Delta Blue

Four

McKenna was asleep in his office when a none-too-gentle slap on the shoulder awakened him. He rocked against the restraint encircling his waist.

Looking to his left, he saw Pearson’s face in the gap between the curtains that closed off his office cell.

“I’ve got the map ready, McKenna.”

Since the time McKenna had made a playful pass at her two years before, Pearson had come to regard the differences in their military ranks as insignificant. McKenna cared less about military tides and military courtesy, except where it was absolutely necessary, but he wished that she would call him something besides “McKenna.” It was always said in a flat, neutral tone.

He brought his left hand to shoulder level, cocked it at the wrist, and waved at her. “Hi, Red.”

She liked that nickname a little less than he liked “McKenna,” from her. Wrinkling her nose at him, she said, “Wake up and come on out here.”

Sighing, he pulled the Velcro straps loose, pushed out of the cubicle, and followed her graceful arc into the command center. Overton was waiting beside the console under the viewing port. A blowsily white view of Antarctica was showing.

The other side of the world was displayed on the main console screen, one of seven screens available to the command center. Three technicians hovered, monitoring the consoles.

Pearson’s map of the Greenland Sea now had green circles representing each of the wells, and inside each circle was a number.

“We don’t know,” she said, “how the Germans are identifying the drilling platforms, but I’ve given each a number, according to when it went into operation.”

There didn’t seem to be a pattern, McKenna noticed. The rigs on the ice had been emplaced last. Their numbers ran from sixteen to twenty-four, but not in order. Sixteen was in the middle of the line, twenty-three on the east end, and twenty-four on the west end. So much for the vaunted German sense of organization.

The offshore wells were just as muddled, with number one in the center of the irregular cluster.

“Couldn’t you have renumbered a little, just to make it easier?” he asked.

“Your logical mind can’t handle this, Colonel McKenna?”

In front of the general, McKenna got a title.

“We’ll do it your way,” he said.

“Thank you.”

Overton told him, “One of the problems we have, Kevin, is that our standard satellite coverage is naturally more concerned with Europe, Asia, and the Barents and North seas. Only sporadically do we get a pass over the Greenland and Arctic seas, and even then, we haven’t been particularly watchful. The data we have on hand is limited.”

“You’re certain these wells are being overprotected, Amy?” McKenna asked. He still wasn’t sure that her suspicions were well-founded.

“From the information I’ve gathered, I am. And NORAD is similarly intrigued.”

“Okay, point made. What do you want?”

With a clear-polished nail, she traced a route over the screen of the monitor. “We want close-up shots of at least three of the platforms, and we want infrared and low-light film of all of them. There are also naval ships in the area, and you should get as many of them as you can.”

“We have any ideas on the shipping?”

“The long-distance photos we have suggest a few armed vessels and some supply ships. The missile cruiser was identified by its deck and funnel layout as the Hamburg. I’m going to check on her assignments through the covert channels.”

“And the patrol aircraft?”

Overton answered. “After we backtracked through the old photos, we suspect they originate out of New Amsterdam Air Force Base. They’re Panavia Tornados and, occasionally, a pair of Eurofighters or Dornier 228s. Amsterdam has four air wings assigned to it, Kevin, all of them equipped with similar aircraft, so we can’t pinpoint the squadron or group. If you happen to run into a plane, get its tail number, would you?”

“Sure thing, Jim.”

“Anything else, Amy? Want me to bring back a pizza and a six-pack?”

Her pale green eyes studied him, perhaps with a trace of amusement in them, but it didn’t transfer to her mouth. “Just the photos, Colonel.”

“I’ll go get my Brownie. Oh, Jim? Conover and Dimatta are due back in a few hours. Would you tell Will to stand down and Frank to prepare for a second run on the wells? We’ll get some backup on whatever I find.”

“Will do, Kevin,” the general said.

After the hatch spun and locked behind McKenna, Pearson tapped the keyboard and cleared the screen.

