Delta Green

Chapter Three

Colonel Kevin McKenna took up a station near the Mercator projection world map on one wall of the ready room. Even in the environmental suit which disguised the finer points of form, he appeared hard and fit. He was six feet tall, and Conover judged that his weight hadn’t varied five or six ounces from 175 pounds in all the time he had known the commander. His skeletal structure was composed of heavy bones, and his cheekbones were prominent in a lean and tanned face. Conover supposed — hell, he knew — that women found the gray/green eyes and slightly long and rumpled black hair enticing. The only change Conover had noted in almost three years was a minor deepening of the lines between the outer edges of McKenna’s nostrils and the ends of his mouth, and Conover attributed that to the weight of command. He smiled just as frequently, though. Perhaps there were a few more wrinkles in the pilot’s squint at the corners of his eyes. He thought, though, that McKenna’s eyes were as sharp as ever. And Snake Eyes was still willing to take a gamble, another reason for his nickname.

McKenna had never talked much about his history, but Conover knew that he had flown with the Thunderbirds demonstration team, had done some liaison work with the Saudis and Israelis in F-15s and F-16s, and had been assigned to Edwards as a test pilot before Brackman selected him to head the 1st Aerospace Squadron.

McKenna had the demeanor and the credentials to demand loyalty and trust, and he got both from the people in his squadron.

He also didn’t pussyfoot around.

“Do-Wop, close the door.”

Jack Abrams closed the door, then took a seat in one of the armed desk chairs.

“Frank, run it down for everyone.”

Dimatta took four minutes to brief them on what he knew of the disappearance of Delta Green and the murders of four people. “Hell, Kevin, I assumed we still had the same old security plan in effect. Bad assumption on my part.”

“We’re not going to sweat the security problems,” McKenna said. “That’s history, and you can be damned sure the arrangements will change. Have you talked to Pearson?”

“I briefed her right after I talked to Brackman. She’s putting together some kind of plan.”

“All right, we’ll adapt our mission as her information comes in. First things first. I’ve ordered the radio encryption boxes removed from all MakoSharks, and the Mark IV boxes installed. We don’t want whoever’s got Delta Green to be listening in on our scrambled radio communications. Space Command will be making the same change. Next, we’re short a MakoShark. As soon as we’re done here, Frank, you and George grab one of the Lears and head for Hot Country. Delta Orange is about ready for flight testing, and we’ll boost the schedule on her. I’ll talk to Brackman and get an approval on that”

George “Nitro Fizz” Williams, Dimatta’s backseater, frowned. He wouldn’t like giving up the Delta Green designation. It was a superstitious trait — even McKenna had renamed his new craft Delta Blue after the original Delta Blue had been shot down.

“George?” McKenna asked.

“Whatever you say, Colonel”

Williams wouldn’t normally call McKenna “Colonel,” except in a public setting. He was pretty much reality-based, though he went overboard on the nutrition thing. He was thirty-three, tall at six-two, and the startlingly red hair and deep green eyes had come from some Irish ancestry, though he denied it to Conover, who was Irish. When he wasn’t messing around with all of his electronic gadgetry in the backseat of a MakoShark, he was messing around with the electronic gadgetry he built as a hobby. His cubicle aboard Themis and his apartment landside were stuffed with stereos, television sets, computers, bar code readers, VCRs, radar detectors, and even radars he had designed and built himself.

“Spit it out, George,” McKenna ordered.

“Well, damn. We ought to rename the new bird Green.”

“No,” McKenna said. “As far as we know, Delta Green is still operational. She’ll stay Green until we know one way or the other.”

Williams shrugged.

“Next. Will, what’s your status?”

Conover sat up in his hard wooden seat and said, “We’re topped up and ready to go.”

“Weapons?”

“We’ve got practice Wasp IIs aboard, Kevin. We were just starting our training series in the desert when Overton diverted us here.”

“Change them out for live missiles, just in case, and install a Chain Gun pod.”

“We’ve got permission?” Conover asked.

“Not yet, but we will have by the end of the day.”

Jack “Do-Wop” Abrams, Conover’s WSO, broke in. “We’re going to shoot her down, Kevin?”

Dimatta groaned.

“That’ll be up to the brass, Jack. My immediate priority is to locate her. Based on the assumption that it’s not wise to let anyone — whoever it is — have a spacecraft that is equal to our own and can be used against us, I recommended to Brackman that we destroy it.”

