Cold Front

  Cold Front

  William H Lovejoy

  © William H Lovejoy 1990

  William H Lovejoy has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1990 by Zebra

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  One

  The flight leader had a great deal of experience in the MiG-25 high-altitude aircraft, but he hated these missions. Though dawn had long since arrived at his altitude, the view outside the canopy was of dark streaky clouds, and he could not even see his wingman fifty meters off his right wing.

  Every flight in the last three months, plus the test flights of last winter, had taken place in the same highly turbulent conditions. It was a requirement of the project. The 37,000-kilogram airplane was a toy, a yo-yo snapped up and down by the unseen hands of a novice operator. The aircraft leaped in gusts, sank abruptly in downdrafts, and yawed unexpectedly, skidding across the dark sky at Mach.9. And again tonight he would see the red and blue bruises on his skin, the effects of tight straps on his chest, shoulders, and waist.

  Far too frequently, the decision of the project commander was to have them wait out deployment for twenty minutes, dangerously close to the point of no return, but the flight leader was heartened this morning when the message came through so quickly: “Falcon One, Code Ruby. Say again, Falcon One, Code Ruby.”

  “Ruby” meant salvation. He could deploy the canisters, advance the throttles to afterburner ignition, and climb at Mach 2.2 into the serenity of calm air at 24,000 meters. Shortly thereafter, he would begin looking for his refuelling tanker. Until he was refuelled, he was always nervous about reaching his base.

  By order, he was not to acknowledge any radio call, and he had to assume that his wingman, Falcon Two, had also heard the order. The pilot simply retarded his throttles and then activated the release by pressing the stud under his thumb on the control stick.

  On the underside of the jet’s nose, a curved panel pushed hydraulically downward as the aircraft slowed to under 1,120 kilometres per hour. One by one, six globes were ejected from the storage cavity, a tethered metal plug pulling free from each. Loss of the plug activated a timer which opened the valve on a compressed carbon dioxide cartridge. When the aircraft were fifty kilometres away, on their homeward journey, the gas forced two pistons upward, ejecting a triangular piece of fibreglass from the top of the shell. The skeletal, hinged struts rose out of the module and unfolded, spreading above the sphere into a wide framework with an attached nylon fabric.

  The paravane gliding mechanism made the module look like an obese angel.

  Of the twelve spheres ejected from the two aircraft that morning, eleven spread their wings successfully. The carbon-impregnated fibreglass struts of one sphere cracked, then snapped in the maelstrom. The structure collapsed, the nylon shredded, and it began a torturous journey downward. It was tossed about by gale-force winds, tumbling and spinning, until it crashed into the heavy swells of the sea. Its heavy cargo dragged it quickly under the surface.

  The launch survivors, whose spread paravanes activated a UHF transmitter, bleeped eleven separate coded messages in one-fiftieth-of-a-second bursts. The signals were gathered by the Molniya I satellite in orbit above the Sea of Okhotsk at the time. The Molniya I was a communications satellite with an elliptical orbit rate of twelve hours, and three satellites in sequential duty were required for the project. The Molniyas had store-and-dump capability; they could retain information for later transmission. On that morning, the satellite relayed the eleven data-impregnated messages to a microwave relay station on the tip of the peninsula, and forced them northward on confidential frequencies to the secret compound where the computers decoded them. Finally, the telemetric data were fed back to the operations room.

  Since the predominant makeup of the spheres was of fibreglass, to avoid radar detection, the sophisticated electronics were necessary to provide a homing signal to the satellite, so that not only the satellite’s computer, but the personnel on the ground would know exactly the altitude and geographical coordinates of each module. Since the beginning of the operation, the telemetry readings had never failed to be accurate, perhaps because the telemetry circuits were almost exact copies of similar devices employed by NASA.

  In the jet stream itself, the modules with the hang-glider wings tossed and bounced, burbling through the dark skies, not losing a great deal of altitude, and following the only guide they had: the wind.

  The specially modified MiG-25’s were on the final approach leg to their home base when the computer aboard the Molniya I received instructions from the ground, verified the classification, and then examined the directions carefully in microseconds, aligned the sequence, and transmitted the triggering codes.

  When the coded transmission was interpreted by the receiver in each module, a relay was closed. Twelve volts of electricity shot through the circuit, detonating a small TNT charge which disintegrated the thin fibreglass shell of the sphere at the same time that the key component initiated a chain reaction in the passive crystals. The miniature fission took place in nano-seconds, and the crystals scattered into the darkly clouded skies in a wide pattern.

  It was a pattern that would affect a continent.

  Two

  By November, the Farmer's Almanac prediction of a winter milder than normal appeared to be slightly out of whack. Judd Petersen stood in his warm kitchen, finishing his second cup of coffee, and stared out the window. A blustery wind piled tumbleweeds against the north side of the barn. The sky was leaden in the direction of Thedford, Nebraska, and a new coating of snow had covered the tracks in the yard. The long fortress of baled hay back of the corrals looked smaller than ever. He turned back to his wife sitting at the kitchen table. “Dee, you remember the name of the fellow we shipped hay to during the drought a couple years ago? Down in Arkansas?”

