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  Airstarts were not possible in the ram-jet mode, and McKenna had learned that the denser air at 45,000 feet was best for restarting the turbofans.

  Sunset was streaking orange on his western horizon when he went through 45,000 feet at a negative twenty degree angle of attack. The speed was down to Mach 1.2. He opened the turbojet throttles far enough to contract the engine intake cones for normal air flow, then stabbed the ignition switches with a forefinger.

  The HUD indicators immediately showed power on both engines, and the RPMs came up quickly.

  “Shit, Snake Eyes. You woke me up early.”

  “Won’t hurt you a bit, Tiger. You’re the only guy I know who sleeps twenty hours a day.”

  “Preparin’ myself for those days when I can’t sleep at all.”

  “When did that happen last?” McKenna asked.

  “‘Eighty-three or ‘Eighty-four. One or the other.”

  Kevin McKenna and Anthony Munoz had been flying the MakoShark together for over three years, but before that, they had flown together in USAF F4-D Panthers and other aircraft. They were well aware of each other’s habits and idiosyncrasies. Without McKenna’s asking for it, Munoz put the GPS signal on the CRT, then overlaid it with a local map.

  On his screen, McKenna saw the borders of Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado as well as a piece of northwest Kansas. Major highways and cities were shown, as were the prominent peaks to the southwest. The blinking orange dot in the middle of the screen was the MakoShark, and the map scrolled downward as they followed the computer’s imposed heading of 189 degrees.

  By the time they passed over the Nebraska panhandle, McKenna had the speed subsonic at 600 knots to erase their shock wave, and Peterson Air Force Base was an orange dot at the top of the screen. A fair amount of conditioning was required in order to become accustomed to the map overlays. North was not always at the top of the screen. Rather, the top was always their direction of travel. Map “North,” in this instance, was 189 degrees, just to the right of true south.

  It was after eight o’clock in the Mountain Daylight Time zone. As dusk settled over Denver, the lights in her downtown high rises and the sprawling suburbs flickered into life. McKenna keyed a few changes into the computer, to give Denver and the new international airport in Adams County a wide berth.

  Sixty miles out of Colorado Springs at 30,000 feet, McKenna punched in the frequency numbers on the UHF for Peterson Air Control, then keyed the transmit mode with the finger button on the hand controller.

  “Peterson Control, Delta Blue.”

  “Go, Delta Blue.”

  “ETA in nine.”

  “Geez, Delta Blue. How about giving me a little warning someday? Squawk me.”

  McKenna initiated his IFF transponder, creating an artificial, and identified, blip on Peterson radar screens.

  “Delta Blue, Peterson Air Control. We’ve got you. Wind two knots, out of zero-zero-nine. Temperature four-six degrees. If you care about it, and if it were light out, the visibility would be great.”

  “I don’t care about it.”

  “I thought not. Okay, you’re cleared straight-in on Nine.”

  “Copy straight-in on Nine. Delta Blue, gone.”

  Despite its stealth on radar, the MakoShark was visible to the naked eye, of course. And while there had been pictures of it published in newspapers and Aviation Week, the Defense Department preferred to keep the craft an arm’s length away from the media and the casual observer. Consequently, takeoffs and landings during daylight hours were rare occurrences. Night landings of the MakoShark were now second nature to McKenna. MakoShark arrivals and departures took precedence over other aircraft.

  McKenna heard the air controller suspending other operations.

  Far to the west, the main east-west runway went dark.

  In the darkness, and despite the lights of nearby Colorado Springs and the Air Force Academy, McKenna could not see it. The skies were clear, not even a cloud bank to blot out the stars. The mountain peaks to the west were dead spots, barely discernible against the stars. He backed off the throttles, deployed the speed brakes, and lost altitude to 12,000 feet as he circled in from the east.

  Five minutes out, Munoz asked, “You ready, Snake Eyes?”

  “Go over.”

  The screen changed to infrared imaging, and McKenna switched his attention to it. At the top edge of the screen, the hot lights surrounding the base provided a red-orange, splayed signal, otherwise there was nothing.

  Two minutes later, he had the landing strip. It was lit along both sides with infrared lights, and on the screen, was as visible as Dulles International. Had he looked through his windscreen, he would have seen only darkness.

