Delta Green

Chapter Four

Lieutenant Polly Tang, Brad Mitchell’s number two, waved through the glass port that overlooked the hangar. Over the radio, she said, “All clear, Delta Red. Good luck.”

Lynn Haggar clicked her transmit button. “Until next time, Beta.”

Over the intercom, Olsen reported, “All systems on line, Country.”

When she and Olsen had been formally adopted by the squadron, she had been given the nickname of Country Girl, but Olsen tended to shorten it.

She fired the nose thrusters, and spurts of nitrogen gas nudged Delta Red slowly backwards out of the bay. The motion was relative, of course, since the MakoShark was hurtling through space at the same 18,000 miles per hour as the space station, which orbited the earth at a mean altitude of 220 miles. The orbital period was 3.6 hours.

The craft reversed slowly from the hangar cell, and as soon as it was clear, she added two more bursts from the nose thrusters, then said, “All right, that’s enough. Close them up, Swede.”

Olsen punched the pad that sealed the carbon-carbon/Nomex/ceramic alloy panels over the nose thrusters. Without the protective doors in place, the nozzles would not survive the intense heat of reentry.

“Nose thrusters passive, panels closed,” he reported.

The gap between the satellite and the MakoShark increased steadily. The hangar doors closed with deliberate slowness, like flower petals folding, and the hangar’s interior lights winked out. And Lynn Haggar was left with the sight that brought her to the brink of awe every time.

When the doors of all twenty-eight cells were closed, twenty-foot-high black letters identified the station as:

The hub of the station was a cylinder three hundred feet in diameter and two hundred feet in width. One half of it (this side) was constructed like a honeycomb, made up of eight hangar cells large enough to accept a Mako or MakoShark behind closed doors. Resupply rockets, fuel, and other stores could be ported in the smaller cells. Additionally, the module on Spoke Twelve was utilized for HoneyBee maintenance as well as for refurbishing satellites which were already in space. One of the tasks of the Mako vehicles was to collect faltering communications or surveillance satellites and bring them to Themis for repair or retrofit.

An unbalanced set of spokes (balance being unnecessary in zero gravity) reached out from the hub and were capped with variously sized modules that housed command, energy, residential, and experimental spaces. The other side of the hub, called the “hot” side since it was exposed to the sun, mounted a massive solar array. The energy developed from the solar panels supplemented that which was provided by the nuclear reactor in Spoke Nine, and the heat bled from the collectors was pumped through exchangers to maintain a constant temperature within the station.

From Delta Red’s current position, Haggar couldn’t see the utilitarian solar panels. Her view was less functional and more impressive. The outer skin of the station was laminated with white plastic for its reflective quality, but the visual effect was that of a single, cold, and massive star projected forward from a movie screen filled with distant stars.

Her significance in the totality of the universe was always dramatically apparent to her in these moments. The calculated output of significance would have a lot of zeros and a decimal point ahead of her number.

“Reentry attitude, Country.”

“Coming up,” she said and eased back on the control stick, firing thrusters that slowly brought the nose up and the tail down, inverting the MakoShark until she was sailing her orbit in reverse. Above her head was the Earth, shimmering with diffused color. She tapped the hand controller forward a couple of times, initiating thruster bursts that counteracted, then canceled the motion.

“I have a reentry track and time,” Olsen said. “Eighteen minutes, Lynn. Time for a few hands of bridge.”

Olsen was a bridge fanatic and was good enough that opponents were hard for him to find.

He was also an expert with the weapons systems and computers. In addition to the variable weight data of personnel, cargo, fuel load, and pylon loads, he had keyed in their desired altitude and geographical coordinates over northern Africa, and the computer had determined their final weight and center of gravity. In a weightless environment, the weight of various objects that could be carried aboard a HoneyBee or a Mako were derived from a master list maintained on the space station’s mainframe computer.

The spacecraft computer ran a test profile of the reentry flight, casually determining just what was possible, and if it accepted the data, planned the initial reentry burn, its duration, the angle of attack, and the trajectory.

Since, unlike the Space Shuttle, the Mako craft could achieve powered flight after reentry into the atmosphere, the windows of opportunity were larger and more frequent.

“I already owe you twelve dollars,” Haggar told him. “Let’s set up the rocket checklist instead.”

“How mundane,” Olsen said, but brought up the checklist on the small screen.

