toward you, and they’re ignoring me.”

“They’ve been told to stay in contact with the airfield,” Kimball guessed.

“That’s the way I interpret it. They… hold one.” After a few seconds, Billingsly said, “I just read some probes by SAM radars. They’re expecting us.”

“How many SAMs, Hawkeye?”

“Six. They shut down again. They’re only radiating periodically.”

“Let’s hold up a minute, Frog.”

Using his controller, Kimball eased into a right turn. Glancing out the canopy, he saw that Keeper and Cadwell were staying with him.

“Speedy, put Four and Five in a three-sixty,” Billingsly told Contrarez. Kimball heard the order since Tac Two was locked open, hot.

“Frog,” Kimball said, “you want to give me any odds that Chiang Base has any aircraft in residence?”

“I’d put up a buck says they do, Cheetah, if you put up ten thousand.”

“Let’s adapt then, Frog. Put Bengal Three on the ground to hole the runway. The minute that happens, we’re bound to see SAM radars lighting up. Four and Five take out the SAM sites. One and Two jettison bombs and take on the Mirages.”

“I’m thinking about it, Cheetah. Okay, I’ve got my mind wrapped around it. I can’t let you jettison the dummy bombs, though.”

They would have to have them for the run on the demonstration target.

“Gotcha, Hawkeye. We can manage the aerial with the dummy’s intact.”

“Roger that. Okey-dokey. Everybody give me a half-second squawk, so I’m sure my computer’s still got you in the right place.”

Kimball reached down for his transponder, flipped the toggle upward, counted to himself, “One thousand and,” then snapped it off.

“Right on, Bengals. Speedy, split your two and station them northeast and southeast of the target, ready to hit SAMs. Three, go to angels four, heading three-five-four.”

“Three.”

Kimball checked over his left shoulder and saw Cad well drop out of the formation. His lights went dark.

“Kill the lights, Two,” Kimball ordered and shut down his own guidelights.

“All weapons are free,” Billingsly said. “One and Two, jettison aft bombs.”

Kimball raised the protective flap on the armaments panel, selected Center Line Two, and released the bomb. He selected his live Sidewinders and AMRAAMs and armed them.

“One, this is Two,” Keeper said. “I’m armed and ready to kick ass.”

“One, take heading zero-one-two. I’m going to hold you until the Mirages pounce.”

“Roger that,” Kimball said.

He eased out of his right turn and swung back to the left until the heading appeared on the HUD. The altitude held steady at 14,000 feet.

“Three,” Billingsly said, “you’re thirty seconds out. Commit when ready.”

“Three.”

Kimball scanned the skies. The stars were clear. The moon was dim and low in the west. Below, the landscape was blacked out. A few thin threads suggested waterways or possible roads. On his left, the peak of Doi Pha Hom Pak was a dark smear against the stars lining the horizon.

He watched the area he thought was the base of the mountain.

Abruptly, he saw tiny pricks of light blossom. They were nearly ten miles away.

“Three’s clear. Got the runway and a couple trucks. No aircraft on the ground.”

“SAMs lighting up,” Billingsly warned.

“Triple-A, also,” Bengal Three reported. “They’re shooting blind.”

Kimball saw the trail of a surface-to-air missile leap from the jungle. The tracers of antiaircraft rounds began to poke upwards, like the quills on a porcupine.

“They’re firing SAMs without targets, too,” he said. “Trying to hit something by accident.”

“Speedy just sent Four and Five,” Billingsly said. “Okay, One. Here come the Mirages. Diving hard from twelve thousand. You want three-four-zero.”

“One. We’re gone.”

Kimball flashed his guidelights once for Keeper, then rolled over into a diving left turn. He pulled out on Billingsly’s heading and eased in more power.

“Two, space it out.”

“Roger, One.”

“Hawkeye here. They’re radiating to beat hell, looking for any kind of target.”

“Paint ’em, Frog.”

Kimball selected his AMRAAM radar seekers while Billingsly locked his computer onto the transmitting radars of the Mirages. Transmitted to the Alpha Kat by the data-link, four red blips appeared on the CRT.

“Two, I’ve got the right pair,” Kimball said.

“Roger, One.”

Locating the search stud on the controller, Kimball pressed it. The radar seeker of the first AMRAAM came to life and an orange target symbol appeared on the CRT. He pulled the nose up and to the right.

The target rose passed over the closest red blip. He depressed the stud.

LOCK-ON appeared on the screen.

Kimball squeezed the firing button.

The missile left the pylon with a blaze of fiery white trailing it.

He forgot about it, jinked the nose down and left.

LOCK-ON for the second target.

A missile screamed by on his left, departing Keeper’s fighter.

Fired.

Second missile away.

Altitude 7,540 feet.

Kimball hauled the controller back and rotated upward.

Shoved the throttle to its forward stops.

“Scratch two SAMs,” Billingsly reported.

“Two missiles gone,” Kimball said.

“Make that four,” Keeper added.

“I’ve got the tracks,” Billingsly said. “Two more SAMs out.”

Altitude 11,600.

Kimball pulled on over until he was inverted and looked up through the canopy.

He saw the tracers from the antiaircraft guns rising up toward him, but stopping thousands of feet too soon.

An orange and red and blue flower suddenly appeared against the earth.

Then a second flower.

And a third.

Seconds passed.

Only a three-flower bouquet tonight.

“Scratch three Mirages,” Hawkeye reported. “The fourth one dodged out on us. Good damned work, guys. And Five got the last two SAMS.”

“Where’d the fourth one go, Hawkeye?” Kimball asked. “I’ve still got Sidewinders.”

“He’s on the deck, headed for China. Let him go.”

Kimball glanced at the chronometer. Billingsly was right. They couldn’t waste more time and still get to the demonstration site as scheduled.

“Form us up, Frog.”

After Billingsly gave each of them new headings and brought Four and Five back on Tac Two, Kimball asked, “Bengals, how you doing?”

“Four’s A-one.”

“Five. Do we get to do victory rolls?”

“Three. I’m a little pissed. What’s it going to look like, two trucks painted under my canopy?”

“Two. Who cares? We kicked us some ass.”

Nineteen

Lujan called from the airport at eleven o’clock.

“Hey, Emilio, what’s up?” Crider asked.

“They ain’t come back, man.”

“Who?”

“The planes.”

Crider spilled his bourbon sitting up on the bed so fast. “You’re sure?”

“They’re hard to miss, man. The honchos, they all come back twenty minutes ago. In two helicopters. But none of the KAT airplanes have shown up.”

“None of the KAT people?”

“Oh, sure, there’s a couple of them, and one of the Starlifters is still here, but everything else, gone.”

“Goddamn! Get the plane ready to go, Emilio.” Crider slammed the phone down, crawled out of bed, and headed for the shower.

Jimmy Gander and Mel Vrdlicka had made all the arrangements with the Don Muang Airport operations people, who weren’t unhappy about having the Kimball Aero Tech aircraft show up a day early. They liked the landing and parking fees as much as any fixed base operator.

They had been assigned space near the domestic terminal, which was the old airport terminal. The new international terminal next door was modern and bristling with traffic. United Airlines had a large array of aircraft snugged up to the jetways, and there were planes sporting Singapore Airlines, British Airways, and Finnair logos as well.

Gander was happy they hadn’t been shunted off to Ubom or U-Tapeo, the military airfields that had supported U.S. tactical and strategic units during the Vietnam debacle. He hadn’t been to Thailand in ten years, but he could tell, just by breathing deeply, that the air pollution in Bangkok had gotten progressively worse.

After the American dollars started surfacing in Bangkok during the Vietnam era, flowing from military people either stationed nearby or R&R-ing in the city, Bangkok had grown from a million-and-a-half people to six million in twenty years. There wasn’t room enough for them, but they packed themselves in anyway.

He longed for Phoenix.

The quiet serenity of the desert.

The smell of sage and mesquite.

In fact, he was thinking about hitting Mollie with the idea of selling their two-story off Indian School Road and looking for a small acreage much farther out of the city. Raise some horses, maybe. Timmy should learn to ride soon.

“You know what I heard?” Walt Hammond asked. They were all sitting around the opened ramp of the Starlifter. That ramp was getting old as a home, too.

“What’d you hear?” Wagers asked.

“I heard that that doc in Riyadh got Kim some scotch.”

“He probably needed it,” Wagers said.

“I’d like a shot of scotch. Or something.”

A few heads turned toward the city. Many of them had been there before, but some had not. They had heard the stories, though, of Patpong Road and the live sex shows, young girls racked like pots and pans behind windows with numbers painted on their breasts, free-flowing booze and drugs. The VD clinics were almost as numerous as the bars named Miami and L.A. and Manhattan.

“Forget it,” Vrdlicka said. “It’s fifteen miles to town, but that’s a ninety-minute taxi trip.”

Warren Mabry stood up and moved out from under the tail.

“There they are. Lights off to the west.”

Everyone clambered to their feet and moved to where they could watch the runway.

The Kappa Kat touched down.

Two Alpha Kats followed.

And three more.

They yelled and screamed.

The mood became more exuberant as the Kimball Aero aircraft turned off on the taxiway and crawled across the field toward them.

“About all we need now,” Jimmy Gander said, “is four more people.”

A.J. Soames woke to the smell of coffee.

He groaned and rolled over.

His back was bent out of shape, literally, and ached. With some trepidation, he pushed himself upright and rolled to his feet. The parachute packs he had been sleeping on were dented in all the wrong places.

Alex Hamilton, who had started the coffee on a hot plate, was digging through the box of MREs.

“You’re not going to find any Danish in there,” Soames told him.

“Hell, A.J., I’m just looking for American.”

Tex Brabham pushed himself halfway out of his sleeping spot on the canvas sling seats and pushed his hat back on his head. He had his arms wrapped around an M-16.

When they had flipped coins last night, McEntire and Hamilton had won the two bunks in the crew compartment. Getting to sleep, though, had been difficult. The Burmese troops had shown up again, prepared to guard, or detain, the KAT aircraft. When the aircraft didn’t return, there had been some yelling and apparently some telephone conferences by the officer in charge with bigwigs.

A harried senior lieutenant demanded to know where the planes were.

Bangkok, McEntire told him.

That is not right, the lieutenant said.

McEntire had insisted that the flight to Thailand had been part of their plans all along. What’s the big deal? he had asked the lieutenant, who didn’t seem to know.

“Where’s Sam Eddy?” Soames asked Hamilton.

“Still asleep.”

Soames walked forward, skirting packing cases, passed through the hatch, and found McEntire sitting on the side of the lower bunk. He appeared fatigued. He sat with his chin in his hand. A black forest of stubble coated his cheeks.

“I don’t sleep well on airplanes either, Sam Eddy.”

McEntire looked up and grinned. “Hell, A.J., it’d be all right if the thing was moving, and I was at the controls. I sleep all right then.”

“Alex has coffee brewing.”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Soames went back to join the others and take a cup of strong, strong coffee from Hamilton.

Brabham opened a tin of soda crackers and passed them around.

Soames looked at them for a second and decided he wasn’t hungry.

Ten minutes later, after a session with an electric razor, McEntire came back.

He looked a hell of a lot better, but there were still dark rings under his eyes.

“Well,” he said, “this may be interesting.”

“You don’t think our hosts are going to be ecstatic?” Soames asked.

“Doubt it. A.J., I want you to stay here with Tex. Have this hummer ready to roll by ten o’clock. Alex and I will cover the debriefing.”

“And if they don’t want us to roll?”

“We’ll play it by ear. We’ve got a radio on our side, and we could raise Bangkok and get the Embassy involved. Without the airplanes here, though, I don’t think Mauk’s going to raise a lot of hell. They don’t know anything they can prove, and if they say something about the attacks on Lon Pot’s little retreats, the world’s going to wonder who’s protecting whom. I think we’ve got them aced.”

Colonel Kun Mauk showed up at eight o’clock in a staff car to pick up McEntire and Hamilton. There was fire in his eyes and a dark suffusion covering his cheeks, but he struggled with, and achieved, civility.

Soames and Brabham spent the next two hours tying down cargo and getting the Starlifter ready for flight.

When those chores were done, Soames sat in the pilot’s seat, and Brabham took the flight engineer’s position. They ran through the checklist as far as they could.

And waited.

10:30 A.M. slid by.

