Delta Green

Chapter Seven

Colonel Amy Pearson… Colonel McKenna… Colonel and Colonel McKenna…

Pearson realized she had awakened. Her mind had been drifting aimlessly, not wanting to acknowledge the necessity of addressing a new day.

She opened her eyes slowly. In the dimness of the cubicle, it took her a moment to recognize the diffused mass of her potato sack floating near her head, against the hatch curtain.

She was sleeping naked.

She never slept in the nude on board Themis.

Never.

And then she realized that her back was warm, McKenna’s chest firmly and comfortably pressed against it. His left arm was wrapped around her waist, his hand flat against her stomach. They were held in place by the restraining straps, but the straps had not been designed to enclose two people, and the Velcro ends barely met.

After a moment’s panicked alarm, Pearson decided she was very content. Another twelve hours in the same place would be pleasant.

And then she glanced at the clock readout on the control panel: 0538. People would be moving around in the corridor soon. The panic returned in force.

Gripping the strap with her right hand, she used it to tug herself around to face McKenna.

“Kevin,” she whispered, “wake up.”

“I’m awake,” he smiled. “I just didn’t want to give up the position.”

“You’ve got to get out of here.”

He kissed her, and though she resisted for a moment, she felt herself falling forward, leaning into it despite the lack of gravity, her mind and body responding to the heat.

No!

She finally broke off, then kissed him again lightly, then released the strap and floated away from him, though not far in the confines of the compartment.

“We don’t have time for this,” she said.

“Did you ever notice how things float in space?” he asked, his eyes running over her. “I did.”

“I’ve noticed,” she said and did. “Come on, now. People will be waking up.”

“I’m awake.”

She grabbed her sleep suit and began pulling it on. In the tight space, her knees and elbows seemed to bump into everything, padded walls, control panel, McKenna.

“You promised me in Aspen,” she said.

“Aspen.”

“You did.”

“I have many fine memories of Aspen”

“You promised.”

“Remind me.”

“We aren’t going to do this where people will see us.”

“I did make that commitment, I suppose. It was in a very weak moment, and I have no willpower, darling.”

He continued to float naked in the corner of her tiny cubicle.

“Get dressed!” she hissed.

“It’s better the other way. Don’t be in such a big rush,” he said.

She zipped up her sleep suit, fished around in the fabric pouch attached to the bulkhead, found his jumpsuit, and shoved it at him. “Get dressed, damn it!”

She was trying to whisper.

“Why would I make a dumb promise like that? The one I made in Aspen?”

“There are three good reasons,” she said. “You don’t want to get married, I don’t want to get married, and I sure as hell don’t want a reputation that will affect my professional life and my career.”

“Oh. Those reasons.”

For all of her ability in analyzing intelligence data, she had never fully evaluated her relationship with McKenna since the time their personal lives had become irreversibly confused on a long weekend in Aspen, Colorado. Or perhaps she was simply avoiding the assessment. On the surface, he was too irreverent with regulations and too infatuated with skirting the edges of danger to qualify as a desirable mate. Slightly below the surface, she had been forced to admit that she liked him a little, but in a more basic, more sensual way. Certainly, he satisfied some of her physical needs, and she supposed that was reciprocal. For the immediate future, however, she didn’t intend to analyze it much further.

Despite his attractiveness, McKenna was just too damned independent to mesh with the other facets of her life, and she wasn’t going to allow trysts like this to dominate her mind or her behavior.

She just wasn’t. She had made that promise to herself the week after Aspen.

Pearson retrieved fresh underwear, a jumpsuit, and her hygiene kit from her locker, then unzipped the side of the curtain. “When I get back, you won’t be here, right?”

“Only if I get another kiss.”

She peeked out into the corridor, which was vacant, then turned back to him. He pulled her close.

Strength was very deceptive in a zero-gravity environment, but McKenna always radiated strength. She felt it in the way, however lightly, his hands gripped her upper arms. He could be tender when he tried.

She kissed him lightly on the lips, so as not to get anything started, then pushed through the curtain, got a toe on the hatchway jamb, and launched herself toward one of the hygiene stations, all of which were unoccupied according to the indicator lights.

