Delta Green

Chapter Eleven

All of the letters or comments in Amy Pearson’s personnel file were commendatory. The adjectives describing her in Officer Efficiency Reports were “superior,” “responsible,” and “outstanding” She couldn’t remember once having harsh words directed at her orally or in writing as a result of her action or inaction.

Until now. And I’m a full colonel in the United States Air Force, for God’s sake.

Worst of all, General Overton’s reprimand was fully justified.

She could not and would not shift the blame on McKenna. It was she who let her knees get watery and let her resolve melt when McKenna touched her or kissed her.

It was my weakness.

And others knew about it.

She felt entirely humiliated.

Pearson was busily composing new resolutions about the rest of her professional and social life when her office intercom sounded.

“Colonel Pearson?”

She pressed the keypad. “Yes, Donna.”

“Colonel Pearson, there is a Top Secret message coming in for you. It’s a long one.”

Donna Amber was being very formal, and Pearson could understand why. She wondered what Polly Tang had said to Amber and Macklin.

“Thank you, Donna. Please send it over on my data channel one.”

She selected the middle screen and called up the message which was directed to, “G-2, USSC-1.” It was a response to her query of MOSQUITO in Phnom Penh.

The CIA agent had been busy. He had identified a half-dozen Russians among an estimated thirty living in a compound of twenty-two residences in the northern part of the city. There was a listing of fourteen companies, businesses, shops, and restaurants in which the Russians appeared to have a proprietary interest.

Of the six people identified, none was using the name with which he was born. Sergei Pavel, who had been followed to the compound, was going by the name of Treml. And — there it was! — Anatoly Shelepin was using the name of Konstantin Paramanov.

The Russian émigré now named Paramanov was, in fact, well known in Phnom Penh as a benefactor. He appeared to be quite wealthy, and he had endowed a hospital for children as well as given freely to an orphanage, to an arts center, and to museums. MOSQUITO suspected he had also given freely to various levels of bureaucrats.

In response to her specific questions, the agent replied that, yes, the Russians had appeared in Phnom Penh shortly after the coup attempt in the Soviet Union, and no, the Russians did not appear to be involved in local politics. They stayed primarily to themselves or engaged in their various businesses. Paramanov/Shelepin travelled infrequently and apparently owned an old twin-engined aircraft.

While reading through the message, Pearson almost forgot about herself. And consciously, to keep her attention directed outward, she decided she needed action. Not the kind of action Lynn Haggar thrived on, but definitive motion in her own line of intelligence-gathering.

She needed to know more about Anatoly Shelepin and his friends.

And for that, she needed Overton’s permission to leave the station. Which made her think about her transgression once again.

God, I feel like a teenager, asking to go to the movies after being grounded.

Aleksander Maslov had slept deeply for a solid eight hours, far more than was normal for him, and he was alert when he awakened.

Crawling naked out of his narrow bunk, he turned on the single overhead light, then moved to the tiny sink and gave himself a sponge bath before shaving. He dressed in a flight suit, grabbed a flashlight, and stepped to the ground outside his trailer.

The ground was moist and mushy under his feet. Crickets and unknown insects created a symphonic buzz in the jungle. Mosquitoes swarmed toward him immediately, only mildly put off by the repellent he had rubbed over his neck, arms, and hands. He could not see the sky through the jungle canopy, but it felt to him as if rain were imminent.

In the dark, he could not see the other side of the runway either, but to the north, there was a whitish haze peeking through the trees. Switching on the flashlight, he used it to avoid the tangled vines and weeds creeping along the ground, rounded the trailer to the runway and walked along it, headed toward the muted light.

The revetment hacked out of the jungle was covered by a green and gray camouflage net peppered with live foliage and suspended seven meters above the Earth. Below it, the MakoShark was bathed in hazy light from four worklamps. Six mechanics were working on the craft.

Boris Nikitin was already there, standing on a short scaffold next to the juncture of the fuselage and the left wing, supervising the last stages of preparation. He looked down when he heard Maslov’s footsteps on the steel mat used as a foundation.

