Delta Green (Colonel McKenna Adventure Book 2) Read online

  DELTA GREEN

  WILLIAM H. LOVEJOY

  © William H. Lovejoy 1993

  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 1993 by Zebra Books, Kensington Publishing Corp.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  This one is for my son,

  the new graduate,

  David Lovejoy

  Chapter One

  DELTA BLUE

  “Mach two-zero, jefe.”

  “I’m still with you, Tiger” McKenna said, his eyes performing the automatic cockpit scan. The digital numbers reported the angle of attack at the correct forty degrees, so he figured that, once again, he’d let the computer play commander of the craft. As a pilot who had flown anything from Stearman bipes to F-16 Fighting Falcons and loved them all, the most difficult thing he had learned to do was to let some magic box of silicon take his job away from him.

  He had relied on the computer almost four hundred times in this segment of the flight, and the computer had accomplished the leg correctly every time, adjusting controls and length of burn for any variance that cropped up. McKenna couldn’t help thinking that, given the chance, he would be just as accurate. He couldn’t help thinking, either, that if he was just slightly in error, it would be fatal.

  The MakoShark prepared to enter the denser atmosphere facing forward and nose high just like her larger cousins, the Space Shuttle Orbiters.

  “Altitude nine-zero,” the weapons system officer reported from the rear cockpit. Major Tony “Tiger” Munoz didn’t have to mention that the unit of measurement was miles. They had been flying together for so long, since Munoz had spent a year as a weapons system trainee in McKenna’s squadron, that certain procedures and expectations had become intuitive and automatic. Back then, McKenna and the feisty WSO in the backseat of his F-4D had taken second place in their class in the Red Flag combat exercises out of Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

  McKenna felt the first drag of the thicker atmosphere pulling at the MakoShark. Two amber indicators in the lower left corner of the Head-Up Display, the HUD, confirmed that the computer had ordered coolant pumped through the heat shields, as well as the cockpit air conditioning level increased.

  “Damned computer remembers everything,” he muttered over the interphone.

  “What’s that, Snake Eyes?”

  “Nothing, Tiger. I’m complimenting a box on a job well done.”

  “Gettin’ bitter, are we, amigo? You seat-of-the-jeans people are too damned romantic. Can’t live with the demise of the Spad.”

  “It died?” McKenna asked, forcing wonder into his voice.

  “Couldn’t take the heat. Skin temp four-five-zero Fahrenheit. Leading edges comin’ up on seven-ought-ought”

  “Copy that,” McKenna said, “coolant running.”

  The leading edges of the wings and nose were composed of a second skin combining reinforced carbon-carbon, Nomex felt, and a ceramic alloy that resisted the temperatures that rose to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit on the leading edges of the wings. Additionally, the nose cone and the wing leading edges contained an arterial network of cooling tubes through which super-cooled fluids were pumped. McKenna thought the system was considerably better than that of the Space Shuttle’s individual tiles, and there had been relatively few failures, none of which were critical.

  Munoz transmitted the warning message on the Tactical One frequency. “Alpha, Delta Blue. We’re goin’ black.”

  “Copy, Delta Blue.”

  The surrounding atmosphere was ionized when the heat shield temperatures topped 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in a blackout of communications.

  McKenna could feel the heat in the cockpit, but it wasn’t particularly uncomfortable. To the uninitiated, the visual impact was more disconcerting. A red-orange film slipped up the nose and enveloped the cockpit canopy. All visual contact with the black and starry environment was lost, and claustrophobic tendencies were heightened.

  As the windscreen began to clear nearly five minutes later, the colors worked their way down through burnt orange to amber to yellow.

  Munoz hit his radio button. “Alpha, Delta Blue. Altitude two-three-eight thousand feet, velocity Mach twelve-point-seven, two-seven minutes to objective.”

  “Alpha copies, Delta Blue.”

  Passing through the blackout still made McKenna’s adrenaline pump, despite the number of times he had accomplished it. It was one of his personal addictions, far better, he thought, than anything he could buy off the street in Miami.

  The computer brought the nose down to thirty-one degrees.

  When the HUD readout indicated Mach 6.2 speed and 130,000 feet of altitude, McKenna said, “I’m taking over, Tiger.”

  “Damned hotdog,” Munoz told him.

  “Isn’t it time for your nap, kid?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Munoz could sleep anywhere, at any time, and most often did.

  McKenna didn’t know how the WSO could pass up the view. It was different every time they came out of blackout, and it was just as spectacular every time.

  They were almost directly over the international dateline that slashed through the Pacific. Behind him, the band of night was moving westward, crawling toward the Philippines, the blackness of space punctured with the bright, unblinking lights of stars. Ahead, the curvature of the Earth was clearly discernible, and while the sun — high to his right oblique — was spreading its illumination over the globe, the backdrop of the sky from this altitude was just as black.

  The Pacific Ocean was so blue it seemed jewel-like. Near the shores of the North American continent, the color shaded into teal. White, puffy cumuli disguised the Central American coastline and dotted the far horizon. The state of Washington, low on his left, was also obliterated by cloud cover. California and Oregon were brownish from haze, dissolving into lighter shades of green as the MakoShark lost altitude.