After fifteen minutes with a sponge bath and the vacuumized accessories in the hygiene station, she emerged to find McKenna dressed and floating in the corridor near his own cubicle, which was across the corridor and two down from hers. He shoved off the bulkhead directly at her.

“McKenna!”

She dodged sideways, and he landed lightly on the wall beside her.

“Got something for you,” he said.

“Not out…”

He held up his hand. Between his thumb and forefinger was a pair of silver eagle rank insignia.

She fastened her eyes on his. The gray of his irises was light, maybe a little amused, but warm.

“I’d like you to have mine,” he said.

“Kevin…”

“These were my father’s,” he said. “He was Army, but they work about the same way.”

No one aboard the space station wore rank insignia except for those newly promoted.

“Thank you.”

He unzipped her jumpsuit a few inches — with her eyes darting back and forth for intruders — and inserted his left hand inside the suit’s left shoulder and used his right hand to position the eagle, then snapped the pin clasps in place. He reversed his hands to fasten the insignia on her right shoulder.

When he was done, he floated a couple feet away, then snapped a crisp military salute that she hadn’t known he was capable of performing.

“Congratulations, Colonel Pearson.”

She returned the salute smartly. “Thank you, Colonel McKenna.”

She felt like crying.

“Now, can we get back in the sack?”

“Damn you, Kevin.”

“I don’t want you to get maudlin,” he grinned.

The last of the Space Command’s Learjets at Merlin Air Base had taken off from the single runway at seven o’clock the night before, taking with it General Delwin Cartwright and his aide, Major Mikos Pappas.

Lynn Haggar didn’t know where the two of them were going, nor did anyone else as far as she could tell. The rumors had a new commandant coming in, but they might have been optimistic rumors.

Heaven on Earth was rampant with rumors, but then it was no different than any other military enclave in the world. There would be nothing to talk about if not for conjecture sworn to as fact.

She was eating breakfast with Olsen, Conover, Abrams, and Munoz after having succumbed to a four-hour nap which had rejuvenated her. Not, apparently, as much as a similar nap had revived Jack Abrams. He had poured half a bottle of picante sauce over his scrambled eggs.

“Tell me what in the hell is that supposed to be,” Ben Olsen said.

“That, Swede, is a Frank Dimatta Special,” Abrams said, working the sauce into the eggs with his fork.

“Aren’t you confusing excess with taste, Do-Wop?” Haggar asked.

“Of course not. I’ve seen him do this many times.” Abrams took one forkful, savored it, closed his eyes in pain, then proceeded gamely on with his breakfast.

“Looks good to me,” Munoz said and dumped the rest of the jar’s contents over the two eggs on his plate.

Haggar decided to ignore the two of them and finished her orange juice, then her grapefruit while half-listening to the banter.

She liked all of them, much as she liked and loved the three brothers she had grown up with in Atlanta. Sometimes, she found humor in the way they struggled to be macho fighter jocks and still obviously tried to avoid what they thought might be interpreted as sexual harassment. Only Tony Munoz was unconcerned about what he might say to her, and he was so good-natured, she would never have taken anything he said as anything but the good humor it was.

Breakfast over, they left the room full of people who were eating roast beef and steaks for dinner and walked back to Hangar One.

Deltas Red, Yellow, and Blue were all prepared for flight. As soon as they saw the flight crews enter the hangar, the ground crews began to assemble for final chores.

“I wish to hell Snake Eyes would quit screwin’ around and get back here,” Munoz said morosely.

“Go back to bed, Tony,” Olsen told him. “The search is the boring part. If it gets interesting, I’ll give you a wake-up call.”

Munoz stood to one side and watched while the Yellow and Red crews slipped into their environmental suits.

Haggar stood still while her crew chief vacuumed her, then climbed the ladder to her cockpit, slid over the coaming, and settled into the reclining seat. The crew chief followed her and helped connect the communications and nitrogen/oxygen fittings.

“I’m buttoned in,” Ben Olsen told her over the intercom system.

“Ditto,” she said. “Okay, Sergeant, how about giving us a tow?”

