The First Casualty

34

The man with the silver eagles on his shoulders watched the nav lights of the pair of Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers fade into the winter sky. The two aircraft would be in the air fourteen hours before delivering their loads of fuel to a facility previously secured, where Jet-A would be locked and sealed with a device that would betray any tampering.

None of that was really any affair of William “Wild Bill” Hasty, Colonel, USAF, but the colonel was a meticulous man who made sure everything having to do with his assigned mission went off without a problem. That fuel so carefully inspected and guarded would be for the return trip of the highly customized 747-200B he would be flying in less than a week. His interest wasn’t the fact the aircraft was the peak of aviation luxury — its two galleys could serve 160 people simultaneously. It wasn’t that the plane cost more than $181,000 per hour to operate, or even that there were only two such airplanes like this in existence. His attention to details, even details over which he had no command, was based on a single passenger who would be on board just six days from now.

Twenty-two years in the Air Force, seventeen in the Air Force Materiel Command, and he’d never lost a passenger or a cargo, a record he intended to keep unblemished until three years from now, when he and Kate pulled the plug and retired to that little fishing shack on the Saint Mary’s River near Palatka, Florida, where their closest neighbors would be deer and alligators. And bigmouth bass, the largest bigmouth bass Wild Bill had ever seen.

Bass or not, the fuel carrying aircraft were off, the first part of the mission begun. He turned his attention to the single closed hangar, the one guarded day and night by armed sentries with no-nonsense orders to shoot to kill anyone who approached without displaying the proper credentials. Bill had those credentials, of course, but there was nothing for him to do there tonight. His work, the actual mission, would begin five days from now. For the present, he contented himself with making sure the space on the tarmac was clear, the space where the C-141 StarLifters would load up the two armor-plated limousines and the half dozen or so equally armored SUVs.

Satisfied he had done all he could for the moment, he dug his fists into the pockets of his sage green MA-1 flight jacket and headed for the gate in the razor wire — topped chain-link fence where he exchanged salutes with two men stamping their feet against the night’s damp cold.