She could feel General Overton studying her. Pearson knew he was a competent judge of people, and he was constantly on the lookout for signs of abrasiveness between members of his crew. In the confines of Themis, teamwork was essential. Arguments between station personnel did not contribute to the mission, and if the warring factions got out of hand, Overton would ship the least necessary person earth side immediately. He had done it before.

She was absolutely certain that the general considered McKenna more necessary than he did her. Though she liked the commander, and she thought he liked her, Over-ton wouldn’t allow anything to interfere with the command assigned to him.

Pearson knew he was waiting — had been waiting for months — for her to say something about her dislike for McKenna. And then, boom, she would be on the next Mako flight to Peterson.

She wasn’t going to give Overton the chance, or McKenna the satisfaction, of getting rid of her. In every position she had ever held, she had had to stand her ground, fight for her rights, and she wasn’t giving up, now.

She had analyzed her reaction to the squadron commander before. It wasn’t that McKenna was unattractive. The lines in his face, the pilot’s squint of his eyes, gave him the appearance of maturity and made him rather ruggedly handsome. His dark hair, though too long, seemed to always stay in place, even in the zero-gravity environment. And yet, there were other things that bothered her. His playful attitude in serious situations jangled her nerves and contradicted the maturity she expected him to display. She knew he was a highly competent pilot, and that competence was sometimes reflected in the deadly slate gray of his eyes. There was a subtle arrogance to the man, as if he knew too well his own capability. He expected things to happen as he planned, just because he was in control.

And the men in his squadron thought he was god. They would do anything, legal or illegal, for him. That was what irritated her most, his loyal following. She was also expected to be a fan. Besides herself, no one else seemed to recognize that he was just a man.

A man who was supposed to be a professional, just as she was a professional. Recognizing her contribution. Staying at arm’s length, maintaining the professional distance. Not patting her on the fanny when he felt like it.

“Are you all right, Amy?”

She looked up from the blank screen. I’m fine, General. Just getting organized.”

Pearson smiled at him, then pushed off from the console, floated across the center, and entered the communications compartment, the “Radio Shack.”

T. Sgt. Donna Amber, one of the three women on board, had the shift, and she was anchored before the primary console, monitoring the circuits in use aboard the station. Amber was a mousy woman — brown hair clipped short, brown eyes, tiny. She was also amazingly proficient at the complex radio, video, radar, and computer console.

From one speaker issued the sounds of some hard rock group.

“Do you want to kill that, Donna?”

“Sure thing, Colonel.” She depressed a keypad, and the high-pitched guitar was silenced. “We have work to do?”

“Yes. First, we want to tap into NATO.”

“Comm net, or data base?”

“The data base,” Pearson told her.

Amber checked the readout mounted on the wall that gave her the station’s celestial coordinates. “Okay, I can get there through a Rhyolite II channel.”

Themis had access to a wide variety of communications networks and computer data bases, utilizing microwave, VHF, and UHF relays in several satellite systems. Commonly, they used the Air Force Satellite Communications System (AFSATCOM) or the Critical Communications Net (CRITICOM), but frequently, because of their orbit characteristics, they could lose contact with those systems. Then, the station linked up through other satellites, such as the Rhyolite. This particular link, though Pearson no longer thought about the details, went through the Rhyolite at 22,300 miles above the earth, to an American DSCS III at 500 miles, to a NATO IIIB, then to the microwave antenna complex outside Brussels, Belgium.

Although Themis — 1st Aerospace Wing, and its 1st Aerospace Squadron operated under the Space Command of the U.S. Air Force, the role of Themis was multipurpose, responding to the needs of many agencies, and the station had access to NATO, CIA, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, FBI, Treasury, and State data bases. Almost everyone aboard the station had cryptographic security clearances of the highest order.

While the sergeant set up the communication links, Pearson pulled herself into position in front of a secondary computer screen.

When the screen told her she was connected to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Military Data Base, she entered an access code that brought up a menu:

She tapped “3.”