Haggar activated the rocket control panel. The two rocket motors operated on solid-fuel propellent and were considerably safer than liquid-fueled engines. The drawback to solid-fuel rocket motors had always been the lack of control. Typically, the solid fuel was encased in a cylinder, and once ignited, burned at a steady rate, raising pressures and exhausting through a nozzle, until the fuel was expended. For the MakoShark, the designers had developed a pelletized solid fuel which was stored internally in wing-mounted tanks. Under the pressure of compressed carbon dioxide, the pellets were forced into the combustion chambers at a rate determined by the opening of non-blowback valves. The valves were the throttle control, and Haggar could vary the thrust output from fifty-five percent to one hundred percent, from sixty-eight thousand to one hundred twenty-five thousand pounds of thrust on each of the two nacelle-mounted rocket motors.

Olsen double-checked her, using the same checklist on his own screen.

“How’s the fuel supply?”

“Ten-point-one thousand pounds,” Haggar said. “We’re showing two-two time.”

“And the CO-two reserve?”

“Twelve thousand, six hundred PSI.”

“Igniter test?”

“I’m testing now. We’ve got one, now two and three. There’s four.”

“Activate igniters one and two.”

Haggar flipped the toggles for the primary igniters in each of the rocket motors. Igniters three and four were backup systems.

“The igniters are hot, Swede”

“Open CO-two valves”

Haggar opened the valves, pressurizing the solid-fuel pellet tanks.

“Done.”

“Activate throttles, Country.”

“Active.”

“Throttles at standby position.”

She pushed the outboard throttle levers to their first detents.

“Throttles in standby,” Haggar reported.

“Comp Control?”

“Punching in one-zero-zero per cent” Haggar tapped the pad in the top row of buttons that read “RKT THRST,” keyed in the one and two zeros, stored the data in Random Access Memory, then tapped the “STDBY” pad.

With another code entered into the keyboard, she turned control of the MakoShark over to the computer. The computer thought about it for nearly a second, then reported out, via blue letters displayed in the upper left corner of the CRT.

“You’re eleven seconds off, Swede.”

“I hate it when you insist on precision, Country Girl” That was because the precise numbers were always available somewhere in his brain, and he felt it unnecessary to verbalize them. At a bridge table — like the ones in the dining/recreation areas of the space station which utilized lightly magnetized cards on a magnetic surface — she suspected that Olsen knew within three plays where all of the other cards were and who was holding them. She keyed her helmet microphone, “Alpha, Delta Red.”

“Go Red.” Milt Avery was tending the command station. She reported their status, and he wished them luck. They waited out the time rechecking systems — twice was never enough for decent safety margins — and tightening straps. Olsen picked up the count near the end: “Six, five, four, three, two, one.”

The CRT countdown readout went to zero.

The mild vibration in the craft’s frame and the thrust indicators on the HUD rising to one hundred per cent told her when the computer ignited the rockets.

The view of Themis in the rearview screen diminished and slid off the top of the screen as white fire encroached on each side of the screen.

The display of Mach numbers began to move, decreasing rapidly.

The burn lasted for three-and-a-half minutes, until the speed was down to Mach 20, then the computer turned Delta Red over again, heading into her line of flight, with her nose held high.

Lynn Haggar had always thought the attitude very haughty and deservedly so. She herself always felt humbled and grateful for the Fates that had selected a woman from Georgia and dropped her into the cockpit of a MakoShark.

She was also grateful to Colonel Kevin McKenna, Earth-side representative of the Fates.

Directly ahead of Conover, the red digital numerals of the Head-Up Display floated in space. His altitude was reported at fifty thousand feet above sea level and his heading at 091 degrees. The readout for airspeed indicated that Delta Yellow was cruising at a meager 650 knots. The tailpipe temperatures were well down in the green.

Below the HUD, the instrument panel provided readouts in blue digital numerals and letters, many of them duplicates of what appeared on the HUD. The eight-inch cathode ray tube was centered in the panel and repeated the imaging mode selected by the weapons system operator in the backseat of the tandem cockpit. The screen had direct visual, map overlay, radar, infrared, and night vision capability and currently was displaying the magnified (images picked up by the nose-mounted video camera.

The pilot’s and WSO’s seats were semi-reclining lounges. Conover’s seat had four-way adjustable armrests on which his forearms rested. Near his left hand were the short throttle levers, and above them, the switch panels related to engine, radio, and environmental control. On his right were the armaments, electronics, trim, flaps, and landing gear control panels. To the rear of the panels on both sides of the cockpit were the less frequently used control panels and circuit breakers. The aerospace craft’s attitude was controlled from the stubby, ergonomically-designed handle that fit smoothly into the palm of his hand.