Williams groaned.

“The general, however, read me a minor riot act which included items such as cost-per-bird, public relations, and congressional thumbs which might be turned down on our whole act.”

“So Brackman’s kicking it upstairs for a decision?” Abrams asked.

Abrams’s bushy mustache had grown even longer, now covering his upper lip, and just then, it seemed to quiver. The mustache was compensation for the hair which had disappeared before he reached the age of forty. His pate was smooth, but his face was lined with the worry he devoted to almost any issue. He was chronic about worrying, and it was reflected in his sharp hazel eyes. Originally a New Yorker, Abrams had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley prior to entering the Air Force. Conover thought that Berkeley had been the root of his worrying. The only thing that took his mind off his imagined troubles was outdated music, the source of his nickname, “Do-Wop.”

“Let’s just say, Jack, that my recommendation, along with General Brackman’s observations, will be considered by the appropriate commands.”

“He kicked it upstairs,” Abrams concluded. “We can figure on somebody making a political decision”

“Which will likely be the wrong one, amigos.” Munoz added. The Arizonian was slouched in a corner chair, missing his normally ready grin.

“Our current mission is purely location,” McKenna said. “Tony, why don’t you go make sure Delta Blue is getting her service? And hot weaponry.”

McKenna was definitely in a bad mood, Conover thought.

“Will, you get your ordnance changed out, then stand by for an operational plan from Pearson. I’ll call Country Girl and brief her. Frank, head for Hot Country.”

The group broke up, more glum than they had been in a long time. Generally, they were a happy-go-lucky bunch, which Abrams worried about, of course. One of the great things about working for 1st Aerospace, outside of flying the best damned bird ever built, was flying with the best damned pilots and backseaters around. They had come to know each other so well that they had learned to anticipate the actions and reactions of one another.

Conover knew exactly what Dimatta and Williams were feeling.

Trailed by Abrams, he wandered out to the hangar proper, found the ordnance specialist, and ordered the missiles and pods changed out on Delta Yellow. Communications technicians had the access doors to the avionics bays open on both Delta Yellow and Delta Blue and were installing the radio frequency encryption boxes with the new electronics.

Abrams got Cokes from the machine in the corner and brought him one.

“What do you think, Will?”

Conover took a long drag from the can and let his eyes trail over the graceful lines of his — his! — MakoShark. “I think we got a damned nearly impossible task, Jack. How’re we going to find something that disappears so easily?”

“Yeah”

The depression of the others was settling on him. Conover was by nature a happy man. He loved to laugh and to design practical jokes which always seemed to backfire on him, but were nevertheless worth the effort. His nickname, “Con Man,” arose from his hobby of using Air Force computers to design elaborate and fiscally rewarding scams that he never put into operation. He feared that, like his practical jokes, they would misfire, and he would end up viewing Kansas from within Leavenworth. He couldn’t imagine anything more dismal than Kansas, unless it was Leavenworth.

He had been raised in New York City by an aunt and uncle after his parents had been killed in a boating accident near their home in Albany. His Air Force ROTC program helped him through Columbia University, then into the fixed wing course at Randolph Air Force Base. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, Conover thought of himself as at least presentable to the many women he chased whenever he had a chance, but he always wore long-sleeved shirts to cover the scars on his arms. He had mangled them getting out of the flaming cockpit of an F-16 when its landing gear collapsed on landing at Edwards.

As the live Wasp missiles were rolled under the MakoShark on a dolly, Abrams said, “You want to sit in the ready room or go over to Heaven and get a sandwich?”

“Let’s go to Heaven and eat something more than a sandwich,” Conover told his WSO. “It may be a while before we get another chance.”

They turned away from the activity under Delta Yellow, circumnavigated am introspective Tony Munoz and Delta Blue, and headed for the door.

Conover was acutely aware of the blood stains in the concrete near the door. Someone had done some scrubbing, but not enough.

Stan Vrdlka’s blood.

Abrams pulled the door open and nearly ran into General Cartwright.

“Where’s McKenna?” the general asked.

Conover came to attention, something he did for generals he didn’t like. This one had been in the command less than five weeks. And already blown it. His head was on the line for a three-quarter billion dollar craft.

“He may have gone up to the control tower, sir,” Conover said.

“He had some calls to make,” Abrams added. “Probably doesn’t want to be interrupted, sir.”