She keyed the number “2.” Pearson was still somewhat amazed at the fact that unified Germany was still a member of NATO, but knew that it was primarily because of the German distrust of the Soviet Union. And though NATO had been dramatically downsized in forces, influence, and role, it still operated an extensive intelligence collection function.

And here she was, snooping in the confidential data of a supposed ally.

She entered two more seven-digit codes, allowing her access to all but the most highly classified data files. Using the Hamburg as her key, she called up all of the available data on the ship, its current assignment, and its primary officers. When she saw that it had been designated as the flagship of Adm. Gerhard Schmidt, she called up his file, also.

She stored the information in the Themis mainframe computer, cleared the screen, and went searching for data on New Amsterdam Air Force Base. She called up the files concerning the base’s air units, commanders, and role and mission, then stored that in her own machine.

Pearson checked for a file on Bremerhaven Petroleum Corporation, but there was nothing there.

“All right, Donna, let’s go to the CIA, then the DIA.”

“Coming up, Colonel.”

From both agencies, Pearson extracted similar information, though again, nothing on Bremerhaven. She supposed that General Brackman was requesting an investigation. Later, she would run a comparison program against all of her files, eliminate duplicate information, and come up with comprehensive files. After she culled those, she would print out a short, but complete briefing report.

“Is that it, Colonel?”

Pearson thought for a moment. “Do you suppose, Donna, that you could get into the German Defense Command’s computer?”

“I doubt it,” Amber said, “but it’d sure be fun to try.”

Pearson wondered why everything had to be fun.

Felix Eisenach’s helicopter landed at the Bremerhaven naval facility at four o’clock, half an hour past its scheduled arrival time. The Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm B0105 was olive drab, marked only with the blue, red, and yellow German flag and, below it, the yellow flag with two stars denoting a general-major. The slate-gray MBB B0105 parked next to it carried the single-starred flag of a navy admiral.

Bremerhaven was a lively, buzzing port, swarming with civilian shipping. Panamanian, Norwegian, Kuwaiti, British, and Soviet freighters and tankers lined the docks and crept slowly in and out of the mouth of the Weser River. A Japanese ship disgorged multihued little cars at one of the large piers.

In the naval yards, thirty-four ships were moored out or made fast to the quays, side by side, four and five deep. Launches and supply tenders poked among them like hungry water beetles. Shore-based cranes waddled back and forth on their rails, trundling cargo nets filled to capacity with crates and boxes. Sailors and civilian workers scurried about on important errands. Eisenach noted with some satisfaction that many of the ships displayed fresh gray paint, sharp edges, the newest radar antennas. In some report he had read, the German High Command had boasted of a 30 percent increase in naval units over the past five years. Most of the new vessels fell into medium-displacement ranges — assault transports, helicopter ships, destroyers, and small missile frigates. There were two new missile cruisers, the Hamburg and the Stuttgart, and two new submarines. The cruisers and the submarines were powered by nuclear reactors.

As the rotors slowed, Eisenach pushed open the door and stepped down from the small helicopter. He ducked his head, held his peaked cap in place, and walked toward the waiting sedan.

Kapitän Werner Niels, Schmidt’s aide, climbed out of the car and saluted.

Returning the salute, Eisenach raised an eyebrow.

“The admiral arrived earlier, General Eisenach, and went on to the officers’ club. He awaits you there.”

“Very well, Kapitän. Let us join him.” Eisenach slipped into the rear seat, and Niels went around to get in on the other side.

Admiral Schmidt was frequently too independent for Eisenach’s tastes. The man could have waited a half hour for his commander to arrive. But no, Schmidt had been in command of ships for a long time, and he was as accustomed to making his own decisions as he was impatient. And Eisenach suspected that Schmidt felt some aversion to reporting to an air force general officer.

Perhaps, also, Schmidt was somewhat frustrated. He had wanted command of the 1st Fleet, but had been cajoled and threatened into accepting command of the Dritte Marinekraft. Though he commanded eighteen major vessels, Schmidt did not consider the task force’s mission as vital as Eisenach did.