To his left, he could see the snow-capped Himalayas, most of the peaks wreathed in misty white. The bronze-tinted canopy took some of the hard edges off the blindingly white and awe-inspiring view.

Abrams had a Creedence Clearwater Revival rendition of “Bad Moon Rising” playing low in their earphones.

Much as he hated to admit it, Conover was becoming a convert to Do-Wop’s golden oldies. There was something soothing about listening to rhythms and lyrics which were familiar enough to stay in the background. He didn’t have to concentrate on understanding words hidden between clashes of metal.

“Here’s a possible location coming up, Con Man,” Abrams said.

Conover scanned the HUD one more time, then switched his attention to the main CRT. The new video cameras allowed them a magnification of forty times normal, though at the higher numbers, the resolution was a trifle fuzzy. Their east-west crisscrossing of the subcontinent had begun to the north, encompassing parts of Afghanistan and China, and Abrams had maintained a camera magnification of twenty, giving them a screen view that was about 150 miles wide. Now, Abrams had jumped the telescopic effect, reducing the width of the coverage to several miles.’

The nose camera was at full depression, aimed downward forty degrees from their line of flight. What they were seeing was a long way ahead of them, and in this case, was across the Indian border into northern Bangladesh. The rain forest disguised almost everything, including the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra River.

Conover didn’t distinguish anything unusual.

“You actually see something, Do-Wop?”

“Upper left corner.”

“Sure.”

“Here, I’ll center it.”

Abrams changed the camera angle with his controller, and a brownish swatch in the jungle centered itself on the screen.

“That’s not in Pearson’s data banks,” Abrams said.

Over the years they had been circling the globe, the MakoShark pilots had been accumulating tons of valuable information, including the location of clandestine airstrips. The data was fed into Space Command computers and retained against the time when, Conover hoped, the Department of Defense turned the 1st Aerospace Squadron loose against drug manufacturing and smuggling operations. He figured the stealth craft could put a dent in the drug trade that would shock the world and put much of it into withdrawal pangs.

During their search, they were reviewing and updating the data files on known airstrips as well as adding new information to the data base.

“Suppose Bangladesh will care if we invade their airspace?” Conover asked.

“I’ll let you know if they shoot us down,” the backseater said.

“You might try an earlier warning.”

“Chicken.”

Conover eased the controller over and went into a shallow right bank, adding a little right rudder. The MakoShark began a slow turn to the right. When the Brahmaputra River, a blue/brown scar in the green jungle, passed under, he started a slow turn back to the left so as to come back on their target from the east.

“I wish to hell it was dark,” Conover said over the intercom, “so we could get down in the bushes and get some real shots”

“Patience, Con Man. Soon as Amy-baby reviews all this stuff, she’ll be sending us back for close-ups of the really suspicious spots”

“Yeah, I hope so.”

The 1st Aerospace Squadron crews, while not veterans of Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, or the Persian Gulf, had tasted combat in the New Germany crisis. None of them talked much about it to each other, but Conover knew they were all seasoned, and he suspected that all of them now had some addiction for operating on the edge, for inducing adrenaline production to ever higher levels.

As he made the last half of his turn, Conover eased in power and gained five thousand feet of altitude.

“Video tapes running,” Abrams reported.

The computer constantly tested the craft’s navigational position and the angle and magnification of the camera lens, then automatically imprinted the bottom right corner of the video recording with the date, the time, and the geographical coordinates of the area they were filming. That precluded having the photo interpretation people making a lot of guesses.

The river, and the brown spot on the other side of it, came up fast. Because of the dense, triple-canopied layer of jungle, an oblique camera shot of the target from ten miles away and ten miles high wouldn’t reveal much. In these cases, Conover brought the MakoShark almost directly overhead, then put her nose straight down on the target while Abrams controlled the camera. They only needed a few inches of good video tape. Pearson could always freeze it and study it for as long as she wanted.

The picture on his main screen was now almost entirely of blue sky for Abrams had centered the camera.

“Two seconds, Con Man.”

“Two.”

A couple heartbeats.

“Mark.”

Conover put the nose down and eased back the throttles. The screen flashed from blue into green into brown. The river appeared, and he neutralized his controls.