“Listen up, Captain. I’ll interrupt anyone I want to interrupt.”

“Uh… yes, sir,” Abrams said.

This general didn’t yet understand that Merlin Air Base, Jack Andrews Air Base, and the detachment at Peterson Air Base in the Springs were operated solely to support USSC-1, which was the space station Themis, and the 1st Aerospace Squadron, which for all purposes was Kevin McKenna.

They stood aside to let the base commander pass, then went outside.

“Let him learn the hard way,” Abrams said.

Anatoly Guryanovich Shelepin had once been a colonel general in the Soviet Ground Forces. His record was impeccable. He had done what the Army and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had asked of him, from field command in Afghanistan to training commands to staff positions at Stavka. In his last assignment with the General Staff, he had been responsible for managing and doling out to clandestine projects the Army’s foreign hard currency reserves.

From his earliest memory, Shelepin had shared the goals and the ideology of the CPSU, assisted in those tenets by a father who had known both extreme deprivation and ardent heroism in the Great Patriotic War.

And now the foundation of his existence had slipped from under him. The CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) was gone, and the disappearance — so quickly accomplished! — had left him reeling like a Vodka-soaked drunk for weeks. The newest Soviet Mem was one he did not recognize and could not fathom.

Fortunately for him, Shelepin was intelligent. He had foreseen the end, and though he had sympathized with the coup plotters, he had not participated with them in the attempt to overthrow the leadership. By virtue of his reputation, however, he knew that he would have been automatically grouped with the conspirators, and so he chose the only course open to him. On the night that the President was placed under house arrest, Shelepin took his wife of thirty-five years, Yelena, and five loyal subordinates, commandeered an Antonov An-72 transport, and flew south out of Moscow.

Under cover of a military inspection trip, and sufficiently preceding the days of tension, his credentials and his flight had not been contested. Nor had the flights of other aircraft he had ordered into the air been contested.

They had escaped through Afghanistan, and they had not been pursued. Whether out of embarrassment or out of relief, the defections of Shelepin and his associates — and of many others — had not been publicly recorded or reported. He could be certain that the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti and the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, the party and the military intelligence organizations, were quietly searching for a number of airplanes that had disappeared from inventories all over the Union. In the hectic days of the coup attempt, many things and many people had evaporated, but the economic and political chaos that now existed had diverted high-level authorities toward more pressing crises.

Anatoly Guryanovich Shelepin felt comfortable where he was.

He was comfortably lost in a city of a half-million people where he had purchased a block-square, walled compound and renovated it to meet his needs. Accessible through two wrought-iron gates on the northern and southern ends of the block, the center of the compound was spacious, gravelled, and overgrown with sugar palm and shrubs. Surrounding the center courtyard were modest-sized two-story residences, favoring French architectural design. Railed balconies overlooked the courtyard, and wide, red-tiled eaves shaded the balconies. In almost every room of every residence, lazily moving ceiling fans kept the air in motion. Khmer servants glided quietly about.

From the window of his second-floor office overlooking the street, Shelepin could see, a half-mile away, the convergence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers.

His associates were comfortable also. He had assigned them to quarters in the compound, and he provided them with monthly stipends from the nest eggs of German Deutschemarks, French francs, British pound sterling, Spanish pesos, and American dollars he had secreted in Switzerland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore. Since it was he that had managed the secret funds, Shelepin did not think that the Soviet government, or whatever government that survived, would ever miss the hard currencies he had transferred over a span of years into his own accounts.

Depending upon the day’s exchange rates, his nest eggs amounted to about seven billion American dollars.

Shelepin was not the only one to provide for his future, of course. He had not been surprised after his arrival in Phnom Penh to find that Sergei Pavel, once a general and a KGB directorate secretary, and who now resided in the compound, also had access to over four-and-a-half billion dollars.

Between the two of them, Shelepin and Pavel were certain they could overcome the ennui that was rapidly consuming their ex-patriot countrymen.

It seemed a shame, however, that their new world must originate from Kampuchea rather than the rodina, the motherland.

