The Ransom of Black Stealth One

SIXTEEN

Briefing the director of Central Intelligence on the scrambler line, Dar had a channel as secure as NSA could make it. He retained enough awareness of his surroundings to circle a thumb and forefinger for Terry Unruh, who was manhandling a color copier into their jury-rigged ops center. “Just myself and Terry. Yes, he and Ullmer both know she’s my niece, I wouldn’t have been smart to hide it …. No, FBI is treading very gently; I’m a little surprised. I suppose we have you to thank for that, Abe …. I see. Well, a foreign perpetrator is still plausible, but I don’t think it’s true. Witnesses all claim he sounded beer-and-Rambo American.”

Although domestic cases of this sort would ordinarily be covered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Randolph obviously had his own reasons for wanting CIA to handle it. In a sense it was fortunate that the operation had involved a deal by foreign nationals, and was expected to cross national borders, because now it was not entirely a domestic matter for the FBI. Using that as his wedge, Randolph had obtained White House approval for his agency’s involvement. Foy’s NSA was deeply involved because Black Stealth One was, after all, their bird. Now all three of the nation’s biggest intelligence agencies would be working “together,” though always, always in competition. And Abraham Randolph’s neck was out a mile, Dar thought, and Abe knew it. If CIA could not get that airplane back, someone very senior would be in for a long fall.

Dar moved aside as Unruh, doing scutwork ordinarily handled by lesser people, patched in two more telephone lines near him, and turned away to speak. It was rare that a top-level conversation proceeded in such chaos. But then, it was equally rare for top-level men to take such an active role as Dar’s. That role was permitted to him only because he was playing it inside CONUS, the national borders.

“There’s Ullmer, of course, and his man Medina; and I expect Sheppard will be landing here any minute. Ullmer insists on being in on the chase with me…. How can I, Abe? Besides, the man knows what Black Stealth One can do. I’ll be glad to have him…. Negative, the less Medina knows, the better, since he’ll be running pretty much in the open and he’s in a very burnable position. Medina would never get it into his head that—well, Ben Ullmer himself says the Blue Sky craft is obsolete. If the Sovs already have Black Stealth One, the older aircraft is beside the point and no great loss to us. But if they don’t have Black Stealth One, then maybe they’ll grab Medina’s crashed offering and run off with the pieces, and that at least buys us more time.

“But we’re not talking policy with Medina. Besides, he’s scheduled out on a McDonnell almost anytime now. I think they’ll get in-flight refueling between here and San Diego, then Marine Harriers will set the team down in Mexico before dark …. Only Medina plus two deniables, Mexican nationals he’ll pick up in San Diego.”

This time, Dar waited patiently for a long minute. Then, “I thought we’d settled that, Abe. Just one little push right now, with relations as touchy as they are, and Mexico could be another Iran. If their Federal Bureau of Security gets wind of this and sends plainclothes Federales into Regocijo, the main thing that’ll matter is whether our people can evade. Our Mexicans are plausible and Medina claims he could pass and make it out alone. More people just might tempt a firefight on Mexican soil …. No, actually it was Unruh’s argument, but I’m backing him.”

Dar looked up as Unruh ushered in a newcomer. “Wup; Bill Sheppard just walked in. I’m sure he’ll know what Foy wants to do about the—the hostage situation.” He could not say, “my niece”; he wanted to say, “the daughter I have plausibly denied for twenty-two years,” but that would have reversed Abe Randolph’s decision instantly, to say nothing of the repercussions later. “I simply don’t know how, Abe. Somebody on the other side did his homework, that’s all…. I’ll call her parents myself later, when I know what spin to put on the news.”

“Spin” was a grotesque way to put it, he realized. The decision was not yet firm whether the United States Government would decide to send Petra spinning to her death as an expendable casualty the moment it got the chance. Abe Randolph had made his choice clear the instant he got Dar on the phone: regardless of the hostage’s identity, he’d said, she was not a prime consideration. Thanks to the predictable reaction of the popular media, she was the prime consideration. CIA had taken its lumps for a certain callousness in the past—“its formerly sanguinary views,” in Abe’s dry parlance.

In one compartment of his mind, Dar was wondering whether the Director of Central Intelligence would have made the same decision had he not been flashed the news of Petra’s identity. That was the kind of question he must never ask; it was prying at the teeth of a gift horse. Randolph had given him the option of continuing to ramrod this thing, and Dar had chosen to stay. Though Dar had always felt the highest respect for Abraham Randolph, never before had he felt like hugging the man.

