Phantom Strike

One

From a half-mile away, the birds still looked proud, sleek, and capable. The mid-morning Arizona sun glanced white-hot off shiny aluminium and titanium panels and stabbed the eyes of observers. Wavery heat made the earth quiver in the far distance.

In the lead Jeep, Andy Wyatt backhanded the sweat from his forehead and fished his sunglasses from the breast pocket of his tan, knit sport shirt. The Polaroids killed the glare and gave him a more dismal view.

As they approached the first group of aircraft, Air Force Captain Owen Dinning, who was driving, slowed the Jeep to thirty miles an hour. Dinning was a fair-haired, smiley young man who displayed easy deference to his visitors. In the real, non-military world, he would have a business address on Madison Avenue. He was following one of the asphalt roads that crisscrossed the aircraft park and delineated half-mile-long checkerboard squares. Within the squares, the sagebrush and weeds had been killed off with some defoliant, leaving sun-baked soil that was the colour of spilled tea.

Behind them, a flight of F-15s took off from the air base with a roar that rumbled forever across the flat desert. Wyatt’s eyes followed the two fighters as they banked away toward the Saguaro National Monument, then nosed upward and climbed steeply to the north.

Live airplanes interested Andy Wyatt far more than did dead ones.

He gazed solemnly at the aircraft they were passing. They appeared frozen to the earth, and he was certain that many of them should have been entombed.

The amiable Captain Dinning flipped a thumb at the behemoths broiling in the sun on their left. “Sure you don’t want a BUFF, Mr. Wyatt?”

BUFF. Big, Ugly, Fat Fucker. The scourge of Hanoi. In the course of the war games in Southeast Asia, the B-52s had dropped more ordnance tonnage on North Vietnam than was expended in all of World War II. The daily pounding of the capital city was enough to drive any nation into mania and submission, but something was wrong with the strategy.

Hanoi won.

Viewed from up close, these B-52s saddened Wyatt. There were over a hundred of them parked in long rows. They were forlorn and neglected. Paint and insignia were peeling; metal skin was tarnished; tires were flattened; control surfaces were missing; Plexiglas was grazed and cracked. Most of them had empty engine nacelles, their turbojets scavenged for other uses. He knew that most of them would have had their radar and avionics stripped out. Stacks of debris — drop tanks, pylons, access panels — littered the ground beneath the wings. In the second row over, a blue pickup was parked in the shade of one of the giant swept wings, and two technicians were busy performing a surgical removal of something somebody somewhere needed on one of the forty-year-old bombers.

The design was forty years old, but the B-52 was still one of the mainstays of the Air Force, with 165 G- and H-model aircraft in active service. It said something subtle but powerful about the design.

“I think I’ll pass,” Wyatt told his driver.

“You don’t look too happy, sir.”

“If I were running this air force, I’d strip the damned things, then melt them down.”

“Maybe we’ll need them again?” the captain suggested.

“It’d cost more to rebuild one today than Boeing billed the taxpayer originally, Captain.”

“That’s true, sir.”

Andrew Wyatt did not like viewing the mothball fleet at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Supposedly, the thousands of aircraft were being held in reserve, but realistically, most would never fly again. The skeletons neatly scattered over this sandy acreage were a highly visible tribute to obsolescence, an expensive symbol of American waste, Air Force style.

Dinning slowed, downshifted, and spun the wheel to the right at the next intersection. They passed ghettos of Lockheed C-121 Constellations, P-2 Neptunes, a few Electras, some Martin B-57 Night Intruders, Grumman Albatross amphibians, and F-101 Super Sabres. On a faraway plot, Wyatt saw a few golden oldies: B-17s, B-36s, a crippled Mustang.

Wyatt looked behind him. The other Jeep was keeping pace. Bucky Barr waved at him, his big, horsey teeth revealing his glee. Barr got a kick out of almost anything, but his exuberance did not pass to Wyatt. It was not only this traipse through avian tombstones that depressed him. The coming weeks carried the very real possibility that he would be buying memorial markers for some people he liked.

Captain Dinning dropped to second gear, bounced off the hard surface of the asphalt, and raced between the first two rows of what had to be over two hundred F-4 Phantoms. The second Jeep pulled up alongside them, to get out of the mini-cloud of dust Dinning raised.

Wyatt’s guide found his clipboard in the space between the seats, checked the top sheet, and began to scan the tail numbers of the fighters. Halfway down the first row, he braked to a stop, and the tech sergeant driving the other vehicle skidded to a stop next to them.

“Here’s the first one, Mr. Cowan.”

“E model?” Wyatt asked, responding to the name he was using.

“Yes, sir. One of the dozen we’ve got. Most of the retirements here are B, C, and D models. Anything later is still in service, usually with the air reserves. A lot of them, all models, have been sold to friendly governments.”

Wyatt swung his legs out of the footwell and stood up. The desert dust immediately coated the spit-shine of his Wellington boots. His chino slacks had had a crease in them at seven o’clock when he pulled them on in his motel room, but the crease was blurred now by heat and perspiration. His shirt felt sticky. Wyatt had big, muscled shoulders and arms, and the damp shirt acted as if it were part of his skin, another dermal layer.

Barr, Demion, and Kriswell slipped out of the other Jeep, and joined him in front of the Phantom’s snout. They were dressed casually also, fighting the dry heat with jeans, sport shirts, and running shoes. The tech sergeant was in wilted fatigues, and Dinning, in summer Class As, was the only one who appeared fresh. In his Air Force days, Wyatt had known commanders like Dinning, who seemed immune to the elements.

The six of them stood there silently for a moment and looked at the airplane.

“I don’t see any dents,” Bucky Barr noted.

“Maybe they used bondo on it?” Jim Demion said.

“Whatever they used, it’s still pretty,” Kriswell told them.

Despite the technological advances made with Eagles, Tomcats, and Hornets, the F-4 was still a lethal-looking airplane. It was also a reliable craft, Wyatt knew. Over five thousand had been built, one of the highest production records ever for a fighter aircraft. Only the MiG-21 could boast the same numbers. The Phantom first flew in 1958, and its combat record in Vietnam, flown by the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines, was commendable.

The huge, ovoid air intakes on each side of the fuselage gave the craft added mass from the head-on view. The outer wing panels were canted upward in a dihedral angle, a counterpoint to the steep, twenty-three-degree anhedral droop of the rear tailplanes. This Phantom was missing its external fuel tanks, and the two wing-mounted weapons pylons which normally sprouted four Sidewinder missiles were bare, The underside was finished in dull white paint, and the fuselage and top surfaces were coated in the most recent scheme of matte olive, green, and tan camouflage colours. The ID was for the 32nd Tactical Fighter Squadron which, as far as Wyatt knew, was still operating out of Europe.

“Want to kick the tires, Mr. B?” Wyatt asked, being careful to avoid true names, deceiving his country, and as far as that went, his air force.

Barr grinned at him. “Hell, yes. I’m a tire-kicker from way back. Salesmen hate me.”

“That’s because you flatten the tires when you kick them,” Kriswell said.

Nelson Buckingham Barr, III, was a solid chunk of a man, his physique akin to that of many boulders Wyatt had seen alongside Rocky Mountain highways. It had always seemed to Wyatt that someone had invented a giant shoehorn solely for the purpose of wedging Barr into fighter cockpits. He was five-feet, nine-inches tall, but his breadth gave him solidity.

Tom Kriswell, the electronics engineer/magician, was a foot taller than Barr and half as wide. He spoke to Dinning. “When was it brought in, Captain?”

Dinning checked his clipboard. “Three months ago, on April seventh.”

“Flown in? Not transported?”

“Under her own power, sir.”

“Suppose it’s still got electrical power?”

“If they haven’t pulled the batteries yet, we can give it a try,” Dinning told him.

Dinning, Kriswell, and Jim Demion, Wyatt’s aeronautical engineer, approached the side of the plane. Kriswell found the recessed control for the forward canopy and played with it. With a reluctant slurp of the rubber seals, the canopy began to raise. It was a slow process, attesting to the depleted condition of the batteries.

The tech sergeant got a ladder from the back of Dinning’s Jeep, brought it over, and hooked it over the cockpit coaming. Kriswell scampered up the rungs with agility surprising in such a long and lean body, checked the safety pin on the ejection seat, swung his skinny legs inboard, and dropped into the seat.

Jim Demion began a circuit of the aircraft, sticking his head up into landing gear retraction wells, testing control surfaces, peering up the tail pipes of the twin J79-GE-17 turbojets. He popped the Dzus fasteners on access hatches, swung them open, and poked around in the innards. He came around to the front of the airplane and removed the protective covers on the air intakes.

Bucky Barr kicked the port side tire.

Kriswell tossed Wyatt the aircraft maintenance log, which had been stored in the cockpit.

“What have you got up there, Tom?” Wyatt asked.

“Not much. I’ve got power on the instrument panel, but not enough amperage to check radios or radar.”

Wyatt took the log back to the Jeep. He sat on the passenger’s seat and slowly read through it, making his own notes in the black leather notebook he carried in his hip pocket. This Phantom had been built in 1975 and had therefore missed the Vietnam festivities. The airframe had over forty thousand hours on it, but both of the General Electric turbojets had been changed out and now had eleven thousand hours on them. They would have to be rebuilt to achieve the reliability he wanted. The craft sported a Tiseo zoom-lens video system which enhanced the pilot’s visual target-tracking. None of the F-4s featured Head Up Displays, but this machine did have the advanced sight system. It was computer-based and made interception and air or ground weapons delivery more accurate. The newer APQ-120 fire control radar was installed, as well as the additional fuel cell in the rear fuselage. That gave it a sixteen-hundred-mile ferry range.

Jim Demion sauntered back to the Jeep and waited for his turn at the log.

Their inspection took forty minutes.

When they were done, standing in a half-circle around the forlorn airplane, Wyatt asked, “Anybody have questions for the captain?”

There were none, but then the captain was not an airman, anyway.

“Okay,” Wyatt said, “let’s take a look at the next one, Captain Dinning.”

At the next Phantom, Wyatt pulled Demion aside, out of earshot of Dinning and the tech sergeant. “What do you think, Jim? Are these old bastards going to work for us?”

“It’s the best thing we’ve got going, Andy.”

“That doesn’t answer the question. We’re going up against damned sophisticated weapons systems. I don’t want bodies all over the landscape when it’s over.”

“We talking our bodies?”

“They’re the ones uppermost in my mind, Jim.”

“Go back to what we talked about before, Andy. The opposition’s systems may be state-of-the-art, but keep telling yourself about the people behind them. They’re assholes, remember?”

“Maybe. But assholes are conditioned to react instinctively.”

“Just be cool, boss. When Kriswell and I are done, those aero-fucking-planes will be things of beauty. Venus de Milo, step aside.”

“I don’t give a good goddamn what they look like,” Wyatt told him.

“But Bucky does,” Kriswell said.

Barr had demanded, and received, responsibility for cosmetic changes. It would, he said, keep him out of the innards where he was all thumbs, anyway.

In four hours, the team looked over the three F-4Es, four F-4Ds, and one C model. By one o’clock, the sun was delivering temperatures above one hundred degrees, and probably much more than that on the barren surfaces of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base’s “Boneyard.”

“I’m hungry,” Barr said.

“That doesn’t tell us anything,” Kriswell said. “You’re always hungry.”

“I’m tired of kicking tires. Let’s play airplane tomorrow, and go back to the motel now.”

“If you start walking now,” Wyatt grinned at him, “you’ll make Tucson by the time we’re done.”

“Shit. How come I always get hooked up with a bunch of workaholics?”

“Do you want to see a couple more, Mr. Cowan?” Dinning asked.

“We’re about Phantomed out, I think. Let’s look at that 130F now.”

They all got back in the blue Air Force Jeeps and drove about three miles to where a C-130 Hercules was parked. The Lockheed C-130 transports, born in 1951, were operational airplanes still in production and utilized globally by a dozen governments and some private enterprises. It was a competent workhorse, and Wyatt already owned one that he had committed to this project.

This single Hercules condemned to mothballs was a one of a kind, designated a KC-130F. It had been an experiment in converting the Hercules to the role of aerial tanker in the normal, designated way of military contracts and design, though Wyatt had heard stories about jury-rigged C-130 tankers created on the spot in Vietnam. By the Marines, probably, since they were expert at Rube Goldberg devices. Apparently, the Air Force had decided to stick with their larger, jet-engined tankers because this aircraft log showed very little time on the four Allison turboprops. After a short reconnaissance trip around, and inside, the aircraft, both Demion and Kriswell appeared satisfied.

Back on the main grounds of the base at three o’clock, Captain Dinning lost the tech sergeant and took them into the officer’s club for a sandwich and a beer.

“Jesus! Air-conditioning. I’d forgotten what it was like.” Barr picked at his yellow Izod shirt with thumb and forefingers like a dainty dilettante, tugging it away from a chest as hairy as a brown bear’s. He took off his Pebble Beach golf cap and wrung it out.

“Your upbringing left something to be desired,” Demion told him.

“Like what?”

“Like upbringing.”

“I was a deprived youth,” Barr explained.

Barr was one of three sons of a noted and Mayflower-linked New Hampshire family. Lacking one physical trait that identified him with the Barr clan, he had evolved as the black sheep. While he had a Yale education, Bucky Barr took delight in being good-naturedly boorish. He also had a multimillion dollar trust fund that paid him a quarter-million dollars every January 2.

They pushed two tables together to give themselves some elbow room and spent an hour with French fries, hamburgers, Heineken, and their respective notes. The debate involved the perceived condition of subsystems, mostly.

Captain Dinning kept the coffee cups filled and the beer cans rolling, and listened to them with what Wyatt thought was growing suspicion. The captain appeared to have a growing distrust of their apparent cover story, which had not been fully detailed for him. Wyatt did not worry too much about their guide, but from time to time, he threw in a statement intended to support the cover. “On 3387, what’s the result if we re-rivet with the new countersunk rivets?”

Demion said, “Much cleaner. It’s worth maybe point-one Mach.”

At four o’clock, the four of them agreed on a list, and Wyatt jotted down the tail numbers. At the bottom of the page, he wrote in a phone number with a 202 area code. He ripped the page out of his notebook and handed it to Dinning.

“That’s the roster, Captain, providing, of course, that each of them still carries an airworthiness certificate.” The captain, who was a public relations specialist rather than a pilot, looked over the list carefully. “I’ll double-check the certificates for you and get the paperwork started, Mr. Cowan.”

“We need drop tanks installed on that first F-4E,” Demion pointed out.

“Also,” Kriswell added, “we need to rob a couple planes for two drag chutes, a replacement IFF for 1502, and a rear canopy for 925.”

“Of course. It’s not a problem.” Dinning turned his head toward Wyatt. “Do you mind my asking what you’re going to do with these planes?”

“Not at all. Back in ’61, the Phantom held some world records for speed at Mach 2.6 and for altitude at ninety-eight thousand feet. It’s still a good airplane, Captain, and we’re going to modify these for racing and endurance trials, as well as taking them on the air show circuit.”

“I see. I wish you luck, but do you need all of these electronics?”

“Hell, if I’m buying them, I might as well get what comes with them, right?”

The set of Dinning’s mouth suggested he thought otherwise. “Yes. I suppose so.”

“Thanks. Now, I’d appreciate it if you could get them all towed in in the morning and checked out. We won’t worry too much about avionics at this point, but we do need batteries installed on almost all of them, and battery charges and fluid levels will have to be up to par. I’d like to have everything fuelled and ready to go by the day after tomorrow.”

The captain straightened up in his chair, his face apologetic. “On Thursday? I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Mr. Cowan.”

“The aircraft we selected shouldn’t pose many problems, Captain.”

“Not on the flight readiness, no, sir. However, before surplus aircraft can be sold to civilians, we are required to have our ground crews remove a number of weapons-related systems: the ordnance pylons, the cannon, threat warning devices, jammers, chaff dispensers, attack radar, and the like. I’m sure you understand, sir. None of that would be necessary for your objectives, anyway.”

While Dinning was explaining his problem, Wyatt got out his wallet and withdrew a certified check for $225,000. The check was identified as issued in favour of Noble Enterprises, Inc., of Phoenix, Arizona. He placed it on the table and slid it across to Dinning.

“What’s this, sir?”

“That’s payment for seven aircraft, Captain. And I’ll give you another check for the fuel and whatever maintenance is required.”

From the look on his public relations face, Dinning apparently did not think that some twenty million dollars’ worth of aircraft should be surplused to some civilian at a penny to the dollar.

“Well, sir, I think the surplus material people will want to negotiate a little further.”

“The price has already been approved by the Department of Defence,” Wyatt explained to him.

“Oh. I didn’t know that, Mr. Cowan.”

“And the price includes all equipment now aboard the airplanes. We get them as is.”

Dinning stood up, the resolution to prevent civilians access to sophisticated, and possibly still classified, military weapons clearly revealed on his face. “I’m going to have to check on that, Mr. Cowan.”