The driver pulled away from the helicopter pad located on the quay and found his way through the labyrinth of warehouses and fabrication plants that crowded upon the docks. Sailors came to attention and saluted as they went by. Toward the back of the base, they passed parade grounds, large brick barracks, and administrative buildings. Elm and oak trees lined the streets, and the grass plots around structures were closely clipped.

The officer’s club was solidly built of red brick and was new. Eisenach and Niels got out and walked up the pristine sidewalk to the double glass doors, the kapitän holding one of them for him.

Schmidt was waiting for him in one of the private meeting rooms, a stein of lager in front of him. The admiral often boasted that he drank only beer. He was a large, florid-faced man in his early sixties. His steel gray hair was shorn to almost nonexistence, and his blue eyes were unwavering. The skin of his face was firm, but his ears jutted outward from his skull like semaphores.

“Well, Felix, you have finally arrived.”

Eisenach was not going to apologize to a subordinate for being late. “And Gerhard, you have started without me.” Schmidt smiled. “I have been at sea for twelve days. I was thirsty. I am also hungry. Are you ready for dinner?” Eisenach looked at his watch. “It is early, but yes, we can eat.”

Schmidt nodded to Niels, and the aide left the room, closing the door behind him.

The general took one of the castered and upholstered chairs opposite Schmidt. He fished in his pocket for a package of American Marlboros and lit one. Schmidt shoved an ashtray across the table toward him.

“All right, Gerhard. You asked for this meeting.”

“Right to the point?” Schmidt said. “No chattering over the sauerbraten?”

“I must return to Berlin immediately after dinner.”

“All right.” Schmidt sat up in his chair and leaned his elbows on the table. His eyes became more serious than normal, and they were normally serious. “I am going to request a transfer to First Fleet.”

“You’ll end up in a staff job, Gerhard.”

“Perhaps, but only for a while.”

The door opened and Niels came in with another stein for Schmidt and a Scotch and water for Eisenach. Werner Niels’s memory was very good, Eisenach thought. He tasted it and guessed that it was his preferred Glenlivet.

After the aide left again, Eisenach asked, “What brings this on, Gerhard?”

“Nothing brings it on. My disenchantment has always been there. The navy does not work well under an air force command that cannot distinguish the pointed end of a ship from the ass-end. For God’s sakes, Felix, all we do is sail back and forth like an endless clothesline. My tactical and strategic training exercises are farces. Morale is slipping badly.”

“I should think your men would be extremely happy,” Eisenach said. “Of your sixteen surface vessels, four are rotated into port for two weeks at a time. That is a lot of shore leave.”

“Leisure time that deteriorates the level of readiness,” the admiral said. “I am a realistic man, Felix. I do not embellish my reports to my superiors. The Third Naval Force is not a crackerjack unit. It is falling apart, and your planning group in Berlin does not allow me to do anything about it. They think they have airplanes to boss around. The mission of standing sentinel to a bunch of oil wells is not awe-inspiring to my ship commanders or their personnel.”

“That accounts for this morning’s incident?” Eisenach asked.

Schmidt snickered. “The idiot in the Tornado? Yes, he caught us by surprise. And do you know why?”

“You will tell me.”

“That is damned correct. Your planning staff has absolutely no concept of naval operations. They keep us strung out in single file, like that clothesline I mentioned, when I should have my ships clustered in battle groups. Jesus Christ! You can’t have a cruiser like the Hamburg exposed like it was today. I should have had destroyers on the flanks.”

Eisenach nodded, but reluctantly.

“It would have served you right if that Tornado pilot had punched us with a Kormoran antiship missile.”

“What do you suggest, Gerhard?”

“I suggest I go back to the real navy.”

Eisenach studied the navy man for a long moment before speaking. “Gerhard, you and I are not friends. Perhaps that is impossible. However, I respect you as a military man, and I do not want to lose you. If I were to remove the planning group from the chain of command — you would report directly to me — would that change your mind?”

Schmidt leaned back in his chair, studying Eisenach’s face. He took a long drag from his stein.

