Black Star

CHAPTER 3 — DREAMLAND

As he felt the brakes release on the 737, Dr. Raymond Lutz punched the timer on his wrist chronometer. It was something he always did for no reason except that he was an engineer and he was obsessive about such things. He wanted to know how long it took the jetliner to lift off the runway at Groom Lake.

As usual, the cabin was dark. The unmarked jet was showing no anti-collision strobes, no navigation lights, no illumination outside the cockpit. The crew didn’t even use the taxi lights.

Through the cabin window Lutz could make out the dim runway edge markers, which he knew were directional, visible only if you were aligned with the runway. As far as the world was concerned, this five-mile-long piece of concrete in the wilderness of Nevada didn’t exist.

He watched the darkened landscape blur past the window. In the clear desert night, he could make out the silhouette of the high terrain to the west. It had once been a favorite place for snoopers until the Air Force took possession of all the high ground around the base.

The nose of the 737 rotated upward from the runway. Lutz hit the button on his timer.

“How long?” asked the man across the aisle. Lutz recognized the voice. It was Feingold, another physicist. He worked in the RAM — radar absorbent material — lab opposite Lutz’s unit in the big hangar.

“Twenty-eight seconds.”

Feingold chuckled. “It’s the same every time, give or take a couple seconds. Isn’t that interesting?”

Not especially, thought Lutz. He made a show of turning his back to the window. If he let Feingold engage him in conversation, he’d invite himself to come along to the casino, go to some shows, be his new best friend. Feingold was your basic jerk.

It was Friday evening, and the unmarked Boeing jet was nearly full. Back at Groom Lake, four more jetliners were lined up, waiting to depart from the five-mile-long runway, taking their passengers on the short flight back to McCarran Field in Las Vegas.

The dark hollow of the research complex dropped away from Lutz’s view. The barren mountains of Nevada sprawled out beneath the night sky. He was glad to get out of the place. He was sick to death of algorithms and electrochromatic technology and jerk-face engineers like Feingold.

A sharp pain in his abdomen brought his thoughts back to the cabin of the Boeing. He shifted in his seat, rubbing his stomach with his hand.

“Want a Pepcid?” Feingold again. He was holding out a little foil package of pills. “I get that acid reflux thing sometimes myself.”

“No, thanks.”

“Always work for me.”

Lutz turned back to the window and forced himself to ignore the discomfort in his gut. Fuck Feingold and his pills. From experience he knew how long it would take the object to transit his intestinal tract. An hour. Two at the most. It was a disgusting way to transport data, but it was efficient. He’d gotten used to it.

He hadn’t planned a drop this weekend. At the morning conference of the Calypso Blue project managers, they were briefed on the incident over the Taiwan Strait. Someone had already postulated how the Taiwanese President’s airplane had been downed.

That meant danger for Raymond Lutz.

Now they wanted the Calypso Blue team to come up with electronic countermeasures. For the rest of the day Lutz’s team ran computer-based algorithms, searching for a technological miracle that would penetrate electrochromatic cloaking.

Lutz hated the whole process. It was the classic irrationality of war. You use your best intellect developing a bulletproof technology. When you succeed, you then waste the same intellect to defeat it. The sum of your work came to zero.

Which was why he had opted out of the game. All those high-sounding virtues — patriotism, duty, loyalty — were meaningless to him. Had his country returned his loyalty when he served as a military officer? Had they recognized his obvious brilliance by admitting him into their precious astronaut corps?

The recollection of how they treated him caused Lutz to clench his jaw muscles in anger. He owed them nothing. In fact, quite the opposite, his own government owed him an immeasurable amount, and now he was collecting.

Today had been productive, at least for Lutz. Some of the formulae his team at Groom Lake had come up with contained the seeds of potent electronic countermeasures. They were close to developing a tool that might unmask the electrochromatic process.

When he collected the results of the day’s work from his eight engineers and mathematicians, he compiled them, compressed the data into a file, then copied it to a digital storage chip the size of a cashew nut. When he was finished, there was no trace of the process except the master file, which he encrypted and moved to the team’s top secret optical filing unit.

The memory chip took a different route.

Lutz waited until the last minute before he logged out of his workspace. Long ago he had learned about the concealed video camera and the two audio bugs that someone — presumably the FBI — had planted. He also presumed that such devices were planted in the workspace of every technician at the facility.

For the benefit of the single-view video, he made a show of compiling the data and storing it in the optical unit. What the camera couldn’t see was the loader card that contained the chip. At the same time the data went into the optical unit, it transferred onto the chip.

In the men’s room, which he knew was also video-monitored, he washed his hands, brushed his teeth, and swallowed his daily Glucosamine tablets — one of which was the microchip wrapped in a soft, insoluble green gel.