At 10:45 A.M., Soames saw the staff car approaching. Except for the driver in front, McEntire and Hamilton were alone in the backseat.

They got out of the sedan, crossed to the entry hatch, and climbed aboard.

Brabham called down to them, “You guys all right?” Hamilton crawled up the ladder. “Yeah. It was a little hairy there for awhile. Mauk wanted us to bring the planes back after the Bangkok demonstration, so he could take another look at them. He suggested strongly that we hang around here until that happened. 1 know damned well he was on the verge of ordering us detained.”

“And?” Soames asked.

“And Sam Eddy was mercifully brief. Invited Mauk to Arizona, all expenses paid, for another look.”

“And?”

“And the defense minister, who may or may not be able to overrule Mauk, said he’d think about it.”

McEntire called up from the crew compartment. “You want to get us up a few thousand feet, A.J., so I can take a nap?”

Ben Wilcox hadn’t been out of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi for hours, and it felt like weeks. He needed a shave and a shower. He had stayed close to the secure room since talking to Simonson five hours before, when he had first learned of the attack on Chiang Base.

He had just stepped out into the corridor and used a wall-mounted house phone to order a roast beef sandwich for lunch when the communications technician called him. “Washington, Mr. Wilcox.”

“Thanks.”

He went back into the claustrophobic room and picked up a phone.

“Wilcox.”

“We’ve confirmed that three Mirages were shot down, Ben. One pilot bailed out. The airfield was torn up a little and they lost six Samsong radar sites. We understand there were a dozen fatalities among the radar crews, but that’s an iffy number.”

“Kimball’s goddamned airplanes work, don’t they?”

“Yeah, it looks like they do.”

“Maybe our brothers down the river are making a mistake, Ted.”

Simonson wasn’t going to comment on the military mind. “There’s a new deadline date. The first of August.”

“And Kimball keeps shoving them back into a comer. Jesus, Ted, have you talked to the people upstairs?”

“Yeah, and they’re still unhappy. They don’t mind looking at the pictures and hearing the reports, but they don’t like having somebody out there with lethal weaponry who won’t follow their orders.”

“Sounds like LBJ, Ted.”

“Micromanagement, that’s right. Still, we’re supposed to abort the mission. Some of the civilians think that Lon Pot can’t succeed at this point anyway.”

“That’s bullshit,” Wilcox said.

“Maybe. Have you talked to Kimball?”

“He’s not answering the phone. I believe he might be mad at us,” Wilcox said.

“Then, there’s something else. Donegal called.”

“Damn it, I need to talk to him.”

“He just left a message. Lon Pot got himself six new Mirages. Pot’s also aware that Bryce Kimball is the man causing him problems. He’s also rigged up some kind of trap for Kimball.”

“Trap? What trap?”

“There’s no detail, Ben. Just that the Alpha Kats have been tampered with, and every one will go down if they fly against Pot again. Sounds to me like a hint that we should stop interfering with Pot’s life.”

“Shit! It’s not possible.”

“Now you sound like Kimball.”

“I’m going to have to stop him, Ted.”

“Yeah, Ben. You’ve done very well at stopping him, haven’t you? As I remember, you set up the scenario because you knew you couldn’t stop him.”

On his flight back to Fragrant Flower in Lon Pot’s Aerospatiale, Henry Loh counted his blessings.

His blessings had just been enriched by another half million American dollars, now residing in Singapore. Lon Pot’s journey into politics was making Loh an even richer man.

And the latest deal had also made Micah Chao a close ally. That could never hurt.

No matter, which way it turned out, however, Loh thought that his future might best be served by resigning his title of Chief soon after the battle was won or lost. He could buy himself an airplane of some kind and tour Indonesia. Perhaps he would go on to South America.

He had never been to South America before.

There was just one niggling, irritating, little detail.

Henry Loh had never lost before, not if he did not count Vietnam, which he did not. He had bailed out of there long before the end.

In the past three days, he had lost seven very expensive fighter aircraft, in addition to transports and helicopters. Lon Pot might well bill him for the losses. He would not put it above the Prince to do such a thing.

Additionally, he felt betrayals closing in from all sides. Kun Mauk was definitely a concern. He sometimes wondered about Jake Switzer. Over time, he had learned that Americans could never be fully trusted.

It was a problem that he had with his entire pilot cadre. While a number of his pilots were of Southeast Asian heritage, the very experienced men came from America, France, Germany, China, and Russia. There were none that he could rely on totally.

This Crider, for instance. While the aircraft purchase had been sweet for all of them, he was not certain that Crider would carry out the final part of the deal: emplacing the doctored transponders in the Alpha Kat aircraft.

The outcome was in doubt. And yet most outcomes were in doubt, and he had survived. All he could do, he decided, was to move ahead with what he had.

He had six relatively new Mirages. He saw them on the ground at Fragrant Flower as he topped the ridge. He eased off the collective and allowed the helicopter to settle to a soft landing just off the runway.

The dust swirled around him, and he waited until the rotors had almost stopped turning and the dust had settled before stepping out.

Jake Switzer approached him.

“The airplanes?” he asked.

“They’re fine, Henry. As advertised.”

“Have you talked to Kao?”

“He’s fine, too, but not very damned happy. He said he was lucky to have gotten away last night. He was nearly clipped by a missile. No one, and I mean no one, ever saw one of the attacking planes.”

Loh told him what he had learned from Crider about the stealth aircraft.

“No shit! How in the hell are we going to fight that, Henry?”

Without mentioning Crider’s name, Loh told him about Crider’s plans for the transponders.

“Well. That might be all right. Yeah, I can deal with that.”

“What is the state of repair at Shan Base?”

Switzer looked at his watch. “In another hour or so, we should be able to take the planes in there and get missiles loaded. Jean promised me a runway by then anyway.”

“And Chung is at Muang?”

“Right. He’s sending tankers with JP-4 for us.”

“Very well, Jake. You call Burov and have him meet you with all of his aircraft at Shan Base. Then, tell Chung to move his squadron here, to Fragrant Flower. He is to get two of the new aircraft.”

“We’re abandoning Muang?”

“For the time being. I suspect that this American Kimball knows the location of Muang, just as he did Shan and Chiang. We will give him an empty present, and we will stage from here and from Shan to wrap it for him.”

Switzer grinned. “Good by me.”

“Now, I must go talk to the Prince.”

“Good luck. I went up there for a drink, and he wasn’t in the best of moods, Henry.”

Loh nodded, then climbed in a pickup truck, turned it around and drove up the twin ruts to the compound. A guard at the main gate peeked out at him, then opened the doors so he could drive inside. He parked the truck in a garage, then walked the gravelled path through Lon Pot’s forest to the front door of the main house.

Dao Van Luong opened the door for him. His face said he had had a long afternoon.

Without speaking, Dao led him to the living room.

It was maybe ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit outside, but Pot had the air-conditioning at full race and a fire going in the fireplace. He was seated in front of it, reading from one of his leather-bound books.

“Good afternoon, Prince. You saw the new airplanes?”

“The Finance Chief went down to look at them. He assures me that we received excellent value.”

“I think that is so,” Loh agreed.

Lon Pot dog-eared a page and closed the book. “Henry, this is not going well. I am dissatisfied.”

“It is going to get much better, Prince.” Loh detailed his plans once again.

“And then we will be rid of this… this Kimball?”

“That is true.”

“And what of Mauk?”

“To be truthful, Prince, I am still uncertain of him. However, when he was unable to commandeer the American airplanes, it was a tremendous setback for him. I think that now he has no choice but to proceed with his promise to us.”

“And then he will die,” Lon Pot said.

“Yes. We will make it so.”

Pot smiled.

And Henry Loh smiled back. He was much happier when Lon Pot was happy.

Ben Wilcox made six calls to the United States. He talked to people at Commerce and the FAA who owed him favors. Then he called the Assistant Secretary of State for Asia.

“Ben? How’s the spook business?”

“Very slow, Adrian.”

“You watching what’s happening in Burma?”

“We’re watching that very closely, of course. The results are still up in the air, but as a matter of fact, that’s why I’m calling.”

“About Burma?”

“Actually, about a problem in Thailand. I think you could help me defuse a situation there with one phone call.”

“I’d be glad to try, Ben.”

Kimball didn’t breathe well until the second Starlifter got in from Rangoon. When it did, and was parked with the rest of the Kimball Aero craft, he relaxed a bit.

Except for two guards, the whole KAT personnel complement moved into nearby Airport Hotel, which was a practical hotel and not very exotic. Andrea Deacon had chosen it for its moderate room rates, which, for the thirty of them, was still running $1500 a night.

They had an extra day in Bangkok now, and Kimball gave everyone who wasn’t scheduled for a stint on guard duty permission to explore the city. He figured most of them would ignore the truly grand sights of the temples, the National Museum, the National Art Gallery, and the Temple of the Reclining Buddha and head right for Patpong Road.

He and Sam Eddy McEntire moved their duffle bags into their room.

“Your turn to call Susan,” McEntire said.

“I called last time.”

“Yeah, but only after I offered.”

Shaking his head, Kimball reached for the phone. It tingled in his hand, and he picked it up.

“Kimball.”

“Kim, this is Ito.”

“Problem?”

“There seems to be. I think you should come over here right away.”

“What is it?”

“They don’t want me to talk on the telephone. Come now, please.”

He related the conversation to Sam Eddy as they took the carpeted stairs two-at-a-time from their room on the second floor.

There was a taxi waiting at the entrance, and Kimball went quickly through the required negotiations before getting into the back.

When they arrived at their ramp space next to the domestic terminal, they found a half-dozen military vehicles parked among the aircraft.

Uniformed Thais were moving among the planes, placing yellow seals on the access doors and the hatches. It wasn’t quite a repeat of the events in Rangoon, but it was more unnerving.

Kimball hopped out of the cab and ran across the tarmac toward a short man in an officer’s uniform.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded.

The officer turned to him and smiled. “You are Mr. Kimball?”

“That’s right. What in hell are you doing?”

“Your aircraft have been grounded, Mr. Kimball.”

“What the hell? What for?”

“The Thai government is impounding the airplanes at the request of the United States Department of State. Beyond that, sir, I know nothing.”

Twenty

The United States Embassy was located at 95 Wireless Road. There was a new expressway running north and south, parallel to and east of Wireless Road, but that didn’t help Kimball any. His cab driver took nearly two hours to navigate the Rama 6 Road south into the city and to wind his way through traffic-congested streets entertaining Kimball and McEntire by pointing out the entertaining and historical sights along the way, detailing their relative importance in nearly unintelligible Pidgin English.

Without warning, he snapped quick detours to point out Jim Thompson’s House, the home of the American architect who came out of the OSS after World War II and revitalized the Thai silk industry; the National Stadium; and the Wat Traimitr, the Temple of the Golden Buddha where a chapel contained a nine-hundred-year-old solid gold Buddha weighing five-and-a-half tons.

Kimball yelled at the driver a number of times, attempting to get him back on track, but he was quite obviously unable to hear with his mouth open.

McEntire slumped back in his corner of the seat and seemed to accept his fate.

Buses, trucks, motor scooters, and tuk-tuks, threewheeled minibuses which sounded like their names, surrounded them. Kimball thought of Kevin Costner, caught in the middle of a thundering herd of buffalo.

These buffalo didn’t move, however.

They were almost to the Embassy, inching along in near gridlock, gagging on exhaust fumes, when McEntire said, “Wilcox.”

“Wilcox?”

“Right, Wilcox.”

Kimball sagged back in the seat and thought about it, but not for long.

“You’re probably right. Why?”

“I think if Bennie had his own way, we wouldn’t have a problem,” McEntire said. “I’m betting the higher-ups got nervous about our antics. Whatever. Wilcox is the one with enough clout to get us grounded.”

The horn of an old Anglia in the next lane began to bleat. A distinguished-looking, gray-haired old Englishman in a tweed cap was behind the wheel, and he kept bleating the horn even though it had absolutely no effect on the traffic ahead, beside, or behind him.

Kimball reached through his window and banged his fist on the Anglia’s fender.

The Brit looked at him.

Kimball shook his hand at the man.

He smiled and quit bleating.

“Jesus, you’re tough,” Sam Eddy said.

“This whole damned thing is giving me a headache. Why would they want the operation shut down now? We’ve got Lon Pot on the run. He keeps backing off on his deadlines.”