“I know. That’s why I gave you the phone number.”

Two

Andrew Michael Wyatt’s hair was full over the ears, tapered above his neck, and fell across his forehead in a casual swoop. With the deep tan of his face, he might have been a Malibu Beach or Honolulu surf bum in appearance. The deep etching at the corners of his ice-blue eyes and his firm mouth suggested otherwise. He did not smile very often, and his closest friends sometimes found him short on humour. What really killed the leisurely image was the iron grey colour of his hair.

Though he was only in his mid-forties, Wyatt impressed people as being a little older and a little wiser, maybe fifty. He had lived with the overly mature image for twenty years, having gone prematurely grey at twenty-four. He could, in fact, pinpoint the date when the silver began to appear in previously dark locks.

It was April 17, 1970, a few hours before April 18.

It was a night mission over Haiphong, and he was flying an F-111A swing-wing fighter bomber under development by General Dynamics. Wyatt was assigned to the 428th Tactical Fighter Squadron out of Ubom in Thailand, and the squadron had been given six F-lll’s for operational trials over North Vietnam. The early version of the aircraft was disappointing for they lost half of their complement within a month.

His was one of them.

Armed with two 750-pound bombs, Wyatt’s airplane had been given a dock and warehouse in the harbour as primary targets. Military intelligence had determined that both the dock and the warehouse were supposed to be military targets rather than civilian. Targets were very specific in that war, approved by the White House inner circle — all of whom considered themselves military experts, and anything not adorned with some kind of NVA insignia, whatever that might be, was off-limits.

He and his wingman, a second lieutenant named Ruskin, approached the harbour low from the west, riding the hilly terrain as low as possible in order to avoid radar detection. They were accompanied by a flight of four Marine F-4s flying cover. As they neared the city, Wyatt and Ruskin climbed to five thousand feet and spread a quarter-mile apart in search of their mission objectives on the far side of the anchorage. His Weapons System Officer, Miles Adair, in the seat next to him, had his head buried in the radar boot.

Wyatt never reached, nor saw, either of his own targets. Five miles before reaching the harbour, the radar screen lit up with the blips of Fan Song target-seeking radars. Adair counted off six surface-to-air missile launches. Most of the Fan Songs went passive as the missile-carrying F-4 fighters launched retaliatory strikes against the radar installations. As the harbour finally burst into view, the dark skies were peppered with bright pinpricks of light: exploding SAMs and erupting antiaircraft shells from the quad-barrelled ZSU-23 batteries surrounding Hanoi and Haiphong.

Some brave communist radar operator kept his set active in order to guide his missile, and Wyatt’s earphones sang with the pitched tone of the threat warning and Adair’s verbal additions to it.

“Lock-on, Andy! Break right!”

Checking his rear-view mirror, he saw the flare of rocket exhaust circling the dark hole of the missile body, and he jinked the plane hard to the right, climbing, but could not lose his deadly pursuer.

The missile went right up his starboard tail pipe.

And did not detonate. It was a Soviet Union version of a dud.

The aerial collision still disintegrated his right Pratt and Whitney TF30, shredding the fuselage and wing with snapped turbine blades. The F-lll skidded and bucked, then started vibrating violently. Red warning lights lit up the instrument panel like the Las Vegas Strip. He killed power on the right engine. A quick stab at the transmit button told him he had lost his radios. Vital electrical and hydraulic arteries had been severed.

Wyatt jettisoned his bomb load and his drop tanks in the middle of the harbour and retarded the port throttle, which eased the vibration. Making a slow 180-de-gree turn, he limped the airplane back to the west as far as Laos. Ruskin stayed with him all the way and circled when Wyatt could no longer keep the F-lll airborne, and he and Adair ejected over a rice paddy. They were picked up by helicopter within an hour, and Wyatt woke up the next morning with the first strands of grey showing at his temples.

He was fully grey-headed by the end of 176 missions and his third tour.

On Thursday morning, he was up by five-thirty to run through his twenty minute regimen of sit-ups, push-ups, and deep-knee bends. Wyatt’s six-foot frame of hard muscle was probably in better shape than it had been twenty years before, but it took increased effort to keep it at the level he wanted. After exercising, he showered, washed his hair, and shaved. It took him five minutes to dress in slacks and a blue sport shirt and to pack his single carry-on bag. Wyatt carried the small bag and the larger one containing his flight gear down to the Holiday Inn’s desk and checked out, paying in cash. Everyone was supposed to pay in cash. He bought a copy of the Phoenix Gazette and went looking for breakfast.

Barr was already in the coffee shop, working away at four eggs and two breakfast steaks. He grinned as Wyatt took the chair opposite him. “Morning, boss.” Wyatt poured himself a cup of coffee from the insulated plastic pot on the table. “You look amazingly alive. How was Nogales?”

Bucky Barr and two of the others had crossed the border the night before to analyse the current level of Mexican revelry.

He reported, “In a world of change, Nogo doesn’t. Same varieties of debauchery.”

Wyatt ordered an omelette guaranteed to contain extra jalapeno peppers and read the paper while he waited for the rest of his team. From Tokyo to Beirut to Washington, the world was in typical disarray. A little greed, a little power-grabbing, a lot of fanaticism.

By six-thirty, they had all stacked their soft-sided luggage in the lobby and were gathered at two tables, urging their beleaguered waitress to greater speed. In addition to Barr, Demion, and Kriswell, there were four more faces. Norm Hackley, Dave Zimmerman, Cliff Jordan, and Karl Gettman had flown in commercially from Albuquerque the previous afternoon. Hackley and Gettman were the two Barr had cajoled into joining him for his Mexican spree. Both were droopy-eyed this morning and particularly fond of ice water and orange juice.

Zimmerman, a clean-cut, sandy-haired man of twenty-eight, was the youngest pilot in Wyatt’s group. He had been an F-15 Eagle jockey for the USAF until eighteen months before. He leaned toward Wyatt’s table and said, “Beats the hell out of me, Andy, why these old fossils, who are supposed to be wise veterans of life, can’t grasp some simple truths. I’ve learned that there’s a direct correlation between the night before and the morning after.”

“Go flub a duck, Davie boy,” Gettman muttered.

Barr, who was never affected by mornings-after, said, “The truth, Dave, is that the night before is worth the morning after.”

“Selfish bastard,” Gettman told Barr. “You always speak for yourself.”

“I knew there was a truth in there, somewhere,” Norm Hackley said, “but I think it’s only a half-truth.”

“Do you guys realize you all sound incoherent?” Wyatt asked.

“Now, there’s a truth,” Zimmerman said.

“You should have heard them last night, you want incoherence,” Barr said.

“I especially don’t want incoherence today. I want bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

He got nods in response, but some of them seemed half-hearted.

Wyatt folded his paper and surveyed his group. All of them were employees of his Aeroconsultants, Incorporated, and he was fond of them all. Except for Zimmerman and a few of the technicians back in Albuquerque, he had served Air Force time, somewhere in the world, with all of his people.

After the waitress had brought yet two more coffeepots, Wyatt briefed them. “Bucky, Cliff, and I will take the F-4Es. Jim, you get the Herc, and Tom will ride in the right seat for you.”

Demion had multiengine and jet ratings on his private license, though he had never flown for the military except as a peripheral activity in consulting for them. His interest was secondary to his profession of aeronautical engineering.

Kriswell was not a pilot. He had abandoned pursuit of a flying license after his first landing on his first solo flight in a Cessna 182. He had managed to leave part of the propeller and the landing gear a few hundred yards away from where the airplane finally came to rest.

“You get to handle the Thermos, Tom,” Demion said. “No touching the yoke.”

“Can I play with the throttles?”

“If you’re real good,” Demion promised.

“The rest of us are here to sightsee?” Hackley asked. “Nope,” Wyatt told him. “I only pay you to work. I’ve got a couple F-4Ds for Dave and Karl. Norm, you get a C model.”

“Shit. The slowest one of the bunch, no doubt. Anybody want to flip a coin?”

“No trades. The hydraulics are a little iffy on your bird, Norm, and if there are any problems, I want your experience in the cockpit.”

Mollified, Hackley — who had F-4 combat hours — shrugged and said, “Ho-kay.”

“Our destination is Ainsworth.” Wyatt had not mentioned that to any of them before.

“What the hell’s an Ainsworth?” Barr asked.

“And where in the hell is it?” Hackley added.

“It’s in north central Nebraska. Just under a thousand miles, and we can make it in one hop.”

“Nebraska in mid-July?” Barr complained. “You’ve got to be shitting us, Andy.”

“The sandhill cranes like it.”

“Yeah, but I’ll bet the crane population is composed of two genders,” Barr said.

After the last of the coffee was drained from their cups, the group made last pit stops and then carried all of the luggage out into the dry heat of morning and dumped it into the trunks of two taxicabs. Thirty minutes later, they hauled it into the operations office at Davis-Monthan and stacked it against a wall opposite the counter.

Wyatt figured that all of the right telephone calls had been made and most of the objections overcome because he could see his seven aircraft lined up on the tarmac about a quarter-mile away. A fuel truck, three start carts, several pickups, and a dozen men were clustered around them.

They waited, milling around, hitting the Coke machine.

Captain Dinning arrived at eight-fifteen wearing a haggard smile and carrying a four-inch-thick folder. He dropped it on the counter and said, “You don’t know what I’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours, Mr. Cowan.”

“I’ve got a fair idea, Captain. And all of it in quadruplicate, too.”

Bucky Barr asked, “Did we get all of the tail numbers we asked for?”

“That’s correct.”

“I’ll get a couple of the guys, and we’ll start filling out flight plans. Jim went off to get the weather info.”

“Good. I want the Hercules to go first, followed by a flight of the 4Ds and the C model. The rest of us will fly out last.”

“And get in first, no doubt,” Barr said.

Barr, Gettman, and Hackley went to the end of the counter and began to fill out forms.

Dinning opened his folder and, one by one, began laying multipart forms in front of Wyatt. He saw that ownership had been vested in Noble Enterprises, Phoenix, Arizona, as requested. With his ballpoint pen, Wyatt dated and signed each form as Roger A. Cowan, President, Noble Enterprises. He was given copies of receipts, temporary registrations, temporary FAA certifications, and, on the F-4E fighters, temporary registrations for the M61A1 twenty-millimetre multi-barrelled cannons.

“The understanding is that you’re to contact the Treasury Department’s firearms division and arrange for a hearing on those,” Dinning said.

“You bet,” Wyatt said, but did not think he could fit it into his schedule.

“That’s what caused the most trouble,” Dinning told him. “Even the base commander got involved.”

And lost, Dinning guessed.

“And finally agreed, if the M61s were disabled.”

“How was that accomplished?”

“The fire control black boxes have been removed,” the captain told him.

“Where are they?”

“On board the C-130.”

“Okay. That’s safe enough.”

“One other thing,” the captain said. “With those radios. You’re supposed to stay off military frequencies.”

“I don’t like to listen to Eagle pilots, anyway,” Wyatt assured him. He signed a sheet promising just that.

“Then, we have this.”

Wyatt took the statement from Maintenance and Operations and went over the entries. Two tires had been replaced. Four sets of brakes were new. The avionics and basic instruments had been superficially examined and temporarily okayed. There were labor charges for installing a rear canopy on 925. Every engine had been started and run for fifteen minutes, but there were no guarantees. Fuel tanks, including external tanks, had been topped off. He had been charged for nearly eighty gallons of lubricants and hydraulic fluids.

The billing came to $34,292.67.

His guess had been close to right. Wyatt produced another certified check for thirty thousand, and wrote out a company check for the balance. Both checks were written against Noble Enterprise’s Phoenix account. It was an account that would cease to exist as soon as this last check cleared.

“Does that make us even, Captain?”

“I believe it does, Mr. Cowan. Happy racing.”

The captain did not believe the racing angle for a minute, Wyatt thought. “Thanks. And thanks for your help.”

“Anytime, sir.” Dinning turned and left.

Barr came over to him. “We’re all filed. You need to sign your flight plan.”

After he signed off on a flight plan that hinted at a destination in Montana, Wyatt led his team down to a dressing room, and they changed into flight gear. Their flight suits were identical, dove grey in colour, with their first names stitched in red over the right breast pockets. Across the back of each garment, red letters advertised, “NOBLE ENTERPRISES-AVIATION DIVISION.” Demion and Kriswell left their matching helmets and their parachute harnesses in their duffel bags, but the rest of them hoisted chutes over their shoulders and carried their helmets, G suits, personal oxygen masks, duffel bags, and over-nighters. In a group, they left operations and crossed the hot concrete of the apron toward the parked aircraft. The short walk resulted in sweat-darkened armpits. Wyatt could feel the perspiration dripping down his back.

“Don’t you feel like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, heading down the main drag in Tombstone?” Barr asked.

“As a matter of fact, no,” Wyatt told him.

“We’ve got to work on your imagination, Andy.” The excess luggage was stowed in the crew compartment behind the cockpit of the Hercules.

Everyone found his airplane and spent the next hour going over it with the crew chief who had worked on it. When each of the pilots had expressed to Wyatt his relative satisfaction, Wyatt said, “Looks like a go, then. Jim, you and Tom can fire up.”

Demion and Kriswell climbed through the crew door on the forward, port side of the C-130 and locked it after them. One by one, the four turboprops came to life, then the big transport moved out of line toward the taxiway. Half an hour later, the plane was a black smudge on the wavery horizon.

Hackley, Zimmerman, and Gettman took off next, Gettman’s Phantom dragging what Wyatt thought was an overly thick kerosene vapour trail, though the Phantom was known for its identifiable exhaust signature.

Ten minutes after that, Wyatt slipped into his pressure suit, buckled on his parachute, climbed the ladder, checked the safety pins on the ejection seat, slid into the cockpit, and settled into the seat of the Phantom numbered 3387. It felt good to be back, he thought, as he locked in the seat and shoulder harness. The crew chief came up the ladder to help him connect oxygen and pressure suit fittings. He settled the helmet on his head, snapped the oxygen mask in place — letting it hang to one side, then hooked into the radio system.

“All set, sir?”

“Ready to go, Sergeant. Thanks for your help.”

“I’m just happy to see ’em flying again, sir.” Even if by a civilian, he thought.

“Let’s light her up.”

The crew chief scampered down the ladder and took it away.

Wyatt ran through his never-forgotten check list, powering up the panel and radios. The inertial navigation system gyros had been activated earlier, using the Auxiliary Power Unit, since they took a while to spin up. He punched in the Davis-Monthan coordinates. He went through the start sequence, setting ignition toggles, and then gave a thumbs-up to the man tending the start cart. The airman signalled back, and Wyatt started turning the turbine. When the RPMs reached thirty-five percent, he lifted the flap and hit the port ignition. The turbojet whined as the turbine built up speed, then whooshed as it took hold on its own. The starboard engine fired a few seconds later. All of the pertinent instruments read in the green.

Lifting a thumb-and-forefinger okay to the crewmen on the ground, Wyatt released the brakes and rolled forward. When he reached the taxiway, he braked for a right turn, lined up on the yellow guiding line, then braked to a stop.

Barr and Jordan fell into line behind him.

Wyatt adjusted the barometric pressure on the altimeter for the setting Demion had gotten during his weather check, dialled in the local ground frequency on the NavComs, then thumbed the transmit button. “Davis Ground Control, Phantom three-three-eight-seven.”

“Go ahead, eight-seven.”

“Davis, eight-seven has a flight of three near Hangar B. Requesting permission to taxi.”

“Phantom eight-seven, you’re cleared for taxi to Runway two-seven right. Switch to Air Control.”

“Phantom eight-seven, wilco.”

The three aircraft rolled along at thirty miles an hour as they headed for the assigned runway. In his rear-view mirror, Wyatt checked the planes behind him. The forward canopies were still raised, capturing the hot breeze. It made him think of the take-off lines he had waited in at Ton Son Nhut Air Base.

Redialling the radios to the air control frequency, Wyatt got immediate take-off clearance, and the three Phantoms turned onto the runway, Barr and Jordan lining up in echelon off his right wing. Wyatt snapped his oxygen mask into place.

On the inter-aircraft frequency they had agreed on, Wyatt asked, “You two ready?”

“Yo, Major,” Jordan replied.

“Can we use afterburner?” Barr begged.

“No afterburners. We’re not showing off just yet. Let’s hit it.”

Wyatt ran his throttles forward, released the brakes, and felt nearly thirty thousand pounds of thrust immediately. It shoved him back satisfyingly in his seat. By the time he passed the operations tower, his airspeed was showing 160 knots. A quick glance to his right confirmed that Barr and Jordan were right with him, demonstrating the discipline and ability taught them by seven thousand hours of flight time.

He eased the stick back a notch and the long, narrow nose ahead of him rose. He felt the lift take over, and, a minute later, the wheels quit rumbling. The Phantoms crossed the Davis-Monthan boundary fence at a thousand feet of altitude and banked into a right turn.