“Coming right up, ma’am,” he said, then scampered down the ladder.

Olsen was right. This was projected to be another boring day, in terms of contact possibilities. Since not one of the high-tech surveillance systems roaming the skies had detected a reentry burn in the last hours, McKenna had put them back on search patterns. Conover and Abrams were going to cover the area of Southeast Asia that McKenna and Munoz had abandoned when their fuel feed valve stuck open, and Delta Red was headed back to Africa.

After she and Olsen completed their pattern, they would put down at Jack Andrews in Chad for a rest break.

And listen to Dimatta and Williams moaning over their loss, no doubt.

She felt the MakoShark shudder gently as the tractor took a strain on the tow bar. Releasing the brakes, Haggar cleared her mind for the checklist.

Delta Yellow moved slowly out of the hangar, eager for her task.

And looking back over her shoulder, Haggar saw Munoz standing in the middle of the hangar, looking as downcast and lost as he possibly could.

She wondered if he were acting.

Colonel Aleksander Maslov had planned this mission carefully.

General Shelepin had always told him that knowledge was power, and his knowledge of the American aerospace capabilities, though limited in detail, was precise enough to give him an advantage.

He knew, for instance, that the massive radar aboard the American space station had a range of around four hundred miles or 643 kilometers.

He and Nikitin had boosted the HoneyBee attached to the MakoShark to an altitude of three hundred miles and then accelerated slowly, conserving fuel, until they had, seven hours later, slowed and parked the HoneyBee in an orbit on the other side of the Earth from the space station. Like Themis, the supply rocket was in a polar orbit. The American satellite completed a revolution around the North and South poles every 3.6 hours. Though it was in a higher orbit, the rocket’s velocity had been increased until it, too, required the same amount of time to complete an orbit. The computer calculations developed by Boris Nikitin had been very precise.

They had then slept for several hours because Maslov knew also that the Americans would have been looking for his reentry into the atmosphere. Their surveillance satellites were everywhere.

As a copilot trainee, Maslov had accomplished the reentry into the atmosphere twice, and he had an excellent mind. He forgot nothing, and even if he had, the checklist on the small screen kept him honest. The first reentry of the New World Order’s MakoShark into the atmosphere above northern China was flawless.

At twenty-five kilometers of altitude, Nikitin said, “Altitude is… sixteen miles, Aleks. The velocity is Mach four-point-six. All systems are cooling down.”

“Excellent, Boris. We are now veteran spacemen.”

“I am relieved to have the maiden flight completed. I admit it.”

“Nonsense, Boris. We accomplished our mission exactly as planned. Proper planning will always tell.”

Conserving rocket fuel, Maslov put the MakoShark into a long, shallow parabolic curve toward the south. It was after nine o’clock at night when they crossed the northern border of Kampuchea and started the turbojets.

With the use of the GPS navigational system and the night vision lens, they found New World Base without problem. Sixty kilometers to the south, Maslov could see the lights of Kampong Thum.

For the first time in their entire flight, he used the radio. Soon after he had acquired the MakoShark, he had learned that the Americans must have changed the radio packs in their other craft because he no longer heard them on any of the available scrambled frequencies.

Similarly, because he was certain that American listening posts would be monitoring the scrambled frequencies on this craft’s radios, he bypassed the scramblers and utilized a clear frequency. That would change as soon as the communications technicians had altered the radios.

He depressed the transmit button and used English rather than Russian. “Commodore, Commander.”

“Proceed Commander.”

“Five minutes.”

That was all. Just the necessary information that he was close, and that the camouflage over the runway must be shunted aside.

Like his reentry into the atmosphere, the landing was flawless, and the second they were down and slowed, the runway lights were turned off. He was not yet familiar enough with the MakoShark’s special systems to attempt a landing utilizing the night vision capability. Even as he turned off the engines and the electrical systems, a tow tractor had latched onto the nose wheel and was pushing the MakoShark back into its hidden revetment on the west side of the runway.

The jungle canopy closed over them, making the darkness even blacker.