Dar put the phone down, sighed, and shook hands with the wiry little scholar, Bill Sheppard. “You’ve met Unruh,” he said, trying to maintain a pose of briskness when he felt like bursting into tears.

Sheppard, looking a bit rumpled in shirtsleeves with his tie askew, was trying not to stare. “You’re handling this directly? Under the circumstances I’m, ah, sure it can’t be easy for you.” Of course Sheppard would know about Petra already. It had been foolish to hope otherwise.

“I’m just following policy on this, Bill, not making it.” He realized how edgy that had sounded, when he needed all the diplomacy at his command. He forced a smile and indicated the coffee bar with its pile of doughnuts nearby. “You and I get to chew over the tactics, and you can start by chewing on a glazed old-fashioned if you like. Oh, and an APB you may want to edit. We’ve just finished it,” he said, handing over the printout. Some version of that allpoints bulletin would soon be issuing from laser printers in several states. That APB would have been out already were it not for the need to coordinate everything this way, face-to-face, with a sister agency. All this complication was buying time for the other side.

Dar noted that Bill Sheppard continued to eye him quietly as the NSA deputy strayed toward the doughnuts and coffee, studying Dar over the top of the APB. Certainly it wasn’t going to be easy, but perhaps easier than going back to his office in Langley and ramming his head against the wall. The hardest part might be having to tell Phil and Andrea to be ready for the worst. He would say that in any case, but there were ways to imply good reason to hope, and ways to deny much hope. It occurred to him suddenly that he had no real choice on that call; whatever the decision here in Blue Hangar, he would have to shore up Andrea’s courage until the last shred of his own hope was gone. Until, in fact, he had seen Petra’s body, so near an exact copy of her mother’s…

Moments later, the door from the offices flew open as Medina entered with Ben Ullmer in tow.

“…unless you have to. Listen to me, Medina: we don’t give a shit about the fuckin’ airchine. It’s a gift; bust it up, but not so much that you lose your hide for it. Oh hi, Bill, with you in a minute.” Medina carried a leather one-suiter over one shoulder and a bulky sport equipment bag at his side, saying nothing, nodding frequently as he swivel-hipped his flamenco dancer’s rump between folding chairs and into the hangar proper, merely using the place as a shortcut toward the runway with Ullmer hurrying after. Ullmer continued until they were out of earshot: “Recheck the pressure in those scuba tanks. If we had a KH-12 available, I could get us a steady satellite link but that’s out….”

Dar met Sheppard’s gaze, and both men smiled sadly. “Ben wants to go himself,” Dar said.

“Wouldn’t that be a picture? High blood pressure, corns the size of manhole covers, and a Georgia accent thick as candlewax. But that’s not why he’s so anxious,” Sheppard replied slowly, making a scientific experiment of dunking his doughnut. “Ben loves his people. He wants to empty his entire brain into Medina’s, give his man the benefit of every scintilla of knowledge he’s accumulated in over sixty years.”

“But he can’t.”

“Of course he can’t. But he can’t stop himself from rattling on, thinking out loud, hoping some drop of that”—he was chuckling now—“that tsunami of words will help Medina. Whereas you and I know better.”

Dar tried to make it light. “Refresh me.”

Sheppard took a sopping bite, shrugged, and wiped his chin. “Nothing can help Medina but what he’s already internalized over the years, plus whatever his adrenal medulla can pump out for him in the very millisecond he needs it.” Sheppard’s owlish gaze was mild, his stand unassailable. Almost.

“Plus luck,” said Dar Weston in a choked voice, turning away so that the NSA deputy would not see the sudden upwelling of tears. He might have tried to prepare Petra for such barbarous possibilities as this, urged martial arts training, everything it took to make his daughter more than the equal of a kidnapper. Because he had not done any such thing, he had nothing left to hope for except her luck. If Sheppard tries to lecture me on the statistical foolishness of luck I will throttle him with my bare hands.

“Oh yes, that’s a given,” said Sheppard around another soggy mouthful. “Problem is, it’s given randomly on all sides.”

A distant surge of white noise, accompanied by keening whistles, suggested something very much more potent than a Learjet taxiing into the distance. Ben Ullmer hurried in with that sore-footed stride moments later, scratching his bald pate and muttering.