“I want to change the makeup of the force.”

“In what way?”

“I want the Stuttgart and another missile frigate. I’ll keep eight destroyers and release the rest. I’ll keep the subs, but I’ll put one at a time toward more fruitful training.”

“To what end, Gerhard?”

“I would create four three-ship surface battle groups. We will not often be in port, for my detached groups will be sent off on training sessions. I must broaden their thinking, and their horizons, Felix.”

“And that will keep you on the job?”

“It’s either that, General, or I tell my ship captains that they’re not really oil wells.”

With several short blasts of the nose thrusters, McKenna drifted Delta Blue backward out of its hangar and watched as the doors folded to the closed position like the petals of a tired rose.

The red warning strobes mounted on the spokes and at four points around the hub blinked clearly at him. They were only activated during departures and arrivals.

The earth looked inviting, rosily lit along a line from Leningrad westward. The dark side melted into the blackness of space, defined primarily by the stars it blotted out. The moon was an eerie white disk far down on his right.

When the aerospace craft had cleared the space station by several hundred yards, Munoz said, “Okay, Snake Eyes, flip her ass over.”

McKenna chuckled. “Roger, Tiger. Flipping.”

Using the hand controller, now connected to the thrusters, McKenna gave the MakoShark a nose-down command. Spurts of nitrogen gas spiked the vacuum, and the craft slowly turned over until the tail was pointing in the direction of travel. The cockpit was head-down to the earth.

He pulled back gently on the controller, igniting the thrusters, to stop the roll.

“Lookin’ good, amigo. I’m gonna hook into the brain now.”

McKenna checked the HUD. The readings looked good, though the cockpit temperature was lower than it should be. He nudged the slide switch to raise it. The velocity showed him Mach 26.2. Flat moving out, he thought, though the only sense of movement came from watching the growing gap between the MakoShark and Themis, which was now on the bottom edge of the rearview screen.

The primary screen displayed the randomly appearing numbers that Munoz was programming into the computer. The computer did, in fact, remember typically used coordinates for returns to Peterson, Jack Andrews, or Merlin air bases, updating them automatically for the position of the earth at the time of departure.

“Got any idea at all where you’d like to end up, Snake Eyes?”

“I think it’d be nice if we hit a hundred thousand feet somewhere in the vicinity of the Barents Sea. Maybe even the middle of it.

“You want to make the first run over the ice?”

“To the west, yeah.”

“That’s not what Amy-baby had in mind.”

“Amy-baby’s not flying it.”

“Good goddamned point, jefe. The Barents Sea, it is.”

The screen flickered with more numbers as Munoz plotted the reentry path and entered the variable weight data — pilots, cargo, pylon loads. The computer insisted on knowing, within certain tolerances, the center of gravity and the total weight of the MakoShark before it finalized the numbers. Since none of the variety of components interchanged on a MakoShark had weight aboard the space station, every object placed on board had to be checked against the master weight file on the station’s computer. The mass of a cargo or munitions pod, a camera, a film pack was double-checked against the file, then fed to the MakoShark’s on-board computer.

When his data was entered, Munoz ran the test program, which compared all of the new numbers with what the computer knew was possible. The machine accepted the new information congenially by flashing green letters: “ACCEPTED.”

“Start up procedure.”

“Ready, Tiger.”

They went through the rocket start checklist, up to the point of ignition, then McKenna turned it over to computer control.

In the upper-left corner of his CRT, new blue lettering appeared:

“Shit,” McKenna said. “Twelve minutes.”

“Hey, compadre, that ain’t bad. We’ve had to wait over an hour before.”

In calculating the duration of retro-rocket bursts, the angle of attack into the atmosphere, and the trajectory to the desired point on earth, the computer also had to determine at what time the reentry program was to begin. The MakoSharks, however, had a distinct advantage over the Space Shuttles, in that they had power available after returning to the atmosphere. It allowed them a great deal more flexibility in reentry scheduling. They had many more windows of opportunity open to them.