“Shit,” Abrams said.

The image steadied, then cleared a little as the magnification was backed off a few notches.

“Lumber operation,” Abrams said.

The comment clarified what he was seeing on the screen, the image fuzzed by the high magnification. A thin tributary to the Brahmaputra was jammed tight with logs chained into rafts for floating down to the coast. The rafts stretched up the river for over a mile.

The HUD read forty-eight thousand feet when Conover pulled out of his dive.

“Lot of damned wood,” he said.

“Not going to land a Mako on it,” Abrams said.

“Doubt it.”

“Let’s go south and take up the next leg”

“Why not?”

Flying search patterns could be tedious as hell, but Conover loved flying the MakoShark so much that he didn’t mind a bit. His conscience zinged him a little when he thought about poor old Dimatta and Williams chugging along in a clumsy Gates Learjet.

Aleksander Maslov did not care for either the temperature or the humidity. Both played havoc with, not only human biology and temperament, but also with the sensitive devices invented by man. Delicate electronic circuitry misbehaved and mechanical systems that were not carefully maintained and lubricated gathered rust. Those conditions were potentially life-threatening, and he thought often that lazy ground crewmen did not fully appreciate the threat. He was an ardent supervisor of ground crew operations.

The air conditioner in Maslov’s small house trailer had failed once again, and the interior was sweltering despite his opening the three windows and the single door. If it were not for the privacy he enjoyed in his tiny residence, he would have moved into the new dormitory which boasted central air-conditioning.

Maslov pushed himself off the single narrow bed and stood up. He was tall (186 centimeters) and he had to duck his head slightly to stand upright. He bent over in the tiny lavatory and used the mirror to brush his short-cropped blond hair. When he turned the tap, the cold water, which was all that was available, came out in a clear, slow dribble. He used the washcloth to swab his face, chest, and arms, then toweled off. Passing his palm over his square jaw, Maslov decided he could forego shaving, but double-checked that decision in the mirror. He had sharp green eyes, a result of some long-ago heritage that had invaded his Ukrainian ancestry. His facial skin was taut, normally fair, and now reddened by exposure to the sun. Maslov did not have much experience with southern latitudes, and the sun did not care for him.

He was already wearing khaki shorts and steel-soled shoes, and he pulled on a short-sleeved, khaki shirt as he pushed open the screen door and exited the trailer.

His trailer was one of six parked side-by-side under the jungle canopy that fringed the west side of the clearing. They were backed right up against a wall of dense foliage and thick tree trunks. Twisted clusters of liana climbed high overhead, dripping downward from the branches of trees. In some places, gatherings of exotic flowers added splashes of red and orange and blue.

Twenty meters to the north, a pathway which was more like a tunnel had been slashed into the jungle. It led to the dormitory structures that were less than a hundred meters away, but which was still invisible from his viewpoint. Still farther away was the tin-roofed, opensided structure that protected the water well pumps and the electrical generators. Even from this distance, he could hear the throaty murmur of the diesel engines that powered the five generators. It was a constant drone with which he had come to terms. The lazy calls of parrots and the angry chatter of monkeys drew more attention. There were tigers out there, too, rumored to be man-eaters, but he had not seen one. He had seen a rhinoceros and two elephants, but that had been from the air and many kilometers away.

The clearing that was open to the sky, not counting the space under the overhanging canopy, was only a couple hundred meters wide, but it was over twelve thousand meters long, running north and south. It was not level. There was a definite rise toward the north, and near the center was a disconcerting hump that had not been totally leveled by the engineers, primarily because there was a shortage of engineers. Laid over the mushy ground was a narrow lane of interlocking steel planks. Maslov thought they had originally come from Vietnam, from the Cam Ranh Bay area, but they were now painted in variegated shades of green that disappeared into the jungle when seen from above. At random intervals down the length of the runway were placed four flimsy, tall structures that supported camouflage netting peppered with live vines and plants. From an aerial view, they added contours to the terrain, leaving the impression of a series of small openings in the jungle cover rather than one long clearing. When the runway was needed, they were pulled back under the jungle canopy.

Maslov crossed the runway, walking east. Looking up and down the clearing, he was pleased with the result of their work. Even on the ground, at the south end of the clearing, all he could see were the six trailers and the mottled green wall of the command center which was snuggled back into the eastern edge of the jungle. It had large windows all along this side, overlooking the runway.