  The long parallel row of lights got longer as the craft descended. McKenna deployed full flaps and landing gear, pulled the throttles full back, and felt the MakoShark sag a trifle. It wasn’t very adept at slow speeds.

  Above the instrument panel screen, the graphic readouts for the Instrument Landing System showed his angle-of-descent right on the money, but he was slightly below the glide path. That was a result of coming in heavy, with a greater than normal solid fuel load.

  He advanced the throttles a fraction and watched the blip rise up into the glide path tolerance.

  On the screen, the infrared lights started to spread.

  A glance at the airspeed readout showed 285 miles per hour.

  “Right on, amigo.”

  The tires squeaked when they touched down.

  McKenna used his left hand to pull both throttle levers inboard and back, neutralizing the turbine blades, then easing them into reverse thrust.

  The nose dipped as the powerful engines revved up, attempting to slow the craft, which with its fuel loads, weighed close to 180,000 pounds.

  The turbofans screamed on either side of him, overcoming the insulation and sound-deadening foam lining the cockpit. McKenna loved that scream.

  Halfway down the strip, he began to toe in brakes, and the MakoShark slowed to a creep a hundred yards short of the end of the concrete. McKenna idled the engines as Munoz cut off the infrared cameras and the screen went blank.

  Activating the nose wheel steering and connecting it to the hand controller, McKenna turned the craft to the right and saw a shaded blue flashlight blinking at him. He eased the controller back to center to follow it.

  Releasing the catch, he flipped his helmet visor up, which automatically closed off the oxygen/nitrogen supply.

  With his left hand, he found the switch to depressurize the cockpit, then raised the canopy. He heard the hydraulic whoosh! as Munoz raised his own canopy. The cool air rushed in, coated with the aroma of pine and JP-4 jet fuel. It smelled good to him after so many hours in artificial environments.

  Ahead, the flashlight blinked again, and McKenna guided the MakoShark directly into her hangar.

  Two

  For a man approaching sixty, Gen. Marvin Brackman was fit, if a trifle overweight. He was five-feet, eleven-inches tall, and he weighed 180 pounds, almost all of the excess wrapped around his waist. Bordering on portly, some would say, though not directly to him. His hair was exceptionally thin and fully gray, topping an elongated face with sad brown eyes, a thin, aristocratic nose, and a straight, wide mouth that surprised people when it smiled as often as it did.

  Brackman was commander, United States Air Force Space Command, which included the North American Aerospace Defense Command. His headquarters was located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain southwest of Colorado Springs, and the nearly five acres of space hollowed out of solid granite contained a maze of passages and facilities resting on a sea of steel springs. The springs were supposed to reduce the shock effects of a nuclear attack.

  NORAD was one of the “C-cubed” systems — command, control, and communications — operated by the Department of Defense. Like the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon and the Alternate NMCC at Fort Richie, Maryland, NORAD handled normal crisis situations with ease, but would
probably remain utilitarian only during the first stages of a nuclear war. All of the command centers were prime targets, and after they were obliterated, command and control would shift to airborne command posts, Boeing E-4Bs known as National Emergency Airborne Command Posts, or NEACPs, or “Kneecaps.”

  Brackman had learned to live with his potential fate, but many visitors to the NORAD headquarters appeared to him to be overly nervous.

  The heavily fortified antenna compound on the exterior of the mountain gathered signals from all over the world. The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), with its over-the-horizon radars, the Defense Early Warning System (DEWLine), Teal Ruby and KH-8 and K-11 satellites in space, and submarines and ships at sea fed their intelligence pickings to NORAD. The results were filtered, combined, and stored in the computers, ready for instant display on one of the plotting screens. At any particular moment, NORAD and her sister command centers could pinpoint the location of most ballistic missiles, aircraft, and naval ships in the world.

  The massive operations center controlled the flow of trillions of bits of information, the operators manning rows of complex consoles on the main floor. Brig. Gen. David Thorpe was in charge of the operations center, and he oversaw it, along with the shift duty officers, from an enclosed and windowed platform raised above the center floor. Through the windows, they had an unobstructed view of the massive screen mounted on the far wall of the center.

  Brackman opened the door and entered Thorpe’s aerie. None of the three men and two women at the command consoles leaped to attention for the commander, and he didn’t expect it. Brackman didn’t believe in diverting attention from the task at hand.