“I can think of a couple reasons. If you cool down some, Kim, you’ll think of them, too.”

“Okay. One, and this is a real contradiction, the stealth planes are too obvious.”

“Right on. Anyone who’s watching close, and we can be sure a number of very concerned intelligence agencies are, sees Lon Pot getting hit a couple times, but the hostile force is invisible. The KAT people just happen to be demonstrating invisible aircraft in the area. Hell, Kim, even I can put one and one together.”

“We’re obviously American, and we’re obviously bought. Washington doesn’t care to have the connection made,” Kimball said.

“It might have been different if Pot wasn’t making a play for his own country, with everybody watching him. We zip through, Pot loses a bunch of planes and product, and no one gives a damn. But with Pot on the political move, too many paid-up members of the UN are keeping an eye on him. They wouldn’t cotton to a unilateral move by the U.S. in this new world order.”

“The timing’s wrong.”

“Just like poor drama or bad comedy.”

“Or wishful antiterrorism,” Kimball said.

The taxi driver stomped the pedal, and they shot into a hole in the next lane, dashing ahead of the Anglia.

“I read it that way. If we were after the druggie…”

“Which we thought we were,” Kimball said.

“Not to be playing Monday morning quarterback,” McEntire said, “but I didn’t quite buy Wilcox’s drug theory back in Colorado. No, wait. I bought the money end. We needed money, and that’s all my vote depended on. You were thinking about Randy, weren’t you?”

Kimball sighed, the image of his brother, the impish grin stretching his mouth, rose in his mind. “I was thinking about Randy,” he admitted.

“It’s okay with me,” Sam Eddy said. “I thought about him, too, but I figured Wilcox was using him for the hook.”

“I knew he was doing it,” Kimball said, “and I didn’t give a damn.”

“But we both got snookered. Pot turns out to be a bigger prize than we planned on. He’s got an international presence now, so we get shut down before we embarrass the people on the mall.”

The driver swung hard into a gap on Rama 4 Road and accelerated.

“All right,” Kimball said. “That’s where we’re at, shut down.”

“Plus,” added McEntire, “we didn’t play Wilcox’s game. The ball didn’t go where it was supposed to go, and the ‘tilt’ sign came on.”

Kimball grinned. “Neither of us have ever been good with orders.”

“We going to play his game, now? Or maybe it’s not his any more. We going to play the CIA’s game?”

“If we shut up, Sam Eddy, and ask please, and promise to not stray from the righteous path, we can have those planes free in a couple hours.”

“The problem with you, Kim, is you never make a promise you don’t intend to keep.”

“Same with you.”

“I’ve slipped from time to time,” McEntire said. “A couple times too many. Anyway, are you going to promise Wilcox that we’ll forego another joyride over Burma?”

“If I do, we finish the tour and maybe sell some airplanes. That’s got to be the first priority, Sam Eddy. People depend on us.”

“We’ve still got this other little problem,” Sam Eddy said. “The one where our airplanes blow up on someone else’s schedule. Wilcox hasn’t been very helpful with that one.”

“He hasn’t been very forthcoming, has he?” Kimball agreed. “I suppose it’s a case of ‘he has his problems, and we have ours.’”

Both of them were shoved to the right as the cab made a hard left turn onto Wireless Road.

“I’ll tell you what, Kim. You make a promise to Wilcox for everyone except me. I’ll take one loaded Alpha Kat and make one run.”

Kimball just looked at him.

“I mean it. For you and me and Randy and your folks.”

“Shit!” Kimball said. He wouldn’t let Sam Eddy assume his own, for lack of a better word, vengeance.

“Then don’t make any goddamned promises at all. Not for you, not for me, and not for any one of the people back at Don Muang. We all came for the same reasons, Kim. And there’s more than one priority.”

Kimball stared hard at Sam Eddy. He could sometimes be extremely moody, but he rarely expressed his moods. This one was heated.

The cab bounced and squeaked to a stop in front of the Embassy. Kimball got out in relief, dug into his pocket, and came up with two red 100 baht notes, the amount he had negotiated before the ride began. He shoved them into the tour guide’s hand.

The two of them marched past a couple Thai policemen, entered the Embassy, and showed their passports to the Marine on duty. He aimed them toward an information desk.

The pretty blonde at the desk asked, “How may we help you, gentlemen?”

“By hauling the ambassador out here right now,” Kimball said.

Sam Eddy grabbed his arm. “Or better, Miss, by finding the political officer, or whatever the cover is for the CIA man. We’d certainly like to speak with him. And we need to talk to the Deputy Director for Intelligence. He’s at the American Embassy in New Delhi right now.”

“What?” Alarm in her eyes.

“Ben Wilcox is his name,” McEntire said and smiled. His smiles always achieved female cooperation. “Please.”

“Excuse me for just one minute,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

They didn’t get the ambassador, of course. He was at some very important function.

They got a roly-poly, smiley little man who insisted he was the commerce attaché, and maybe he was. He listened sympathetically to the problem, didn’t suggest any solutions that might get him in trouble, and got them on a supposedly secure phone with Wilcox.

“What the hell are you doing?” Kimball demanded.

The DDI’s voice was irritatingly controlled and only raised the level of Kimball’s anger. “It seems that the FAA is double-checking your airworthiness certificates, after that accident in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Kimball. I’m sure it’ll all be straightened out soon.”

“Wilcox, goddamn it! I want those planes cleared for flight, and I want it taken care of now.”

“These things take time, Mr. Kimball. Certainly, you understand that.”

“I understand that I’ve got a damned good story for the Washington Post.”

McEntire, on the other side of the table, shook his head. Kimball knew the threat was empty. They didn’t have a shred of paper that pointed toward the CIA.

Wilcox knew it, too. “I’d bet, Mr. Kimball, that your aircraft will be released in a week or ten days. Why don’t you just enjoy the city? You’ve earned a vacation.”

Kimball slammed the phone down, but that didn’t help either.

Derek Crider, Alan Adage, and Del Gart left their rental car in the parking lot of the domestic terminal and carried their canvas carry-alls across the lot. They skirted the building to the south, walking along the chainlink fence toward an employee entrance.

“First time I ever did a job armed only with a power screwdriver,” Adage said.

“The way things are going,” Gart said, “my battery will be dead when I need it most.”

Crider didn’t say anything. They passed the corner of a building and the Kimball Aero airplanes came into view.

Crider slid to a stop. “Goddamn.”

The aircraft were there, as expected.

But they were surrounded by a single stripe of yellow tape, draped in sagging intervals from one portable stanchion to another. Small yellow tags dotted the fighters and the command aircraft.

“What the hell?” Gart said.

One Thai in a police uniform sauntered among the aircraft, obviously bored.

The two C-141 transports were not within the cordoned-off zone. They were parked side-by-side sixty feet from the Alpha Kats and appeared to be all buttoned up. Crider couldn’t see any Americans hanging around.

“It looks to me,” Crider said, “as if they’ve been confiscated.”

“Or impounded,” Adage said. “Maybe they didn’t pay their fees. Or take their shots.”

“What now?” Gart asked.

Crider thought it over. “This may make it easier than we thought it was going to be. I don’t see any one other than the local cop.”

“Let’s give it a try,” Gart said. “We can always tell the cop we’re here to correct the problem. He probably doesn’t know shit about the problem.”

Crider led the way to the employee entrance, manned by an employee of the airport security force.

He held up his clipboard for the guard to see a thick wad of red baht notes peeking from under the paper on the clipboard.

“What is this?”

“We’ve got some parts to deliver.”

“Parts. What kind of parts?”

They opened the carry-alls and let him take a good look in each.

“Those are squawk-ident transponders,” Crider explained patiently.

The guard reached inside Crider’s valise and fingered the black box. He’d probably never seen anything like it before in his life.

He looked at the clipboard.

“Okay,” he said.

He took the clipboard, initialed the bottom line, and gave the clipboard back.

Minus the baht notes.

The rest of it was even easier.

Jimmy Gander and Ito Makura, who had drawn the first six-hour stint of guard duty, had spent the first three hours of their tour confined to a small, drab room in the terminal building.

As soon as they had exited the Starlifter with their M-16s, a Thai policeman, one of two left to watch the aircraft, had yelled at them, drawn his pistol, confiscated the rifles, and led them away.

Gander protested all the way, but in vain. The cop didn’t understand English. And couldn’t read it, either, when Gander forced his copy of the weapons permit on him.

The supervisor in the security office could speak English, but he had motioned them into the little room, said he must examine the permits and make some telephone calls, and locked the door.

Gander fumed, demanded the use of a telephone, and got nowhere.

Makura climbed on a chair to peer through the single small window, hut he couldn’t see the aircraft from where they were confined.

After a mere two hours and fifty minutes, the supervisor came back, smiling. “All is in order.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Yes. But you may not carry the weapons more than twenty meters away from the airplanes.”

“I knew that,” Gander said.

“The officer will carry them back for you.”

“Wonderful.”

“You are free to go.”

Smile.

Gander followed the policeman carrying their weapons down a maze of narrow corridors in the administrative section. When they reached a door onto the tarmac, he said, “Ito, go find a phone and tell Kim what happened.”

“Got it, Jimmy.”

As he and the cop neared the impounded planes, Gander scanned the area. It didn’t look any different than when they’d been taken away from it. The Alpha Kats and the Kappa Kat were still buttoned up.

He walked alongside the yellow tape and took the assault rifles from the cop, who ducked under the tape and went to join his partner.

Gander rounded the corner stanchion and approached the Starlifter.

The hatch into the crew compartment was closed.

He distinctly remembered leaving it open, in the hopes that the heat wouldn’t build up inside.

Gander stopped where he was and rotated.

The Americans exiting through the employee gate stood out like three sore thumbs. They were a full head taller than the Thais milling around near the gate.

Gander yelled, “Hey!”

The Thais all looked his way.

The Americans didn’t. They slipped through the gate and began walking north.

Gander ran to the crew hatch, shoved the rifles inside, and then loped toward the gate.

The guard was only there to keep people out, not in, and he didn’t give Gander a second glance.

His quarries were running now, headed for the parking lots, but they were tall enough for him to track.

Gander went to full gallop.

Except for Gander, all of the pilots and Tex Brabham were crammed into the room shared by Soames and Billingsly when Kimball got back. He had been using the telephone in his own room.

“All right,” he said, “I’ve made some headway.”

Soames hoped so. The atmosphere was definitely dampened by pessimism. There were no jokes today, off-color or not. He asked, “Did you find Jimmy?”

“No.”

All they had heard from Gander was a phone message left at the desk saying that the airplanes might have been tampered with by three Americans. Gander had called it in at 4:15 P.M., three hours before.

“So what’s the headway?” Vrdlicka asked. His depressed tone said he was worried about his friend.

Kimball leaned against the dresser. “The Thai cops insist that no one was allowed inside the tape. But you know the power of the baht. They apologized profusely for detaining Jimmy and Ito.”

Makura said, “Jeez, now we are getting somewhere.”

“What about the demonstration flights tomorrow?” Soames asked.

“Indefinitely suspended. I called Manila to delay our arrival, but they had already heard that our certificates had been withdrawn, and they postponed indefinitely. They’ll call us.”

McEntire was stretched out across the head of one bed shoved against the wall, his head and shoulders resting on a pair of pillows. He said, “Have we gotten to the part where we’re making headway, Kim?”

“I got some concessions. As long as we don’t start or move the planes, we can work on them. I pleaded the humidity here and the need to keep moisture out of the fuel bladders. We can refuel all of the planes, including the transports. We can do our normal maintenance.”

“And we can see if anybody’s been fucking around with them?” Brabham asked.

“Right, Tex.”

“We can strip their seals?”

“Yes. Just leave the ribbon in place.”

Brabham climbed out of his chair, and Tom Keeper was the quickest at anticipating the vacancy. He claimed it by rolling backwards over the arm.

“I’ll get the boys up and go on out there, then,” Brabham said.

Kimball grabbed Brabham’s arm as he passed and leaned close to whisper in his ear.

Soames also leaned in close and heard, “Tex, tell Carl Dent to stay out of sight inside the Starlifter, but to prepare a full ordnance load for ought-eight. He’s to be prepared to missile-up at any moment.”

“Now wait just a goddamned minute!” Soames said.

The undercurrent murmur in the room died away.