Though he knew they were there, he could not see a single one of the aircraft. Revetments had been hacked out of the jungle on the east side. Several of the reinforced parking spaces had been given camouflaged roofs, and the rest had roofs now under construction.

There were four Mikoyan MiG-27 ground attack planes, one MiG-25 interceptor currently in reconnaissance configuration, and six Sukhoi Su-24 attack fighters hidden in the jungle, along with three assorted civilian aircraft. Perhaps the greatest achievement had been their ability to hide the monstrously large Antonov An-72 belonging to Shelepin. Maslov had been in favor of abandoning the huge transport, crashing it into the sea, but had been outvoted. Or out-ordered. And on reflection, Shelepin and Druzhinin had been correct. The transport had been necessary for ferrying in their supplies. There had been millions of kilograms of material carted in from all over southeast Asia. Maslov did not know the details, but he supposed that much of it had been purchased and that much of it had also been surreptitiously acquired from old Soviet caches around the southeast region of the Asian continent.

On the west side of the airstrip, two more revetments were under construction, one of them housing the Tupolev Tu-124 that had been converted to a tanker. Several dozen trips with the tanker had been required to fill the underground fuel tanks located a half-kilometer out in the jungle. The tanker made at least three trips a week to a shifting schedule of destinations to take on fuel and transport it back here.

At the far north end of the runway, off to the west side, they had excavated large bunkers in which to store the ordnance. There were ground-and air-launched missiles of Soviet, Chinese, French, and American manufacture. Iron bombs and guided “smart” bombs were stacked in one bunker. Another held ammunition of various calibers, ranging from that for 9-millimeter personal weapons to 7.62-millimeter rounds for automatic weapons.

When he reached the command center, Maslov skirted the building to the left and entered through a side door. The value of the four ceiling-mounted air conditioners was immediately apparent. The perspiration on his forehead dried quickly. He felt chilled.

No-air operations were planned for the day — their necessary training flights for the pilots took place at night — and the chairs in front of the radar and communications consoles were vacant. He crossed the control room and entered the narrow corridor leading to the back of the building.

At the rear were offices for the base commander and his assistants, as well as a large space for pilot briefings. Along the corridor were smaller cubicles set aside for storage, hygiene, and dedicated tasks. Maslov turned into the one identified as “Global Communications.”

General Oleg Druzhinin, the base commander, was seated in one of the two chairs available in the small room. He was not an imposing man. With moderate stature, bland facial features, and mousy brown hair, he was the kind who disappeared in the crowds of nearly any city in the world. His mind was sharp, however, and his reflexes, while slowed somewhat as he approached sixty years of age, were still capable of commanding MiG-25s and MiG-29s.

With the general was Sergeant Nikita Kasartskin, a lumbering bear of a man whose massive hands were extremely adroit with computer keyboards. Kasartskin was their top communications and computer specialist. He was seated before the massive global communications console which, with its super secret encryption devices, had accompanied Anatoly Shelepin on his flight from Moscow. The antenna complex required for the machine, along with the antennas for the radars, was located two kilometers to the south, at the top of a hill in the jungle. The antennas were finished in matte camouflage paint and would never be seen by the human eye. Only search radars might detect them at a time when they were radiating energy.

“Good afternoon, Comrade General,” Maslov said. “Sergeant Kasartskin.”

“Come in, Colonel Maslov,” the general said. “We were about to review the morning’s tapes.”

“I wonder if they will be informative?” Maslov asked.

“Who knows? I doubt it. Proceed, Sergeant”

Against one wall was a bank of forty tape recording drives. The technician could assign them to monitoring forty of the thousands of frequencies in the Commonwealth satellite system. That they could still tap into the old Soviet satellite communications was a wonder, but not an awesome wonder. The breakup of the state, with various republics assuming control of bits and pieces of the Soviet military, communications, and intelligence apparatus, had resulted not only in confusion, but also in trust. The new commanders in the Commonwealth assumed that the security of the system was still intact. Kasartskin, too, was circumspect in his use of the system.

Normally, he only drew information from it. Only rarely was it used for transmission of data or voice communications, and then on unused channels. The likelihood of the Commonwealth members discovering the usage was not high, and the system provided them with, as the sign outside the door said, a global communication and listening ability that was worth billions of rubles.