Wyatt retracted flaps and landing gear and got green lights.

“Phantom eight-seven, Davis Air Control.”

“Go ahead, Davis.”

“Eight-seven, you are cleared to thirty thousand feet, heading zero-zero-five.”

“Roger, Davis, confirm angels thirty, zero-zero-five. Eight-seven out.”

Barr’s baritone sounded in his earphones. “Now?”

“Now, Bucky.”

Wyatt shoved his throttles outboard and past the detents into afterburner, pulling back on the stick at the same time.

The three Phantoms leapt upward, climbing almost vertically, airspeed reaching past the five hundred-knot mark, looking for the rarified freedom of thirty thousand feet.

Jesus, I love this.

The Excelsior Hotel on Bath Road was convenient to Heathrow Airport for the German, or Formsby would not have agreed to it as a meeting place. He did not like to hold such meetings in ostentatious surroundings.

Neil Formsby got out of his cab in front of the main entrance to the hotel at 6:30 P.M. in the evening. He tipped the doorman just enough to remain unremarkable and pushed his way into the ornate lobby. He stood inside the doors for a moment and looked around.

Formsby was in evening dress for he had to meet Pamela at D’Artagnan in Regent’s Park immediately after seeing the man from Bonn. In fact, Muenster’s telephone call had almost upset his entire evening. He did not care for unexpected disruptions in his schedule.

He was a tall man at six-feet, two-inches and always tailored in the latest of immaculate fashion. His dark blond hair was crisply styled to his aristocratic head. Set widely on either side of an aquiline nose, his eyes were hazel and very direct. People who spoke with Formsby thought he was either extremely interested in them or obnoxiously intrusive. Those who thought him impolite also thought that his wide shoulders were padded and his slim torso girdled. They were incorrect.

Spotting the man who must be his quarry standing near the entrance to the bar, Formsby crossed the deep pile carpet of the lobby toward him. He walked with an obvious limp. The bones of his left ankle were nearly solidified with aluminium pins, and there was almost no flexibility left in the joint.

“Herr Ernst Muenster?”

“Yes. Mr. Carrington-Smyth?” The German spoke almost unaccented English.

“Correct. Shall we?” Formsby lifted a hand toward the lounge.

“By all means.”

Seated at a table near the back, after ordering a

cognac for the German and a single malt scotch for himself, Formsby said, “I appreciate your responding so quickly, Herr Muenster.”

“Please. It is Ernst.”

“And Malcolm, if you will. Do you frequently conduct your business face-to-face?”

“Always. It assures that I will do more business.” Formsby nodded, but remained silent as their drinks were delivered and placed in front of them with a flourish.

Muenster spent the diversion examining Formsby closely, but then that was the very point of the personal meeting, Formsby thought.

Muenster appeared to be nearly sixty years of age. What was left of his hair — a fringe that was trimmed close to his skull — was snowy white. His jowls sagged some, an accompaniment to his massive girth. Formsby guessed that he would tip the scales at better than three hundred pounds. His tailors had much to work with, but performed a credible job. The man wore a summer-weight wool worth a thousand U.S. dollars. He also wore a constant half-smile, as if the circumstances he found himself in bordered on the humorous.

He was not in an amusing business. Herr Ernst Muenster was an arms dealer, but to be honest, an arms dealer of the highest calibre and reputation. Formsby managed to keep the pun to himself.

When the waiter moved away, Formsby raised his glass, and his eyebrow, in a toast. “To the point?” Muenster sipped from his crystal glass, then ran his tongue lightly across his upper lip. “I appreciate a man who comes right to the point.”

“Very well.” Formsby withdrew the single sheet of yellow notepaper from his inside breast pocket and passed it across the table.

The German scanned it, his eyes hesitating over a couple of the entries. He nodded. “It can be done.”

“I am encouraged.”

“Delivery included?”

“Please.”

“And End-User Certificates?”

Formsby shrugged. “Quite up to you, I’m sure.” Muenster nodded. “Expensive, but manageable. The destination will have a bearing. Might I know where that will be?”

“To be determined at a later date, but certainly on the African continent.”

“Yes. I see.”

“How about a price?” Formsby asked.

“To be determined at a later date,” the German told him with a slight increase in the grin. “I will need to check on several items. Demand and supply, you understand?”

“I do understand. I will ring you the first of the week next.” Lacking a true name and a telephone number for Formsby, the German could not telephone Formsby.

“Thursday may be a better day,” Muenster said. “I will have to travel some.”

“Thursday it is,” Formsby agreed.

They finished their drinks, and Formsby got up and made his way back across the lobby and out the entrance. While the doorman whistled a cab forward, he reviewed the meeting and thought that it had gone well.

Soon, he would be armed again.

The brown and tan Nebraska plains stretched from one horizon to the other, seemingly endless at Wyatt’s altitude of fifteen thousand feet, about 12,500 feet AGL — above ground level — at Ainsworth. A few blue dots that were the remains of lakes in July were scattered about. Fifty miles ahead was the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

“Trees seem to be in short supply,” Barr told him over the radio.

“We don’t have to build a homestead.”

Cliff Jordan broke in, “Tally ho, there we go. Eleven o’clock.”

Wyatt saw the airfield just as Jordan reported it. The long, straight runways broke up the terrain.

“My God!” Barr said. “What’s that doing here?” Turning slightly left to align himself with the airport, Wyatt touched the transmit button and said, “It was a bomber training base during War Two, Bucky.”

“Well, it was a big son of a bitch.”

The concrete runways were wide enough that small aircraft could take off crosswise. Each of the three runways looked to be about ten thousand feet long. Spaced along the north side of the field was a row of massive hangars, their corrugated roofs streaky with rust and dirt. From two miles away, it looked deserted.

Jordan clicked on, “Can you imagine that place with B-17s, B-25s, and B-36s lining the aprons?”

“Yeah, Cliff, I sure as hell can,” Barr said, his voice a little awed. He had a soft spot for 1940’s era warbirds.

Wyatt took them down to five thousand feet and made a pass down the northern runway so they could check conditions. One corner of one hangar, near the dilapidated tower, contained a local flight service. A couple Aeronicas, a Mooney, a Cessna light-twin, and a Beechcraft were parked in a row out in front. In the middle of all that concrete, they looked like exquisite miniatures. A wind sock high on the hangar hung limp. As the three Phantoms shot down the runway in formation, seven or eight figures abruptly burst out of the flight service and peered up at them.

The runways appeared to be in good repair, though clumps of weeds grew in the cracks between slabs. Some of the outer edges had crumbled, but it was nothing worrisome. There were no painted centre-lines.

Wyatt banked left to circle around and begin his approach. By the time they reached the eastern end of the approach leg, the other three Phantoms appeared from the southwest. Wyatt’s flight of F-4Es had passed them up a hundred miles back. The C-130 tanker was much farther behind, making the trip at a cruise speed of 330 knots compared to the 550 the Phantoms had been averaging.

Gettman’s voice came over the air. “Is that our home, Andy?”

“Sweet home,” Wyatt told him.

“You don’t suppose there’s someone in, say, L.A., who’d adopt me?” Gettman asked.

“You’ve been kicked out of every home you’ve been in,” Barr said. “Remember last night?”

Norm Hackley cut in, “The chart says there’s no airport operations.”

“True,” Wyatt said. “The flight service has a base radio, if you feel like you need to talk to someone.”

Wyatt retarded his throttles, dropped his landing gear, and set forty degrees of flap. The Phantom floated in, trailed closely by its identical sisters. The tires squealed as they touched down on hot pavement. He had completed his rundown and turned right onto the taxi strip as Hackley’s flight of three passed overhead behind them, performing their own examinations of the airstrip.

The flight had taken less than two hours, though they had lost an hour crossing the time zone.

Rolling down the taxiway, Wyatt raised the canopy. After the dry heat of Arizona, the humidity here was like a slap in the face with a barber’s hot towel. Immediately, the sweat popped on his forehead. The chalky white concrete reflected the sun, and the stillness trapped the superheated air.

Hangars Four and Five had been leased by Noble Enterprises. The structures were tall, built to allow clearance for the vertical stabilizers of now-antique bombers. Weeds as high as six feet crowded against the sidewalls. Faded, barely legible numbers on the front comers identified the two for which he was looking. Wyatt toed the left brake and turned toward Five just as the giant doors on the hangar began to rumble open.

Thirty yards from the building, Wyatt stopped, set the brakes, and killed the engines. He was disconnected from his electrical and environmental systems by the time Barr and Jordan parked next to him in a neat row. Wyatt stood up in the cockpit, leaned forward against the windscreen, and looked around.

Half a mile away, down at the flight service, people were piling into two pickup trucks. They just had to come visiting the tourists.

Behind him, the engines of Hackley’s flight lost their high pitch as the landing aircraft whistled by.

Ahead of him, five men stood grinning at him in the open doors of the hangar. Behind them, parked in the cool-looking depths, was a Cessna Citation business jet and a Lockheed C-130 Hercules. The Citation was painted the colour of cream and the Hercules was in pristine plain aluminium, and both carried the thin blue fuselage stripe which was the signature of Aeroconsultants, Inc.

But the red-trimmed logos on the tails identified them as property of Noble Enterprises.

Three

Ace had a white amulet in the middle of his chest and a white circle of fur around one yellow eye, but was otherwise a solid smoke grey. He was about three feet long, from his nose to the tip of his broken tail, and after a round of betting by the technicians, had been weighed in at nineteen pounds. He had wandered into the shop area one morning, a month after Aero-consultants opened its doors for business, and had hung around since then, four years now. He liked to sit on top of things (tool chests, airplanes, the computer terminal in Kramer’s office) and survey his world. Ace was not big on affection. About the only one who was allowed to pet him was Janice Kramer. Anyone, however, could feed him, and Ace went through cans of 9-Lives in lionish fashion. His food bill was a major draw on petty cash.

After his lunch on Thursday, Ace stretched out on the desk next to the computer terminal and cleaned himself up while Jan Kramer instructed the machine to print out the monthly statements. When he was done with his bath, Ace laid his chin on the telephone and went to sleep. Every once in a while, she reached over and ran her fingers through his thick coat.

Liz Jordan, Cliff Jordan’s wife and the company’s secretary/receptionist/bookkeeper, normally ran the billings, but Kramer liked to operate the computer now and then. In fact, only Kramer, Andy Wyatt, and Bucky Barr could access certain of the data files stored on the hard disk. Anyone trying to get into the files without the proper access codes would only find gibberish when they got there. The files were programmed to self-destruct at the first hint of unauthorized entry.

Kramer had been with the company from just before the beginning. Freshly out of work and frantically near the end of her savings, she had been submitting resumes to almost anything that appeared in the paper, even the skimpy, blind ads. She had been highly sceptical when one of those submissions brought her a phone call. One of the strange things about the interview with Andy Wyatt was that she had not gone to him. He had flown to Seattle and interviewed her in the lounge at Sea-Tac Airport at five in the afternoon.

He was a very presentable man in a good suit and conservative tie, with a few hard edges to him, and a no-nonsense, let’s-not-waste-time approach.

Kramer had worn her best skirted business suit — a creamy beige — with a green silk blouse that complemented her deep green eyes and contrasted nicely with her heavy, dark red hair. The suit dampened some of the more daring curves of her figure and gave her a professional appearance, she thought. She was not yet desperate enough for a job to use her femininity as a drawing card.

However, as far as she could tell, Wyatt did not even notice. Half the time, he was turned sideways to her, watching the air traffic on the runways and apparently only partially interested in the interview, though his questions were sharply directed.

He went right to the first, hurtful point. “You got fired from Boeing?”

“Along with many others, Mr. Wyatt. There was a major cutback in the division.”

He tapped her resume. “This says you got your law degree from UCLA. Third in your class?”

“That’s correct. If you feel it’s necessary, I can get the transcripts for you.”

“You tell many lies?”

“What! Of course not.”

“Then I don’t need the transcripts, do I?”

“Oh. No, you don’t.”

“Can you tell a lie if you need to?”

She had to think about that one. This was not an interview like any she had ever read about or experienced. “I don’t know. Are you talking about legal matters?”

“If the security of your nation were involved?”

“That’s what Fawn Hall thought.”

“If Baghdad was going to poison Seattle’s water supply?”

She hesitated once again. “I suppose I could, if the rationales were justifiable.”

“You’re up-to-date on aviation law?”

“Very much so.”

“How about office administration?”

“I think I could handle that. I worked in my father’s accounting office through high school and while I was attending college at the University of Washington.”

“And you’re divorced?” Wyatt asked, his blue eyes holding hers, being just a little obtrusive.

That was not on her resume. Wyatt had run some background checks on her before showing up. That indicated he was more thorough than her first impression had suggested.

“I don’t know what bearing that has on…”

“This position would require that you move to a new city, Miss Kramer. It’s easier for a single person.”

“The divorce was finalized over two years ago.”

“You mind if I call you Janice?”

“I go by Jan.”

“And you don’t object to moving?” He went back to staring at the airplanes.

“Probably not,” she said. “Mr. Wyatt, your ad simply asked for, ‘Attorney, aviation law and contracts.’ I don’t know anything about your company. For instance, for starters, where is it located?”

Wyatt turned his head and grinned at her. “It isn’t. It’s not even formed yet, which is the first reason I need a lawyer. But I’m leaning toward Albuquerque as the base of operations at the moment. Do you like Albuquerque?”

“I’ve never been there.”

No wonder it was a blind ad. The whole thing was beginning to sound like a fly-by-night scheme. Without really meaning to do it, Kramer started to reverse the procedure of the interview. She became the interviewer. “What kind of business are you starting, Mr. Wyatt?”

“We’ll be consulting professionals in aviation matters,” he said. “Anything from efficiency studies to route management to federal aviation applications to customizing and rebuilding very sophisticated aircraft for clients.”

“And you have the background for that?”

Again, she got the half-grin, as if he was amused at the course of the conversation. “I just got out of the Air Force, Miss Kramer.”

“You were a pilot?”

“Of just about every aircraft type they have.”

“And you retired?”

“No. I left a couple years early.”

And gave up his pension? No way. He was probably kicked out of the service. She was becoming very skittish. “Mr. Wyatt, I’m not sure I’m the one…”

“You haven’t asked about salary.”

“All right. What salary are you offering?”

“We’d start you at seventy thousand.”

Well, now.

“If it works out for you, and for us, we’ll boost that steadily and throw in stock bonuses and stock options.”

“You say ‘us’, Mr. Wyatt.”

“There are some friends of mine who will be joining the company.”

It sounded a little more interesting to Kramer, being in on the start-up of a new enterprise. Still, there were no guarantees.

“You seem assured that this venture will be successful,” she said.

“It will be.” He spoke with absolute confidence. “I already have four contracts lined up. Of course, my attorney will have to check them over before I sign them.”

“It sounds like a fair opportunity,” she said, attempting to be nice, “but I guess I’m also looking for some degree of security.”

His grin widened. “Well, Jan. At the moment, I could guarantee your salary for a couple hundred years. I’ve got ten million in capitalization.”

“My God! Where do you get money like that?”

“That’s one of those little secrets we have to rationalize. Think of it as Seattle’s water supply.”

Shady. All she could think was that this was on the shady side.

“I don’t know about you,” he said while looking at his watch, “but your questions have convinced me. Do you want to go to dinner with a new boss?”

“You’re offering me the job?”

“If you could pack tonight, you can fly to Albuquerque with me in the morning.”

The whole thing was preposterous, of course. She couldn’t just fly away to some vaporous destination with a stranger she had just met.

But she did.

And her father was furious with her.

In four years, Andy Wyatt had never been bossy. And after four years, Janice Kramer was vice president, treasurer, and general manager of the company and making $100,000 plus bonuses annually. She did not get the really impressive bonuses some of the others did, but then she did not take the same risks they did. Wyatt appreciated her, though. He hated administrative details and left all of the day-to-day decisioning and the standard contracting to her. Only on general policy questions and special contracts did she get together with Wyatt and Barr and argue the merits. She had learned to love and trust both of them. She thought the feelings were reciprocal, though Wyatt wasn’t the effusive type, and Bucky Barr was so outgoing he loved everyone.

And her relationship with Wyatt had taken a course with more curves in it than the Rio Grande. She wasn’t quite certain how she had allowed herself to become so involved — enthralled? — with a man whose attention was so easily diverted by high risk.

The phone rang and Liz Jordan answered it, then swivelled her chair toward her, “Andy’s on Line One, Jan.”

“Thanks.” Gently moving Ace’s massive head from the telephone console, she picked up the receiver. “Are you on-site?”

Whenever this kind of operation was under way, they used extreme caution on the telephone.

“On site and schedule,” Wyatt told her.

“Good.”

“Have you heard from Neil?”

“He called last night,” she said. “He made the first contact, even though it interfered with a fabulous dinner he had planned.”

“How did it go?”

“The dinner? He didn’t say.”

“No, damn it.”