  “We’ve got it in a file somewhere.”

  Judd Peterson shrugged into his blanket coat. “You want to look it up and give him a call? See if he can spare a few tons?”

  Dee rubbed her tired eyes with her forefingers. “You think we’re going to need more?”

  “Just a feelin’ I got.”

  Judd Petersen’s forebodings were shared by others across the plains of Nebraska, Montana, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. For people whose ancestors had pioneered the high plains, weather forecasting was part of the psyche — a careful interpretation of the clouds and the vane over the barn, a sniffing of the wind, and an experience that arose from within.

  Something was twitchy. It did not feel right.

  The trees had shed their leaves a few days early this year. The first snowfall in September was not unusual, but had been heavier than expected. A sudden snow flurry in Bellingham, Washington, combined with salty sleet off the sound, had caught traffic on Interstate 5 unaware and resulted in a forty-two-car pileup. Denver’s airport had already been closed down twice in late October because of snow and low visibility. That happened in Denver, but not usually so early in the winter. A light snowfall in northern Michigan had transformed itself into a raging blizzard when eighty-mile-per-hour winds descended from Canada. Utilities crews were still repairing telephone and electric lines, and the snapshots of ten-foot drifts were still a staple on the evening news.

  To people old enough, like Judd Petersen, it felt like 1949.

  *

  About twenty miles out of Denver’s Stapleton Airport, still in a steep climb, Brandon Garrett began to regret his decision to bring the Cherokee. He should have rented a twin or flown commercial.

  Ahead of him to the west, the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies were brilliant, almost dazzling, in the morning sun. Beyond them, however, the sky was a dead gray. At the top of the stratocumulus, the edges were silver, but at the bottom, and spread from his left horizon to his right, the colour was considerably darker. They offered a gloomy omen for the afternoon.

  “Cherokee seven-one, you are cleared for fifteen thousand feet,” the air controller told him.

  “Cherokee seven one. Confirm clearance fifteen thousand feet. Thank you, Denver. Seven-one out.”

  Denver Air Control was actually located in Longmont, Colorado, to the north of the city. Garrett did not worry about it.

  He worried about his airplane. It was a 1978 Dakota model with the Avco Lycoming 235-horsepower engine. The plane was perfectly suited to his weekend flying out of College Park Airport in Maryland, where he kept it. With a 17,500-foot ceiling and a maximum speed of 170 miles per hour, it was also adequate for mountain flying. That meant he could clear the peaks in the rarified air of Colorado.

  Garrett was a competent pilot, and a cautious one outside of combat flight, and he approached winter mountain flying with an eye to the dangers involved.

  The ro
ugh air he was currently bouncing around in was typical of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a result of updrafts, and did not concern him. But the storm clouds in the west did, and intuition told him the storm would move in faster than the meteorologists had calculated. He was following Visual Flight Rules, currently using Interstate 70 as his guide, so he dialled his Nav/Coms into a weather channel. He turned the volume down until the broadcast was a murmur in the overhead speaker.

  By ten-thirty, Garrett had achieved his altitude, trimmed out the controls, and poured himself a cup of hot coffee from his thermos. Idaho Springs was passing by on his right. The town looked to be about knee-deep in snow. Snow was piled high along the streets and the exits from the interstate highway, and cars were moving, but it was a hell of a lot of snow. Garrett thought that he had read somewhere that the snowfall for October and November was far above normal. It would be a record season, if it kept up.

  The syndicates and the few individuals who had a proprietary interest in things snow-worthy were probably doing handsprings once a day. Skiers bound for the multitude of Colorado resorts had snapped up most of the available motel and condominium accommodations. Garrett had had to make a number of calls before landing reservations at the Aspen Lodge for himself and for Harv and Connie Landers.

  This was going to be an impromptu get-together, sparked on Garrett’s part by a desire to get out of his Pentagon office and to use up some of his accumulated leave time before the paper-pushers started X-ing it off his records. Though he was a full colonel, the U.S. Air Force still insisted upon a ceiling of ninety days of accumulated leave. He had to use it, or lose it.

  Then too, after the operation in West Germany, working out of Rhein-Main, he decided he could use the rest. Seven days of that mission had been conducted on what had been the eastern side of the Wall, pursuing rumours of an intelligence pipeline out of the Air Force’s electronic security section at Tempelhof Air Base in Berlin. It had been a little dicey at times.

  As a special assistant to the Deputy Director for the Operational Intelligence Directorate of Air Force Intelligence, Garrett was a troubleshooter who was often assigned to run such rumours to ground. In this case, the rumours proved to have foundation, and Garrett had traced them back to a personnel staff sergeant and a headquarters clerk at Tempelhof. Their motivations in delivering personnel assignment and squadron battle plans to the military liaison division of the German Democratic Republic’s Volkspolizei had been 10,000 Deutsche marks a month. For the equivalent of a couple thousand American bucks a month, the two had been willing to risk not only their personal freedom, but also NATO’s position in Europe.