General Marvin Brackman’s command was located, not only in space, but in Borneo, Chad, part of Peterson Air Force Base and in the new Space Command facilities east of Colorado Springs. He preferred, however, to maintain his own headquarters in conjunction with the North American Air Defense (NORAD) facilities located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain southwest of Colorado Springs. The Department of Defense operated NORAD as one of the “C-cubed” systems: command, control, and communications. NORAD, the National Military Command Center (NMCC) in the Pentagon, and the Alternate NMCC at Fort Richie, Maryland, handled normal crisis situations with ease, but would probably remain utilitarian only during the first stages of a nuclear war. After they were obliterated, command and control would shift to airborne command posts, Boeing E-4Bs known as National Emergency Airborne Command Posts (NEACPs, or “Kneecaps”).

Physically, the NORAD center took up nearly five acres of space hollowed out of solid granite. Resting on a bed of steel springs intended to reduce the shock effects of a nuclear attack, the underground facilities were a rat-defying maze of corridors and compartments. Above ground was a heavily fortified antenna compound which gathered communication signals from all over the world. The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), with its over-the-horizon radars, the Defense Early Warning System (DEWLine), a variety of spy and reconnaissance satellites in space, aircraft and listening posts around the world, and vessels at sea fed their intelligence to NORAD. There, the computers analyzed the data and stored it for instant display on one of the plotting screens. NORAD and her sister command centers could pinpoint the location and movement of most ballistic missiles, aircraft, and naval ships in the world.

It was nearly eleven o’clock at night, and one o’clock in the morning in Washington, when the phone call came. Brackman was nursing an uncounted cup of coffee in his spacious, but modestly furnished office. His longtime secretary, Milly Roget, had gone home long before, and a duty sergeant transferred the call.

“Admiral Cross on your line two, General.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

Brackman punched the button for the secure line.

“Brackman”

“Good morning, Marvin”

“Not quite morning here, Hannibal. I thought you’d given up and gone to bed”

Admiral Hannibal Cross had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for almost four years, a position he took very seriously and which he filled well. He was as adept at political strategy and tactics as he had been of the military counterparts while in command of carriers off Vietnam. TV loved his crisp military appearance, with a deep-water tan and weather wrinkles at his eyes, and he was frequently interviewed on the Sunday morning shows.

“Why is it, Marvin, that I lose sleep every time I get a call from you?”

“Can’t be love, can it?”

“I doubt it,” Cross said. “Your congressional delegation still there?”

“No. We gave them a nice dinner and put them back on their VIP plane.”

“They have any suspicions about this?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Good. Harvey and I spent some time with the SecDef and the National Security Advisor.”

General Harvey Mays, whom Brackman regarded as a highly capable commander, was the Air Force Chief of Staff. Mays had flown F-4 Phantoms in Vietnam, and he had shrapnel and burn scars on the left side of his face to prove it.

“And?”

“We want to contain the PR damage as much as possible, and for as long as possible.”

“That means,” Brackman said, “we’ve got about forty-eight hours.”

“If that. I expect the rumors will begin to leak before that, and then the Secretary will have to inform the appropriate congressional committees. He will inform them, in any event, within three days. We’re buying time here, Marvin, in order to come up with some hard data on what happened, and why.”

“No conjecture?”

“None at all. Before he goes to the Hill, I’ll want to put a fact sheet in his hand that tells the whole story.”

Brackman sighed. He didn’t object to laying out the truth, but he was afraid the truth was going to eradicate the inroads he had made with Senator Worth and Congresswoman Anderson. He could see his 1st Aerospace Squadron composed of “doddering old men” flying machines held together with baling wire and Band-Aids.

“I talked to McKenna a little while ago,” Brackman said, and related the details of the hijacking.

“Jesus. Four dead.”

“McKenna wants funerals with full military honors. Line of duty deaths, not accidents. Purple Hearts.”

“That will draw the media, Marvin.”

“We can wait four days.”

“All right. We’ll give them the best we can.”

“What about McKenna’s and my recommendations?”

“There was a lot of thought given to that,” Cross said. “The President was involved.”

I’ll bet he was.

“The first priority is to recover the MakoShark intact.”

“Good.” Saving me from the appearance of shooting myself in the foot with a three-quarter billion dollar bullet.

“If that is not possible, we will destroy it, rather than let someone else have it, or copy the technology.”

“The big question, Hannibal, is where do we cross the line from priority one to priority two?”

“You are not to put at risk your remaining craft or crews. As far as we know, this is not an event equivalent to the accepted danger levels of war.”

“That doesn’t give me, or McKenna, much leeway.”

“I know, Marvin, but that is the way it has to be.”

“I can free my weapons systems then?”