“The contact looks promising. He thinks it will pan out, but he won’t know for certain until the end of next week.”

“All right, then. We may put this together yet.”

“You didn’t have problems in Arizona?” she asked.

“Only a good one. We were able to obtain the full complement of equipment. If we’re going to stay on schedule, I need a couple more bodies.”

Of Aeroconsultants’ thirty-eight employees, only sixteen, including herself, had been cleared by Wyatt and Barr for special contracts. “You’ve used them up, Andy. All we’ve got left is Fox, and I’ve got him out in Riyadh.”

“I know. What do you think about bringing in Harris and Gering?”

Lefty Harris and Amie Gering were engine techs. “You’ve got power plant problems?”

“We’re going to rebuild them all, but no, not real problems. They can handle some of the other chores, like everyone else is doing. Painting, for one.”

“How long would you need them?” she asked, feeling suddenly protective of her schedule. “I’ve already got a backlog of projects for them here.”

“A week.”

“Andy.”

“Ten days, maybe.”

“You think they’re ready for this?”

“They won’t know the whole operation. I’ll meet them in Lincoln, first, and work them through it.”

“Okay,” she said with some misgivings.

Jan Kramer did not like risking her whole future on unexpected developments.

Nelson Buckingham Barr had been married once, while he was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Raylene Delehanty Barr was a statuesque blonde who stood four inches taller than Barr. Her physique had matched the strict requirements for showgirls at the Tropicana, and Barr had thought at the time that everything about her was flawless. It was not the first time he had been wrong, but it was the most expensive time. The excitement went out of the marriage in about thirty days, and the passion followed a couple months after that. It had cost him a $200,000 settlement to get unmarried.

The episode still stung, whenever he thought about it. Despite his outward demeanour, Barr was not careless with money. He was not materially acquisitive. Back in Albuquerque, he owned a small two-bedroom condominium, an eight-year-old Ferrari 308GT, and an antique Bell Model 47 helicopter that dated from the Korean War. He and Wyatt shared ownership of a restored P-40 Warhawk.

Since his twenty-fifth birthday, when he started receiving $250,000 a year from the trust set up by his father, he had learned that he could get along pretty well on his Air Force pay. He had set up a budget then that he still followed today. A large chunk of the trust payment was set aside to meet taxes, five or six thousand dollars was dumped into his checking account for play purposes, and the balance was invested. Barr’s stock, bond, money market, and Certificate of Deposit portfolio was currently valued at close to seven million. He owned fifteen per cent of Aeroconsultants, Inc., and was listed on the private corporation’s paperwork as vice president and secretary. The position paid him $100,000 a year, plus an occasional bonus. Sometimes the bonuses matched the salary, but every time he received one, he doled out chunks of it to the Red Cross, the American Heart Association, AIDS research, and/or his favourite educational foundation.

Mostly, what he did for his salary was fly, which was his first and true love.

He also talked about flying a lot when he and his friends gathered around a table.

The Rancher’s Cafe and Lounge was going to be their kitchen for the next few weeks, and the whole group arrived there at eight o’clock in the evening, parking the three Jeep Wagoneers rented in Lincoln at the curb. It was a nice small-town establishment. Formica-topped tables and new linoleum on the floor. Big glass windows gave them a view of the main drag and the half-dozen cars and pickups cruising it. Barr had high hopes for the food.

There were ten diners in the place when they arrived, and the seventeen-year-old waitress behind the counter straightened up to her maximum of five-five when the thirteen men trooped through the door.

Wyatt crossed the room directly to her. “Is the manager around?”

“Yes, sir. The owner. I’ll get him.”

She turned and went to the doorway behind her, calling, “Dad!”

The man came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. He was in his forties, dressed in an apron.

“Mr. Jorgenson?”

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“My name’s Cowan. I’m with Noble Enterprises.”

Which was obvious, Barr thought. All of them wore either shirts or jackets with the company name tastefully displayed. It was part of the act. Class act, he thought, since he had designed the logos and the clothing.

“I understand you prepare the best food in town, Mr. Jorgenson.”

“We are proud of our reputation,” the man agreed.

“I tell you what,” Wyatt said, digging a roll of bills out of his pocket and beginning to peel them off. “We’re going to be hanging around for a few weeks. We’ll need breakfast every morning and dinner every night. I’d like to have you make up lunch boxes daily. If I give you five thousand dollars now, would you just run a tab for me?”

The economy of Ainsworth just took a giant leap, and it showed in Jorgenson’s face. “I’d be happy to do that, Mr. Cowan.”

“You just let me know when the tab catches up with the deposit. Let’s start off with a case of Budweiser.”

“I’ll get the beer, Julie, while you put four tables together.”

Barr went over and helped Julie shift tables and chairs around in a back corner, then plopped himself down. Julie was a quiet girl, but developing quite nicely. She seemed uncomfortable with Barr’s innocuous questions. When Barr looked up at Wyatt, the boss gave him a stem look.

The others gathered around the tables, many of them wiping away the sweat of the day, preparing for the air-conditioning of the cafe. Dennis Maal sat next to Barr. He was a company pilot, too, the one who had flown the C-130 in the day before. Next to him was Winfield Potter, the company’s best technician. He was also a rated pilot and had flown the Citation. The other specialists in ordnance, electronics, and jet engines were Ben Borman, Sam Vrdla, and Henry Cavanaugh.

“Where’s Lucas?” Barr asked, realizing they were missing Littlefield, their airframe technician.

Potter responded. “I expect him late tonight. I sent him to Lincoln to rent a ten thousand-gallon tanker and buy a few buckets of JP-4.”

Jorgenson started placing bottles of Bud around the table. Barr downed his in three gulps. “Mr. Jorgenson, I’m ready for another.”

The man smiled happily. “Be right back. And call me Max, please.”

Hackley asked, “Hey, Andy, were there enough motel rooms in this burg for us?”

“Winnie took care of it,” Wyatt said.

“Got us fourteen rooms at the Sandy Inn,” Potter said. “Nothing but the best. And I was damned lucky. We’re at the height of the tourist season.”

“You’re shittin’ us,” Demion said. “What tourists?”

Potter whipped his thumb toward the east. “Hey, if you’re over thataway, and you want to go thisaway, you got to go through Ainsworth.”

“What’s over thisaway?” Barr pointed toward the west.

“Black Hills. Mount Rushmore. You wanta see where the cavalry cut down Chief Crazy Horse, you got to go to Fort Robinson. That’s over west of Chadron.”

“Chadron.”

“Bucky, there’s a bunch of history in this part of the country.”

“I think I’d rather read about it, or fly over it,” Barr told him.

Julie got their orders in sequence, her eyes going wide at the quantity in some cases. Barr gave her his best, most polite smile and ordered two chicken-fried steaks.

They lived up to his expectations.

Major Ahmed al-Qati had a fetish about cleanliness, perhaps because he recalled his Bedouin youth as one of dirt and sand. He bathed daily or more often, and he dressed himself in a fresh khaki uniform each morning. Though his closet contained traditional Arabic garb, he was most comfortable in a short-sleeved uniform shirt and knife-edge creased slacks bloused into combat boots in the paratrooper fashion.

In his mid-fifties, al-Qati was lean and as hard as the desert from which he had emerged. His forearms below his shirt sleeves and his face were burned into bronze from the sun. He was meticulous about the trim of his dark hair — which was tightly curled and contained a bald spot at the back of his head — and the smoothness of his cheeks. His eyes were almost black, peering through a permanent squint. The lines of his face deepened with each passing year, spreading outward from his eyes and vertically down his cheeks from the base of his wide and proudly humped nose.

Al-Qati commanded a motorized infantry battalion — including a company of special forces soldiers, and he commanded it well. He had learned the finer points of his trade as a foreign officer visiting the Ranger training centre at Fort Benning, Georgia, thirty years before. The foundation of that education as a professional soldier had instilled in him a discipline that he was certain could be found nowhere else in the Libyan military.

He was aware that most of the men in his command did not like him. They respected him, however, and that was far better. His men worked harder, drilled more frequently, and engaged in realistic training exercises on an accelerated schedule. They did not like him, no, but they took pride in themselves, and al-Qati was certain that many would die for him if called upon to do so. The men in his companies and platoons were qualified as parachutists, as airborne assault infantry, and as members of a rapid deployment force. The majority were cross-trained in at least two combat specialties.

The four hundred soldiers in his battalion had more morale, more esprit de corps, than could be found in the balance of the Libyan armed forces. Of that, al-Qati was certain. He knew that other commanders were jealous of him, and though he offered advice when asked, it was never acted upon. Ahmed al-Qati considered most of his brothers in the officer corps to be elitist and lazy, and that kind of leadership manifested itself in sloppy, mistake-prone combat units.

The Leader, naturally, recognized al-Qati’s abilities, for al-Qati was often called upon to deliver lectures at various military workshops.

Which was why, he assumed, he was now at the Tripoli barracks, ordered away from his battalion which was garrisoned at El Bardi, adjacent to the Egyptian border on the Mediterranean Sea.

Though he was irritated at his sudden recall, al-Qati did not reveal it as he attended the briefing on the morning after his return to Tripoli. The briefing was held in a cramped conference room on the first floor of the wood-sheathed and air-conditioned administration building and was attended by only al-Qati and a uniformed air force lieutenant. The lieutenant did not provide his name, and al-Qati did not ask for it.

“I am to give you an overview of an aircraft, Major.”

Al-Qati did not know why, but he said, “Then let us get on with it, Lieutenant.”

The lieutenant turned down the lights in the room and switched on a projector. On the large wall screen appeared the silver and grey form of a late-model airplane that had been built in the former Soviet Union. “This is the Sukhoi Su-24 fighter bomber.”

Al-Qati had seen it before.

Another slide flashed on the screen. It was a drawing of the airplane with cutaway sections allowing internal views. Lines and arrows and crisp Arabic lettering identified various parts of the anatomy. In many cases, where the Arabic was insufficient for the technology involved, the original Russian words were utilized.

“The NATO forces have given the Su-24 the name Fencer.”

Al-Qati knew that also. He was already bored.

“The aircraft matches the American FB-111A in capability. It is a two-seat, all-weather craft that can fly at speeds of Mach 1.2. It is extremely accurate, Major, delivering its ordnance within fifty-five meters of the target. The D model, with which I understand you will be concerned, was put into production in 1983.”

The lieutenant seemed to know more about al-Qati’s assignment status than he did, and that irritated him further.

“The D model has been enhanced with an in-flight refuelling system obtained from the French. It carries one thirty-millimetre, six-barrel cannon and up to eleven thousand kilograms of ground attack weapons. These can range from heavy, free-dropped ordnance to air-to-ground AS-7 high-explosive missiles, laser-guided AS-10 missiles, and AS-14 missiles. The most advanced electronics are used for navigation and attack radar. There is also terrain avoidance radar employed. Targeting methods can be either laser rangefinder or marked target seeker.”

Most of it was gibberish to al-Qati. He was more concerned with motorized infantry tactics and the capabilities of his armoured cars and personnel carriers.

The lieutenant moved to the front of the room, next to the screen, and with a long metal pointer, began to take al-Qati on a sight-seeing trip of the cutaway drawing. To familiarize al-Qati with the nomenclature, he identified everything in the drawing, from flaps to sensors to chaff dispensers.

“Do you have any questions at this point?”

“No, Lieutenant. I have no questions.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Do I have to fly in this bloody thing?”

“I do not believe so.”

“Then I know all that I have ever wanted to know.”

With a sceptical look on his face, the lieutenant said, “Then you are to report to Colonel Ghazi.”

Al-Qati did not bother thanking his instructor. He got up, left the conference room, and went to wait in the anteroom to Ghazi’s office. After twenty minutes, a man al-Qati did not know emerged from the office, and the male secretary told al-Qati that he could enter.

For the man who commanded Libyan ground forces, the colonel did not possess a large office. He had made it comfortable, though, with wool carpeting, several antique office furnishings reupholstered in new grey leather, and pastoral paintings hung on the panelled walls. The paintings focused on Neva River scenes outside of Leningrad where Ghazi had once been trained by the Soviets.

Ghazi got up and came around the desk to give al-Qati a hug. He was bearish in appearance, a typical Arab prototype stuffed with Western foods, which he adored. His body was square and broad, his face the same. He had heavy dark eyebrows shading dark caverns for eyes.

“Ahmed al-Qati, you appear fit.”

“Thank you, Colonel. I have been active. And you are well?”

Ghazi smiled, “Very well. How is El Bardi?”

“It still awaits me. I have an important exercise under way.”

The colonel circled the big desk back to his chair. “I know. I am afraid, however, that it must fall to your deputy. Please, Ahmed, sit.”

Al-Qati sat in one of the two leather straight chairs. This meeting with his superior was not starting well. Al-Qati had never left any operation incomplete before.

Ghazi was, however, his superior, and al-Qati would not be allowed many negotiating points.

“You have had the briefing on the Sukhoi bomber?”

“Yes. It seems to me to be well within the province of the air force.”

The colonel was not interested in al-Qati’s opinion. “Until a few years ago, the Su-24 was not deployed outside the Soviet Union. The powers-that-be, or were, at Red Army headquarters did not want to risk making the secret electronics accessible to outsiders.”

Al-Qati nodded. He knew what was coming.

“You know, of course, that twelve of these fine fighter bombers have been provided to our air force?” “I know this, Colonel.”

“And with the demise of the Soviet Union, the bombers have become a permanent part of our inventory?”

He nodded again.

“And do you also know that the bombers are assigned to Colonel Ibrahim Ramad?”

“That I did not know,” al-Qati said.

“Do you know Ramad?”

“I know him, Colonel.”

“He is a worthless bastard.”

Al-Qati smiled for the first time in two days. “That is an optimistic assessment of his character.”

Ghazi inclined his head in agreement. “The Leader felt it imperative that we monitor Ramad’s program, as well as integrate it with current ground forces strategies. You are to be the liaison between Ramad’s project and my office.”

This was not likely to be a fruitful assignment.

“What is the nature of this project?” al-Qati asked.

“It is, of course, a bombing program. What we want, what Ramad suggests, is that his bombers could be utilized in close infantry support. You are to evaluate the methodology, make any suggestions you like, and report the results to me.”

“And I am to watch Ramad?”

“Of course, but that is between you and me.”

There was something to be gained here, al-Qati thought. “It would be quite difficult, Colonel.”

The commander frowned. “Why is that?”

“Ramad outranks me. I should have more stature.” The frown evolved into a lopsided grin. “You are blackmailing me, Ahmed al-Qati.”

“Not at all, Colonel. Certainly, I am due.”

The colonel nodded slowly. “Very well. I will talk to the Leader about it.”

Despite the promise of a long-delayed promotion, al-Qati was still extremely disappointed. He did not want to be stuck in the middle of some hot, barren airfield with an aggressive and ambitious bomber commander. He wanted to be back on the beaches of the Mediterranean, where he had established his headquarters. He wanted to be involved in the action and movement of his BMPs and BMVDs as they wheeled across the desert, securing the border from Egyptian invasion. Which was not going to happen, anyway.

But it was well to be prepared.

Al-Qati believed in preparation.

He also believed in the promising young lady he had met in Tobruk two months before.

Martin Church hit his intercom button and said, “Okay, Sally. Send him in.”

Church was Deputy Director for Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had fifteen years of field experience backing him up, experience that had thinned his brown hair and etched deep wrinkles across his forehead and at the outer edges of his nose. His face was lightly scarred from acne.

In addition to holding an excellent reputation for his field work, Church was a competent administrator. He had a multi-tracked mind capable of following dozens of current operations. He synthesized concepts well and kept the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and the Executive Director abreast of developing operations and shifting intelligence estimates. He also attempted to keep his office out of media trouble, which was a primary responsibility of the DDO’s office. Church would never be faulted for his dedication to country and duty.

George Embry entered the office through the wide door and plopped in a chair on the other side of the desk. Protocol was not one of Embry’s major priorities. Embry, who ran the North African Division, and who usually made some jealous comment about the DDO’s view of the Virginia countryside, skipped the comment today.

“You look pissed, George.”

“I am pissed.”

“Do I get to know about it?”

“Marianne Cummings?” Embry said.

Church had to think for five seconds. “We’ve got her undercover somewhere. On the Med.”

“Right, in Tobruk. She’s been there seven weeks, and she just about had Ahmed al-Qati roped in.”

“Okay. I’ve got it placed.”

“Tripoli just recalled al-Qati.”

“Goddamn it!” Church exclaimed.

“I already said that myself, Marty. Now we have to start all over, and we have to convince her to seduce someone else.”

Four

After a group briefing in the morning — which was more of a conference than a briefing since everyone got a word or two in — Wyatt fired up the Citation and flew to Lincoln, Nebraska. They were using the Cessna as their air taxi. Popping into Lincoln with a C-130 or an F-4 was guaranteed to attract unwanted attention.