“Stay out of it, A.J.,” Kimball said.

McEntire came off the bed. “Who’s doing what to whom, A.J.?”

Brabham started for the door, and Soames slipped in front of him and rested his shoulder against it.

“Move, A.J.,” Brabham said.

“In a minute. Kim, you’re not going anywhere without me. You’ll need a controller, and I’m it.”

“Fuck this,” McEntire said. “No one’s going anywhere, or doing anything, on the spur of the moment.”

“It’s my fight, Sam Eddy,” Kimball said.

“You heard what I said, buddy. If we’re sticking to Mr. Washington’s plan, we’re also sticking to our plan. Admittedly, given the current conditions, we’ll need some alternative departure routes, but that’s easy enough.”

“Damn it, Sam Eddy, I’m the president!”

“Damn it, yourself. I think we can rustle up enough votes to oust you.”

“Shut up a minute,” Soames said, loud enough that everyone shut up.

The rifts were widening under the pressure, and he wasn’t certain of some of the motives, but he wasn’t going to stand by and watch it happen.

“We haven’t got a quorum for a shareholder’s meeting,” Soames said, “but I guess we could call this the executive committee. I’m going to want to see enough hands in the air before I go along with anything that deviates from what we all agreed on in Phoenix. Anyone object to that?”

All he saw were heads shaking negatively.

Except for Kimball’s.

“Anyone want to try busting out of here?”

All of the hands went up.

Except for Kimball’s.

“You’re out-voted, Kim.”

“You’re out of line, A.J.,” Brabham said.

“Hang on, Tex. I’m barely started. Next, I want to know just…”

The telephone rang.

“That’ll be Susie,” McEntire said, “wanting to know if we’re all happy.”

Keeper grabbed the phone, listened a second, and said, “It’s Gander. He wants to talk to you, Kim.”

It was after midnight before they beached the Oriental Hotel. Located on Oriental Avenue, the hotel overlooked the Chao Phraya River, and was spread over enough acreage to accommodate expansive gardens, two tennis courts, and a swimming pool. Until recently, the Oriental had been considered the best hotel in the world.

They came by the river route, using a long-tail boat, named for the absurdly long drive shaft turning the propeller, and disembarked near the Garden Wing of the hotel. Duplex rooms looking out on the river and the gardens made up the wing.

Kimball paid the boat’s operator, then gave him another five hundred baht to wait for them. He stepped ashore, followed by McEntire, Cadwell, Mabry, and Halek, all of whom had drawn the short straws and professed to be happy about it.

The garden’s paths were lit with small yellow lamps, but it only served to make the shadows darker. Gander emerged from the blackness near one of the duplexes, identifiable by the outline of his Stetson.

Kimball left the path and met him in the middle of a patch of grass that would have impressed the greens keepers at Pebble Beach or Rock Creek.

“’Bout time, boss,” Gander said.

“We had to go back to Don Muang to retrieve the hardware,” Kimball said. “You were right, Jimmy. The gate guard didn’t check us on the way out.”

“What’ve you got?”

“The four pistols. We weren’t about to hide an assault rifle.”

“Okay. They’ve got six rooms. Three duplexes. They travel better than we do. You know these suckers run two hundred and fifty bucks a night?”

“We getting a tour, Jimmy?”

“No. I followed them back here, but didn’t pinpoint the rooms until late because they all got together for dinner. I’m hungry, by the way.”

“I’ll buy you a cheeseburger later,” Sam Eddy said. “So, what do they look like?”

“Hard guys.” Gander described each of the six men. “All of them Americans, I think, except for the Latino. He could be something else. And one of them’s got an Irish brogue that could be the real thing.”

“Any names?” Kimball asked.

“I heard Crider, Wheeler, and Gart mentioned, but that’s all. If I had to guess, Crider’s in charge.”

“Good work, Jimmy. Any suggestions?”

“We’re short a couple guns. Let’s try to take them one at a time, starting with the Hispanic. He’s the smallest.”

“If somebody yells, we lose a few,” Halek said.

“Two at a time, then,” Kimball said. “We want Crider, for sure.”

Gander explained the layout of the rooms and who was occupying which room, and they split up. Kimball and Halek followed Gander across a sidewalk to another row of duplexes and they stepped into grass between two buildings.

As he studiously attempted to place his feet on soft ground, Kimball kept thinking about stealthy Indians. Hiawatha or somebody from his bookish youth.

Gander slowed as they reached the second building, sliding into the shadows next to it, putting his back to the wall. Kimball slipped around him and peeked around the corner. He saw sliding glass doors that opened on a small patio.

And they were open, the occupant taking advantage of the balmy night.

Kimball reached under his shirt and pulled the Browning nine millimeter from its perch in the small of his back. His thumb found the safety and clicked it off.

He heard the snick of Halek’s pistol being armed.

He went first, tiptoeing across the patio to stand next to the open door. The pale white curtains were drawn, billowing outward between the open doors a little.

He couldn’t hear any noises, any movement.

Reaching with his left hand, the pistol held muzzle-up in his right, he grabbed the fabric between his thumb and fingers and drew it back slightly.

As he leaned his head to peer through the gap, he realized his body was probably backlit through the curtains. He hesitated, considering his vulnerability, then pressed forward to see.

There was the bed, ghostly white.

One form in it, lying on its side, its back to him. He stepped through the curtain onto deep, sound-absorbing carpet.

Crossing quickly to the bed, he switched the gun to his left hand, reached over the man’s head, and slapped his hand over his mouth.

Shoved the muzzle into the back of his neck as he came to life, struggling.

Then Gander was there, gripping the man’s arms.

Kimball leaned down and whispered, “Move again, hombre, and I’m going to put your lights out.”

He quit struggling.

Halek appeared, tucked his Browning into his belt, and began cutting the sheets into strips. The man was sleeping nude, and he wouldn’t like being caught that way. In the thin light spilling outside, his eyes rolled wildly in their sockets. In four minutes, the captive was gagged and trussed like a rodeo calf. Gander had that experience.

Halek rapidly went through the man’s suitcase and pants pockets.

“Looks like he’s a pilot, Kim,” he whispered. “Got a license and log. Passport says his name is Sanchez. There’s lease papers and keys.”

“Leave the money and bring the paperwork and the keys. Let’s make it tough for him to get out of the country.”

Halek stuffed his pockets with documents.

“Who’s next door, Jimmy?”

“That’ll be Crider.”

“Let’s go.”

Crider was a more cautious man. His doors were closed and locked.

Kimball was considering his next move when all hell broke loose.

Two loud shots rang out from the next row of buildings.

People started yelling.

He grabbed a metal chair from next to a glass-topped table, rotated nearly a full turn, and slammed it as hard as he could into the glass door.

Glass exploded everywhere.

He danced through the doorframe, trying to stay away from the jagged edges.

Crider was sitting bolt upright in his bed, his hand scrambling beneath his pillow.

“If you find it, Crider, you’re a dead man,” Kimball said, holding the Browning steady on the man’s forehead.

Crider pulled his hand out.

The use of his name didn’t stop him from trying to bluff it out. “What the hell’s going on? You want money? Take it.”

Gander and Halek came through the broken door.

“We’d better move,” Gander said.

“Out of the bed, Crider.”

He slid out from under the sheet, wearing boxer shorts, and stood up slowly, keeping his hands out in front of him. Kimball had the feeling Crider had done this before.

Halek sliced sheets.

Gander slipped behind the man, pulled his arms behind him, and bound them tightly, from wrists to elbows.

“Get the paperwork, Jay.”

Halek searched the slacks and jacket of a suit tossed over a chair and came up with the passport and wallet.

“Let’s roll,” Kimball said.

Gander shoved Crider barefooted through the broken glass and out the door.

The captive complained about the glass, but he complained quietly.

Kimball heard feet pounding on the sidewalk. More people were screaming for the police. Lights came on in most of the duplexes.

Somewhere to Kimball’s right, and ahead of him, somebody yelled, “Derek?”

They ran for the river, passing the last duplex at a canter, Crider jerked along between Gander and Halek. Because of his bound arms, he couldn’t run well, but the two pilots didn’t let him lose his balance.

Four more shots rang out behind them.

And the more prudent hotel guests immediately shut off their room lights.

Ahead of him, Kimball saw a shadow prancing among deeper shadows.

And the shadow hollered, “Stop, or I’ll shoot!”

Twenty-one

“There’s three of ’em, Alan!” Crider yelled, diving for the ground and pulling Halek and Gander with him.

Kimball, with the awareness a fighter pilot has for his tactical situation, realized he was outlined by the lights still on in a few duplexes behind him. A stand of three palm trees ten feet away on the left was his closest cover, and as he made a cut off his right foot and headed for them, he heard the sharp crack of a pistol and a bullet whistled past his head. Its sonic trail concussed against his eardrums.

He saw the muzzle flash in the darkness ahead, and almost without thinking, squeezed off two shots in reply.

Then hit the ground.

Heard his shots tearing leaves.

Rolled wildly to his left.

Another bullet kicked dirt in his face.

The image of the muzzle flash hung on his retina. He whipped his Browning out in front of him, gripped it in both hands, aimed to the right of the flash memory, and squeezed the trigger.

The automatic bucked.

The bullet hit meat.

Deep groan.

He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, running toward the sound.

“Jay! Jimmy!”

Kimball heard them hauling Crider to his feet, chasing after him.

When he reached a thicket of shrubbery, he searched the ground rapidly and saw the dark form sprawled on the grass. It didn’t move.

He knelt beside the man and tried to feel for a pulse on the side of the throat, but his hand came away slippery and wet with blood.

“Come on, Kim!” Gander yelled. “Forget him!”

Leaping to his feet, Kimball circled around the shrubbery, and then the river was before him, the quay softly lit by regularly spaced lampposts.

Among the dozen boats held against the dock, their boat was waiting. Thais had a strange kind of loyalty to strangers who had paid them.

He heard more feet running on a gravel path, and whipped around, raising the automatic.

“Me, Kim!” McEntire called.

They came trotting into the light, and Kimball saw that McEntire and Mabry were carrying Cadwell between them.

“Jesus!”

“In the boat,” Sam Eddy urged.

They leaped from the quay into the longtail boat. Gander and Halek more or less threw Crider aboard, who tripped and fell heavily on his side, then followed him.

“Let’s go,” Kimball yelled to the driver.

His eyes were wide with fear, but he quickly took in all the guns, revved the ratty motor, and pulled out into the current, joining other boats on the move.

Mabry and McEntire helped Cadwell move forward, into the protection of the deck cabin, and Gander prodded Crider with the toe of his cowboy boot, forcing him to follow, scooting along on his knees.

Kimball dropped to the deck next to McEntire, who was examining Cadwell with a small flashlight.

The left shoulder, arm, and side of Cadwell’s blue sport shirt turned a slick black under the light. McEntire ripped the sleeve away.

“Cardsharp?” Kimball asked.

“Not too bad, Kim. Hurts like hell, but I don’t think the slug’s in me.”

“Roll over,” Sam Eddy ordered.

Gritting his teeth, and assisted by Kimball and Mabry, Cadwell rolled onto his side.

McEntire probed with the light and his finger.

“No bullet, Howard,” he said. “Took a chunk out of the back of your arm, and furrowed your back. Bleeding like a stuck hog, however.”

“Damn, thanks, Doc,” Cadwell said.

While Mabry cut up Cadwell’s shirt and used it as a bandage, Kimball checked aft. Jay Halek was sitting next to their boatman, chatting with him, and keeping him on a course up the river.

“What the hell happened, Sam Eddy?”

“We were tying up the first guy, when the second guy popped over for a drink, I guess. He skipped the drink, shot Howard, and disappeared into the dark. I thought the prudent course might be to leave, but we ran into a third guy with a gun. We exchanged pleasantries.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. I think I downed him for good.”

“Kim got one of them, too,” Gander said. “Probably the one who shot Howie. The one called Alan, right, Crider?”

Crider didn’t respond. He was lodged against the cabin wall, his arms still bound behind him, and his boxer shorts bunched up.

Through the open front end of the deckhouse, Kimball could see the river curving to the left. The lights of dozens of watercraft moved with, and opposite, their course. More lights lined the river’s shores.

There were sirens sounding behind them now, converging on the hotel.

Kimball moved over next to Crider.

“What’s your first name, Crider?”