McKenna punched the communications button for Themis. “Delta Blue to Alpha. We’ve got retro burn in one-two-point-four-one.”

“Alpha copies,” General Overton said. “Have a nice night, Delta Blue.”

“Colonel Pearson there?”

“I’m here, Delta Blue.”

“Get this, Amy. Twenty-four, twenty-two, twenty-one, seventeen, sixteen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-two, fifteen, twelve, ten, nine, thirteen, six, fourteen, eight, seven, two, five, three, four, eleven, one.”

“Very good, Colonel. You memorized the order.”

“Told you I could do it.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Pearson said, “That’s backward.”

“Delta Blue out.”

Pearson called several times in the next five minutes, then gave up.

Overton called, too. “Alpha to Delta Blue.”

“Go Alpha.”

“You’ve changed the op?”

“Fuel savings,” McKenna professed.

“Roger, confirm fuel conservation.”

On the intercom, Munoz said, “Snake Eyes, we ain’t savin’ shit.”

“I know, Tiger, but it irritates the IO.”

“That ain’t the way to get into her jumpsuit, gringo.”

“I don’t want to get into her jumpsuit,” McKenna lied. Actually, he had decided to fly the ice first for a particular reason. Despite her stealth characteristics, the MakoShark was vulnerable to the naked eye when seen against a light background, like blue sky or white ice. A storm had passed through the target area around noon, but conditions were now clear, and in the summer, the northern regions did not become fully dark. If, by some chance, a German patrol plane was up by the time Delta Blue made its low-level run, there was a possibility of detection. McKenna wanted the higher-risk portion of the flight out of the way, first.

At thirty seconds to burn, McKenna tightened his straps and double-checked the oxy/nitro fittings. He snuggled his helmet down and rotated his shoulders against the gray-blue environmental suit. The suits they wore were considerably advanced over the EVA suit in which Armstrong sauntered on the moon’s surface. The fabric was a combination of Kevlar, silicon, and plastic, very tear-resistant and very flexible. When inflated, there was less than an inch of space between the fabric and the skin in most places. It depended for some people on the amount of food intake. Frank Dimatta had been refitted for new environmental suits twice, and McKenna had warned him to watch his weight. In the pressurized cockpits, the suits were not inflated, but they would automatically fill if the cockpit seals failed. The helmet-to-suit fitting was comprised of a pair of collars with a series of meshed grooves, allowing almost full freedom in head rotation.

“Four, three, two, one,” Munoz intoned.

The CRT countdown readout went to zero.

McKenna knew the rocket motors were firing from the vibration in the craft’s frame and from the thrust indicators on the HUD. The thrust on each motor climbed rapidly to 100 percent.

Themis slid off the rearview screen as white fire encroached from each side of the screen.

The Mach numbers started to dribble off.

The burn lasted for two-and-a-quarter minutes.

At Mach 20, the computer flipped the MakoShark over once again so they were facing forward, but the angle of attack into the atmosphere would not be nose down. Like the Space Shuttle Orbiters, the MakoSharks pancaked into the heavier soup of the atmosphere. The HUD reported the correct angle of attack, 40 degrees.

The leading edges of the wings, the nose, the pylons when they were mounted, and the nose cones of exterior ordnance or pods were composed of a second skin combining reinforced carbon-carbon, Nomex felt, and a ceramic alloy that resisted temperatures that rose to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit on the leading edges of the wings. Additionally, the nose cone and the wing leading edges contained an arterial network of cooling tubes through which supercooled fluids were pumped. The system had had very few failures, and none of those fatal, and McKenna thought it considerably superior to the Space Shuttled individual tiles.

Half an hour later, at ninety miles of altitude, McKenna felt the first dragging fingers of atmosphere pulling at the MakoShark. Two red lights in the lower-left corner of the HUD indicated that the computer had begun pumping coolant through the heat shields, as well as initiating cockpit air conditioning.

He watched as the exterior temperature sensors began reporting the effects of aerodynamic heating. The skin temperature on the top side climbed to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Leading edges were already near 700 degrees.