Before starting his approach to the airport, he made a wide circle of the city. The grid of the streets delineated blocks of heavy foliage; elms and shrubbery were profuse, fed by the high humidity. It was a pretty city in the summer, just as he remembered from his four years at the university. In midsummer, the plots of grass had the barest tinge of yellow. The State Capitol dominated the central part of the city, and traffic was heavy on the east-west O street which passed by the university’s main campus.

Lincoln, and to the east, Omaha, had been wonders of metropolitan sophistication to Wyatt at one time. Raised on a farm close to Norfolk, in the north-eastern part of the state, he had come to the university naive, and he had left it still naive, but with a degree in engineering and an Air Force ROTC commission.

His aerial tour of the city brought back memories of his parents. They had died when a tornado twisted then-farmhouse from its foundation in 1972, the year of his last tour in Vietnam. By then, he had been committed to a career in the Air Force, and he had willingly turned over his interest in the 320-acre farm to his sister and her then-new husband. In the intervening years, he had occasionally considered how much simpler his life would have been if he had just gone back to Norfolk.

As he called air control for landing permission, Wyatt thought that there were only two things wrong with Lincoln, Nebraska. The hot, sticky summers and long, frigid winters were one. He much preferred the dry heat of New Mexico at five thousand feet of altitude. Secondly, they needed a professional football team. The Kansas City Chiefs were too far away, and in another state, to generate widespread loyalty, and without their own pro team to diffuse fan interest, the fans achieved near mania over Big Red. Wyatt didn’t think it was healthy. He was biased, of course. He had tried out for the football team as a freshman and didn’t make the first cut.

He parked the airplane in the general aviation section and ordered the tanks topped off, then crossed the blistering tarmac to the waiting room and pulled open the glass door. A frigid dollop of refrigerated air smacked him in the face.

After getting a Coke from the machine, Wyatt went to the public telephone hanging on the wall and used his secondary credit card number — he never saw the bills, but they always got paid — to call Washington.

He reached the recording he expected: “No changes at this time.”

Hanging up, he carried his Coke to one of the couches and sprawled out on it to wait for Gering and Harris.

The girl behind the counter, restocking aviator paraphernalia in the glass case, glanced surreptitiously his way from time to time, but Wyatt only smiled at her. In his go-to-hell-or-bust days, he’d have been leaning on this side of the counter in two seconds. There had been a lot of such adventures, and misadventures, in his early hot-shit pilot years. Like Barr, he had been married once, but Tracey had found solace in a bottle and another pilot while Wyatt had been detached from Homestead Air Force Base for special duty in Grenada. The divorce wasn’t good for his career; the Air Force preferred stable families, at least superficially stable.

He had finished his Coke by the time he saw the United 737 touching down, then taxiing toward the commercial terminal. Forty minutes later, Gering and Harris tumbled out of a taxi and into the waiting room, hauling overnight bags.

“Jesus, boss!” Gering said. “I thought it was hot in Albuquerque.”

Arnie Gering was twenty-seven years old, fair-haired, and red-skinned. He had prominent freckles on his cheeks. He had graduated with high grades from several specialized aviation schools, and he was a wiz with hand tools, machine tools, and diagnostic electronics. He was overtly ambitious, and he wasn’t afraid to ask Jan Kramer for raises in his pay, which he did regularly.

Wyatt pointed to one of the air-conditioning outlets. “Enjoy it while you can, Arnie. It gets warmer at the next stop. Why so sour, Lefty?”

“I hate flying commercial,” Harris said. “Don’t like leavin’ the drivin’ to somebody I don’t know.”

Harris was close to fifty, grey-haired, and with a grey tinge to his skin. He too was a master engine mechanic, but he had been around airplanes so long that he was proficient, though not certified, in a number of other specialties.

“Come on over here, guys,” Wyatt said, leading them to a group of chairs stuck in the corner.

They sat down, leaning toward each other, and Wyatt asked, “What did Jan tell you?”

“Just to get on the airplane,” Harris said. “That you’d give us the word once we got here.”

“Here’s the word,” Wyatt said. “Mum.”

“Mum?” Gering asked.

“That’s right. What we’ve got here is a classified project, and if you don’t think you can keep it to yourselves — I mean, Amie, not even your girlfriend, and Lefty, not your wife, we’ll get you a return plane ticket.”

The two of them knew, of course that some of Aeroconsultants’ pilots and technicians disappeared sporadically to resurface days or weeks later with no explanations. Wyatt wasn’t about to enumerate or amplify on any of the company’s history with secret projects.

Harris asked, “Is it illegal, Andy?”

“Get right to the point, don’t you, Lefty? Let’s just say that anything you’ll be doing is not illegal. You might, however, see some things that skirt the boundaries in a civilian sense. I won’t elaborate beyond that.”

“Who are we working for?” Gering asked.

“You don’t want to even speculate about that, Arnie. Not with anyone.”

“Are some of the other guys working on this?” Harris asked.

“Yes. And we work strictly on a need-to-know basis. Some people will know more than you, and they know less than others. But no one talks about it.”

“I don’t suppose there’s some kind of overtime pay involved?” Gering asked.

Wyatt grinned at him. “We’re looking at about four weeks work, Amie, but I’ll only need the two of you for around ten or twelve days. For that, you get a flat two thousand dollar bonus, and you can’t talk about that, either, because people might want to know how you earned it.”

“I’m in,” Gering said.

“This wouldn’t be considered hazardous duty pay, would it?” Harris asked. He had served in Vietnam as a Marine.

“No, Lefty. Just the same risks you take working around volatile fuels and fluids normally. We take the same precautions as we ever do.”

“Well, I’ve got to call my wife and tell her something.”

“The cover story we’re using is the salvage and rebuild of a corporate jet that belly-landed in North Dakota. We’re not close to telephones.”

“I’d better call Jackie, then,” Gering said. “She’d be too happy to think I ran off with some new chick. Come to think of it, she’ll probably worry about the farmer’s daughter. They have farms in North Dakota, Andy?”

“A few. But tell her the closest one is seventy miles away.”

“That’ll do it.”

Las Vegas looked dusty and washed-out under the midday sun; the glare was subdued, but it always was from fifteen thousand feet.

Barr made a wide, left-hand circle of the city, losing altitude and coming back to the east. Ahead of them, Lake Mead was a shimmering mirror dropped on the beige earth.

Cliff Jordan was in the co-pilot’s seat. He was a compact man at five-eight, with steady hazel eyes and a ruddy complexion marred by a three-inch scar on his left cheek. There were more scars on his left arm and torso, the result of pancaking his F-14 Tomcat onto the deck of the America. The crash occurred after a sortie over Baghdad when he had taken some triple-A hits in the aft end of the plane. Until he slammed the fighter into the arresting cable, he didn’t know the landing hook had been damaged. The Tomcat hit the wire, hesitated, then broke free, slewing sideways, collapsing the landing gear, and then rolling up on its left wing. The plane didn’t go over the side of the carrier, but it tore up Jordan and his backseater.

After the Iraqi war, and as the Navy downsized, Lieutenant Commander Jordan opted for an early retirement arranged by some shadowy people who knew Andy Wyatt.

Barr heard himself called on the radio. “Lockheed two-nine, you have a Continental seven-six-seven coming out of McCarran. Hold your present altitude for one minute and give him about five thousand.”

“Roger, Nellis. Two-nine copies,” Jordan said as Barr eased the throttles forward.

Barr leaned forward to peer downward through the windscreen. He found the Boeing 767 as it cleared the outer markers of the civilian airport. As he continued his turn, the passenger liner passed beneath.

“Lockheed two-nine, you are cleared for descent and landing.”

“Two-nine, Nellis. Roger.”

Barr scanned the instruments, then turned his head and looked back at the flight engineer’s station and checked the readouts there.

“Hey, Cliff, we forgot the engineer.”

“Little late to worry about it, don’t you think?”

“Problem with our air force, it’s not fully staffed.”

“I agree. The Navy was so much more efficient.”

“More efficient than what?”

“Than Congress, for one.”

“You got a point.”

Barr kept backing off the throttles and losing altitude. The C-130 came around to a northerly heading and he levelled the wings.

“Think we ought to use the landing gear, Cliff?” Barr asked.

“I’m all for it. Maybe some flaps, too.”

“If you insist, and whenever you’re ready.”

Jordan deployed the gear and flaps, and Barr felt the big transport bounce upward with the added lift. He drained off more power with the throttle levers.

The wide, straight runway of Nellis Air Force Base aligned itself with the C-130.

“Outer markers,” Jordan called off. “One-two-five AGL, two-eight-zero knots. You going to use the whole damned runway?”

“You want to do the flying?”

“Yes.”

“Tell them we’re down, and go to Ground Control instead.”

“We’re not down yet.”

“Details.”

A quarter-mile beyond the end of the runway, Ban-flared the C-130, idled the big turboprops, and settled easily onto the concrete. The main gear rumbled and vibrated through the fuselage.

“I’ll bet they don’t often see a Herc with decorative stripes putting down here,” Barr said.

“Let’s just hope they don’t go checking tail numbers, Bucky.”

Like the phony Noble Enterprises logo, the Hercules transport also carried a tail number that had arisen from someone’s imagination.

As the speed bled off, Jordan switched to the Ground Control frequency.

“Nellis Ground Control, Lockheed two-nine checking in.”

“Two-nine, Nellis. I’ve got your plan here. You’re not staying with us for long.”

“Roger that.”

“Ah, two-nine, take the second turnoff to the left, go right on the taxiway and straight to the end of the taxiway.”

“Two-nine, wilco,” Jordan said.

Barr eased in his brakes, and reversed the prop pitch to slow his forward speed, then turned off the runway.

Jordan shed his headset, unbuckled his harness, and crawled out of his seat.

“This chickenshit outfit even has Navy commanders doing loadmaster duties,” he said.

Barr grinned up at him. “How many loadmasters get the same pay?”

“There are compensations,” Jordan said, then went back and dropped down the ladder from the flight deck.

As Barr neared the end of the taxiway, he saw the ramp down indicator flash on as Jordan started to lower it. Ahead, off to one side, were two Jeeps with canvas-covered trailers. After he passed them, he toed in the left brake, goosed the starboard throttles, swung the transport around 180 degrees, then idled his way back to the Jeeps and set the brakes.

Both Jeeps, with one driver each, started their engines and drove out of his view toward the rear of the aircraft. He felt the slight jar as Jordan dropped the ramp the rest of the way to the ground.

The fuselage tilted a little as each of the Jeeps backed their trailers into the cargo bay, unhitched, and drove out again. Loading both trailers took less than four minutes, then the Jeeps departed.

On the intercom, Jordan told him, “Ramp’s coming up. I’ve still got to chain these babies down, but if you drive real slow, I can do it on the move.”

“Oh, Ainsworth, here we come,” Barr sang, “right back where we started from…”

“And don’t sing,” Jordan ordered.

Except for Ace the Wonder Cat, Janice Kramer was alone in the office. It was after ten o’clock, and outside the window, the lamps in the parking lot lit up only half-a-dozen cars, her Buick Riviera among them.

The hangar was locked up and darkened. The only light in the office spilled from the desk lamp under which Ace rested and from the screen of her computer.

Ace got up, turned end-for-end, flopped down again, and tucked his head under his forepaw.

Kramer finished her last paragraph and saved everything to disk.

“That, Ace, is a magnificent piece of writing. Creative writing.”

Ace didn’t say anything.

She picked up the phone and dialled the number of the Sandy Inn.

It rang only once.

“Wyatt.”

“Andy, are you hooked up?”

“Just a second, Jan.”

While she waited for him to connect the modem of his portable computer, she called up the communications program and selected the files she would send.

“Okay, darlin’.”

“Coming your way.”

She zipped the data off to Nebraska, then waited while he read it on the screen of his computer.

“Looks good,” he said. “You do wonderful things.”

“I can’t believe that I, a member in relatively good standing of the New Mexico Bar, wile away my nights creating illegal documents.”

“You’re not doing it,” Wyatt said. “Somebody else will. Somebody who’s probably also a member of the bar.”

“How about the roster?”

“It’s still the same. Go ahead and send it all to the number.”

“What if I’m ever asked to testify against you, Andy?”

“We’ll just have to get married.”

“You said you weren’t ever getting married again.”

“It’s better than jail,” he said.

But not much better, from his point of view, she knew. He was perfectly happy with their relationship, roaming when he wanted to roam, or had a contract to chase, and spending as much time in her condo as he did in his own. She had thought that it would work for her, also, but sneaky bits of doubt had been creeping into her mind in the last few months.

Maybe she wasn’t truly a ’90’s woman.

“When do I see you again?” she said.

“I’ll try to get back in the next couple of days.”

“I miss you.”

“Me, too.”

She hung up, then used the computer to dial the 202 area code number. When she had the connection, she began sending each of the files to the Washington computer.

There was a file for each man taking part in the operation. In addition to a passport photograph, the file provided a short biography of the man along with his vital statistics, address, phone, and occupation.

The photo and statistics were correct, but everything else was the product of her imagination.

The last file provided a detailed cover story, what the spooks called a legend. From all of the information, whoever was the expert in this sort of thing would develop the necessary documents: passports, credit cards, driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, purchase orders, aircraft paperwork, insurance coverage, and probably even matchbook covers that agreed with particular hometowns.

Kramer had done this ten or eleven times before, but never on such a scale. Usually, it was a team of two or three. She had the distinct impression that the larger the operation was, the greater were the odds of something going wrong.

This one didn’t feel good.

Somebody wasn’t coming back.

And she loved them all.

Especially Andy.

Formsby wore a pale blue Oxford broadcloth shirt of soft cotton, khaki slacks, and a khaki Safari jacket. His low-cut leather boots had cost him ninety pounds Sterling, but then his footwear was always expensive, handmade so that the left shoe or boot supported his ankle adequately.

He thought he was dressed appropriately for Rabat. Later he would prowl the marketplaces for souvenirs or perhaps even something useful. In the afternoon, he would stroll the waterfront, taking in the sights, and adding to his knowledge. He wished he had time to go to Casablanca, simply because he had never been there before.

If Formsby had a stated goal in life now, it was to go where he had never been before. At one time, the objective had been to fly anything and everything with a wing and a power plant. That was no longer to be, and he was fairly successful at erasing the desire from his mind.

His travel goals were well supported by his salary, and he was grateful for that. On top of which, his job did not interfere unduly with his life.

Today, he had two tasks.

He approached the first by sitting on the edge of his bed in his hotel room, picking up the telephone, and asking the operator to place a call for him.

Fifteen minutes ticked by before the connection was made. The telephone rang, and the operator told him in broken English that he might proceed.

“Hello?” the voice on the other end asked.

“Carrington-Smyth here.”

“Ah, yes. How are you?” Muenster asked.

“Quite well, thank you. I’m calling to see if the pieces have fallen into place.”

“Finally, yes. A couple of the pieces were difficult to find, but I have succeeded.”

“And the paperwork?”

“Is all but complete,” Muenster said.

“It is trustworthy?”

“To the highest scrutiny.”

“And the cost?”

“It will come to one-point-eight. American, of course.”

“Of course. However…” Formsby let his voice trail off.

“Ah,” the German laughed, “there is always a ‘however.’ Did you have another figure in mind?”

“I did indeed. My mind was firmly set at one-point-two.”

“That is, I am afraid, quite impossible.”

They haggled for a quarter hour before arriving at one-and-a-half million dollars. Muenster gave him a long number that Formsby recognized as a Swiss bank account number. He knew also that it would be only a receiving account, and the funds would be immediately transferred out of it, floating off to an account whose number was far more secret.

“Half-and-half,” Formsby said.

“That is agreeable. And the destination?”

“The location will be forwarded along with the first payment.”

“Excellent, Mr. Carrington-Smyth. It has been a pleasure.”

“Quite,” Formsby said and hung up.

He stood and straightened the hem of his jacket. Now, he would walk the bazaars in search of something useful.

Perhaps one hundred thousand litres of JP-4 petrol for jet engines.

And tanker trucks to haul it.

And someone to drive the trucks several thousand miles into the desert.

It was not an insurmountable problem.

He had solved similar ones in the past, and as Director of Logistics for — whatever it was this time, Noble Enterprises? — he had no doubt whatsoever that he would find that for which he was searching.

Newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed al-Qati bought some new uniforms before he left Tripoli. He had left almost everything he owned in El Bardi, and he did not want to get caught somewhere in the desert without a change of uniform.

He thought about calling Sophia, the Italian girl he had met in Tobruk, then decided against it. She seemed to him to be very sophisticated, and he did not want to appear too eager.

Al-Qati had a military truck take him to the airport in time to catch a ride on the weekly Aeritalia G222 transport to Marada. It was over six hundred kilometres away, and the flight took two hours. At the small airfield in Marada, he was met by a driver with another truck, and they drove for another two hours to the northwest over roads that were barely defined from the surrounding desert.

Twice, he saw mounted Bedouins topping dunes on their camels and was reminded of his heritage, now withered and gone, if not forgotten.