The man pursed his lips.

Kimball was certain that the man’s passport and ID, which Halek had, wouldn’t agree with the truth.

McEntire crawled over next to Kimball and turned his flashlight on the captive’s face.

The close-cropped hair suggested military, and the taut skin of the face, along with the rippling shoulder and arm muscles, indicated a man who was fit and could be dangerous. The cold gray eyes confirmed the impression.

“I’ll tell you what, Crider. I’m running out of both time and patience. I want quick and accurate answers to some questions.”

Under the glare of Sam Eddy’s light, Crider’s lips tightened.

Jay Halek came forward with Crider’s passport and handed it to Kimball. “Take a look at this, Kim. The entry and exit stamps match our stops except for Islamabad.”

Kimball took the blue book, held it under Sam Eddy’s light, and glanced at it. Just looking at the dates brought back the memory of the Alpha Kat exploding from under him. He took the wallet from Halek and scanned through it, found the slip of paper listing phone numbers and times. He shoved both the passport and the wallet in his pocket.

His anger rose proportionately to what he had read, and he didn’t bother disguising it. “Well. Mr. Joseph Brooks, huh. Brooks or Crider, it puts you where I thought you were. You happen to have four million on you? You owe me for a plane.”

“Go to hell,” Crider said.

“That’s all I need,” McEntire said. “Let’s ice him.”

“Fine with me.”

Crider didn’t think they’d do it.

Kimball told him, “I was flying the plane you rigged, Crider. If you think I give a shit about you, think again. I’m going to make my own justice system.”

The hard eyes stared back at him.

But they flickered.

Kimball looked at McEntire, nodded, and they each grabbed one of Crider’s legs and dragged him across the splintery deck out of the deckhouse.

“Stick close to the driver, Jay,” Kimball said.

Halek went aft.

Crider began to struggle, kicking his legs, rolling back and forth on his bound arms.

Kimball gripped the man’s ankle with both hands.

McEntire had a firm grasp on the other ankle. He laughed and said, “Make a wish, Kim.”

They stood up outside the deckhouse, raising Crider upside down, to where he rested on the back of his thick neck.

Spread his legs a little more.

Heaved upward.

Swung his torso outboard and lowered him headfirst into the polluted water of the Chao Phraya.

The leg bucked and fought in Kimball’s hands. He tightened his grip.

“How long, Sam Eddy?”

“Ah, hell, Kim. You messed up my count. Now I’ll have to start over.”

The water tended to drag Crider back alongside the hull of the boat, and Kimball braced his feet against the pull.

The boatman, Halek, Mabry, Gander, and Cadwell, who was raised upward on his good arm, watched the action silently.

“Let’s try now,” McEntire said.

They hauled him inboard, dripping, gagging water.

“Crider?”

“Fuck you!”

Back in the water.

McEntire counted to three hundred this time.

Lifted him out.

Spitting, coughing. A stream of filthy water erupted from his mouth.

“Who you working for?” Kimball asked.

Hacking cough. More water gushing from his mouth.

“Who?”

“Goddamn it, I don’t know.”

“Back over the side,” Sam Eddy said.

“I don’t know, damn it!” There was an edge of hysteria in Crider’s voice. “Hold on! I’d tell you if I knew.”

“Tell me everything you know,” Kimball said.

Crider told them.

It wasn’t much. No names. Phone contacts only.

“How do you make contact?” McEntire asked.

“Numbers and times in my billfold.” He coughed and spit more water.

“What else have you been doing?” Kimball asked.

“That’s it! Nothing else!”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“Asshole! We weren’t trying to hurt anyone. Just the planes.”

Kimball and McEntire stood up, raised Crider’s legs high (he wasn’t fighting as hard now) and started swinging him.

“Goddamn it! Henry Loh!”

They dropped him headfirst on the deck, maybe a little harder than necessary.

Henry Loh, according to Wilcox’s information, was the man heading Lon Pot’s little air wing.

“Tell me about Henry Loh.”

Crider told them about the deal for the six Mirages.

“What else did you learn from Henry Loh?”

“He works for Lon Pot.”

“Where is Lon Pot?”

“Here. In Bangkok.”

That was news.

“Got an address?”

Crider gave them one. “It’s near Chinatown, his wife’s place. Half block from Yawaraj Road.”

Kimball left Sam Eddy kneeling over Crider and duck-walked back to where Gander waited with Mabry and Cadwell.

“How you doing, Cardsharp?”

“Hurts like hell, Kim, but as long as it’s hurting, I know I’m all right.”

Kimball handed Gander his Browning. “Jimmy, we’re going to drop you off somewhere along here. All of you. Buy Howard a new shirt. Buy a bottle of whiskey,” he looked back at Crider, “cheap whiskey, and start pouring it in our friend. When he’s nice and drunk, take him back to the airport. Anybody asks, he’s a fellow pilot that got rolled, okay?”

“Gotcha, Kim.”

“If you don’t think you can get through the gate with the guns, ditch them.”

“Where are you going?”

“Sam Eddy and I are going to visit a lady.”

Gander grinned at him. “You single guys just can’t leave it alone, can you?”

A relieved boatman let them off on a dock near Mahachai Road and grinned nervously as Kimball gave him five thousand baht. It was much more than he might have expected, and enough that he wouldn’t want to brag about it.

Kimball and McEntire, who still had one of the pistols, flagged a taxi, bargained a fare, and climbed in.

It took twenty minutes to find the address and another two hundred baht to keep the driver waiting.

The front door was made of steel, but it had a wrought-iron protected window in it. McEntire stood to one side of the door, out of sight, and Kimball, who couldn’t find a doorbell, banged on the door with his fist.

After a few minutes a light came on inside, then a hardened and matured Oriental face appeared in the window and stared out at Kimball. He shook his head negatively, waving Kimball away with his hand.

McEntire stuck the muzzle of the automatic against the glass, aimed in the middle of the man’s face.

He opened the door.

Kimball pushed in, shoving the man aside.

“Lon Pot?”

He knew the name, but he didn’t know English. Shook his head madly.

“Lon Pot?”

More negatives.

“Mai Pot?”

The eyes clicked upward.

“Wait here, Sam Eddy.”

“Happily,” McEntire said, holding the pistol at the ready and roughly pushing the man back into the foyer. He closed the door.

Kimball took the stairs two at a time and reached the landing at the top.

He banged on that door several times.

When it finally opened wide, he was surprised to see a small boy.

Damn it. He didn’t want to be faced by a small boy.

A woman appeared from a hallway, clutching a silken, embroidered robe around her. She moved up behind the boy and put her arm over his shoulder. There was real beauty in her face, despite the touch of fear in her eyes.

“What do you want?” she asked. Her English was stilted, but she obviously recognized him as American.

“I want Lon Pot.”

“He no… is not here. You must go.”

Kimball heard the sickly thunk of metal striking flesh and bone and looked down to the foyer. McEntire had clubbed the Oriental, whose eyes rolled backward as he sagged to the tiles. Sam Eddy now had the gun trained on a second man, motioning him into the foyer from a doorway.

“Getting crowded, Kim,” he called.

“Where is Lon Pot?” Kimball asked the woman. He kept his hands at his sides, trying to dispel her fright.

“Why you want Lon Pot?”

To hell with her fright. “I may kill the man.”

Her hand rose to her mouth.

“Why kill?”

“He killed my parents and brother.”

Her head sagged forward, her chin resting on her chest.

“Can you tell me where to find him?”

She said something to the boy, in what Kimball thought might be Vietnamese, and the boy slipped out from under her arm and ran back into the depths of the apartment.

She raised her head and looked directly into his eyes. There was no fear there, now, just a wicked gleam.

“I tell you where to find Lon Pot.”

Kimball was amazed.

“You make me widow.”

“I’ll damned sure try.”

In her halting English, she described to him a large compound called Fragrant Flower, and she graphically related its location relative to villages, rivers, and roads.

Kimball wondered if Wilcox had had this information.

He didn’t think he’d have to leave Mai Pot and the boy bound and gagged. He thanked her and backed out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Back down in the entrance hall, just in case the other Asian could understand English, he told McEntire, “Pot’s not here. Come on.”

Together, they raced out the door and into the back of the cab.

McEntire told the driver, “Don Muang. You do it fast, and we’ll double your fare.”

Kimball was shoved off balance into the seat as the cab whipped a U-turn and headed out of the alley.

When he got himself upright, he leaned over the back of the front seat and told the driver, “We want to make a stop at the central post office.”

The man nodded vigorously.

“Forget to mail your postcards?” Sam Eddy asked.

“Forgot to call home,” Kimball said. “The international telecommunications center is next door.”

It was nearly three in the morning when Kimball picked up a phone and got the AT&T operator. He used his credit card and long distance information to make his call.

“Central Intelligence Agency.”

“I want the Deputy Director of Operations.” Kimball didn’t even know his name, but he was certain the man knew as much as Wilcox knew.

“I’m sorry, sir, but —”

“It’s three o’clock in the afternoon there. You can find him somewhere. Just tell him it’s Bryce Kimball.” It took nearly eight minutes to run him down.

At nine minutes after nine o’clock at night, Brock Dixon picked up the public telephone after its first ring.

He looked around the mall, but didn’t see anything suspicious. He turned back to face the wall, pushing himself close between the short partitions separating the four telephones.

“Yeah, Crider?”

“Wrong party. This is Bryce Kimball.”

Dixon nearly dropped the phone. What the hell?

“Who? What are you…?”

“I don’t know who you are, asshole, and I don’t know where you are, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Listen, goddamn it!”

“You listen. Take a look around. I’m sure you’ll see someone you recognize.”

Kimball hung up on him.

Dixon was afraid to turn around. He replaced the receiver, took a deep breath, and rotated slowly.

In the sparse crowd moving along the central atrium of the mall, he didn’t see anyone who…

There.

Ted Simonson.

He stood near a planter full of tall greenery, just looking at him, nodding slightly.

Dixon started walking in the opposite direction.

Two men rose from a bench and began to close on him.

He turned around and started the other way.

Two more men emerged from the entrance to Sears.

And Ted Simonson kept nodding.

Lon Pot emerged from the master suite, stood for a moment on the balcony, and then descended the stairs.

He tried so hard to appear regal, Henry Loh thought. He and Dao Van Luong stood as the Prince approached them across the soft plushness of the white carpet.

“Well,” Pot demanded.

He thought he was managing the coup, but all he had done in the hours since he returned to Fragrant Flower was to ask questions of Dao or Loh, wanting to know if the orders they had formulated had been carried out.

Dao said, “I have just talked to Vol Soon. The army is prepared, Prince.”

“Chao is ready, also,” Loh said. “He has been in contact with Colonel Mauk. Beginning at four o’clock in the morning, the country is yours.”

Pot almost smiled. “And this American? Kimball?”

“Their aircraft are quarantined at Don Muang. They are no longer a threat,” Loh said. “We flew air defense last night, but there was no attack on any of your facilities, Prince.”

“Suppose the airplanes are released. What then?”

Loh smiled. “They are no longer stealth aircraft, though their pilots do not know that. We will keep an air cover near Shan Base and here. If, by any chance, the Alpha Kats come, they will not last long.”

“Who is flying this air cover?” Pot asked.

“Two of the pilots from Switzer’s squadron.”

“No. You will fly it. And you will use all of the Third Squadron’s aircraft.”

The man was becoming paranoid, Loh thought, but he would not argue. If the Americans came, he would achieve his goal of becoming an ace very easily.

“Very well, Prince. I will issue the necessary orders. At 3:30 A.M., Pyotr will launch his aircraft from here and fly the intimidation patrols to the south. At the same time, Switzer will take the new Mirages and fly the north and coast patrols. I will assume command of Kao Chung’s squadron, and we will maintain a twenty-four-hour air defense of Shan Base and Fragrant Flower.”

“Make it so,” Lon Pot said.

His broken teeth marred his smile, but he was happy because he had finally made a decision.

Susan McEntire called at six o’clock.

Kimball and Sam Eddy were devouring a large platter of hamburgers and French fries in their room, chasing them with Classic Coke.

McEntire lifted the phone off its cradle and handed it to Kimball.

“’Lo,” he said.

“Where have you been all day?”

“Busy. We’re working on this end, Susie.”

“I’ll bet you are. You made the papers here.”

“Ah, damn. What’d they say about us.”