A gaggle of flashlights approached while he and Nikitin raised their canopies and rose awkwardly from the reclining seats, stretching unused muscles. Disconnecting their umbilicals, they eased over the coaming, found the makeshift ladders, and descended to the ground.

Anatoly Shelepin was the first to greet him.

“Aleksander Illiyich!”

“Comrade General.”

“You were successful?”

“Very much so,” Maslov said.

“I am so proud of you. I knew that I would be.”

Maslov was proud of himself also.

He could still be a general.

In the Air Force of the New World Order.

By ten o’clock in the morning, Pearson had toured the station — as security officer, she kept an eye on the military personnel as well as the visiting civilian scientists working in the laboratories — and met with Overton and Avery to accept their congratulations and to discuss her new duties. She congratulated Avery on his transfer and promotion.

“But let’s not sweat the routine stuff for now, Amy,” Overton told her. “The first priority on our list is Delta Green.”

“Yes, sir. I should have the information I requested from the CIA by now.”

“We’re putting a lot of credence in your theory of an ex-Soviet pilot,” Overton said.

“I know,” she admitted, “but the incident with the HoneyBee yesterday supports the theory. That pilot simply had to have had more training in Mako systems than someone with a background in, say, fighter aircraft.”

“Astronaut?” Avery asked.

“Well, maybe, Milt. Still, I want to run down my current leads first.”

“Go for it,” Overton said.

She left the Command Center for her office cubicle, strapped herself in, and powered up the console.

Entering her access code, Pearson checked her electronic mail file and found a great deal of information queued up. The first document was a long message taken by Don Curtis from Commonwealth Colonel Pyotr Volontov. He verified the whereabouts of twenty-eight of the pilots on the original list of thirty-four who had gone through his Mako training program. She didn’t know Volontov, but he seemed to have a mild sense of humor. He had added his own name to the list: “Volontov, Pyotr Mikhailovich, Colonel, Russian Air Force, 5th Interceptor Wing, Present and accounted for.”

That left the six defectors.

The electronic copies of dossiers compiled on the pilots by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) were as disappointing as she had thought they might be. Until a man achieved high rank, or was placed in a command or policy-making position, the intelligence agencies did little more than track his assignments when they learned them, or paste odd tidbits in the file.

She culled out the twenty-eight that were accounted for, storing the information for possible later use in one of the mainframe computer laser disk files. Cutting and pasting, she merged the CIA and DIA files with those she had received from General Sheremetevo, leaving her with six files.

And six names: Averyanov, Bryntsev, Maslov, Nikitin, Pronnikov, and Yevstigneyev.

Tapping the intercom pad to the communications room, she said, “Anyone there?”

Donna Amber responded, “Amber, Colonel. And congratulations.”

“Thank you, Donna. Would you toss a hot coffee pouch my way?”

“Coming up.”

Two minutes later, Pearson leaned out of her cubicle and arrested the flight of coffee soaring toward her from the radio shack.

By noon, after reading carefully through each of the six files several times, she had compiled a long series of notes on her right console screen. She had Amber complete a communications hook-up with General David Thorpe, Brackman’s deputy for intelligence.

“It’s nice to drop the ‘lieutenant’ part of it, isn’t it, Amy?”

“Would it be a major breach of protocol to write a thank-you letter to General Brackman?” she asked.

“Not necessary. He’s thanking you.”

“But…”

“Be better to do it in person sometime, Amy. What have you got?”

“My possibilities for the pilot are still six, but the other twenty-eight possibles are firmly rejected now. In examining the files, I’ve come up with some repetitive names that we should explore, and I’d like to have the CIA track down some rumors. That request should probably come from you, General.”

“I’ve got my pencil handy,” Thorpe said.

Pearson read off all six names. “Averyanov and Pronnikov, according to the Commonwealth files, are rumored to be somewhere in Germany. Nikitin might be in Italy. Bryntsev and Maslov were last reported to have been seen in Syria. Yevstigneyev was supposedly in Iraq at one time. I wonder if our friends at Langley could check those out?”

“We’ll find out. What about the other names?”

“I’ve been looking for patterns involving the names of higher-ranking men,” she said. “I don’t think a pilot dreamed up this escapade by himself.”