The Marada Base, which was actually 120 kilometres from Marada, was difficult to pick out as they neared it. The only visible signs were the small concrete bunkers containing antiaircraft guns, surface-to-air missiles, and radar and radio antenna complexes, along with the single wide and long runway. The runway was finished in camouflage colours that matched the desert surrounding it, but al-Qati was certain that America and Europe knew exactly where it was as a result of their satellite surveillance.

The base was not hidden, but it was protected.

Marada Base was underground.

From the runway, the taxiways led to slanted ramps that allowed the aircraft to descend some twenty meters below ground level. They were parked in caverns protected by blast-resistant doors and hardened steel-and-concrete roofs covered with many kilotons of sand.

Al-Qati had toured the facility once, and he knew that the Libyan Republic Air Force had deployed to the base its twelve Sukhoi bombers, as well as two squadrons of MiG-23 interceptors and MiG-27 strike aircraft.

His driver pulled directly onto a taxiway, scooted across it, and followed the ramp downward to pass through the huge doorway created by the shunting aside of the thick steel sliding doors.

He braked to a stop next to what, after his briefing, al-Qati now very well knew was a Sukhoi bomber. The driver pointed to a doorway in a concrete wall.

“The headquarters is through that door, Colonel.”

“Thank you.”

He climbed down from the truck, taking his canvas carryall with him. Compared to being in the direct sun on the desert floor, it felt relatively cool, inside the hangar. Banks of fluorescent lights bathed the bunker in non-glare light. A large contingent of specialists of one kind or another moved among the four fighter-bombers in this hangar, performing maintenance chores.

Moving to the steel-clad door, he pulled it open and entered a hallway. There was a rudimentary air-conditioning system in use, and the corridor was perhaps ten degrees cooler than the hangar.

Halfway down the hallway, he found the operations room, peopled with air controllers and radar operators. Next to it, set off by a window wall, was Ramad’s office. Al-Qati left his bag in the hall, crossed the operations centre, and knocked on the glass door.

Colonel Ibrahim Ramad was at his desk, his head bent low over the papers spread across it. Al-Qati thought the man was probably a bit near-sighted, but too vain to acknowledge the deficiency. He was, to be kind, portly. His waist approximated his chest in circumference. His uniform, though crisp, did not seem to fit him well.

Ramad’s face was moon-shaped, and he wore a moustache and goatee in the attempt to elongate it. The hair on his face and on his head was thin and brown. His nose was hooked and dominant, and his eyes were brown, but in the right light, appeared to flame with redness and lack of sleep.

Upon hearing his knock, Ramad looked up, smiled, and waved him in. He stood up to come around his desk and embraced al-Qati as if they were long-lost brethren. Or even friends.

“Ahmed, it is good to see you.”

“As it is to see you, Colonel.”

“Nonsense! I congratulate you on your well-earned promotion, and you must call me Ibrahim.”

Al-Qati nodded his thanks.

“I have, naturally, been notified that we will work together to coordinate air and ground movements, and I am excited at the prospects.”

“As am I,” al-Qati lied.

“Come. I must show you what we have, and then we will find a room for you. Tonight, you will meet my staff officers at dinner.”

Ramad led him back out of the operations room, back down the corridor, and back into the hangar. Crossing the floor between the aircraft, they reached yet another steel door — this one some two meters wide — in the back of the hangar.

On the other side of it was another corridor. It was five meters wide and four meters tall. On the right, it was dead-ended. Spaced along the opposite wall were more doors. On al-Qati’s left, it seemed to go on forever, the walls narrowing with perspective, and the end a pinpoint never to be reached.

“This leads to the factory,” Ramad said, “twenty kilometres away.”

“An amazing achievement,” al-Qati said and meant.

“All open excavation work was accomplished at night, so that surveillance satellites would not detect the activity. I am very proud of what we have accomplished.”

“As well you should be, Ibrahim. Why did you make it so large?”

“We have electric-powered transports, and the tunnel had to be wide enough to allow them to pass each other. Otherwise, we would get bottlenecks.”

“I understand. It is well-done.”

“Come.”

Ramad crossed the tunnel to another wide steel door imprinted with Arabic lettering: “Entrance denied to non-authorized persons.”

He produced a key and unlocked one of the double doors.

They stepped inside.

Ramad turned on overhead lights.

It was a large room, dismal in its concrete finish. The air carried a sour odour.

Around its perimeter, resting on wheeled cradles, were dome-nosed canisters.

Al-Qati recognized the yellow skull-and-crossbones symbol stencilled on them.

He stepped close to the nearest canister and read the legend: “Poison Gaseous Elements. Extremely Hazardous. Move with Extreme Caution.”

“Are they not lovely?” Ramad asked him.

Five

After five days, they were settled into the routine that was necessary to accomplish the job, They were up by five, had breakfasted at the Rancher’s Cafe and Lounge on pork sausages, bacon, eggs, pancakes, waffles, wheat toast, muffins, hash browns, orange juice, and gallons of coffee, and carrying their large boxes of lunch, were ensconced in the hangars by six. At seven or eight o’clock at night, they trooped back into the Rancher’s Cafe to order stacks of hamburgers, or steaks, or chicken, or veal cutlets surrounded by baked potatoes, homemade fries, and Texas toast. Not many in Wyatt’s work force were fans of green peas, com, or broccoli. Max Jorgenson doubled his order with the Budweiser route delivery truck. When they came in at night, they were sweaty and tired and ragged, and most ambitions were aimed at showers and clean sheets.

Bucky Barr was getting to know Julie Jorgenson well. She wasn’t nervous around him anymore, and after they had eaten, she would sit with him and talk about her life in Ainsworth, her hopes, and her dreams. Barr was a good listener.

Out at the old bomber base, the locals who hung around the airport office had become accustomed to having them down the way, and if they were still curious, were polite enough to not press inquiries into the activities at Hangars Four and Five.

The Cessna Citation and the Aeroconsultants C-130 were parked in front of the hangars, and their thin blue fuselage stripes had disappeared, replaced by two parallel and wider, bright scarlet stripes that zipped along the fuselages, then swooped at a steep angle up the vertical stabilizer. The Noble Enterprises logos on the tails were also in red. The Hercules tanker was parked next to them, but it still wore its Air Force uniform.

Bucky Barr was in charge of decorations for this party, and he had made certain that the red stripes and logos, on adhesive-backed tape, were perfectly aligned and straight.

And after five days, the six F-4 Phantoms were simply shells parked in Hangar Four. Norm Hackley, Karl Gettman, Ben Borman, and Lucas Littlefield had climbed through and around them with air-powered die grinders, attacking any serial number they came across, burnishing it into near-oblivion. A number of fuselage and wing panels had been removed, also, in order to access hidden numbers identified by Demion as requiring obliteration. Exposing the interior ribs also gave Demion a chance to evaluate the structural members. Because of the high hours on all of the airframes, there were a few stress fractures, and Demion and the airframe technicians designed reinforcement repairs.

While their method of eradicating serial numbers wouldn’t stand up to the latest developments in forensic examinations, where high-powered X rays and computers and acid-washes might raise an old serial number, it was sufficient for standard replacement parts not particular to an airplane. For those parts that might be traceable by serial number to a specific aircraft — an oleo strut, a Martin-Baker ejection seat — the area around the former serial number was heated with an acetylene torch to make the molecules dance around and perhaps totally eradicate an important number or two.

Almost all of the removed panels had now been reattached in their proper locations.

When Barr slipped through the Judas door into the hangar at noon, he found the two pilots and two technicians sprawled in one comer, sucking on soft drinks and munching on thick chicken salad sandwiches built on homemade bread. He figured the heat inside the hangar was in the low nineties, a welcome relief from the heat on the tarmac. The five-gallon jug of iced tea parked against one wall was about half empty.

“You guys taking another break?” he asked.

Norm Hackley flipped him a finger. Hackley, who was short and dark and had flown F-4s in one Vietnam tour, was closing on fifty years of age. His light eyes were as sharp as ever, and Barr estimated he had lost fifteen pounds in the last week, which he wouldn’t miss.

Karl Gettman also had F-4 time, though he was too young for Vietnam. Gettman had been a weapons system operator, the GIB — Guy in the backseat. In his mid-thirties now and certified as a pilot in a dozen jet types, he was black as night, with a mini-Afro, and a ready smile.

“You want to break something, Bucky,” Gettman said, “take a walk over by the airplanes. Better yet, take a run.”

Barr turned to look at the planes. Two five-horse-power air compressors and a commercial wet/dry vacuum stood near them, and air hoses snaked around the floor. The concrete was littered with the fine, dry sand used in the sandblasters. The sand was vacuumed up to be used again. About half of the insignia and camouflage paint had been stripped from three of the planes, and the aluminium skin was shiny and virginal. He could smell the sour aroma of the liquid paint remover being utilized in addition to the sandblasting.

“You’re not the neatest housekeeper I ever met, Karl,” Barr said.

“Me? Lucas is in charge of floors.”

Littlefield, a bulky man with huge hands and an impressively bald and large head, grinned. “Thing I like about this outfit, everybody gets to be in charge of something. I drew sand.”

With eight years in the Air Force and another eight at Lockheed in California before that aerospace giant folded its West Coast operations and retreated to Georgia, Littlefield was a top-rated airframe technician. When he made a suggestion, the pilots yielded to it without complaint.

Ben Borman was another big man, with a Swedish heritage apparent in his colouring and blue eyes. He had put twenty years of his life into the Air Force before signing on with Aeroconsultants. His specialty had been ordnance, and he was now learning to be a fuel boom operator.

“What are you in charge of, Ben?” Barr asked.

“I’m in charge of Norm. He needs all the direction he can get.”

Barr squatted in front of the group, resting his forearms on his thighs. “What’s the schedule look like?”

“There’s a schedule?” Gettman asked.

“We’re damned near as close as we can be,” Hackley said. “Day after tomorrow, we’ll be ready for paint. Then, we’ll take on the tanker.”

“Thank God we only have to strip insignia off it,” Littlefield said. “She’s got about two acres of skin, and if she’d been painted, I’d go out to the highway and raise my thumb.”

Barr grinned at him. “Before you go, you want to patch the holes in the E models?”

“Hey, guy, I already fabricated my pieces. I’m waiting on these slow bastards to get the paint off.”

The early models of the F-4 had not had an internal gun, a design failing that had raised complaints from Vietnam-era pilots who, as far as Barr could figure, only wanted the guns to prove themselves as hot-shit pilots on their glorious way to ace status. Of course, Sidewinder air-to-air missiles hadn’t been very effective at the time, either. The complaints had been met with gun pods slung beneath the centre-line for the early models, then the internal M-61A rotary-barrel cannon mounted in the nose of the F-4E.

Barr had always been a firm believer in missile technology, engaging battles with about twenty miles between the hostile aircraft. If one had to use a cannon one was too damned close. After some serious reconsideration and discussion about their mission, he and Wyatt had elected to remove the twenty-millimetre cannons from the E models. It not only saved a great deal of weight, though it changed the centre of gravity, it precluded pilots from relying on the gun for close combat. If one was out of missiles, the prudent course was to turn tail.

Littlefield had fashioned new fittings which would lock the gun port doors in the closed position.

Barr pushed himself back to his feet. “You need anything from Albuquerque?”

“You’re going to Albuquerque?” Gettman asked. “I thought Andy was going.”

“He’s got another appointment.”

“I need about ten more gallons of paint reducer and five quarts of catalytic hardener,” Littlefield said.

Barr pulled his notebook from his shirt pocket and wrote it down. “How come? I thought we had it figured.”

“We did, but we forgot about later.”

“Gotcha. Anything else?”

“I’d ask you to call my girl,” Gettman said, “but you’d probably go see her in person.”

“I’ll do that,” Barr said.

“No, you won’t.”

Barr left the hangar, crossed the dry steam of the tarmac, and entered Hangar Five.

Here, too, the lunch break was underway. The pilots and technicians were gathered at the back of the hangar, around the old wooden workbenches. In front of the benches, in twelve maintenance cradles, were the engines from the Phantoms. The Hercules engines had been pronounced fit by Demion and Hank Cavanaugh, the primary engine specialist, though the nacelles had to be removed in order to grind off serial numbers.

Each of the F-4 turbojets, however, was being fully disassembled, examined, shorn of identifying numbers, and rebuilt with new seals, bearings, and subassemblies where necessary. That was the primary reason for Barr’s trip, to pick up parts. It wasn’t an unexpected development, he thought. It was one of the laws of mechanics. Whenever he started a mechanical restoration, he always had to run back to the store a dozen times for forgotten parts. And he wasn’t alone, judging by the number of NAPA Auto Parts or Checker Auto Parts delivery trucks he saw running to the Ford and Chrysler and GM service centres in any city in the nation.

Scattered around the hangar were toolboxes on casters, small lifting cranes, air compressors, start carts, a small sheet-metal roller, an arc welder, and a couple oxy-gen/acetylene dollies. A big electronic diagnostics unit was shoved against the sidewall.

The two trailers he and Jordan had picked up at Nellis were parked in one corner, still covered with canvas and packed with cardboard boxes. The boxes contained all of the avionics and electronics, and they weren’t yet ready to dig into that pile. Wyatt wasn’t ready, though Tom Kriswell and Sam Vrdla, the electronics wizards, were itching to get their hands into those boxes.

Barr hiked the long trail to the back of the hangar, approaching Demion, Kriswell, and Wyatt.

“I think I’ve lost five pounds just walking around these damned hangars,” he said.

“Doesn’t show yet,” Demion said.

“You sure you want to fly with me today, Jim?”

“But I have noticed your face seems thinner,” Demion said. “Don’t you think he’s better-looking, guys?”

“Julie seems to think so,” Kriswell said. “How you making out there, Bucky?”

“You know she’s carrying a three-point-six grade average in high school? She’s a smart kid. Debate, FHA, and thespians, too.”

“I noticed she’s carrying about, what, thirty-four, twenty-two, thirty-four?” Demion said.

Barr gave him a pained expression. “Get off it, James. She wants to go to Chadron State College and become an English teacher. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“So she’s a candidate?” Wyatt asked.

“Yeah, I think so. I’ll know more in another week.”

Only Demion, Kriswell, and Wyatt knew about Barr’s foundation because they were on the board of directors, fulfilling the number required by the regulations governing tax-exempt corporations. Barr was the executive director and the screening committee and the entire unpaid staff. He poured some of his excess cash into the foundation each year, and each year he personally found one or two kids — usually girls — for whom the foundation provided college scholarships. The unadvertised educational foundation was currently supporting eleven college students. Barr didn’t want every girl he met to grow up and become a money-grubbing Raylene Delehanty Barr.

“The guns on board the Herc?” Wyatt asked.

“We got guns,” Barr said. “Captain Dinning will be a happy man when he see them come back.”

Barr and Demion were making a stop at Davis-Monthan to return the M61-A cannons. Since they had decided against them for the mission, they had also decided to turn them in. It might lower the stress levels of the local Air Force types at Davis-Monthan, and it might preclude having the Treasury’s Bureau of Firearms get excited, just in case some of that paperwork fell through the cracks and actually arrived at the Bureau.

“I’ve got my shopping list,” Demion said.

“And I’ve got a couple things to add to it,” Barr said, ripping the page out of his notebook.

“And I’ll take off for Washington,” Wyatt said.

“What do you suppose they want?” Kriswell asked.

“Who the hell knows?” Wyatt said. “They’ve probably decided to call it off.”

“Personally,” Barr said, “I think that’d be a real shame.”

“You’re just bloodthirsty,” Demion said.

“That’s me, the New Hampshire vampire.”

“One-and-a-half million dollars,” Martin Church said.

“A steal,” George Embry, who was standing at Church’s window enjoying the view, told him.

“From us, maybe. What do we get for it?”

“You really want to know?”

“Damned right,” the DDO said.

The North African desk chief turned from the window and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “How come you get the best view in the house, Marty?”

“Come on.”

Embry dug a ragged-edged piece of notepaper from his pocket and scanned it.

“Let’s see. There’s four ALQ-72 countermeasures pods. That presupposes some airborne resistance, you know?”

“I know. Wyatt’s being overly cautious, maybe.”

“Wyatt wants to get out of there with the same number of people he takes in,” Embry said. “Can’t say as I blame him.”

“What else?”

“There’s thirty-six Mark 84 five-hundred-pound bombs. That’s the ground attack complement. For the fun stuff, we’ve got twenty-four AIM-9L Super Sidewinders. Like I said, a bargain.”

“Do we need it all?”

“You’re trying to save money?” Embry asked.

“It’s a new era.”

“You want to start a war, Marty, you got to pay for it. There’ll be more bills coming in.”

Church sat silently for a moment. He, and others, were committed to the operation, and he didn’t know why he was quibbling over what amounted to peanuts in the total scheme of things. Perhaps because in the back of his mind was a ghastly image of the results.