“That the airplanes are grounded, pending a review of the airworthiness certificates.”

“Not good publicity, huh?”

“Damn it, Kim! You didn’t call me yesterday, and I’ve tried a dozen times today.”

“We really have been working. Sam Eddy and I have been to the Embassy three times. We’ve been hitting every Thai government office we can think of.”

“At least,” she said, “you can’t… do the other.”

“Don’t worry about it, Susie.”

“But I do.”

“The guys are all fine.”

“I worry about you.”

Women! No. Susan. Kimball had an instantaneous image of her. He could smell the fine aroma of her dark red hair, see those big green eyes locked on his own. He remembered her tears when they left Phoenix.

As a test, he compared the image with that of Cathy Colby, but Cathy’s features were blurred.

“You are a puzzle, Susie,” he said.

“We’ll have a long talk when you come home,” she said. “Why don’t you come home now?”

“It won’t be long.”

McEntire motioned for the phone.

“Sam Eddy wants to talk to you. I’ll call tomorrow or the next day.”

“No, I don’t…”

He passed the phone to McEntire.

“Susie, you still have the key to my apartment, right?”

Pause.

“Do me a big favor, will you? My plants are going to die if they don’t get water. Yeah, thanks, hon.”

McEntire hung up and went back to his hamburger. His mood had changed, and he didn’t seem inclined to talk.

Kimball finished his Coke and got up from his chair.

“It’s about that time, Sam Eddy.”

“I know. I’m a clock-watcher from way back. You sure you want to do it this way, Kim?”

“No, I don’t. But I got out-voted, remember?”

They had put the plan to all of the Kimball Aero Tech employees in mid-morning. Kimball had offered an alternative that primarily affected himself alone, but that had been turned down when Soames and McEntire lobbied the voters.

Sam Eddy pulled himself out of his chair, and the two of them went through the room, stuffing paper and documents in their pockets. They were leaving their duffle bags.

They left the hotel together, certain that the desk clerk saw them, wandering slowly down the street. From time to time, they saw some of the others, out shopping for trinkets and souvenirs, ready for a good time.

The shadows got longer as the sun settled in the west.

To kill time, they stopped in a jewelry store and examined almost everything behind the glass counters.

McEntire asked to see an emerald ring. He held it up to the light, then handed it to Kimball.

“Look like the real thing to you, Kim?”

Kimball peered at it in the light. The deep yellowish-green appeared clear and cold.

“Looks good to me, Sam Eddy, but you’re more of an expert than I am.”

“I’ve bought a few, I guess. For too many women.”

McEntire engaged the proprietor in a long barrage of offers and counteroffers, switching back and forth between Thai baht and American dollars. He finally forked over nine hundred dollars American.

“Stateside,” he said, “it’ll be worth twice that.”

They kept meandering around the streets, trying out the shops, buying a couple T-shirts, always moving toward the airport, and at nine o’clock, they entered the domestic terminal.

Airline traffic seemed normal, and the terminal was crowded with a couple dozen different nationalities, all of them going somewhere important.

Moving easily through the crowd, Kimball found the airport offices, and after showing their passports, they were allowed to pass through the employee-only corridors and go out on the tarmac. All of the KAT people were entering the airport grounds through different gates and doors.

Ahead of them, they saw the shadowy outlines of the Alpha Kats and Kappa Kat backed up by the soaring tails of the Starlifters.

There were no lights in the section, but the yellow tape surrounding the aircraft was clearly visible.

Approaching one of the Thai guards, Kimball said, “We’re going to do some work, all right?” He pointed to the transports. “Over there?”

The guard nodded his acceptance.

Kimball saw Tex Brabham talking to the other guard.

And Kimball punched this one in the stomach.

The air went out of him, and his head whipped down. McEntire clipped him smartly behind the ear with the edge of his hand.

“Ow!” McEntire yelped. “That’s not supposed to hurt me. James Bond doesn’t get hurt.”

Kimball caught the collapsing Thai, spun his body around, and got his hands under his arms.

“Bond has a stand-in,” he said.

“Damn it. I knew there was a trick to it,” McEntire said as he lifted the guard’s feet.

They hauled him across the tarmac to the darkest spot against the chainlink fence, meeting Brabham and Dent with the other guard.

Dent whipped nylon line out of his pocket and went to work tying them up.

Kimball and McEntire trotted to the first C-141, opened the hatch, and climbed into the crew compartment. Walt Hammond was seated on the raised flight deck, looking down on Crider, who was spread-eagled on the lower bunk, his wrists and ankles tied to the four corners. His mouth was stuffed with an oily rag, held in place by someone’s tie wrapped around his head.

His eyes followed Kimball as he peeled off his shirt and slacks, shoving them into a locker. McEntire changed out of his civvies also, and a few minutes later, they were both in their flight suits and pressure suits.

“He been a good boy?” Kimball asked Hammond.

“The best. Any time he looks happy, I tell him about the joys of free-flying from ten thousand feet. Without a chute, of course.”

“Of course,” Kimball said, handing his helmet and mask to Hammond. “Don’t let me forget these, Walt.”

He slipped into the cargo bay and found most of the pilots and mechanics waiting for him.

“Anyone have a problem getting into the airport?”

No one had.

McEntire came through the doorway and joined them.

“Anyone have any questions about the sequence? Do we have it down pat?”

“Down pat,” Soames said.

“We can always draw names again,” Kimball said. “I don’t want to force anybody into this.”

Gander, Halek, and Vrdlicka, who had drawn the positive numbers for the Alpha Kats, shook their heads violently.

Howard Cadwell, bare-backed and trussed in clean white bandages, said, “I think I got fucked over. Jimmy wouldn’t let me draw.”

“Next time, Howie.”

Brabham and Dent pulled open the passage door and joined them in the hot cargo bay.

“How about the Kappa people?”

Soames, Hamilton, Mabry, and Keeper had drawn the seats on the Kappa Kat.

Soames said, “Kim, let’s just get on with it.”

“Roger, A.J.”

He looked around the bay. Cardboard, slats, and chunks of crating were shoved against the far wall. Missiles were loaded on the dollies, ready to roll as soon as the ramp was dropped. More missiles were unpacked, resting on canvas beds, ready to be lifted onto the empty dollies as they came back. He was certain the floor of the other transport was similarly cluttered.

“Carl?” he asked.

“We figure we’ve got the time down to twenty minutes, Kim.”

“Without lights?”

“We know our babies.”

“Setup?”

“A Sidewinder and an AMRAAM each on the two outboard pylons. Four Hellfires on the inboard pylons. On the centerline, we’re slinging a gun pod.”

“Good. Jay, did you find the Lear?”

Among the personal effects they had lifted from the Hispanic pilot at the Oriental had been the lease papers and keys for a Lear business jet.

“It’s about a quarter-mile north of us, Kim.”

“Good. Give me the keys.”

Halek tossed him the key ring. Kimball caught it, then checked his watch.

“The planes all check out, Tex?”

“They’re clean, Kim. And we went over our entire inventory. I can’t see where the asshole,” he pointed a stubby forefinger toward the crew compartment, “got hold of anything.”

“Okay. 9:35 P.M. all right with you, Tex?”

“Any time’s all right with me, chief.”

“I’ll go at 9:35 P.M.”

“We’ll be waiting.” Brabham gave him two coils of quarter-inch nylon rope.

McEntire punched him lightly on the shoulder as he left the bay. Kimball gave him a wink.

He stayed close to the fence, walking behind parked aircraft. There were several Thai International planes, a Boeing 737 from India Air, a large number of private light twins and business jets.

He found the Lear by its tail number, checked the immediate vicinity, and finding no one interested in him, walked up to the Lear and unlocked the door.

He let the door down and climbed inside. It took him five minutes to rig the ropes, one to the brake release, and one looped around the throttle handles. The line to the throttles was hooked around the console so that tugging it from the rear pulled the handles forward. He trailed both ropes along the floor and tossed their ends out the door.

He leaned down and looked through the windscreen at the runways that passed in front of the plane. He counted the planes taking off and compared them to the second hand on his watch. The interval was almost six minutes.

Then he sat in the pilot’s seat, powered up the instruments, and went through the checklist as best he remembered it. He hadn’t flown a Lear in years.

He waited, checking his watch occasionally.

At 9:33 P.M., he fired the port jet, then the starboard. They both spooled up quickly, but he didn’t worry about temperatures and pressures.

He levered himself out of the seat, backed through the curtain into the cabin, then descended the steps.

Watched the runway and waited.

Waited.

A silvery DC-9 flashed past, its engines at full throttle. He waited until he saw it start to rotate, then backed away from the fuselage and pulled his throttle rope hard.

The twin engines immediately started to scream.

The plane bucked against the rope.

Kimball backed away a little farther, keeping a firm grip on the other rope.

When he was clear of the stabilizer and the engines were crying a moan that hurt his ears, he jerked the rope.

Then he started running.

Twenty-two

A.J. Soames was in the Hawkeye Three position, Alex Hamilton backing him up in the air controller’s seat on his right. Warren Mabry was the aircraft commander, and Tom Keeper was in the right seat.

Soames was proud of the whole damned bunch of them. Pilots and techs working side-by-side in nearly pitch darkness, they had missiled-up in less than eighteen minutes. The start carts were positioned between aircraft, and all of the pilots were in their assigned seats, except for Kimball.

Kimball absolutely would not let anyone else take the risks with the Lear.

Kimball was very protective of his charges. From the information provided by the CIA man, Kimball, McEntire, Billingsly, and Soames knew the names and background of some of the pilots they might face: Loh, Switzer, Chung, Burov. Kimball had decided to not pass that data on to the other pilots. He thought it was much better if they confronted nameless adversaries, and Soames agreed with him.

He could see Tex Brabham’s hat moving between the planes, as he checked on his mechanics and the start carts.

Mabry whistled through his teeth. The Colonel Bogie March.

Soames craned his neck to look north.

The Lear emerged from the line of parked aircraft, appeared to hesitate, then rapidly picked up speed. The unmanned business jet zipped toward a ninety-degree intersection with the main runways.

With some trepidation, Soames quickly scanned the end of the runways. A civilian airliner was just turning onto it from the taxiway.

Hold on, mother.

The Lear bounced over a section of grass, then crossed a taxi way, still gathering speed. It lumbered through the depression of the median between the taxiway and the first runway. He figured it was doing at least fifty by the time it hit the first runway.

Tex Brabham shouted, “Light ’em up! Come on, fuckers! Move!”

The Kappa Kat’s left turbofan started to spin.

The Lear bounced as it hit the next runway.

The jet engine ignited behind him with its pleasant whine, and Mabry started turning the right turbine.

The business jet struck a runway light standard and leaped a trifle as it went off the side of the second runway, attempting to launch itself, but the control surfaces were following their own whims. Soames could see the silver airplane clearly in the runway lights now. It was wavering wildly, shifting from side to side.

The left wing came up, and the nose went down. The jet began rolling in a careening, caterwauling fashion. It flipped and flopped, tearing itself apart, for nearly a quarter-mile before it exploded into flames.

The second turbojet fired, and Mabry released the brakes and began to roll even as he warmed the engines.

The Alpha Kats were firing up all around them. Soames saw Walt Hammond sitting in zero-eight, starting the engine for Kimball.

Mabry turned out behind the Starlifters, now designated Atlas One and Two, and headed for the taxi way. Both C-141s had their portside engines running.

“Leave the goddamned start carts!” Brabham yelled at someone. “Mount up! Come on!”

Soames closed the rear canopy so he could use the rearview mirror. When it sealed itself into place, he saw that two Alpha Kats had pulled in behind them.

Glancing at Alex Hamilton, he saw narrowed, squinting eyes that betrayed jangled nerves. Soames gave him a wide grin, and Hamilton smiled back, gave him a thumb’s up, then snapped his oxygen mask in position.

Soames saw Kimball running back, circling around the first transport.

On the intercom, Mabry said, “Miner, you monitoring the tower?”

“Roger, Dingbat,” Keeper told him.

The emergency trucks had started rolling. Blue pulsing strobes lit up the far end of the field and started down the far right runway. Sirens began to keen.

Keeper told them that, on Tac One, Bangkok Air Control was suspending all takeoffs and landings, citing an emergency on the field.

Switching to Tac Two, Soames said, “Bengals, let me hear from you.”