Maslov leaned against the doorjamb as Kasartskin played his nimble fingers over the keyboard. All of the tape drives began to whir, searching forward until finding a transmission, then halting to wait until the transmission was replayed over the speaker mounted in the ceiling. The replays were automatically queued, and once one drive had disgorged its data, it searched forward again while another drive was replayed.

The sergeant watched a readout on his cathode ray tube, commenting on the source of the transmission: “That is Molniya I in polar orbit… here is Salyut 7 over the eastern United States…”

If the message transmitted was graphic, rather than vocal, it appeared on the console CRT as well as on the screen of a monitor placed near General Druzhinin. All of the messages were in the clear, decoded by the encryption devices. If the message appeared innocuous in the beginning, Kasartskin tapped one of his keys, and the machine jumped to the next message. For such reasons, the review went quickly.

The session still required two hours, and by the time it was done, Maslov had settled to an uncomfortable seat on the linoleum floor.

“That is all there is, Comrade General,” Sergeant Kasartskin said.

“Very well. You may reset the machines,” the general said as he rose from his chair.

Maslov pushed himself to his feet and followed the commander back to his office.

It was a tiny office. Prefabricated buildings were not intended to be spacious.

Druzhinin sat down behind his small, gray metal desk. “Well, Aleksander Illiyich?”

“The segments which eavesdropped on American communications were the most interesting, General.”

“Even while undecoded?”

Indirectly, their eavesdropping on Commonwealth satellites provided them with some intelligence about American activities through U.S. communications that were being monitored. They were neither staffed nor equipped to decode the American messages, but frequently, that was not necessary.

“There is no change in tone, urgency, or frequency from earlier messages,” Maslov said. “My interpretation is that the Americans have not increased their level of defensive alertness. I suspect that they are acting as if nothing of import has occurred.”

Druzhinin smiled.

And Maslov smiled back at him.

Because he had faith in Tony Munoz and the WSO’s equipment, McKenna was covering his search area at sixty thousand feet of altitude and twice the speed of sound. They could cover a lot more area at Mach 2.

They were conserving the turbojets, boosting on rocket motors, then shutting them down to coast in parabolic curves. Munoz had set their search pattern on a north and south grid, and they had already covered all of Vietnam and part of Laos, stretching their area between the Chinese border on the north and latitude ten degrees North on the southern end. When they were finished with their portion of the Asian continent, they would cover Malaya and Sumatra.

“I’m changing tapes again, jefe.”

“Amy’s going to have a year’s worth of video,” McKenna told him over the ICS, the Internal Communications System.

“I’m just shootin’ everythin’ in sight, pilgrim. Don’t want to miss anythin’ at all.”

“You make a lousy John Wayne.”

“Do not”

“Do, too. Wayne didn’t have an Arizona border accent.”

“Wayne didn’t know what he was missin’,” Munoz told him.

“Do you think we’ve gotten anything worth having yet?”

“I doubt it. There were a few possibles in South Vietnam. Probably old strips from the war.”

“It’s lousy terrain,” McKenna said. “I’m glad I missed those games.”

“Me, too, amigo. Me, too.”

From a tactical point of view, McKenna couldn’t help thinking he might have made a difference if he had been flying at the time. From a more practical point of view, he figured the politicians had made victory impossible. It happened all too frequently, though he had been impressed by the President’s allowing the military to conduct the war in the Persian Gulf. He suspected, however, that the decision to end it at one hundred days was a political and public relations decision that would increasingly haunt the political hacks.

McKenna noted that the speed was down to Mach 1.8 as they approached the end of their northbound run.

“We’ll make the turn, Tiger, then boost again.”

“Roger. We can go at any time. That’s Dien Bien Phu off the right wingtip. Another couple minutes and we’ll be hittin’ the Chinese border.”

“Is that politically correct?” McKenna asked him.

“Don’t think so.”

“Turning now” McKenna eased in left stick and rudder, keeping the nose down to maintain speed. When the gyro compass read 270 degrees, he leveled out.

Using the Global Positioning System (GPS) as an aid to his navigation, Munoz ticked off twenty-five miles before telling him, “Come to one-eight-oh, Snake Eyes.”

By the time he had completed the turn, the airspeed was down to Mach 1.6, and the video screen was displaying a bleak picture of the high plateau area of northern Laos. This leg would take them across central Thailand and western Kampuchea.

“Let’s goose her a little, Tiger.”

“Roger. Checklist coming up.”

Munoz put the checklist on the rearview screen and read it off quickly.