  McKenna squinted his eyes, picking out the central Rocky Mountains.

  Colorado was the target.

  Disengaging the computer, McKenna assumed control, fitting his hand to the stubby control stick fitted to the end of his right armrest. The “fly-by-wire” control system, which he had first encountered in the F-16, had taken some getting used to, but McKenna now thought of any other control system as inordinately primitive.

  As the MakoShark coasted without power, losing speed and altitude and slowly bringing her nose down, McKenna ran through his post-reentry checklist, double-checking the readouts on the HUD and the instrument panel. The skin and leading edge temperatures were coming down fast. He shut down the coolant pumps, lapping a simple code into the keypad next to the control stick, he ordered the computer to run diagnostic checks of all systems.

  One by one, green indicators appeared across the top of the cathode ray tube in front of him, in the instrument panel below the He
ad-Up Display. Hydraulics, electrical, battery status, flight controls, radar, electronic countermeasures, radios, weapons control, the computer itself — everything was humming as it should, ready for instant use. That was typical of the maintenance program headed by Lieutenant Colonel Bradley Mitchell. He was an activist when it came to the safety and operation of his birds.

  McKenna loosened the shoulder and lap belts he had snugged down before the reentry burn. He manually examined the oxygen/nitrogen feed tube fittings. Rotating his shoulders against the gray-blue environmental suit, he forced some of the tension from his shoulders. The protective suits were constructed with a fabric which was a combination of Kevlar, silicon, and plastic, very tear-resistant and very flexible. When inflated, there was less than an inch of space between the fabric and the skin. In the pressurized cockpits, the suits were not inflated, but they would automatically fill if the cockpit seals failed. The helmet-to-suit fitting was comprised of a pair of collars with a series of meshed grooves, allowing almost full freedom in head rotation. Men’s fashion in environmental wear had evolved considerably since Alan Shepard’s day.

  “Goin’ through sixty thousand, Snake Eyes. Mach four-three.”

  “I thought it was siesta time.”

  “Nah. I’m playin’ with my firin’ solution.”

  “You told me that was a piece of cake”

  “It is. Unless we could make it more of a challenge.”

  “How’s that, Tiger?”

  “Forget comin’ down out of the sun. Everybody does that.”

  “Up from the deck?”

  “Why not?” Munoz said.

  “We’ll do it your way,” McKenna told him.

  “Hot damn! I get my way at last. Angels four-oh, Kevin.”

  “Let’s light ’em up.”

  Forty thousand feet was the prime altitude for starting the jet engines. The MakoShark operated on both rocket motors and turbojets, depending on the need at the time. Additionally, for high altitude missions, there was a ramjet mode.

  McKenna retracted the ramjet cones — triangles, actually — in the turbojet intakes, and Munoz intoned the start checklist, which also scrolled down the smaller, four-inch CRT on McKenna’s instrument panel.

  The HUD showed the RPMs coming up on both engines, and at 25% RPMs, he activated the ignition and fuel flow. A few seconds later, the tailpipe temperature readout told him he had operational turbojets. He let them warm a minute before running them up to 100%.

  Mach 3.1. Three times the speed of sound. The high-pitched roar of the turbojets was behind him, leaving the cockpit in relative quiet. Except for the slight whisper of the increasingly dense atmosphere sliding over the craft’s skin that penetrated the insulation of the cockpit.

  And except for the toothy, under-the-breath whistle of Tony Munoz, working his way off-key through the “Colonel Bogey March.”

  The California coast came up quickly, pretty inviting on an October afternoon. McKenna knew, though, that his view from eight miles up was considerably more scenic than the close-up reality. The beer cans, fried chicken wrappers, and french fries sacks could be distracting.

  Sometimes he wondered how he had been so fortunate. He was being paid for this. Originally, after achieving his engineering degree from the Air Force Academy, McKenna’s sole objective had been to become a general. It seemed like the thing to be from a twenty-two-year-old’s perspective. Now, he didn’t give a damn if he never advanced beyond the silver eagles he wore on the right occasions. Generals didn’t get to fly much.

  The MakoShark passed into the coastal Air Defense Identification Zone, the ADIZ, without a challenge from one radar site, civilian or military.

  The explanation was simple enough. The MakoShark was invisible to radar.

  Every facet of stealth technology had been utilized in her construction. The internal ribs of her wings and fuselage were cast of honeycombed carbon-impregnated fiberglass that reflected radar probes at odd angles, and not back to the radar transmitter. The skin of the craft was also carbon-impregnated plastic and was coated in a midnight blue paint containing microscopic iron balls which conducted electricity and deterred radar reflection. Instead of bouncing back, radar signals slithered around on the surface of the MakoShark. The radar cross section (RCS) was so slim that the craft had to be within five miles of a powerful conventional radar before she returned a signal the size of a California Condor, and that signal was weak enough to go unnoticed.