No publications, hardware, software, or personal data devices were allowed to leave the ultra- secret labs at the research facility. The Groom Lake facility possessed the most sophisticated security equipment outside the White House and the CIA headquarters. There were retinal identification devices, ultrasound scanners, metal detectors so sensitive they could read the iron content in a subject’s blood.

Lutz passed through them all. After he’d used his coded ID card to sign out with the last security agent, he walked across the unlit ramp and boarded the first of the five 737s.

Now his gut felt like he’d swallowed a tin can. The 737 was on the downwind leg of its approach to McCarran.

“Look at those lights,” said Feingold. “Did you know Las Vegas burns more kilowatts than the rest of Nevada combined?”

“No,” said Lutz. Nor did he give a damn. The 737 was flying through some low altitude turbulence, bumping around like a truck on a desert road. He wanted to land, get rid of the goddamned chip.

He winced as the jet thumped down on the runway. When the flight attendant opened the main cabin door, Lutz was the first to deplane.

Feingold was behind him. “Hey, Ray, whaddya say we go have a drink and check out the—”

He didn’t wait. Before Feingold could catch up, he was in a taxi and on his way downtown.

After three hours at General Quarters, the Reagan’s captain gave the order to stand down. The inbound bogeys — SU-27 Flankers from bases in mainland China — had given the Reagan Strike Group a wide berth. While pummeling each other with missiles, both sides — China and Taiwan — were keeping a respectful distance from U.S. warships.

Maxwell was feeling the fatigue of the long mission, then the strain of the debriefing. He left the ready room and made his way to his stateroom. After he’d popped open a warm Coke, he flopped into the steel chair at his desk and powered up the Compaq notebook. Half a minute later he was logged onto the Athena net, the ship’s satellite connection to the World Wide Web.

Something about the “Mail Waiting” icon bothered him. The way it was flashing. He had a feeling it was not good news.

For a solid five minutes he sat motionless, staring at the screen. The pixels on the display winked back at him like stars in a galaxy.

That’s all they are, he thought. Pixels. Bytes. Microscopic pulses of energy. How could something so inconsequential have the power to cause him this much pain?

He kept waiting for the anger to spew out, like steam from a cauldron. Nothing came. There was only a deadness inside him. He felt more alone than ever before in his life.

Claire. She had entered his life when they were both young, still careless with their hearts. For reasons neither understood, they went different ways, he to the space shuttle and a new life and love; she to a career as a broadcast journalist and marriage to a dashing reporter named Chris Tyrwhitt.

Years later, when they found each other again, it seemed like a storybook romance. He was a widower, his astronaut wife lost in a training accident. Claire was divorcing her wastrel husband. They were more in love than ever before. It seemed too good to be true.

And so it was.

She was right about one thing, he thought. Life was stranger than fiction. And a hell of a lot more cruel.

For another five minutes he sat at the computer, trying to compose his jumbled thoughts. In tiny increments, the anger began to come, rising in a slow simmer. His hands returned to the keyboard. Slowly, without looking up or taking his fingers from the keys, he typed a reply.

For a minute he stared at the message while a vat of dark emotions stirred inside him. The screen swam in his vision, pixels and lines running together in a blurry amalgam.

He slid the mouse pointer on the screen to the SEND button.

Don’t, said a voice inside him. He knew he was angry, bitter, jealous. Filled with irrational thoughts. Not a good time to send a message to the girl you love.

To hell with it. It’s over. Finito. Send it.

His finger went to the left-click button on the mouse—

A rap on the stateroom door.

He hesitated, his hand on the mouse. Finally he rose and swung the door open.

The wide bulk of Commander Bullet Alexander filled the doorway. “Sorry to bother you, Skipper. CAG wants us in the air wing office ASAP.”

Alexander had come by his call sign naturally. He was a handsome, burly-shouldered African-American man with a shaved skull that approximated the shape of a .45 caliber round. He had come aboard a month ago as Maxwell’s new executive officer.

“Give me a second.”

He returned to his desk. The mouse arrow still covered the SEND button on the message screen. He saw Alexander watching him from the doorway.

His hand hovered over the mouse key. He didn’t have to reply the message. He could let it molder there in the IN basket while he considered. Nothing had to be done now.

Abruptly he reached down and slapped the SEND button.

Snatching his hat off the hook on the bulkhead, he stormed out of the room. He closed the door behind him with a vicious slam.

“Something the matter, Brick?”

“No.” Maxwell gave him a ferocious look. “Why the hell do you think something’s the matter?”

“Oh, no reason.” Alexander kept his eyes straight ahead. “What’s her name?”