“Good evening, Colonel. Did you sleep well?”

“Quite well, Boris. Have you eaten?”

“I waited for you.”

“Good. We will gorge ourselves shortly. Are the radios working?”

“The transmissions are excellent, at least at short range. We will know for certain when we achieve orbit. Sergeant Kasartskin is a genius.”

The man kneeling on the: wing, with his head and shoulders stuck into the compartment behind the cockpit, scooted backward and sat up.

“I am told that you are a genius, Sergeant,” Maslov called up to him.

“I must be, Comrade Colonel, to have achieved the modifications with the tools we have available.”

“Explain the alterations to me, please.”

Kasartskin rolled backwards to sit on the wing and wiped his hands with a rag. “There are five communications radios in this aircraft, selected on the keypad as Tac One through Tac Five. The first four are tunable to various frequencies, and the last is permanently set to two-four-three-point-zero, the emergency channel. The first, called tactical one, is utilized for normal military and general aviation communications. The second through fourth would be used for communications with headquarters or other craft in the squadron or wing.”

All of which Maslov had guessed.

“The first four radios have scrambling circuits which may be switched on. I left the first radio alone, removed two, three, and four, and reworked the integrated circuit boards so that the scramblers are all the same, but not the same as they were before.”

“These three radios will only work with each other?” Maslov asked.

“That is correct, Colonel. They are discrete from any other that the Americans, or anyone, has available. And they will also use the Molniya I satellite channels we are pirating from the Commonwealth network. We will now have communications with you, wherever you might be.”

“That is wonderful, Sergeant,” Maslov said, though he really did not mean it. He preferred being left alone when he was flying.

“I have reinstalled the number two radio in the craft, so that you will have Tac One, Tac Two, and Tac Five on the keypad. The other two radios will be installed here and at our other necessary contact point.”

“Very well, Sergeant Kasartskin. You will be finished soon?”

“Within the hour, Comrade Colonel”

Nikitin climbed down from the scaffolding, and the two of them walked together beneath the MakoShark. The four curved payload bay doors were lowered, and Maslov could see that the aft bay now contained an elongated pallet of equipment, with a large spherical tank painted white and labeled, “OXYGEN/NITROGEN, COMPRESSED,” and a clear-plastic-wrapped electronics console dominating the pallet.

In the forward bay, on a wooden floor, the mechanics had rigged two uncomfortable-appearing seats and restraining harnesses. Two space suits (part of a shipment of six stolen from the space program at Baikonur Cosmodrome) rested on the seats as the technicians modified the life-support and communications connections between the suits and the interior receptacles of the American craft. They did not yet have the materials and tools to fabricate one of the passenger modules normally used in the Mako and MakoShark, and so they were adapting what they had.

Two Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) backpacks, with self-contained batteries, air tanks, and propulsion systems rested on the steel mat at his feet, ready to be lifted into place in the bay.

“Has General Druzhinin determined who our passengers will be, Boris?”

“He has selected Captain Yuri Bryntsev and Corporal Filatov,” Nikitin said.

Bryntsev was a good choice, since he had already been in space as part of the Mako program. He did not know Filatov, except that he had once been a part of Soviet ground forces, and he supposed that the man had more brawn than brains, the opposite of what was necessary in zero-gravity.

The two of them checked the weapons pylons next. The space-modified Phoenix missiles, the only two they had, were mounted on the outboard pylons. Maslov would be very conservative about using them because he was not likely to obtain replacements soon.

Eight Wasp II missiles had been attached to the inboard pylons. He checked them over carefully, making certain that the safety pins were still in place.

“The on-board environmental and electronic systems have been examined, and the oxygen-nitrogen tanks refilled,” Nikitin said. “Both fuel types have been replenished. We are all but ready to go.”

“Are you nervous, Boris?”

Nikitin grinned weakly. “Not as much as I have been, Aleks. Our last flight may not have cured my uneasy nerves, but they are certainly more numb.”