“What about Cummings?” he asked, to shift the subject from dollars and cents.

“Marianne? She’s spending a lot of time on the beach, enjoying herself. No further contacts with al-Qati.”

“Why don’t you have her make some calls? Maybe she can run him down somewhere.”

“Marty.”

“Yeah, I know. Okay, just have her cross her fingers.”

“There is one little thing,” Embry said.

“Which you’ve saved for last?”

“I always save the best for last, Marty.”

“Well, damn it, tell me!”

“This is kind of third-hand, but then, since we’re so short of assets there, everything we get out of Libya is third-hand. Cummings doesn’t have corroboration yet.”

“George.”

“Ahmed al-Qati has been promoted to lieutenant colonel and attached to Ibrahim Ramad’s command.” “This tells you what, George?”

“You remember Ramad? He’s air force, and he disappeared from the Tripoli military staff when they got the Sukhoi bombers. The consensus at the time, though never substantiated, was that he’d been given responsibility for developing a long-range bombing program. That was reinforced when our French friends gave them the aerial re-fuelling technology.”

“Do we know where he’s located?”

“We have a good idea that he’s at Marada Base, the one they buried in the sand. That’s where the bombers are flying from, anyway.”

“So what’s al-Qati got to do with Ramad?”

“Exactly!”

“Goddamn it, George.”

“Ahmed al-Qati is a superb tactician and strategist in ground warfare. My people think that marrying the two of them means they’re developing a coordinated air-and-ground attack scheme.”

“So it’s just good military planning,” Church said. “Contingency planning.”

“Except that we also know that Marada Base is located thirteen miles from what the Leader describes as his agricultural chemical plant.”

Church thought about that for a moment, then said, “You want to send me the dossiers on those two people, George?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Ibrahim Ramad glanced sideways at al-Qati who was sitting in the bombardier/navigator’s seat next to him. With the helmet and the oxygen mask, very little of his face was visible. His eyes were unreadable; they stared straight ahead at the onrushing desert.

The undulating desert unrolled before them with amazing, dizzying speed. The velocity indicator stood at Mach 1.1. The aircraft bounced lightly upward and downward as the terrain-avoidance radar instructed the automatic pilot to maintain a one-hundred-meter ground clearance above the sand dunes and wadis. The E-Scope on the instrument panel, with its “ski-tip” line imposed over the computer-generated drawing of the terrain ahead, showed how close the Su-24 approached the tips of dunes. The Head Up Display currently displayed the symbol for the bomber in the centre of the screen, the symbol rising and falling as the aircraft responded to commands from the computer to change its vertical position.

They were so low that the horizons had pulled in on them, making their world much smaller and more isolated. Ramad could see nothing outside the canopy that bespoke of life. Looking backward and down, he could see the snouts of the missiles on the outboard pylons. The wings were in their swept-back configuration, and the missiles were mounted on the pivoting pylons. The bombs were shorter and not visible from his position. They were attached to the inboard pylons, which were fixed to the solid, inner portion of the wing. Four more missiles were affixed to fuselage hard-points.

As always in the cockpit of an airplane, Ramad was entirely comfortable. He rarely became nervous, and if he did, he never demonstrated the condition to observers. He knew that he exuded confidence, even arrogance in regard to his talents. That was as it should be. His talents had brought him the command of an entire air base at the tender age of thirty-five.

He was more than a little disappointed at al-Qati’s reaction to supersonic, ground-hugging speed. Others from Tripoli, from military staff, who had taken the orientation flight with Ramad, had paled significantly and allowed the fear to cloud their eyes. Some had gallantly attempted to retain their previous meals for minutes before ripping off the oxygen masks and spilling vomit over their borrowed flight suits.

Ahmed al-Qati’s hands rested lightly and unclenched in his lap. Not even his shoulders betrayed an elevated sense of tension. This was a man, Ramad decided, who filled the large cup of his reputation.

He was not to be underestimated.

But then, neither was Ibrahim Ramad to be underestimated.

He had no illusions about the reasons for al-Qati’s presence at Marada Base.

Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed al-Qati was there to spy on him.

Ramad knew that Kamal Amjab, the Leader’s closest advisor, and Colonel Ghazi, chief of the army, considered him brave but untrustworthy. He had never done anything to invoke their distrust, and he suspected that they were jealous of his rapid rise in rank and responsibility as well as envious of his abilities and his close relationship with Farouk Salmi, head of the air force. So they had sent an army man to watch over him, though not as a guardian angel.

It was all right; Ramad could adapt.

He began to ease back the throttles for the Lyulka turbojet engines. The velocity readout flickered, then the numbers began to descend.

“Twenty-two kilometres to target, Ahmed,” he said over the internal communications system.

Al-Qati turned his head to look at him. “I trust that you do not expect me to operate this thing, Ibrahim.”

The infantry commander tapped the hood of the radar.

“Of course not,” Ramad said. “We will concern ourselves less with accuracy than with demonstrating the concept.”

The airframe shuddered as they came down through the sonic barrier.

Ramad reached out for the armaments panel and armed the two bombs. They were simulated bombs, of course, each filled with three-hundred kilograms of white powder and three kilograms of high explosive.

He switched the HUD display to Continuously Computed Impact Line.

The airspeed dropped to 450 knots.

Then four hundred knots.

Ramad checked the wings. The computer was slowly rotating them forward as the speed deteriorated.

Automation. He loved it, and he had, after many flying hours of doubting it, come to rely on it.

Al-Qati leaned toward him, to get a better view of the HUD.

“Do you understand it?” Ramad asked.

“No.”

“The circle in the centre is the estimated location of the target, data that I programmed into the computer earlier. The almost vertical dotted line leading toward it is the recommended flight path from our present position. Our current heading, one hundred and forty-two degrees is indicated at the bottom. The number to the right, minus fourteen, is the distance in kilometres to the target.”

Al-Qati leaned back into his seat and retightened his harness. “We have similar targeting computers for our artillery.”

“We may give thanks to Allah for his beneficence,” Ramad said.

“Or to the Soviet Union,” al-Qati said.

Ramad let his eyes go icy. The oxygen mask hid his scowl.

He forced himself back to the task at hand.

As they topped a line of high dunes, he assumed manual control of the aircraft. In the faraway, hazy distance, he saw the tiny white tent that had been erected in a geographical depression as his target. He utilized the electro-optical targeting system to verily its location and found it to be nearly a kilometre away from the position he had estimated for the computer. He punched the correction into the keypad and watched the HUD symbols shift minutely. With a little right rudder, he realigned the bomber on the target.

Assuming the bombardier’s role, and with the small joystick located between his seat and the bombardier’s seat that controlled the electro-optical targeting symbol — a set of red cross hairs inside a red circle, he shifted the target rose until it covered the target circle on the HUD. Then he depressed the stud that locked the attack computer onto the target.

He committed the attack by depressing the button on the head of the control stick.

No matter what he did with the airplane now within predetermined parameters, the computer would determine the optimum release point.

At six kilometres from the target, Ramad pulled the stick back and shoved the throttles into full afterburner. The immediate thrust from the turbojets pressed him back into his seat. The gravitation readout climbed to five Gs. He felt the skin around his eyes forced backward.

The Su-24 aimed its nose toward the blue sky. In seconds, the altimeter indicated two thousand meters of altitude.

He felt the bombs release.

And eased the stick forward, centring it into the vertical climb.

Altitude five thousand meters.

The gravitational forces eased.

He snap-rolled 180 degrees to the right, jerked the throttles back, then pulled the stick toward his crotch. The aircraft went inverted, and he looked up toward the earth, found the small white square that was his target.

The bombs had not reached it yet.

“Do you see, Ahmed?”

“Yes. I see.”

By the tone of his voice, al-Qati seemed unimpressed by the precision flying that Ramad was performing for him. He certainly gave no indication that the aerobatics had upset his equilibrium or stomach.

The simulated bombs impacted in the sandy surface of the earth, their small explosive charges destroying the bomb cases and creating geysers of white powder. He estimated each to be within forty meters of the target, which would have been destroyed had the bombs not been dummies.

As he came out of the loop at near ground level, Ramad passed to the right of the target so that they had a clear view of the bomb impact.

“That was very well executed, Colonel,” al-Qati said.

The man sounded sincere.

“Thank you, Ahmed. The technology and the training of my pilots — and I say that proudly — will allow us to deliver… whatever it is we wish to deliver with similar ease and precision.”

“And we are to develop the tactics which will coordinate your bombs with my ground advance?”

“Exactly! Just think, Ahmed, how we will complement each other. Would it not be better for your tanks and armoured vehicles to arrive at a target site that has already been devastated.”

“Infinitely better,” al-Qati agreed.

Again, he advanced the throttles to afterburner and climbed toward the heavens, performing one victory roll during the ascent.

“Together, Ahmed, we will show the world what we are capable of accomplishing.”

“I am certain that is true, Ibrahim.”

“Allah akbar!”

Ibrahim Ramad was but the tool of Allah, to be used as necessary to achieve the goals of Islam.

He knew that.

He also knew what Allah had in mind.

Wyatt parked the Citation in the transient section at College Park Airport and ordered it refuelled. He rented a Mercury Topaz, drove north to the Capitol Beltway, and jammed himself into the eastbound traffic. His fellow travellers were of the hunt-and-peck variety, searching for spaces in adjacent lanes and jumping into them, only to be disappointed by the lack of progress and jumping back to where they had been.

At the interchange with Georgia Avenue, he extricated himself from the line-up in the right lane and took Georgia north to the suburb of Wheaton. Wyatt found the Wheaton Plaza easily enough, and he found a place to park the Mercury in a crowded lot with just a little more difficulty. He got out, locked the car, and started looking for a place called the Pizza Joint.

He was half-an-hour ahead of the dinner hour rush and had a large number of open tables from which to choose. Wyatt picked a red Naugahyde booth in the back comer of the dining room and slid into it.

It was a family kind of place. There were red-and-white-checked tablecloths, red candles in heavy iron holders designed to keep the pizzas warm, and travel posters lining the empty walls above the booths. Most of the travel posters promoted countries on the northern side of the Mediterranean: Greece, Italy, France, Spain. The owners were promoting safe travel, no doubt. When he thought about it, though, he couldn’t recall ever seeing posters that begged him to “Take the Sun in Syria,” or “Ski Lebanon.”

A young man with a mop of dark hair atop a band of short-cropped stubble that went clear around his head, wearing a short-sleeved shirt that matched the tablecloth, sidled up to him.

“What can I get you, sir?”

He looked at the platters hanging over the serving counter which defined the sizes available, then said, “Let’s have the gigantic with pepperoni, Italian sausage, mushrooms, onions, and green pepper. And a very tall, very cold, root beer.”

The boy didn’t seem impressed by the size of his order. “Twenty minutes.”

The pizza didn’t come for twenty-five minutes, five minutes after Church and Embry arrived. They poked their heads inside the entrance, spotted him, and walked to the back.

Church was in his typically preppy uniform of chinos, blue buttoned-down cotton shirt, striped tie, and blue sport coat. The only wrinkles were in his forehead, and they seemed deeper than ever.

George Embry wore a grey suit that was two or three years past its prime and contained enough wrinkles to match Church’s forehead. He was half-wearing a paisley tie loosened against the heat. Taking the side of the booth next to Wyatt, Embry slid in, then looked up at the menu posted next to the platters.

“Hi, Major. What looks good?”

“I don’t know what you want, George, but you’re getting pepperoni and sausage.”

“No anchovy?”

“Nary a one.”

“Good.”

Church sat across from them.

“I didn’t know you were coming along, Marty, or I’d have ordered more.”

“I’m not much in the mood for pizza, anyway,” Church told him.

“Used to be, we’d meet where we could get a decent steak or a lobster tail,” Wyatt said.

“New austerity program,” Embry said. “I’m not happy about it myself.”

The pizza arrived, along with Wyatt’s root beer. Embry and Church ordered more potent beer.

While waiting for the waiter to deliver two steins, Wyatt and Embry worked wedges out of the pizza. It tasted fine to Wyatt.

With apparent reluctance, Church scooped up a slice for himself.

“You guys asked me here,” Wyatt said. “I suppose there was an important reason?”

“That’s right,” Church said, “very important.”

“You’re not calling it off?”

“We haven’t aborted any mission we’ve ever given you, have we now?” Church asked.

Four years had passed since Martin Church had first approached then-Major Andrew Wyatt in a meeting at the Sans Souci, where they had eaten lobster.

“How good are you at predicting the future, Major?”

“I haven’t been keeping track, Mr Church, but the records probably not impressive.”

“We’re in the prediction business in my shop!”

“And how’s your record?” Wyatt asked.

“So-so. There are a couple things I’m sure of, however!’

“Such as?”

“The military is going to be reducing its numbers in the next few years.”

Wyatt had the same premonition. “And?”

“And you will probably be one of those numbers.” Wyatt raised an eyebrow. Was this a recruitment pitch? “You’ve talked to Air Force personnel?”

“Not directly, no. The problem is, you’re not in the right career track. You’ve antagonized a few people who wear stars. You’re divorced. You open your mouth at times when it would best remain closed.”

Wyatt couldn’t think of any counterarguments.

“You’re a prime target for reduction in force, just a few years shy of the pension.”

“I fly well,” he said defensively and somewhat lamely.

“Which is why we’re talking. You’re certified in a dozen types of aircraft, and you’re also an efficient manager. The latter quality isn’t always recognized in the military.”

Wyatt didn’t ask how Church knew what he knew. “My agency will also suffer some cutbacks, and I’m preparing for that lean future,” Church said. “I need an organization that I can call on for special projects.”

“An organization with airplanes?”

“Right.”

“A modern-day Air America?”

“Much smaller in scope” Church said. “We’re cutting back, remember There won’t be anyone on a payroll.” No recruitment.

“Contract players?” Wyatt asked.

“That’s it.”

“Maybe I want to take my chances on reaching for that pension.”

“You could do that, but I think you’d rather fly.” Again, Wyatt didn’t have an argument.

“So I’ll give you ten million dollars to keep you flying.”

“This is great lobster, Mr. Church.”

“For one thing, I’ve got the ten million today. Next year, or the year after, Major, I probably won’t have it.”

“That’s the kind of money” Wyatt said, “that buys a lot of risk. A lot of dead people.”

“DOD’s paying you forty thousand a year to take the same risks now.”

“It’s legal.”

“You’d never be asked to do anything that isn’t sanctioned at the highest levels, though I admit that the general public might not always see it in the best possible light.”

Wyatt scraped the last meat from the shell and dipped it in the butter.

“The ten mil comes to you in the form of four contracts, fronted through various agencies or companies. Five of it is your start-up cash. Use it any way you want to set up your organization. Buy yourself a pension fund if you’re that security conscious.”

“Five million up front buys some other things,” Wyatt said, chewing his lobster.

“That is correct. It buys your absolute loyalty and your willingness to perform on short notice well into the future.”

“How far into the future?”

“Not determined. We see how it goes. But you get paid on each project.”

“And the other five?”

“At the moment, we’ve got four quickie projects on the table…”

Wyatt couldn’t complain about many of the projects he had been handed over the last four years. Usually, they were small: transporting sensitive cargo into sensitive geographical areas, assembling teams of aviation experts to conduct workshops, seminars, and training sessions for governments and non-governments which needed the help. A couple of times, he and Barr had been asked to extract endangered agents from hostile territory. The particularly lucrative contracts had involved the use of live ordnance, but those had only come up three times before.

“The difference might be, Marty, that we’ve never had a mission on this large a scale,” Wyatt said. “With the number of aircraft and people involved, we’ve become way too visible. The risk factor is high. And with the way the politics keep shifting, especially in the Middle East, I expect the go/no-go switch to be thrown on and off.”

“It’s definitely not off,” Church said. “George can tell you why.”

Wyatt scooped up another wedge of the pizza as he looked to Embry.

“We — that’s me and my analysts — think that our fears have been realized. We think the chemical plant is now producing weapons in large quantities.”

“We suspected that going in,” Wyatt said. “That was the rationale for this operation.”

“Yeah, Andy, but when we planned it, we were worried about a small stockpile of delicate weapons under the control of a less-than-delicate administration. Now, it gets worse.”

“How so?”

“One of my people went back through overhead surveillance tapes and made some estimates of the amount of raw materials that have been shipped in to the plant. He also computed the estimated tonnage of fertilizer coming out.”

“And it doesn’t come out equal?” Wyatt asked.

“Not by a long damned shot. Over the last couple of years, we figure we’ve lost track of about four hundred tons of liquid and solid raw material. That’s based on mathematical projections, since we naturally don’t have all of the photographs we might want to have.”

“So they’re storing it inside the plant.”

“But in what form, Andy? If it’s one-hundred-pound artillery shells or missile warheads or wide-dispersal bombs, that adds up to eight thousand units.”

“That’s a bunch,” Wyatt agreed.

“Plus, with our estimates of storage space inside the plant, we don’t think there’s enough room to store that many shells.”