“You don’t have a very high opinion of pilots, Amy?”

“You know what I mean, General.”

“Sure. Who have you got?”

“Chestnoy, Guriev, Shelepin, and Dneprovsky. They are all generals at this time, and their names appear more than three times in various pilot dossiers. They were commanders or recommenders or signed letters of commendation. I’d like copies of their files as well as some indication of their current assignments.”

“Those dossiers are frequently cross-referenced by their known close associates, Amy. How would it be if I asked for those, too?”

“That’s a good idea, General. Please. How long do you think?”

“Oh, this will be a national first priority. It shouldn’t take long at all.”

McKenna assigned Kenneth Autry to a round-trip flight to Wet Country, and Benny Shalbot and his technicians mounted one of the passenger modules in the payload bay of Mako Three.

McKenna and Avery arrived at the Mako hangar cell together. Polly Tang was tethered to the control console which, with its window, overlooked the hangar interior. The MakoShark cells had windows that could be darkened so that visiting civilians could not get a close look at the space fighters.

Avery was towing a stuffed plastic bag.

“Not much in the way of personal items accumulated over two years, is it?” Avery said.

“There’s not a hell of a lot of places to go shopping, Milt.”

“True.”

“Let me take that, sir, and I’ll stow it,” Benny Shalbot said.

Avery gave him the bag, and Shalbot arced across the hangar to the Mako, which was held in place in the center of the hangar by bungee cords. Since the craft’s velocity was matched to that of the space station, only the reaction to a technician pushing off her skin would change her attitude.

Polly Tang gave Avery a kiss on the cheek. “We’ll miss you, Milt.”

“Can I have one of those?” McKenna asked.

“You’ll get yours, for sure, McKenna,” she said. “And besides, you’re not leaving for good.”

He gave her a grin, then gripped the hatchway, tugged, and floated across to the Mako.

Autry and his backseater were already in the cockpit. McKenna gave them a thumbs-up, deflected himself off the nose, and sailed beneath the Mako.

The bay doors were wide open, and Shalbot was tending the module.

“You stock up on my favorite magazines, Benny?”

“National Geographic was the best I could do, Colonel.”

“That’s it? You wouldn’t want me to get too excited now, would you?”

“That’s the way the guys on Spoke One run this place,” Shalbot complained. “Bastards don’t want us to appreciate the finer things in life.”

McKenna grinned at him, then pulled himself up into the passenger module. Avery followed him, and Shalbot started sealing the hatch, then the bay doors.

There were four airline-type seats in the module, and a video screen was mounted on the forward end. That was the end of the amenities.

McKenna and Avery buckled into the seats, connected the communications and nitrogen/oxygen lines to the proper receptacles, then helped each other settle and lock their helmets.

Avery’s helmet was general purpose, finished in white and utilized by many passengers. McKenna’s was a personal helmet in Air Force blue, with the accessory visor used for infrared and night sight targeting, and with “Snake Eyes” painted in half-inch-high white letters on the right side.

Avery went right to the intercom. “Ken, you suppose we could see something? Anything.”

The backseater linked their video screen to the video lens, and they had a view of the inside of the hangar. Shalbot was following the last of the technicians through the hatchway, then turning to close and dog the hatch. Polly Tang stared at them through the window.

McKenna watched as Tang evacuated the atmosphere in the hangar; the gases required for the survival of humans was never wasted; it was sucked into holding tanks.

After she opened the hangar doors, Autry backed the craft out of the cell.

They had a twenty-three minute wait for a reentry window, then Autry completed the retro burn, flipped back over to forward flight, and positioned the Mako in its nose-high reentry attitude.

The view on the screen was of stars.

McKenna reached between the armrest and the seat cushion and found a magazine.

“Benny wasn’t kidding,” he said. “It really is National Geographic.”

He offered it to Avery.

“I’ve read that copy three times, Kevin.”

“How about some entertainment back here?” he asked on the intercom. “Otherwise, I’ll have to come up there and fly this thing.”