  Garrett thought that the upcoming Air Force court-martials for the two NCOs would effectively restrict their freedom to the immediate vicinity of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for about twenty-five years. It was about fifty or sixty years short, in his opinion, but a lot better than current civilian courts would mete out.

  The mountain coming up on his right felt a little close, so he banked away from it to the left and passed directly over Georgetown. It too was inundated in snow, but the highway climbing up to the Eisenhower Tunnel was clear, twin black ribbons snaking through a white wilderness. It looked cold as hell.

  It had been cold and gray, a German winter constant, when he had left Munich for New York City on the last weekend in October. The Big Apple had been dismal too. Garrett remembered slush when he remembered New York in winter, not snowpack. He remembered face-tingling cold, not numbing, bitter impact.

  His Trans World Airlines flight had arrived at Kennedy three hours behind schedule, at eleven in the evening, and he had elected to taxi into the city for the rest of the night, rather than hang around for a shuttle flight to Washington. The shuttles were backed up.

  He stayed at the Marriott Marquis on Broadway. Garrett had a fondness for first-class hotels, if not for the pornographic sights and amusements of Times Square and 42nd Street.

  After checking in and carting his single suitcase up to his room, he hit the lounge at twelve-fifteen. At twelve-eighteen, Harvey Landers hit him squarely in the middle of the shoulders.

  “Garrett, you son of a bitch!”

  He wheeled around on the stool to face his attacker. “I’ll be damned. Harv. What in the hell...”

  “Come on. I’ve got a booth over here, and I’ll do the buying.”

  Settled in a banquette booth with Johnny Walker Black Label on ice, Garrett and Landers eyed one another with fondness. The two of them had gone through the University of Southern California on ROTC scholarships, then the fixed-wing school at Lackland Air Force Base together. Landers had stayed in fixed-wing craft, while Garrett had also picked up training in rotary-winged craft.

  In his more than two decades in the Air Force, Garrett had met a lot of people. If he sat down and compiled a list — which he would not do because he hated paperwork — he could probably come up with over a thousand names of people he knew fairly well. He guessed there would be less than ten on the list that he would call a true friend.

  Landers was on the shorter listing.

  “You give up L.A. for New York?” Garrett asked. “Hell, no! Who wants this snow-and-cold shit? I’m here on business.”

  “Same business?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’d say no.”

  “And you’d be right,” Landers grinned.

  Harv Landers had left the Air Force after two tours of Vietnam, four years of service, a captaincy, a Distinguished Service Medal, two Silver Stars, and three Purple Hearts. One of the Silver Stars and one of the wounds came during his second tour, when he was flying a Cessna 0-1 Bird Dog as a forward artillery observer for an artillery brigade. Like many FAOs, he had rigged two rocket launchers to the struts of the high-winged aircraft, in addition to the marking flares. Firing the rockets in flight nearly brought the plane to a standstill.

  At that time, Garrett had transferred to Nathan Petrie’s Special Operations Group, working out of the Saigon Embassy. Garrett and three ARVN officers, en route to a rendezvous in Laos, lost the tin-bine of their UH-1H Huey to ground fire and went down west of An Khe. They were under heavy machine-gun fire by a platoon of NVA regulars and calling for extraction by rescue choppers, when Landers heard the radio transmissions. Garrett would forever remember Landers’s call on the radio emergency net: “Sounds like that fuckin’ Brandy Garrett to me. Hey, Tiger Base, I’m going to go check it out.”

  Landers came in low and unleashed his two rockets on the NVA position, but did not do much damage. On the second pass, he came in behind them, cut power, and crashed the Cessna into the middle of their emplacement. He killed seven of them, disabled three, and walked away from it with only a gash in his forehead.

  Since his release from active duty, Landers had sold insurance, become an insurance broker, sold cars, bought three automobile dealerships, sold real estate, become a realty broker, built houses, become a general contractor, sold airplanes, and become an airplane dealer. He still owned pieces of the action on all of it.

  “So what is it now?” Garrett asked him.

  “Couple of things. We’re doing a hostile takeover of a Southern California restaurant chain, and while that’s going on, I’ve set up a holding corporation for all of it. I’ve been here for two weeks screwing around with the underwriters who think I’m going to make a few bucks by taking the holding company public. Most of them are assholes.”

  Garrett sipped his drink and grinned. “You don’t put up with the establishment very well, Harv.”

  “Look who’s talking. I remember seeing your name in the paper a few months ago. As I recall, you were testifying at a Senate hearing on intelligence leaks, and you told a prominent Senator on the panel that he was the biggest hole in the dike.”

  “His staff is, in reality.”

  “I don’t see why you’re still with Air Force Intelligence,” Landers said. “If I were the boss, I’d have canned your ass the next day.”

  “Because it was the truth. It’s hard to bitch about the truth.”

  “The truth is,” Landers said, “you should take your exalted pension and get out of it, Brandy. Hell, you know you’re not going to make brigadier general, not with the brass you’ve pissed off.”