“So they may have moved them?”

“That’s the worry. If we don’t hit them soon, they could spread that ordnance all over the country. As it is, we may miss some of it.”

“How come you didn’t do all this computing earlier?”

“Maybe it’s because we’re human,” Embry said.

Six

It was nearly midnight when the Citation landed.

Janice Kramer was in the office with Ace the Wonder Cat, and she had been ignoring the paperwork stacked on her desk so she could keep an eye on the runway. The Aeroconsultants building was located on Clark Carr Loop, a circle of hangars and offices in the commercial section of the airport south of the east-west runway. From the side window of the single executive office, she had a view down the alley between buildings. It was a clipped view, revealing just a few hundred yards of the west end of the runway and the adobe-styled passenger terminal building on the north side of the runway. The current activity was limited to a few night-scheduled passenger liners. Kirtland Air Force Base, which shared the runway with Albuquerque International, appeared quiet tonight.

She was also monitoring Albuquerque Approach on the radio in the outer office, and she heard Wyatt call in, so she was ready when the Cessna flashed across her limited view of the runway. It slowed quickly, then turned onto the end taxiway and headed directly for the hangar.

Sometimes, she daydreamed about the way things could have been, or might be, and she found herself damning Andy Wyatt for what he was. And she damned herself for putting up with it and waiting feverishly for his plane to come in. She had waited too many nights.

Again and again.

When she pushed herself up out of her chair, Ace sat up on the desk and yawned.

“You can’t be hungry again.”

“Mee-yaw.”

That was “yes” in feline-mongrel, so she went out to the storeroom off the hangar, found a can of 9-Lives tuna, and popped the top off it. She had scooped it into his dish by the time Ace got there. There was very little in Ace’s world that required haste.

Ace never said thanks, either. He just went into a semi-squat and started to nibble.

Kramer went on to the back of the hangar, which abutted the tarmac. There were two business jets in the hangar, both in partial disassembly as they underwent alterations in their technology as well as refurbishing from merely luxurious to ultra-luxurious. One belonged to a Texas real estate developer, and the other was owned by a Hollywood producer. Both men had been referred to Aeroconsultants by a Saudi prince.

Aeroconsultants enjoyed a credible word-of-mouth advertising program. Currently, Kramer had a seven-month backlog of projects, and they were going to back up even further since Wyatt was draining off all of the manpower for the latest Agency contract.

There were only four dim night-lights on, but it was enough to find her way to the back door. She defeated the alarm system, unlocked the door, and pulled it open. A soft warm breeze struck her face, carrying with it the aromas of diesel oil, hot metal, and jet fuel.

A pair of floodlights mounted on the hangar lit up several rows of single-and twin-engined airplanes. Some of them awaited their turns at the hands of Aero-consultants craftsmen, and some of them belonged to employees. Wyatt let them park their planes for free. Bucky Barr’s pristinely restored Bell helicopter was parked at one end, its rotors tethered.

The twin jet braked to a stop in line with parked client aircraft, the nose bobbing lightly, then the engines whined down. When the door opened and Wyatt descended to the apron, Kramer picked up a set of wheel chocks resting nearby and began walking toward him.

Wyatt saw her coming. “Hey, my favourite ground crewman.”

“Crew person,” she said, handing him one linked pair of chocks.

“You just watch. Someday, I’m going to have all the gender-definitive terms down pat.”

“I doubt it.”

“Anyone else around?”

“Just me. If they aren’t in Nebraska, they’re home in bed.”

Together, they chocked the wheels, then Wyatt locked the door. She waited, fingering the new red stripes on the fuselage.

“I thought you weren’t going to show this logo around here.”

“I wasn’t, but if anyone notices, they’ll just think it was a client.”

They walked back to the hangar, and Kramer wrapped her fingers around his arm.

“How was Washington?”

“Near gridlock inside the Beltway.”

“The traffic?”

“That, too. Mostly, the politics and the intellectual capabilities are close to standstill.”

Inside the hangar, Kramer locked the door and reset the alarm. Wyatt walked over to the Texan’s Mystere-Falcon and peeked inside the open door.

“Security systems in?” he asked.

In addition to the luxury upgrade, Aeroconsultants was installing antiterrorist detection and protection systems which included bomb detectors and infrared and radar threat sensors. More executives who flew internationally were becoming nervous about drug-toting maniacs with Stinger missiles. The pilots who flew for them were treated to two-week workshops in defensive and evasive flying tactics conducted by Wyatt, Barr, Hackley, and Zimmerman.

“They’re mostly in,” she said.

He climbed the airstair and slipped inside, turning on an overhead lighting strip.

She followed.

Much of the interior panelling had been replaced with laminated teak. The new carpeting had not yet been laid and the sofa and chairs — reupholstered in new, soft leather — had not been reinstalled as yet. Snugged up against the rear bulkhead, behind a fitted fiberglass door that folded to either side, was a full-sized bed.

“The bed work?” he asked.

“Hasn’t been tested.”

“Should it be?”

She moved in close and wrapped her arms around his waist. The heat of Washington was still on him, musky. She could feel the strength in his arms as he pulled her to him.

She tilted her head back to look up at him and said, “Around here, we double-test everything.”

Wyatt woke at five-thirty.

He was in his own bed, which felt a little strange. The first early morning light was sliding into the bedroom through the large and undraped window which overlooked his backyard. The overgrown, dense shrubbery and trees which completely enclosed the yard made it private, even though it was small. The grass was also overgrown; the neighbour’s boy was a day or two behind on his mowing.

Wyatt’s house was forty or fifty years old, located in a quiet residential area of northeast Albuquerque. Since buying it, he had painted it inside and out, installed new carpet, then added air-conditioning. It was the first house he had ever owned, and after three years, he still wasn’t certain how he felt about his ownership. His feet were still attuned to Air Force ways, ready to move on at any moment.

The queen-sized bed dominated the room, which was the largest of the two bedrooms, and left little space for the nightstands and dresser. The bedspread was crumpled in one comer, where he had tossed it at two o’clock.

He sat up, worked his way backward, and leaned against the headboard.

Jan opened one eye.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I know. You like to watch the sun come up.”

She opened her other eye, and both eyes came alive, a vibrant green in the soft light. Slithering her way up beside him, the sheet fell away from her full breasts.

Wyatt raised his left arm and put it around her shoulders, tugging her close.

“You’re worried, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Who, me? Worry?” he said, but he was. He was putting a lot of lives on the line, more than ever before. And he found himself thinking about the people attached to those lives, the wives and the families.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do. I made a commitment.”

“Make this the last one.”

“The commitment is four years old.”

She knew that. He had told her. Church had given him five million dollars as the fair price of having Wyatt on tap for undetermined years into the future. More than that, Church had known Wyatt better than he knew himself. Church had known that Wyatt lived up to his promises.

She turned slightly and put her hand on his chest. She locked her eyes on his. “The company is doing very well. We don’t need the covert contracts anymore.”

“I also believe in what I’m doing, Jan.”

That was true, also. There wasn’t one operation he had performed for Church for which he felt any regret whatsoever. His actions — or Bucky’s or Norm’s or Karl’s — were necessary in some degree toward maintaining stability in one part of the world or another. His people felt the same way, he thought.

Her dark red hair was tousled. There was an impressed line on her cheek from a wrinkle in the pillowcase. Her hand felt warm on his chest.

He slid his left hand along her upper arm.

“So,” she said, “you’re only going to make one commitment in your life? To God and country, but mostly country?”

“That’s the pressing one right now, Jan.”

She pulled away abruptly, spun around, and sat on the edge of the bed with her back to him.

He leaned toward her and put his hand on her shoulder.

She shrugged it off.

“You don’t think I should fulfil my promises?”

“Maybe you should make more of them, Andy. Maybe you should think more about the company, about the people who work for you.”

“Well, damn it! I am.”

“Bullshit!”

She stood up, crossed to the dresser, and scooped up her clothing. Clutching them to her stomach, she turned toward him. Her breasts heaved, and he saw a tear in the corner of one eye.

“You need to rethink your priorities, Andy.”

“Jan…”

When she went through the doorway, she slammed the door behind her.

Wyatt sighed, leaned back, and waited for her to come back.

She had had temper tantrums in the past, and she got over them quickly.

He waited three minutes.

Then heard the yelp of tires on his driveway.

He scrambled out of bed, jerked the door open, and trotted down the hall and into the living room. Through the front window, he saw his carefully tended and lovingly treated 1965 Corvette roadster in a four-wheel drift as it rounded the comer at the end of the block.

Then she gunned the 396 cubic-inch V8, and black smoke boiled off the rear tires.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“I was,” Ahmed al-Qati told her. “My wife and two children were killed when the Americans bombed Tripoli.”

She put her hand to her mouth. Her fingers were long and slim, expressive. They danced against her lips, which were lightly defined with pale pink. “I am so sorry.”

“Many would say it was God’s will. I do not know.”

The waiter interrupted to pour more coffee, then backed away with tiny, servile bows. He was seeking a tip that would last him a month, no doubt. Foreigners with money still visited Libya, but not in the droves of previous decades. Tobruk was no longer a thriving and bustling resort city; most of the tourists who stayed here came for reasons other than simple relaxation. Foreigners rented the hotel rooms while they worked on government contracts. There were Russians, Frenchmen, Germans, Dutch, even a few Americans.

Sophia Gabratelli had her reasons. When al-Qati had first met her, almost three months before, she had told him simply that she was hiding out until her divorce was finalized. She had not elaborated, but al-Qati, ever the perfectionist when it came to information, had conducted his own inquiry through friends in Libyan intelligence.

He had learned that Sophia Gabratelli — her maiden name — was indeed awaiting a final divorce decree from a French court. She had established a residency in the south of France since the Italian courts would not acknowledge her right to leave her husband of two years, a Sicilian named Aragone. Moreover, the husband was a known Mafia chieftain, and that fact alone explained her desire to lead a low-profile life in Tobruk.

Al-Qati had learned more than that, of course. He knew that she had a small appendectomy scar on her lower torso and that her small toe on the right foot had been broken once. He knew the names of her parents, who lived in northern Italy. He knew that she had once aspired to a career in filmmaking or modelling, a dream worthy of the classic, high-cheekboned lines of her face, the smouldering dark eyes beneath full lashes, the perfectly smooth, olive skin, and the straight, flashingly white teeth revealed by her ready smile. She was petite, and though she wore loose-fitting, non-revealing, and conservative dresses — perhaps in deference to the mores of the country — al-Qati was aware that the curves she attempted to disguise were abundant and lush. He had imagined them out of disguise more than once.

Ahmed al-Qati also knew that she had lied to him. She had told him she was twenty-nine years old when, in fact, she was thirty-three years old. That deceit was perfectly understandable in a Western or Continental woman. She had also told him that she had a modest sum put by, enough to live in relative comfort in the seedy Seaside Hotel overlooking the Mediterranean until her divorce decree was handed down. He knew to the contrary that she had escaped the mansion in Sicily with the equivalent of two-and-a-quarter million American dollars. Considering that the spurned Aragone was probably looking intently for that money, that lie was also understandable.

In one of his fantasies, which would never be lived out, al-Qati had given himself the role of protector of Sophia Gabratelli and her fortune. By her upbringing, she was considerably more worldly and outspoken, and probably needed less defending, than any woman he had ever met. Still, she was tiny and likely susceptible to wily men. After the sixth time he had met her for dinner, he had let it be known quietly around the city, and through the police, that she enjoyed his protection. He had not told her this.

He forced his eyes from her face and stared over the railing at the smooth, darkening expanse of the sea. White rollers coasted up the sand of the beach. A dozen people walked in the surf’s edge. Two swimmers were far out.

For the life of him, he could not recall his wife’s face. Sophia had that effect on him.

“Does it make you bitter?” she asked.

“The American attack? Yes, it does.”

“Do you seek vengeance?”

He smiled at her. “At one time, it was all I could think of. But no longer.”

“You are at peace with yourself?”

“Not at peace, I think. But I have decided that the fates of nations are not up to me. I will do my part, and I will be prepared if it should ever happen again.”

“Defensively? With your battalion?”

“Yes. That is, I believe my soldiers will conduct themselves with honour, should the Americans come again.” After convincing Ramad of the need to check on his command, al-Qati had conducted a quick inspection at El Bardi, then headed directly for Tobruk.

“And you?”

“Myself, I now play games with the air force.”

“And you do not think much of the air force?”

“I do not think much of the games,” he said.

She smiled at him. “Enough of this. I tire quickly of war talk and coffee. Will you walk in the sea with me?”

He grinned. “I have not done that in many years.”

“Then you will enjoy it all the more.”

Al-Qati paid the bill, then the two of them walked down the steps from the veranda to the sand.

She stooped to free her feet from her sandals, and he noted that the small toe of her right foot was slightly bent. Nevertheless, all of her toes were delightfully carved.

When she straightened up, standing a full head shorter than he, she wrapped her hand around his forearm. Her skirt swished against his leg as they walked down to the sea.

Ahmed al-Qati had not felt as content in many years.

Jim Bennett had Liz Jordan and mechanic Slim Reddy witness Wyatt’s signature, then had them sign their names at the bottom of the document.

For a lawyer, Bennett was only mildly ambitious, a trait that had encouraged Wyatt to retain him a couple years before for his personal needs. His personal requirements weren’t all that extensive, but Jan Kramer had insisted that Wyatt use someone other than the company attorney. Bennett also took care of the legal niceties for Bucky Barr’s educational foundation.

After they were left alone in the office Wyatt shared with Kramer and Barr, Bennett asked, “Where’s Jan?”

“She took some vacation days, Jim.”

He assumed she had. By the time Wyatt had gotten dressed, called for a cab, and arrived at the office, she had totally disappeared. His Corvette was sitting in the parking lot with the keys in the ashtray, but her Riviera was gone. She either wasn’t at her condo, or she wasn’t answering the phone. During the day, he had left five messages on her machine.

He ended up spending the day with Liz Jordan, paying the monthly statements, preparing bank deposits, and constructing last month’s profit-and-loss report. Jan was right; they were doing okay.

The meeting with Jim Bennett — the primary reason he had returned to Albuquerque — took place at three in the afternoon. Together, they reviewed the final draft of his will, Wyatt asked some questions, Bennett answered them satisfactorily, and Wyatt signed off.

Wyatt shoved the document into its envelope, then got up and put it in the wall safe. Only he, Bucky, and Jan had access to the safe. He noted that Barr also had a more recently dated will stored in the safe. Apparently, neither of them were very confident about this operation.

Bennett snapped his briefcase shut. “You sure you don’t want to get in some handball?”

“Can’t do it, Jim. The work’s stacking up on us.”

“Next week, then? I’m going to go to potbelly if I don’t spend more time on the court.”

“Give me a call, but don’t write anything solid on your calendar, Jim. I’m going to be in and out of town.”

Bennett gave him a wave, then went to the outer office to hassle Liz for a couple minutes. She didn’t want to play handball either.

Wyatt stood, looked around, couldn’t think of anything else he needed. He started for the door.

Then stopped and went back to lean over the phone.

He punched the memory number labelled, “Kramer.” It rang four times, then the answering machine kicked in.

He hung up.

Checking his watch, he decided he had better get airborne for Nebraska.

He checked the contents of his wallet. Four-thousand-two-hundred-and-eleven dollars. The roll in his left pocket contained eleven thousand. He figured it was enough to get him through the next couple of weeks.

Shutting off the lights, he stepped into the reception area and headed for the door to the hangar.

Time to go.

“Are you leaving already, Andy?” Jordan asked.

“In a little while, Liz,” he said, altering course for the door to the parking lot.

The Corvette started right away, and he rolled down the windows for air. The heat was oppressive, but his Corvette didn’t offer air-conditioning except for the forced-air kind. Pulling out of the lot, he took the access road to University Boulevard and got the roadster up to seventy before he came abreast of the passenger terminal. The traffic slowed him down then, and he drifted with it onto Gibson Boulevard and got into the lane for Interstate 25 north.

He managed seventy miles an hour on the freeway, staying with the flow of the traffic until he reached Lomas Boulevard and took it west.

Jan Kramer’s condominium was in a four-story minitower just north of downtown Albuquerque. It was a newer building, following the architectural principles in evidence throughout much of the downtown region. The rounded corners and lodgepole projections of adobe construction predominated.

His wallet contained a plastic pass-card for the underground parking garage, and he used it to gain access to a guest parking spot.

Jan’s Riviera was parked squarely in her slot, and his hopes lifted a trifle.

Taking the elevator to the fourth floor, he got off and walked the carpeted hallway to the north end. Being circumspect, he knocked on the door.

No answer.

He unlocked it with his key.

She wasn’t home.

Wyatt walked through the living room and peeked into the master bedroom. He checked the closets and found large gaps in the hanging clothes.

In the second bedroom, which she used primarily for storage, he found that her luggage was missing.

And that made him feel somewhat lonely.