“The rules of engagement are that MakoShark crews only are allowed to fire if fired upon. The one exception to that, of course, is if they find Delta Green and must shoot it down. They may fire without warning in that case.”

“And Delta Red?” Brackman asked, aware of previous administrative reticence to endangering unduly the pilot of that MakoShark.

“I think Major Haggar proved her, and Colonel McKenna’s, point at Peenemünde. She’s a combat-capable pilot, and McKenna may assign her any normal squadron duty.”

Brackman assumed that Mays and Cross had had to argue for equal treatment, and he appreciated their support. McKenna would also.

“All right, Hannibal. We’ll go looking.”

“Don’t look too long, Marvin, before you start hunting.”

It was two o’clock in the morning aboard Themis when Pearson called Wet Country and had someone there go rouse McKenna from a nap.

Army Sergeant Don Curtis was manning the communications console, but Donna Amber was still hanging around after her shift. General Overton, Colonel Avery, Major Haggar, and Captain Olsen, her WSO, were also crowded into the compartment called the radio shack or floating outside the hatchway.

Lynn Marie Haggar was stylishly slim and four or five inches taller than Pearson, and her dark hair was trimmed short, framing a heart-shaped face. Her eyes were a clear, clean aqua blue, and her ivory smile might have moonlighted for toothpaste ads. Pearson pictured her as a short-haired Naomi Judd. She appeared completely at ease in the light blue jumpsuit that was so convenient to living aboard a space station.

Amy Pearson was not jealous of her, but she sometimes wondered what it would be like to be in a more active role, flying hot combat craft instead of probing the innards of computer data bases.

Ben Olsen, her backseater, was short and wiry-muscled, with Scandinavian fairness in flesh, eyes, and hair. He wore a lopsided grin most of the time, as if he found most of life amusing in some way. Today, he wasn’t grinning.

McKenna’s voice finally came through, echoing slightly as a result of the radio scramblers on both ends of the transmission.

“McKenna here, Amy-baby.”

Pearson let her voice drop a tone or two toward icy. “Colonel McKenna, we have present General Overton, Colonel Avery, Major Haggar, and Captain Olsen.”

“And I’ve got the rest of the gang here, Amy, all waiting for you to give us the word.”

He sounded a little too flippant, but she wouldn’t say anything about it just now, naturally. Her relationship with McKenna had become more complicated than she had ever planned, and Amelia Pearson believed in maintaining professional protocol.

“What is your situation, Colonel?”

“Cancha and Nitro Fizz have departed for Hot Country to start flight trials on the new bird. Delta Yellow and Delta Blue are hot and ready to go, except for a minor hitch.”

“Hitch?” Pearson asked.

“General Cartwright has sealed the base, and us on it, until his security problem is resolved. I expect that will be resolved as soon as he gets off the phone with Semaphore.”

Pearson glanced at Jim Overton, who simply raised one eyebrow.

“Country Girl?” McKenna asked.

“We can launch within ten minutes, Colonel,” Haggar responded.

“Colonel Pearson?” McKenna asked, finally getting to the formality she expected with so many people in hearing range.

“I’ve had to work with several assumptions,” she said. “First, the window of opportunity existed for about an hour. Cancha landed at four-oh-three, and Delta Green was serviced by a few minutes before five. The intruders took off with her some time between five and six. It was already getting light by then, and the assumption is that they headed west to stay under cover of darkness.”

“But they could have entered the base earlier than that, couldn’t they?” Overton asked.

“Certainly, General. Any time during the night. Then just waited until Delta Green landed.” She knew what he was getting at. If they rode their hang gliders into the base sifter Delta Green’s unannounced arrival, then they likely had been signalled by someone from within the base. The security examination would have to determine whether or not there had been an insider involved. She looked to him for other questions.

“Go on, Colonel.”

“We’ve backtracked the tapes for our infrared sensors, as well as for those of the reconnaissance satellites in the area at that time. There is no indication that the rocket motors were utilized.”

There was no technological development yet available for disguising the infrared signature of the MakoShark’s rocket exhaust, especially when full thrust was required for orbital insertion. Most rocket burns, however, lasted for about four minutes, with the maximum burn around nine minutes. Observers on the ground probably mistook the burns for meteorites entering the atmosphere.

“My second assumption, then, is that Delta Green was not taken into orbit. At least, not yet. We will be searching to the west of Borneo, and we will be looking for landing strips of concrete or asphalt, which are at least two miles long. They will not be in populated areas, of course, and they will have available some form of cover: hangars, jungle canopy, camouflage netting.