The backseater gave them Elmore Leonard’s Mr. Majestyk, with Charles Bronson handling the melons. McKenna had seen it twice before, but went ahead and lost himself in it a third time.

Autry landed the Mako at Merlin Air Base in the late afternoon.

Munoz was there to meet them when they crawled down the ladder from the passenger module.

“Damn, I’m glad to see you, Kevin,” Munoz said. “Sittin’ around this burg watching the sweat run isn’t my idea of real racing.”

“Hey, Tony, meet the new base commander.”

“No shit? Milt? Damn, you gonna be a general and everything?”

“There’s been a few hints, Tony,” Avery said.

“You think you’re still gonna talk to us working-class people?”

“Most of the time, I suppose.”

“In that case, congratulations.”

Munoz gave Avery a salute, then shook his hand.

Avery headed for the administration section, and Munoz asked, “What now, jefe.”

“Now, we go hunting again, Tiger.”

“Hot damn!”

By the time they got off the ground, Conover and Abrams were inbound from their search, ready for a rest break and a refueling of the turbojet tanks. Delta Red was already on the ground in Chad. McKenna took up the search pattern over India where Conover had abandoned it the day before. After six hours of back-and-forth searching, they had located one possible clandestine airfield.

And though he checked in frequently with Semaphore (the code name for Space Command in Colorado Springs) and with Alpha, there had been no new or promising information on the whereabouts of one HoneyBee, one MakoShark, or any organization interested in either.

After the last pass over the lower tip of India, McKenna said, “Let’s go home, Tiger.”

“Which one, Snake Eyes?”

“The closest one.”

“Programmin’ for Wet Country. I could use a San Miguel.”

“Not this trip, I’m afraid. We’re flying again in about four hours.”

“You got some new ideas, compadre?”

“No, but Amy-baby’s bound to have some by then.”

“I been meanin’ to talk to you about Amy-baby.”

“No, you haven’t,” McKenna said.

“I thought so.”

When General Anatoly Shelepin and General Sergei Pavel left New World Base at eight o’clock in the morning, it was only for a short hop. Their pilot took them north for a few hundred kilometers, turned back, and landed on the short strip at the hospital.

The hospital’s airstrip was less than a kilometer from that of New World Base, located directly west of the base.

Shelepin had founded the hospital with ten million American dollars, an amount that was quickly matched by the Kampuchean government.

As the old Dassault transport taxied toward a parking spot midway down the single asphalt strip, Pavel said, “It goes very well, Anatoly Guryanovich.”

“Yes, Sergei. I am pleased.”

“Maslov has but one more operation to complete before we make the final thrust.”

“We may count our blessings,” Shelepin said, “but not too loudly as yet.”

Shelepin’s handpicked hospital administrator, Dr. Geli Lemesh, met them with a white Land Rover when they deplaned. The Land Rover had a red cross painted on its hood.

They shared greetings, then crawled into the Land Rover for the monthly inspection visit that Shelepin liked to make. The hospital was, after all, his undertaking, and no one objected to his visits in the least.

The Khmer Hospital and Clinic boasted some of the finest laboratory and treatment equipment in the world. A medical staff of internationally trained doctors and nurses maintained an educational program intended to develop an eventual cadre of Khmer medical personnel.

The facility was situated in inhospitable jungle territory, a long distance from villages or more civilized cities, and that was one of its charms for the Kampuchean government. Since the hospital specialized in treating the diseases of almost hopelessly afflicted and abandoned children, the politicians preferred having the sightless, limbless, mentally-deficient wretches, most of them casualties of the war between Kampuchea and Vietnam, out of the view of tourists.

There was no main structure, unless one considered the administration building as a primary facility. The hospital was spread throughout the nearby jungle in specialized treatment clinics, small cottages, and slightly larger dormitories. Each building was simply constructed of wood painted white. The dark brown shingled roof of each building had a white circle with a red cross painted on it.

And three hundred yards through the jungle to the east, the buildings of New World Base that were visible through the jungle canopy were similarly painted.

It was a simple philosophy, worthy of a Ho Chi Minh. No aggressor would attack a hospital filled with children.

Anatoly Shelepin thought of his concept as brilliant.