“Three’s right on your ass.”

“Two in line.”

“Five here.”

“Four.”

As Mabry turned right onto the taxiway, Soames peered across Hamilton to check the lineup. The first C-141 had drawn up behind Bengal Four. The second transport was just easing out of the parking line, Walt Hammond running alongside it, then being dragged inside.

Kimball was in zero-eight, just closing the cockpit.

“One, you clear?”

“Got me, Hawkeye. I’ll be the last one out.”

That hadn’t been part of the plan, but Soames said, “Roger, One. Remember, guys, no lights, no IFF. Hawkeye Four, go to Tac Four and remind Atlas.”

“Gone Four, Papa,” Hamilton said.

The transports didn’t have the ability to scramble communications on the frequencies used by the KAT planes, and Tac Four had been set up as the common, unscrambled frequency for inter-craft dialogue with the Starlifters.

With their fuel and ordnance loads, and especially with the Starlifters, they needed most of the runway, so Mabry was leading them to the far end where the airliner sat in suspense. Her running lights, anti-collision strobe, and landing lights appeared bright.

Keeper, monitoring the air control frequency, reported, “The tower hasn’t seen us yet.”

“They’re busy,” Mabry said.

They were taxiing fast, almost thirty miles an hour, and they weren’t showing any lights. At the tail end, Kimball reported that he had reached the taxiway.

On the intercom, Mabry said, “That 727’s in our way, Papa. We’re going to have to turn short and cross the median. It may be a little rough.”

Soames passed the message to the Alphas, and Hamilton notified the Starlifters.

As Mabry braked and turned off the taxiway, dipping through the slight depression of the median, Keeper said, “They’ve seen us. I’m getting lots of babble. Who are we? Stop. Stop. Emergency on the field.”

“No shit?” Mabry said.

“I only go by what I’m told, Dingbat. You want me to respond?”

“No response,” Soames said.

As the Kappa Kat lurched back onto concrete, Mabry didn’t hesitate for a second. He turned onto the runway ahead of the airliner, almost lined up with the center stripe, and slammed the twin throttles forward.

On the right, halfway down the strip, the blue emergency lights were gathering in the field around the wrecked Lear. Flames from its burning fuel climbed high into the sky and black smoke was beginning to drift over the runways.

Soames heard the fighter pilots making cryptic calls as they lined up in pairs and poured on the power.

The Kappa Kat accelerated smoothly, the main landing gear rumbling beneath them.

The runway lights flickered and went out.

The sudden loss of the guiding lights was almost blinding.

“Goddamn!” Mabry said. “Is it dark in here, or is it just me?”

“Our hosts don’t want us to leave,” Soames said.

“We’ve got one-ninety,” Keeper said.

Mabry rotated, the wheels quit rumbling, and they were airborne.

“Flaps and gear, Miner.”

“Coming up. Greens.”

“Bengals, Hawkeye. I’ll want to know.”

As he went through two thousand feet, Mabry began a shallow turn to the left.

“Three’s flying,” Vrdlicka said.

“Two’s off,” Halek reported.

A few heartbeats later, Soames heard McEntire’s voice. “Four.”

“And Five,” Gander said.

The monstrous transports took more time, and they had a greater interval because of the air turbulence they created. Two minutes went by, the Kappa Kat already at ten thousand feet, before Sam Miller reported in to Hamilton on Tac Four.

“Atlas One’s clear, Papa,” Hamilton said. “He’s starting his turn.”

“Roger, Flamethrower.”

Both of the transports would turn to the right, heading for the sea and international airways.

“Atlas Two’s wheels-up,” Hamilton said.

“Roger that. Tell them to have a nice trip, Flamethrower.”

Soames flicked on the radar, cutting back to a thirty-mile scan, and filtering out a lot of ground clutter. He immediately saw seven blips, five of them in what appeared to be normal airliner traffic lanes, and two of them flying as a pair. They were turning toward the transports, which they could see on their radars.

None of the KAT planes had squawked an ID, and none of them appeared on the screen.

“One’s clear, Hawkeye.”

Soames felt relief for the first time in three hours.

“Atlas has company coming, Cheetah. Pair of interceptors at Mach one.”

“Vector me, Papa, then shut down.”

“Go to one-nine-seven.” Soames switched his radar set to passive.

For the next nine minutes, he longed to switch to active and see what was going on. Mabry continued to climb, settling in on a northerly course.

“Hawkeye, One. I think I surprised the hell out of these guys.”

“Tell me, One.”

“They’re a couple of Royal Thai F-5s, and they thought they were in the driver’s seat, coming up on the Starlifters. I snuck up behind them, hit my landing lights, and gave them a five-round burst of twenty mike-mike above their heads. I think they’re trying to clean up the cockpits now.”

“What’re they doing?”

“They got the message. They can’t see me, now, but they know I’m here somewhere. They’re diverting from the Atlases and heading in the direction of Ubom. I’ll stay with them for a little bit, then catch up.”

On Tac Four, Miller reported to Hamilton, who passed it on. “Papa, thank One for them and tell him they’re feet wet. He can leave anytime.”

On the primary tactical channel, Soames said, “One, Hawkeye. They’re clear.”

“Roger, Hawkeye. I’m saying bye-bye.”

“All Bengals, form on me. I need a second’s squawk from everyone to locate you.”

One by one, the IFF transponders came on, and Soames locked their positions into his computer memory. As long as they maintained heading and speed, the computer could guess where they were.

Wilcox had been in Bangkok since early in the morning. Immediately after arrival, he had crossed from the international terminal to the domestic terminal to reassure himself that the KAT planes were still there. They were, nicely corralled by yellow tape.

He had then taxied into the Embassy, checked in, and called Langley only to have Ted Simonson ream him out.

“What the hell, Ted?”

“I’ve got a major general under lock and key. I don’t know what the hell to do with him.”

“Jesus. One of ours?”

“Hell, yes, one of ours.” Simonson told him about Kimball’s call and the predetermined set of telephone contacts Kimball had discovered between someone named Crider and the head of Air Force Intelligence.

“I don’t know what your man Kimball is doing, but I couldn’t very well turn him down on this, Ben. If Crider’s responsible for the sabotage of the airplanes, Dixon’s in deep. Now, I don’t know what to do.”

“Is Dixon talking?”

“Hell, yes. He’s talking about having my balls bouncing around his tennis court.”

“Keep him quiet for a few more hours, and I’ll run down Kimball.”

Before he even had a chance to start making calls, though, the Thai police contacted the Embassy about dead Americans at the Oriental Hotel, and Wilcox got caught up in that.

He went to the morgue with a delegation from the Embassy, expecting to find Kimball and McEntire laid out on the slabs. He had never seen the faces on the bodies before. One had a full red beard, and the other had nasty burn scars covering his right cheek and temple.

Then the Thai police got him involved with the others they had arrested at the hotel. There were three of them, and they were all carrying false passports, and none of them were talking. They didn’t know the dead men, and they didn’t know anything. According to the hotel registrations, there had been a sixth American man, but he was nowhere to be found.

With the false passports and the refusal to cooperate, the State Department people found it difficult to assist them, and for the time being, they were left to the whims of the Thai prosecutors.

It was after 6:00 P.M. by the time he got back to the Embassy and began calling the Airport Hotel. No one was answering the room telephones there. The front desk reported that the Americans were probably shopping or taking in the nightlife. The clerk had seen them leaving by twos or threes.

For the next three hours, Wilcox had called Kimball’s room at the hotel every twenty minutes. He was getting madder by the minute. He knew damned well Kimball was responsible for two dead men.

At 9:40 P.M., one of the communications specialists said, “They just shut down Don Muang. There’s been some kind of accident.”

Wilcox didn’t think anything about it for twenty minutes. Then it slowly dawned on him that the KAT aircraft were at Don Muang. Kimball and accidents were never coincidences.

He ordered a technician to get the tower for him.

After a slightly heated discussion about his power to ask questions, the supervisor finally gave in and said, “No, Mr. Wilcox, they are not here.”

“Not there?”

“They took off against orders. We turned the problem over to the Royal Thai Air Force.”

Wilcox slammed the phone down, picked it up, and called Langley.

“Simonson.”

“Get hold of somebody at the NSA and find out where the satellites are.”

“What’s going on, Ben?”

“Kimball’s on the loose somewhere. I think we’ll want to watch the Muang Base.”

“Kimball’s gone? With his airplanes?”

“With his airplanes.”

“Shit. See if I ever let you run an operation again.”

“Okay, Bengals, listen up.”

Gander tightened his harness straps and shifted the oxygen mask to reseat it. He pulled his visor down.

“In a second, I’m going to go active and see what we’ve got around. If we’re clear, we follow plan A. Bengal One, with Two and Three will go after Shan Base again. If our information’s correct, the Fragrant Flower compound and its airstrip is eleven miles southeast of Shan. Four and Five will take it out.”

They had decided to pass on an attack against the Muang Base in Laos, the third target given to them by the man from Washington. Kimball and McEntire figured the aircraft would have been moved by now, just as they had been moved from Chiang Base. The Fragrant Flower target was a new one.

Gander looked ahead to see the guidelights of McEntire’s plane ahead and to the left of him. A half-mile to the left were Kimball, Halek, and Vrdlicka. They were all at 12,000 feet, some twenty thousand feet below the Kappa Kat which had climbed away ten minutes before.

Below them, the hills weren’t distinguishable from the blackness of the jungle. A few rivulets of water winked occasionally.

“Going active,” Soames said.

A split second later, Soames said, “Hey, Jesus Christ! Flight of three closing on you. Eight miles dead ahead. Goddamn it! Three of you are radiating. Scramble! Scramble now!”

Gander took one glance at his transponder. It was off.

McEntire’s guidelights went off, and he concentrated on trying to stay on his leader’s wing, chasing a shadow.

McEntire climbed. Going almost vertical.

Gander hauled the stick back, eased in throttle, and stayed with him.

“Data feeds are in,” Soames called. “Weapons free. Arm ’em up. Infrared says Mirages.”

Keeping his eye on McEntire, and following him through a roll to the right, Gander reached over with his left hand and armed all of his pylons.

“One. Got a lock on the lead hostile. Gone.”

A flash of brilliant white on Gander’s left evolved into a missile trail. Gander rolled upright, still behind McEntire, but apt to lose him at any moment. Every time the lead airplane went below the horizon, it disappeared from Gander’s sight.

“Shut down those damned transponders,” Soames ordered.

A chorus of negatives told Hawkeye that all the transponders indicated they were turned off.

“Something’s fucked up,” Soames said.

With the data feed from the Kappa Kat appearing on Gander’s screen, he could see what it was. McEntire was radiating a blip. So were two of the aircraft in the other element.

To the north, three blips were spreading out as they approached.

One abruptly disappeared. Through the canopy, Gander saw the explosion, white and orange, maybe six miles away.

“Down one,” Soames reported.

“Stay with me, Five,” McEntire said, pulling his nose up and climbing again.

“Like snot on a doorknob, Irish.”

They climbed high and fast, trying to get altitude on the aggressors.

And then, boom! They were into it. McEntire launched two missiles, but the Mirage dodged them, diving beneath them. Gander pushed his nose down and had him in the gunsight for a half second, and fired off thirty cannon rounds. The tracers all fell far behind the target.

McEntire rolled right and went into a tight right turn, coming back. Gander rolled hard, jockeyed the stick back, and stayed with him.

“One, Hawkeye. You’ve got a Mirage tight on your six. Pull Gs!”

On his CRT, Gander saw the blip that must be Kimball. A second blip was a thousand yards behind him.

McEntire swung toward the blips and firewalled the throttle. Gander bounced in his turbulence for a second before he could find the spacing. He shoved his own throttle forward, but McEntire had gained a couple thousand yards on him. “He’s got a radar lock on you, One,” Soames said.

“Break left, Cheetah,” McEntire ordered.

The blip on the screen hung there for an instant, then slipped sideways.

McEntire launched two Sidewinders.

The hot exhaust stung Gander’s night vision as he followed the trails converging on the hot red exhaust of the Mirage, praying.

Wham!

Both missiles slammed into the Mirage, and it blew apart in streaks of yellow and blue.

“Thanks, Irish,” Kimball called.

“Anytime, buddy.”

And then from above and a thousand yards behind him, Gander saw the streak of a missile homing on McEntire.