The rocket motors ignited smoothly, and McKenna used sixty-five percent power to accelerate to Mach 2.2, climbing to an altitude of 63,000 feet.

He left Munoz alone as the WSO studied the terrain on the screen, cutting in the video tape any time something suspicious appeared.

“Shutting down rockets,” he said.

Pulling the rocket power levers back past their detents, he watched the readouts. The starboard motor came quickly to zero, the igniter cut off, and the anti-blowback valve position displayed as closed. The CO2 pressure in the pellet tank measured 10,294 PSI.

The port motor power readout came slowly down to twelve percent. And stayed there.

The igniter remained operative.

The anti-blowback valve remained open.

McKenna jiggled the throttle handle.

Still twelve percent power on the motor, and nearly eleven thousand PSI of pressure in the tanks, feeding the pellets to the combustion chamber.

“Tiger.”

“I see it, jefe. Anti-blowback valve’s stuck open. The interlock is keepin’ the igniter on.”

“I’m going to try the emergency valve shut down.”

“Go.”

McKenna had to lean to his right and shift his shoulders in order to tilt his helmet enough to see the circuit breaker panels on the left side. He found the correct switch and closed it.

“No change, compadre. We’ve got us a real stuck valve.” Already, he was having to balance the power on the left side against the drag on the right by correcting with the rudders.

He ran the power lever forward.

No change.

“We ever run a simulation on this before, Tiger?”

“Nothin’ like it, Snake Eyes. Everythin’ we guessed could happen was power loss at critical moments. This is power on at an uncritical moment.”

McKenna pulled the nose up, to keep the speed from building up on him.

“We’ve got several choices, Tiger.”

“I’ve been flashin’ on them. One, we can just burn off the fuel load, but that’ll leave us way out of balance — five thousand pounds in the starboard tanks. And at one-two per cent, it’ll take over an hour.”

“The slow combustion may also, clog the rocket nozzle.”

“That happens, we’ll get a pressure buildup in the combustion chamber.”

“Which we don’t want,” McKenna said.

“At least I don’t. Maybe I’ll call Mitchell.” “Why don’t you do that?”

Strapped into her cubicle office, Amy Pearson reviewed the photo and dossier scrolling down her screen. General Vitaly Sheremetevo had once been the Deputy Commander in Chief of the Red Air Force. He was sixty-two years of age, with well-deserved gray hair. Under the new regime, he had been recognized as a patriot, and he retained his responsibility for the Protivo-vozdushnaya Oborona (PVO Strany), the largest air defense force in the world. The PVO had over five thousand early-warning radars, twenty-five hundred interceptor aircraft, and fifty thousand surface-to-air missiles at its disposal. Ostensibly, it reported to the Commonwealth, but many of the republics were claiming ownership of parts of the command.

Donna Amber’s voice came over the intercom. “I’ve got a connection for you, Colonel. Channel four.”

“Thank you, Donna.” Pearson tapped the pad for channel four. “General Sheremetevo?”

“Yes, Colonel Pearson.”

“I would like you to know, General, that I have permission from General Marvin Brackman to speak with you. If you would like, I can have him call you to confirm that.”

“I do not believe that will be necessary, Colonel. How may I help you?”

“I have some questions regarding Colonel Pyotr Volontov’s 5th Interceptor Wing.”

The Red Air Force’s 5th Interceptor Wing had been allied with the 1st Aerospace Squadron during the New Germany crisis and had performed exceptionally well.

“Yes?” Sheremetevo said. “Go ahead.”

“After our… joint venture, the United States Department of Defense approved the sale of two Mako aerospace craft to your country for use with the wing. They are still operational, of course.”

She knew they were.

“Very much so, Colonel. And Colonel Volontov is quite pleased with them. Though naturally not as pleased as he might have been with the stealthy version.”

“Yes, I understand that,” she said. McKenna had told her about Volontov.

“We have assured both the United States and the United Nations of the peaceful mission assigned to the Mako, both before and after the changes in our national administration,” Sheremetevo told her.

“I do not have doubts in that regard, General. Rather, I would like to know the names of the pilots who have trained in the Mako, in addition to their current assignments.”

“May I inquire as to why?”

“I would prefer not to say at this time,” Pearson said. “General Brackman would be a far better source.”

After only a moment’s hesitation, Sheremetevo said, “I will talk with Colonel Volontov and then call you back.”