  The turbojet engines were not directly behind the intake duct; they sucked their air supply from an upward-curving tunnel. In that configuration, the spinning turbine blades were diminished as radar reflectors. To limit the RCS additionally, the turbojet blades were not made of metal. They were plastic, combined with carbon fiber for strength. While some designers had experimented with engines made of ceramics — not detectable on radar — the MakoShark’s designers had elected to stay with the more reliable and higher output metal-encased engines, which were enclosed in a honeycombed structure that diffused and absorbed radar probes.

  The jet engines were mounted nearer the forward end of long nacelles, and their exhaust was channeled slightly downward in another curving tunnel that was wrapped with tubing carrying Freon gas. The refrigerant cooled the exhaust considerably, so that by the time it exited the exhaust pipe, its infrared signature was practically nonexistent at seventy per cent throttle settings. Infrared tracking sensors just might pick up a small signal at ninety per cent throttle, and would at a hundred per cent.

  The rocket motors were mounted inboard of the jet engines, in the same nacelles, and were also protected from radar by the honeycomb layer.

  “Maybe we could do Palm Springs tonight, jefe? Or Vegas? We haven’t been to Vegas in a long time.”

  “If we don’t pull off this attack, Tiger, the CO will fire us, and then we can’t afford Palm Springs.”

  “Good damned point, Snake Eyes. I’ll make sure my computer is counting right. You happen to see Needles, go to three-oh.”

  McKenna saw Lake Havasu first, retarded his throttles, and began a slow descent. The speed came down to Mach 1.8.

  He dialed in a Denver radio station on the Nav/Com radio and used it to verify the position reported by the inertial navigation system, which obtained its information from the NavStart Global Positioning Satellite system. Using triangulating information from at least three of the eighteen satellites in the GPS system, the computer usually knew within a few feet their exact position on the globe.

  As usual, the MakoShark’s brain was correct. The coordinates were printed at the lower edge of the HUD, to the right of the readout for the craft’s heading.

  078 34° 55’ 14” 114° 49’ 55”

  At the top of the HUD, the crucial data of speed and altitude were dominant figures. By the time the Grand Canyon crossed beneath them, he had reached Mach 1.5 and thirty thousand feet of altitude.

  “Take a big, lazy S-turn, Snake Eyes, and bleed off another tenth of a Mach, then go to heading zero-seven-four. We’re ahead of schedule.”

  “Always hated being late for a date,” McKenna said.

  The sun was behind them at 3:15 P.M. when they crossed the Colorado border west of Durango. As soon as he passed over the 14,000-foot Mount Wilson, McKenna eased the throttles back. The velocity rolled back until the Mach numbers on the readout changed to knots. He didn’t want to leave a sonic footprint.

  Easing the side-mount stick, which was computer-adjusted for the tensions McKenna favored forward, he put the MakoShark into a shallow dive.

  “Unless you want C. W. McCall to see us, Kev, you’d better grab a couple points to the right.”

  The man who had given the world “Convoy” and “Wolf Creek Pass” was the mayor of Ouray, Colorado.

  McKenna banked to the right to give Ouray plenty of room and lined up to the right of Uncompahgre Peak. The MakoSharks were only infrequently brought into populated areas during daylight hours since, despite all of their stealthy characteri
stics, they were still visible to the naked eye, and they were still mostly classified.

  The Uncompahgre National Forest came up quickly on the left, a thick blue-green blanket of Ponderosa Pine and Blue Spruce peppered with the pristine white of the year’s first snowfall a week before.

  When the peak lined up with the craft’s left wingtip, which was actually the slanted-up rudder, Munoz said, “Target four-five miles, beadin’ zero-zero-five. Put her on the deck, jefe.”

  McKenna could have used the terrain-following radar on his invasion of the mostly deserted Gunnison National Forest, but that might have taken the fun out of it. He rolled hard to the left, pumped in some rudder, and dove toward the earth, pulling out on a northerly heading.

  The landscape was rugged and undulating between six to eight thousand feet above sea level, and he used his radar altimeter to monitor his distance above the peaks, mesas, and valleys. Rollercoasting at five hundred feet above the earth, he maintained a speed of five hundred knots.

  Highway 50 and the Blue Mesa Reservoir shot past.

  “We got a target yet?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to go active and give ourselves away,” Munoz told him.

  A transmitting radar revealed itself to an enemy.

  “You’re the one who picked up the moniker Snake Eyes,” Munoz added. “Prove it.”

  McKenna had already picked out the white dot against the slate blue of the sky.

  “One o’clock high,” he said.

  “Jesus! I don’t believe it.”

  Thirty seconds went by before Munoz found the airplane for himself. He quickly aimed the video camera in the nose with his hand controller, shunted the image to the main CRTs, and zoomed the magnification to twenty.

  On McKenna’s screen, the sharp image of a Cessna Citation business jet appeared. It had United States Air Force markings.

  “That’s the hummer,” Munoz said. “Let me have a couple of Wasp IIs.”

  McKenna reached for his armaments panel, opened the bomb bay doors, and lowered the missile rack. He selected missiles one and two, armed them, and was rewarded with two green LEDs.