Munoz transmitted the message to Themis. “Alpha, Delta Blue. We’re goin’ black.”

“Copy, Delta Blue.”

When the heat-shield temperatures exceeded 2300 degrees, the surrounding atmosphere was ionized, resulting in a blackout of communications.

In the cockpit, McKenna felt the heat, but it wasn’t entirely uncomfortable. Kind of like hanging around the pool on a summer day in Aspen. More disconcerting was the red-orange film that enveloped the cockpit canopy. He lost all visual contact with his black world.

Four minutes later, as the windscreen began to clear, working down through the colors from burnt orange to amber to yellow, Munoz called Themis. “Alpha, Delta Blue. Altitude two-four-zero thousand feet, velocity Mach twelve-point-six, fourteen minutes to objective.”

“Copy, Delta Blue.”

McKenna had lost track of the number of times he had made the reentry — well over 350 times — but passing through the blackout still made the blood pump and the adrenaline flow. It took several moments to come down from the high.

Coming out of the blackout, the computer put the nose down a trifle, to 32 degrees.

When the speed was down to Mach 6 and the altitude to125,000 feet, McKenna said, “I’m going to take it back, Tiger.”

“You damned barnstormers are all alike. Seat-of-the-pants bullshit.”

That was true to a great extent. McKenna started flying because he liked to fly. Though he had come to trust the computers most of the time, going along for the ride still wasn’t the same.

He said a silent thank-you to the computer, then canceled its control.

Dropping the nose to maintain his speed and glide, McKenna began a wide, wide turn from his heading of 84 degrees to due north.

“That’s Moscow off the port wing,” Munoz said.

“Good night, Moscow.”

The march of night had crossed the British Isles and most of Greenland now, and the lights of Moscow were orderly at eleven-thirty. McKenna could pick out the ring roads. He kept the city off the left wing as he made his turn.

Far ahead, he saw a smudge of light that would be Archangel, on a bay of the White Sea, and just over a hundred miles short of the Arctic Circle.

Beyond the city, the horizon was still bathed in vague light. There wasn’t much darkness in northern latitudes at this time of year. In fact, to the residents of Sweden, Norway, and Greenland, the sun did not go up and down. It descended sideways, barely touching the horizon before beginning a slanted ascent. The MakoShark’s stealthy traits were negated to some degree by the geography of the objective.

Munoz busied himself with system checks of the two pods they were carrying, to make certain that the heat of passage into the atmosphere had not damaged either the infrared and standard cameras or the film cartridges.

“How do they look?” McKenna asked.

“Green lights all the way, Snake Eyes. I’m ready if you are.”

Over the northern end of the Barents Sea, McKenna started his turbojets and dropped to a thousand feet of altitude before turning westward.

Munoz brought up Pearson’s map of the area on the screen, with the well sites noted by yellow dots. On the map, McKenna’s north was almost exactly 270 degrees. Svalbard Island was a mass of green on the left side of the screen.

“No shippin’ this side of the island,” Munoz said. “Radar’s tellin’ me there’s a dozen ships on the other side.”

“Let’s see them, Tiger.”

On his panel screen, eleven red dots appeared. They moved slowly, and most of them cruised around the perimeter of the offshore well cluster. Two seemed to be patrolling the south edge of the ice pack.

“I don’t see any aircraft, Tiger.”

“Nor do I, jefe.”

“All right. I’m going right down the top of the string on the ice. We’ll coast it at four hundred knots and a thousand feet of altitude. On the last two, numbers twenty and twenty-three, I’ll put it on the deck.”

“Go, babe.”

McKenna climbed a few hundred feet to pass over the small island of Northeast Land, then settled back to a level flight at 1000 feet. He lined up with the first well, number twenty-four, using the map on the screen, then looked up through the windshield.

The ice appeared very rugged. Pressure ridges and chasms pocked the surface, but gave him some landmarks. The light was perhaps equivalent to a sixty-watt bulb burning in a very large room, and the surface was a jigsaw puzzle of light and dark patches.