Maslov grinned and slapped him on the back. “You will be fine, Boris. Let us go find dinner.”

Following the lead of Maslov’s flashlight, they started onto the pathway leading to the dormitory.

The flimsy rumble of one of the camouflage hills being towed from the runway stopped them, and they turned around and walked beneath the MakoShark and along the short taxiway to the edge of the runway.

“Do you know if we were expecting an airplane to arrive?” Maslov asked.

“No.”

A single flashlight winked on near the control center, then began to bob across the runway toward them.

It was within ten meters of them when the runway lights illuminated and Maslov recognized General Druzhinin.

He was smiling broadly.

“General?”

“Our warheads are coming in, comrades”

“The nuclear warheads?” Maslov asked.

“Exactly!” Druzhinin exclaimed. “We are now a superpower, and the world will soon know of it.”

Anatoly Shelepin was in bed when the telephone rang. It rang three times before he managed to rise from the bed without waking Yelena and get to the living room.

“Yes?”

The voice on the other end, attesting to the quality of the Kampuchean telephone system, was tinny and more than slightly distorted.

“It is a grand evening.”

“And a balmy one,” he replied to Oleg Druzhinin’s code phrase.

“The packages have arrived.”

“All of them?”

“Three of them. The fourth is expected within fifteen minutes,” Druzhinin said. “However, I report that the first three are in excellent shape.”

The four SS-X-25 missiles had Multiple Independently Retargeted Vehicle (MIRV) warheads. Each of the nose-cones on the missiles contained ten five hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads. With four rockets at his disposal, forty targets could be designated. The missiles were solid fuel-based, and not as volatile as earlier liquid-fueled rockets. These four, in fact, had once been mounted on trailer-truck launchers.

“Thank you. I appreciate the notice,” Shelepin said and hung up.

It was going to happen.

He would make it happen.

If the former general secretaries and — terrible title! — the presidents of the Soviet Union had had the same resolve as Colonel General Anatoly Shelepin, there would still be a Soviet Union, and she would be the supreme and only government of the world.

Lynn Haggar hooked her elbow around one of the stanchions of the spring-loaded exercise machine and floated with her legs straight out in front of her.

The exercise room, which was also the 1st Aerospace Squadron’s briefing room, was slowly filling up with the crew members. Tony Munoz sat upside down — to her — in the centrifugal machine and yawned widely. Ben Olsen and Will Conover were trying to arm wrestle each other, but neither of them was going to win since they were floating in midair, without a solid surface to brace against.

McKenna came in, looked over his team, and slowly soared to the top bulkhead.

Jack Abrams ushered Amy Pearson through the hatchway, then closed the hatch.

“Three-quarters of the squadron present and mostly accounted for,” Abrams said.

“It’s all yours, Amy,” McKenna said.

“Thank you, Colonel.”

Uh oh, Haggar thought. Just when it looked as if Pearson and McKenna were getting along better, something had happened to spoil the progress. By the reddish flush coating Pearson’s throat, Haggar guessed that the new deputy commander was embarrassed about some incident. Maybe McKenna had made a pass at her?

She looked upward at the squadron leader. He seemed to be a little more reserved today. And he appeared just as handsome as ever.

Pearson was an idiot.

McKenna could make a pass at Lynn Marie Haggar any time, and he could expect an interception.

“All right,” Amy Pearson said, “here’s what we’ve got so far.”

She read off a bunch of names, most of which sounded Russian to Haggar.

“Shelepin and Pavel once held flag-rank positions in the Red Army and the KGB. They are both considered extremely right-wing as well as capable strategists. We… that is, I think they are involved in the hijacking of Delta Green. The motive is unknown at this point, but both men have been spotted in Phnom Penh.