“I have designated three search areas.” Pearson nodded to Curtis, and he pressed a button sending the maps to receivers at Wet Country.

“Coming up on the printer now,” McKenna said.

“Zone One is Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Zone Two is the Indian Subcontinent. Zone Three is, I’m afraid, the entire continent of Africa.”

“What are we going to do for the rest of the day, enamorada?” Munoz asked.

Pearson cleared her throat. “The crosshatched portions of the maps are areas you can eliminate for population, political, or other reasons. The yellow areas are probably iffy for geographical or topographical reasons. The blue-shaded areas are the most suspicious. Those are where a MakoShark could be landed and hidden.”

“Nice job, Colonel,” McKenna said without being condescending, a tone she sometimes searched for in his voice.

“On short notice, it’s the best I could come up with in order to initiate a physical search.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Country Girl, you’ve got Zone Three. Con Man, you’re on Two, and we’ll take One. We’re going to have daylight for much of this, so we’ll keep the altitude high. Stay around five-zero-thousand and use your video cameras on magnification.”

“Do we want to mount recon camera pods?” Abrams asked.

“I don’t think so,” McKenna said. “We’re not trying to document anything just yet. If we run into something, the video tape will be sufficient. Also, let’s avoid air traffic, people. We don’t want anyone spotting us and alerting some trigger-happy air defense force. Questions?”

There were none and McKenna told them to take off.

Haggar and Olsen pushed their way out of the radio shack, eager to be on the way and doing something.

Pearson followed them out of the compartment, aiming herself toward her office cubicle.

Now that she had the squadron started on one segment of the search, she was impatient to get her own intelligence investigation under way.

Her search, she was certain, would be more fruitful than shooting around in the skies, looking for a tiny MakoNeedle in an earthen haystack.

McKenna, Munoz, and the Delta Yellow crew were already dressed in their environmental suits, and they left the ready room and turned into the hallway leading to the hangar proper.

Emerging into the brightly lit aircraft area, McKenna saw that the ground crews were lolling around the workbenches at the back, sitting on the floor or the benches themselves. Both of the MakoSharks had their canopies closed and appeared to be all buttoned up.

General Cartwright and the aide he had brought with him from his last assignment, Major Mikos Pappas, stepped from the elevator to the upper floor and control tower.

McKenna took one look at the crewmen, then told his squadron members, “Wait here.”

He crossed the hangar and caught up with Cartwright near the exit door.

“General.”

Cartwright stopped and turned toward him. “Colonel?”

“Have you spoken to General Brackman yet?”

“No, Colonel. I have nothing to report to him as yet.”

Despite how he often felt about petty officiousness in the military, McKenna did not often go around superior officers. He had asked Cartwright to talk to Brackman, rather than going directly to the Space Command boss himself.

Pappas smiled at him.

McKenna suppressed the urge to turn the major’s smile inside out. His patience was wearing thin enough to produce some verbal heat when Munoz came up beside him.

Tony Munoz was only five-nine, but the Tucson-born Arizonian was a tight bundle of sinew. Hard-ridged muscles lined his arms, legs, chest, and stomach. He had dark brown hair that matched his eyes and a smooth, almost round face that many people had misjudged as complacent. He didn’t worry about much, but when his fires were stoked, the cold fury appeared in his eyes.

It was there now.

Munoz spoke to the general’s aide, “Mikos, lets, you and me take a little walk.”

“What? I don’t think…”

“I know you don’t. But the colonel and the general want a few moments together.”

Munoz put his arm around Pappas’s shoulders and led him away.

“What the hell’s going on, McKenna?” Cartwright asked.

McKenna saw the flush creeping up the base commander’s throat.

“Whatever your problems are, General, they’re yours. I have my own. Right now, you’re going to tell those men over there to get these birds in the air.”

“The hell I am!”

“If you don’t, sir, then I will.”

“Bullshit!”

“And do you want to take a wild-assed guess about which one of us they’re going to respond to, General? What I’m doing here, I’m giving you a chance to save face before you lose it.”

Judging by the changing shades in Cartwright’s face and the flickering in his eyes, the decision was having a tough time surfacing.

But it finally did.

Cartwright called to a master sergeant, “Bristol, let’s get those craft ready to roll.”

“Thank you, sir,” McKenna said.