Sheppard: “How is Medina taking it, Ben?”

Ullmer: “The dumb shit, he’s just happy to be in a Phantom Two. He’ll be in Dago in less’n three hours, meeting those Company mercenaries for the last leg. I expect that’s when he’ll start taking it all seriously.” His sigh would have been appropriate for a wayward son. “I wonder where the hellbug is now,” he added.

“It has to be down,” said Sheppard, “unless the pilot expects to glide it to Moscow.” Scanning the big wall map, he went on, “He’s got to have fuel dumps along the way, and some help. It just won’t play any other way unless the man is crazy.”

“The hellbug will soar,” Ullmer replied, “especially without much of a fuel load.” He pulled up a folding chair, reached for a doughnut, thought better of it. Seated at a worktable with Dar and Sheppard, he studied the deletions Sheppard had made in the APB while Terry Unruh, lost in his own thoughts, paced behind them.

“Looks good, I guess I was saying too much,” Ullmer said, dropping the page with the neat lines Sheppard had drawn through a few phrases. “Except one place. You cut out the caution against destroying the hellbug.”

Dar took a deep breath, but held his silence. “You can build another one, Ben. The Sovs will be monitoring radio traffic and chances are overwhelming they’ll realize the airplane can become visually low-observable on demand. That’s okay, so long as they don’t find out how. We’re giving them a chameleon paint job as it is. But the real pixel skin must not be seen by the other side, not even a piece of it,” said Sheppard.

“I’m thinking about the girl,” Ullmer said, “and you know it. She’s not a ringer or a copilot. She’s a goddamn hostage. Must be twenty people who know that already. You want the Feebs holding that over you?”

Very softly, pulling at his tie and with a glance toward Dar that might have contained guilt, Sheppard said, “That decision is over my head, Ben. Like Dar, I’m not making policy, I’m just implementing it.”

Ullmer licked his lips and nodded, glancing to Dar, then to Sheppard. “Say we find the hellbug well inside the continental U.S., where we can try to force it down. What does policy say about that?”

“Judgment call,” Sheppard said. “But it may be in Canada already, or near the border.” He shifted position to peer at Dar. “Do you know how much I hate this, Weston?”

One of the telephones rang. Before Dar could reach it, Terry Unruh had snaked an arm out. “Ops center; Bumblebee here.”

He’s already given us code names for this, thought Dar. And I don’t even know mine yet. “For the record, the DCI has made the hostage’s welfare the prime factor. I won’t pretend I’m not relieved.”

Unruh, holding the phone against his chest, said, “Mr. Ullmer: Black Stealth One runs on aviation gas?”

“One hundred, one-thirty,” Ullmer nodded. Dar thought he saw something in Unruh’s face: fear, or excitement.

Unruh persisted, “Could it fly from here to Sugar Grove, West Virginia, without refueling?”

Dar’s “Christ! Have they found her?” was lost among two other voices.

Ben Ullmer knocked his chair over getting to the ladder, where he stretched the tape. “It’s an easy reach,” he said over his shoulder.

“Fifteen gallons of avgas were stolen early this morning from the chopper pad up the valley from your own facility in Sugar Grove,” Unruh said. “With your permission, I’m going to call for a microsearch of the area,” he said, looking at Dar.

“Do it,” said Dar and Sheppard simultaneously.

While Unruh spoke earnestly into the phone, Dar strode to the map. He watched Ullmer swing an arc from Sugar Grove to St. Louis, past Memphis, then southeast to Jacksonville, Florida. Then the grease pencil dashed a straight line starting at Elmira, passing through Sugar Grove. The line continued through Tallahassee and, with Ullmer squatting to complete the line, into the Gulf of Mexico.

Dar’s smile was not very convincing as he turned to Sheppard. “Not much to go on, is it?”

“No. Not enough to send us chasing down a grease-pencil line in a Lear,” Sheppard agreed.

Unruh cradled the phone and looked up from his notes as Dar patted his shoulder. “You sent out a query for thefts of avgas, I take it,” said Dar.

“By way of the Feebs,” said Unruh, “I mean the Bureau.”

“Quick thinking,” said Sheppard.

“Very,” Unruh assented, “an hour ago. But not mine. Mr. Ullmer’s assistant, Marie. Said if I didn’t, she’d ask them herself.”