“Of the five possible Soviet Mako pilots who could have hijacked the MakoShark, Aleksander Maslov appears to be the strongest candidate because of his past associations with Shelepin. He has a strong record in MiG-23 Floggers and MiG-29 Fulcrums, and he has combat experience in Afghanistan. He washed out of the Mako program because his superiors didn’t think he had enough self-discipline. He was too willing to risk his backseater and his passengers. We’re still trying to track the remaining four pilots, and one or more of them could also be involved.

“That’s good, Amy,” Haggar said. “But there’s no hint about motivation yet?”

“Not yet, Lynn.”

“We know one thing,” McKenna said. “Whatever it is, it’s going to be space-based.”

“How so, jefe?” Munoz asked.

“They went to the trouble of capturing a shipment of fuel pellets. That suggests to me that a few trips into orbit are planned.”

“The odds,” Haggar said, “favor the HoneyBee still being in orbit. Somewhere.”

“So they’ve got to come out here to refuel,” Will Conover added.

“The odds also favor,” Pearson said, “a land base somewhere in Southeast Asia for three reasons. It’s close to the hijack site, Colonel McKenna spotted them once in the area, and they nearly flew into a trap we set off Vietnam.”

“So we’re going to adopt a lie-in-wait philosophy,” McKenna said. “We can’t take Themis stationary, but the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is going to reposition some infrared-detecting satellites over Southeast Asia. We’re going to put a MakoShark out there, too, watching for an eight-or nine-minute rocket burn. That, we can see.

“It’ll be boring as hell, but we’ll set it up in six-hour shifts, rotating back here for rest periods. Will, you and Do-Wop get the first shift, and Lynn and Ben go second. Tony and I will do the wrap-up.”

“Except,” Pearson said, “I need to go Earth-side, and none of the Makos are available. I also need someone to pilot a Lear for me once I get there.”

McKenna studied her for a moment, then said, “That’s us, then, Tony. Get suited up.”

Haggar thought Pearson was going to protest for some reason, then decided to keep her mouth shut.

Which was usually the best course.

McKenna had Benny Shalbot install a passenger module in the aft bay of Delta Blue, and by the time he was finished, Pearson appeared, all dolled up in a unisex environmental suit and helmet.

Shalbot helped her get settled in the module while McKenna and Munoz pulled themselves down into their cockpits and began to strap in and hook up.

“Hey, compadre?”

“Yeah, Tony.”

“There’s somethin’ I’ve been meanin’ to ask you. What the hell…?”

“Don’t ask, Tony. Put your helmet on.”

He locked his own helmet in place and then secured his shoulder restraints and connected the environmental and communications lines. He powered up the instrument panel and computers.

Shalbot, rising from below, appeared alongside him. “You can close the bay doors, Colonel.”

He did so. “Thanks, Benny.”

“Have a good trip,” Shalbot said and pushed off for the hatchway.

“You on the line, Amy?” Munoz asked on the intercom.

“I’m here.”

She wasn’t going to be very talkative, McKenna thought, and didn’t blame her. He was assuming she had permission from Overton to go to Wet Country, but he wasn’t going to ask her about it. He was a trifle leery of the temper that came with the red hair.

Polly Tang worked them out of the hangar, and Munoz and his computer came up with the reentry solution. They had a sixteen minute wait for the window.

Sixteen minutes of silence.

Munoz offered to put Silence of the Lambs or Raise the Titanic on her video screen.

“No, thank you, Tony.”

“Geez,” Munoz said.

The reentry was exceptionally smooth, except for burning the nose cone off of a Wasp II, and the landing at Merlin Air Base was accomplished at 0712 hours, Borneo time.

Once they were towed inside Hangar One, and the passenger module opened, Pearson climbed down the short ladder and stretched muscles that hadn’t been subjected to gravity for some time.

It was a nice stretchy despite the environmental suit, McKenna thought.

She had all the help she needed from a half-dozen technicians in getting her helmet off.

“Are you going to fly the Lear, Colonel?”

“Of course, Amy. Where are we going?”

“Phnom Penh.”

“Damn,” Tony Munoz said. “I’ve gotta go check my log and see if that’s one of the cities I’ve been told not to come back to.”