“Hot one coming at you, Four,” he called. “Break right.”

McEntire broke right, but not soon enough.

The missile almost lost its heat source as Bengal Four turned her exhaust away from it, but it passed close enough for the proximity fuse to detonate the warhead.

Gander saw the missile’s explosion, followed quickly by the eruption of the Alpha Kat’s fuel cells as hot splinters of shrapnel penetrated the fuselage.

The Alpha Kat blew up in a thousand pieces.

Gander was still at full power, and he whipped the control stick back.

He felt the pieces of debris striking the wings.

And saw the Mirage directly above him.

Too close for a missile.

He triggered off a long burst of twenty millimeter rounds.

The tracers lanced out, reaching, stitching to the right, missing the fuselage, cutting a wide path in the wing.

The right wing peeled away from the Mirage, and the fuselage whipped hard to the left, then spiraled down into darkness, trailing a long blue flame behind it.

Gander retarded throttle and rolled to his right.

“There, you son of a bitch,” Gander said to himself.

But it wasn’t enough.

Not nearly enough.

Henry Loh had been scheduled for the next flight of fighters. He was in the main house with Lon Pot and Dao Van Luong, staying close to the radio in Pot’s office, when Chung announced the intruders on his Mirage’s radar screen.

Loh had grabbed the microphone and yelled, “Attack, attack, attack.”

Then he leaped out of his chair and ran from the house. In the compound, he yelled for pilots and slid behind the wheel of a pickup.

Jean Franc and one of his countrymen dove into the back of the pickup.

The guards at the gate barely got them open before he shot through and started careening down the hill toward the airstrip. Loh nearly turned the truck over a couple of times when it tried to climb out of the ruts of the road.

Dao had alerted the mechanics at the strip, and the remaining three Mirages were being started as they arrived. He slid the pickup to a stop, hopped out, and ran toward his fighter.

Precious seconds were lost as he was helped into his pressure suit and parachute. He scrambled up the ladder and into the cockpit, strapping in and hooking up.

He dialed the radio to Shan Base’s frequency.

“Rose One, Amber One.”

“Rose, go Amber,” Switzer called.

“We are under attack here.”

“We’ll scramble now. Rose out.”

He switched to Chung’s frequency.

“Jade One?”

There was no answer.

“Jade One.”

Nothing.

“Jade Two or Three?”

Again, nothing.

Loh looked to his right and saw that Franc and the other pilot were in their cockpits, the canopies closing.

He closed his own, scanned his instruments, and released the brakes. The gyros were still coming up to speed. He turned on the radar set.

The Mirage eased forward, onto the asphalt of the runway, and he turned to line up with the center of it. He held the brakes and ran up the engines, watching the tailpipe temperatures.

The runway lights came on.

He could not help thinking that, though the money was nice, he was about to launch his reputation as a fighter aircraft ace, and that was much better.

Kimball was numb.

The Alpha Kat flew herself, an extension of his nerve endings. His mind felt absolutely clear, but his body was detached, off on its own, responding as directed, but unaware of heat, cold, pain, elation.

“One and Three, you’re still radiating,” Soames told them. “Get rid of the transponders.”

“While we’re waiting,” Soames went on, his voice so steady it was deadly, “Five, you have the lead. Two, you’re his wingman. You’re off to Target Two. Go to heading three-one-five, angels one-one. Meet Hawkeye Four on Tac Three.”

“Five,” Gander replied.

“Two, gone,” Halek said.

Kimball’s mind told the aircraft to level its wings, enter a slight climb, and then begin a wide turn to the right.

Sam Eddy. Damn, buddy, I don’t know if I can do it without you.

His body reacted to Soames’s instructions. He pulled his flight gloves off and dropped them on the floor. His left hand found the leg pocket of his flight suit that contained the multipurpose knife. His right hand left the control stick in position and popped open the screwdriver blade of the knife. He had to loosen his harness in order to lean far enough forward to work on the transponder’s face. He turned up the cockpit lighting enough to see the screws. It was an awkwardly shaped screwdriver but within a minute, he had withdrawn the two screws.

He got his fingernails behind the faceplate and tugged. The transponder came out of its sleeve, and he dropped it between the seat and the fuselage side. Collapsed the knife and shoved it back into his leg pocket.

“Good, One. You went away,” Soames said. “Come on, Downhill, snap it up!”

Kimball’s body dimmed the cockpit lights once again and retightened his harness straps.

“All right, Three! I lost you on the radar.”

“Damned glad to hear it, Hawkeye,” Vrdlicka said. “Cheetah, can I have a light?”

Kimball turned on his guidelights, and a few seconds later, Vrdlicka eased up beside him.

Where are you, my friend?

He scanned the HUD. His circle was bringing him up on due south. The speed was steady at 550 knots. Altitude 8,750 feet.

“Weapons status?” Soames asked.

“One. Four Hellfires, one Sidewinder, one AMRAAM. I’ve got six hundred rounds of twenty mike-mike.”

“Three. Full load, less one Sidewinder and fifty rounds of twenty.”

“All right, good. We’re about to make our first pass at Target One. We are now northeast of the compound, and I am changing the pre-flight plan.”

That was almost a surprise. The dogfight had carried them farther north than he had realized. Originally, the tactics had called for the first run on Target One by McEntire and Gander from the south.

McEntire.

Sam Eddy, my friend.

All the good ones leave me.

“Vector me,” Kimball said as he double-checked his armaments panel.

“One-eight-five should be right, One. Go now.”

Kimball eased out of his turn on the heading, pushed the nose over, and started down. He saw two strings of runway lights appear in the darkness.

“Three, trail formation. Give him a thousand yards.”

“Roger that,” Vrdlicka said.

Kimball deployed the night vision lens and activated the infrared sensor. Pulling his infrared reader down, he found three hot spots right away. The area around them was painted pale green. The asphalt runway, still carrying the heat of day, stood out against the landscape, and the runway lights were green pearls. On the left, higher up a hillside, was the large compound. There were a few lights on in its interior buildings.

Too close. Maybe six miles.

He eased the nose down some more and backed off on the throttle.

Kicked the speed brakes out.

“I put my boards out, Three,” he warned.

“Three.”

When he was down to four hundred knots, he pulled the brakes back in.

The first hot spot was moving now, racing along the runway, coming toward him.

“Hawkeye, I’m reading three hot aircraft on the ground. The first is on his takeoff run.”

“Let’s take the first one first, then,” Soames said.

“Good idea, Hawkeye.”

Henry Loh knew that his attack radar had to have some altitude before it worked effectively, but he had expected to see at least a few moving blips among the ground clutter as he started his takeoff roll.

Maybe Chung had gotten them all?

That would be disappointing.

Speed ninety-five knots.

The compound went by on his right.

Idiot Lon Pot. He should shut off the lights.

The adrenaline pumped into his veins. He felt high, ready to soar.

He hoped Chung had not hit any of Kimball’s air craft. He needed at least five of them to call himself an ace.

And he knew that he had the advantage.

Crider had made them visible for him.

And Wilcox had made him invulnerable.

Switzer, Chung, Burov — none of them knew that Loh was invulnerable. They did not know that the Americans had orders not to shoot at him.

But he did not have similar orders not to shoot at the Americans.

The airspeed indicator showed 122 knots.

His secondary radio was set to the American emergency frequency, 243.0. He pressed the transmit button.

“Kimball, I am Henry Loh. Do you read me?”

There was no answer.

Surely, they were monitoring the emergency channel.

He began to have doubts.

They had to know which aircraft was his.

His airspeed reached takeoff velocity, and he rotated, immediately withdrawing the flaps and landing gear.

He climbed steeply, trading speed for altitude.

“Kimball, I am Henry Loh.”

“Big fucking deal,” the radio responded.

Loh peered forward through the windscreen.

And there was a slim, twin-ruddered shadow against the stars.

Coming directly at him.

No radar return.

His missiles were useless.

Worse, they were not even armed yet.

Suddenly, green tracers erupted out of the shadow.

Passing below him.

Rising.

He pulled back on the stick.

The stall warning buzzer went off.

Screaming at him.

The speed gone, his left wing dipped.

The Mirage rolled inverted.

Tumbled.

Henry Loh’s last thought was that he would never be an ace.

Kimball wanted to save at least two of his Hellfires. He would use two of them on the runway, to stop the last two planes from taking off. Head-on, his air-to-air missiles weren’t going to be as effective.

By the time the Kappa Kat determined the plane taking off was radiating, and illuminated him for the data-link to Bengal One, he was too close.

He heard the two radio calls coming in on his Tac Five receiver, and was mystified by them. Henry Loh meant nothing more to him than another drug runner, responsible for his brother Randy’s and his parents’ deaths.

And indirectly, the death of Sam Eddy.

He keyed Tac Five. “Big fucking deal.”

The Mirage had just lifted off the runway when Kimball opened up with the gun.

The green tracers probed below the Mirage, and he lifted the nose.

But the big fighter, trying to evade, went into a stall, whipped a wing over, and plowed into the earth off the end of the runway.

“Nice shot,” Vrdlicka called.

“Didn’t even hit him,” Kimball radioed back.

Leveled off, heading directly down the strip.

Used the yellow square to target the strip both left and right of center and launched two Hellfires.

They lanced away, slammed into the asphalt and erupted.

He jinked upward and left to dodge the debris.

Found a Mirage and two helicopters parked off the left side of the runway. Another Mirage was on the end of the runway, prepared for its takeoff run.

The parked Mirage was hot.

The infrared lens told him so, and he locked on, then launched the Sidewinder.

It streaked off the wing pylon.

He pulled up and missed seeing the hit.

But below him, the landscape illuminated white-hot.

“Two choppers and a Mirage, Three.”

“See ’em,” Vrdlicka said. “Launched.”

Kimball rolled right, and as he came around in his circle, looked back at the airstrip. He couldn’t see Bengal Three, but Vrdlicka had hit the remaining Mirage and both choppers. Four fires raged at the south end of the runway.

There were no flames on the north end, from the Mirage that had stalled out.

Henry Loh?

Kimball dipped the nose and slowed some more as he came back to the north end of the airfield.

If Loh had gotten out, he was going to rip him up with cannon rounds.

The image picked up by the night vision lens was quickly gone as he shot over the wreckage, but he would remember it.

Loh had ejected from the Mirage after it went inverted. The ejection seat had rocketed him headfirst into the ground. All he saw was the bottom of the seat and a pair of legs.

“Hawkeye, One. Any other aggressors around?”

“Negative, One. You’re clear for your final pass.”

Kimball rolled left to complete another 360-degree turn and get some distance from the compound.

He turned on his wingtip guidelights, and Vrdlicka joined with him four miles north of the compound. Together, they turned back.

“One, Hawkeye. Bengals Five and Two report total destruction at Shan Base. They caught every damned one of them on the ground.”

“Damn,” Kimball said, “now they’ll expect me to buy them a beer.”

He lined up on the compound, which was easy to do. Lights were on in some of the houses within it. He guessed that a lot of people inside were in a state of panic.

As he closed in, he saw that, down by the airstrip, more figures were running around. The headlights of vehicles dashed about.

“We want to hit the trucks?” Vrdlicka asked.

“Skip them. Dump it all in the compound.”

Two miles out, he lifted his head,enough to aim the night vision lens. The wall of the compound came up.

Roof.

Garden?

A wall of windows, brightly lit.

Two figures behind the windows, peering out.

LOCK-ON.

Committed.

The Hellfires launched.

He fired his last AMRAAM also, just to get rid of it.

Kimball eased the stick back and nosed upward.

Both Hellfires had detonated inside the house by the time he went over it.

He went into another right turn, looking back.

Vrdlicka’s missiles had gone into another house and probably a garage with stored gasoline… The flames reached for the stars, red and yellow and orange and spreading.

He hoped Mai Pot was a widow.

That’s all I can do, Sam Eddy. Is it enough?

There would be some satisfaction in Mai Pot’s becoming a widow, though it was not as great a satisfaction as he had thought it might be.

Kimball felt as if his body was becoming his own again as Soames called, “Bengals, form on me. Be tender with the throttles, please. We’ve got twenty-three hundred miles to go, and fuel may be tight by now.”

Rolling into a westerly heading, Kimball began a climb, looking for Vrdlicka to join with him.

He was looking forward to seeing a real prince.