One minute later, McKenna saw a red strobe light. No one had said the domes were identified by beacons. He’d rib Pearson about that.

The dome came up fast. It was geodesic in construction, large triangles fastened together, so that it was a series of flat planes, rather than a true globe. It was larger than he expected, maybe a couple hundred feet in diameter. That would make it twenty stories tall.

“Bingo,” Munoz said. “Got it.”

The next six wells passed quickly under them, McKenna counting them off, checking the map for a heading on the next one. At one point, he glanced out the left side of his canopy and thought he might have seen the running lights of a ship, some ten miles away.

After well nineteen passed under, Munoz said, “Put her down, Snake Eyes.”

He bled off some speed and let the MakoShark descend to 400 feet. McKenna wanted some clearance over the domes, and he had noted that some of the pressure ridges had punched their way a couple hundred feet above the surface.

Well number twenty had floodlights blazing on the helicopter pad, and there was a small chopper sitting in the middle of the marked “X.” Fortunately, there were no people working outside on the pad to watch the silent intruder whisk over them.

McKenna retarded his throttles as they passed over, to further reduce the sound of the engines at the low altitude. As soon as the well appeared in the rearview screen, he advanced the throttles again.

They got the same low, slow shots of well number twenty-two, then McKenna banked into a tight, climbing turn and headed south toward well fifteen.

At 1,500 feet, they approached one of the red dots. McKenna felt a little easier over the dark waters of the Greenland Sea. A ship or an aircraft would have to be in a very good position to spot the MakoShark against the pale sky or the ice now behind them.

The red dot got closer.

“I’m gonna get him,” Munoz said.

The screen went to infrared for a moment, then to the night-vision mode, then back to the map projection.

“It’s a destroyer, Snake Eyes. Wish I had a data bank aboard.”

The U.S. naval commands had access to data bases that stored the unique sonar signatures of vessel propellers and could frequently identify exact ships by their sound. Occasionally, the infrared heat signatures could also be identified. The MakoSharks did have a limited data bank of radar and infrared signatures, but they were restricted to aircraft.

“Well number fifteen coming up,” McKenna said. “Well get all of them at a thousand feet, and take our close-up of number one.”

The circular flight path they followed in order to photograph each well took eleven minutes to cover. Munoz snapped hundreds of photos of the wells, and he took shots of four ships. One of them was the missile cruiser.

In all, they spent seventeen minutes coasting through the area, and McKenna felt certain they had not been seen. As soon as they had their close-ups of number one, he began a steady climb to the south, gradually adding on speed.

The MakoShark cracked through the sonic barrier at 20,000 feet, 200 miles off the coast of Norway.

“You keep this heading, Snake Eyes, we could put down at Jack Andrews for a couple beers.”

“Amy wants us right back. She’s going to develop these herself.”

“Shit. You didn’t promise her, did you?”

Munoz knew that McKenna kept his promises. He just avoided making promises wherever he could.

“No, but I told Overton we’d do a quick turnaround.”

“Ah, damn, amigo. I’m just real thirsty.”

No liquor or beer of any kind was allowed aboard the space station. Overton strictly enforced that rule.

“Next time, buddy,” McKenna told him.

The instrument panel screen was displaying the 200-mile radar sweep, and by the time they passed over Copenhagen at 50,000 feet, it was busy with commercial night flights between European cities. Most of those flights were at 20,000 feet or less. Some military flights were much higher, but McKenna wasn’t paying much attention to them.

“Hey, Snake Eyes.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been watchin’ New Amsterdam. A flight of two just took off from there.”

“Got a heading on them.”

“Goin’ north.”

“Suppose they have tail numbers?”

“Damn betcha.”

McKenna retarded the throttles, pulled back on the hand controller, and put the MakoShark into a vertical climb. As soon as the speed drained away, he went on over onto his back, then rolled upright. He put the nose down and began searching the screen for his bogies.

“Wish to hell-and-gone we were armed,” Munoz said.