Ben Ullmer had a laugh like a farm pump, and did not use it often. “She would,” he said, subsiding. “Any other suspicious stuff like that?”

“Since early today, only two more reported,” Unruh said. “A holdup for five gallons of unleaded in Queens, and a hot-wired station pump in Algona, Iowa.”

“Hey, wait a minute. That Iowa thing just might be possible,” said Ullmer, glaring at the map.

Unruh: “For diesel fuel?”

Ullmer’s baleful look said he’d been swindled. “Another good call. How’d you know it couldn’t be diesel?”

Unruh blinked. “Well, I didn’t think airplanes used it.”

“Not many do,” Ullmer said grudgingly. “Bill, if it comes to a vote on the hostage—”

“Only two votes count here,” Sheppard cut in, checking his wristwatch. His meaning was clear: CIA and NSA. And every second of delay counted against them. Sheppard threw his pencil down and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Weston, I’ll compromise if you will. I’ll reinstate the phrase that prohibits forcing it down.”

“If?”

“If you’ll agree to taking it down, any way possible, the moment we have solid evidence that it’s within a hundred miles of our borders.”

“The shoreline is a border. Fifty miles,” Dar countered. “Solid evidence means visual contact.”

“Would you compromise on seventy-five?”

An agonized pause. “If I must,” Dar sighed.

With a single abrupt nod, Sheppard committed himself. “Agreed. Here, get this thing into the computer,” he said, handing the printout to Ullmer.

“I’ll take it to the Bureau,” Unruh said, waiting for Ben to make erasures. “It goes to everybody with dedicated aircraft, right? Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, Air National Guard units, and state highway patrols.”

Dar nodded and felt a massive weight lift from his shoulders as Unruh darted out. At least he’d bought Petra a little time.

Dar, studying the map, mused, “We may be able to limit the individual states’ involvement to those along the Eastern seaboard. The governors have the power to refuse, you know.”

“That’s what martial law is for,” Sheppard snapped. “It would also let us ground all private aircraft. Make the job a lot easier.”

Dar almost laughed. “You can’t.”

“The hell you say,” Sheppard said, perplexed.

“Ex parte Milligan, Supreme Court decision,” Dar explained quickly. “Martial law can’t be applied where the civil courts are functioning. I hear they’re still in business, Bill.”

“I didn’t know you were a lawyer.”

“I’m not. I’ve just heard the argument in Security Council meetings. Personally I’d declare martial law myself if I could. I guess that’s why the court said ‘no.’”

The telephone buzzed. “What’s my code name on this?” Sheppard asked.

“Christ, I don’t know,” Dar said, and grabbed the receiver. “Ops center, Bumblebee here,” he lied.

Ullmer and Sheppard watched in silence. “My God, that’s wonderful,” he said, closing his eyes as if in prayer. “Certainly didn’t take you long. Any other tidbits? … It’s enough. Well done; you’ve earned a commendation.” He simply could not remain seated, but stood up, stretching, wiping his face to remove the moisture at the corners of his eyes.

“Well?” Sheppard was a patient man, but within limits.

“They’re analyzing fresh human excrement and scuff marks less than a mile from the chopper pad. And they’ve found a piece of duct tape. With right thumb and forefinger prints of the hostage, clear and unequivocal.”

Ullmer was up instantly. “Let’s fire up that Lear and fly down the line,” he said, pointing to the wall map.

“This is my post for the duration,” Sheppard said to Dar. “Weston, this isn’t an official objection but—what can you do in a Learjet that a squadron of naval aviators can’t do better?”

Dar, without hesitation: “Make decisions about what that squadron does.”

“Well, this is official, from Dernza: we doubt you’re the right man to make those decisions in a midair confrontation. I just wanted you to know.”

“Let’s leave the second-guessing for debriefing, shall we?” Dar’s voice was tight, but steady.

Sheppard, softly: “No offense intended. You’re leaving Unruh here?”

“As my deputy,” Dar nodded, feeling the surge of adrenaline course down his arms and legs.

“And, Ben,” Sheppard continued as the others reached for luggage, “don’t make me ask for frequent bulletins.”

“We’ll keep you in the loop,” Dar said, pausing at the edge of a partition. “I still don’t even know our code names yet. You’ll find Unruh is so efficient it’ll scare you.”