  Thorpe, a natty and meticulous man, checked his watch, climbed out of his upholstered chair, and met Brackman by the door.

  “I hope you’re not running a search-and-destroy mission for me, Marv. I lost track of time.”

  “No. I’m running late myself, David. I’ve been putting out congressional fires.”

  “Bonfire?”

  “More like an overheated toaster.”

  The two generals slipped out into the corridor and headed for the conference room.

  “Any anomalies?” Brackman asked.

  “None. Red Banner Fleet is running a war game in the Baltic, but we were notified of that last month. The Persian Gulf is quiet.”

  “Almost boring, huh?”

  The intelligence officer laughed. “Damned boring.”

  “I hope you’re not going to put me to sleep,” Brackman said.

  “ ’Fraid so.”

  The half-dozen officers waiting for them in the conference room came to attention as they entered, and Brackman told them, “As you were.”

  He took a seat at the table and let Thorpe proceed with the meeting. The weekly Intelligence Briefing stayed on Brackman’s schedule whether or not there were noteworthy developments in the previous week. He needed to maintain a consistent overview at all times, just in case — like today — some senator called with a question.

  David Thorpe went to the head of the room and stood at a lectern next to the wall-mounted screen. One by one, he introduced the series of intelligence professionals who reported on the status of hostile, or potentially hostile, armed forces in the world. Numbers, numbers, numbers. ICBMs, SAMs, strategic bombers, naval fleets and task forces, reconnaissance satellite tracks altered, the logistics of supply.

  Thorpe was right. It was boring as hell.

  Finally, the brigadier introduced the single woman in the room.

  Brackman had met her on several occasions, but mostly knew her through her personnel file. Amelia Pearson was a tiny woman, four inches above the five-foot mark, and gave the impression of a small package of frenetic dynamite, instantly ready to detonate. She had dark red hair cut delightfully longer than air force expectations and pale green eyes. Even in a summer uniform, her figure invited exploration, but General Brackman had given up exploration at Pamela Brackman’s command thirty years before. At thirty-three, Pearson was unmarried and intensely devoted to her career. She held a doctorate in international affairs from the University of California at Los Angeles and had also read at Trinity College.

  She also wore the silver oak leaves of a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force.

  “Gentlemen,” Thorpe said, “Lieutenant Colonel Pearson, intelligence officer of the First Aerospace Squadron.”

  Pearson got up and moved to the lectern. She moved with confidence and grace, Brackman thought, and maybe a trace of overconfidence. Her eyes surveyed her audience with unflinching calm.

  Tapping a few keys on the lectern’s control panel, Pearson changed the screen from the last briefer’s view of Kuwait to an almost bare map. The eastern coast of Greenland was shown, along with the Greenland Sea, the island of Svalbard, which was Norwegian, and part of the Barents Sea. North to south, the map ran from the North Pole to the Arctic Circle.

  As soon as the map was in place, Pearson entered another code, and twenty-four yellow dots appeared on the map. Nine of them were sprinkled in a rough line along the southern edge of the Arctic ice pack, and fifteen of them dotted the northern Greenland Sea.

  “General Brackman, gentlemen, in yellow, you see the empire of the Bremerhaven Petroleum Corporation.”

  Brackman looked over at Thorpe, but the intelligence chief was studying Pearson. Thorpe had told him last week, when Pearson requested a chance to present her case, that it might be a little off-the-wall, but was worth hearing.

  “Bremerhaven Petroleum Corporation was formed in unified Germany three years ago, and the company went into operation almost immediately. The charter states that its primary business is the exploration for new oil sources and the transportation of that oil to the German mainland by way of subsea pipelines.

  “The area of operations is approximately fifteen hundred miles north of discoveries in the North Sea, and the venture was scoffed at by many prominent geologists. And yet, while there has been no public acclaim, the company has apparently met with some success. There are twenty-four sites currently. Each site consists of a geodesic dome housing the operational equipment and living quarters, apparent storage tanks, and a helicopter landing pad.”

  The screen changed to show a recon photo, probably taken from a Keyhole satellite. The well shown was ocean-based, the oversized dome supported on a three-legged platform. Brackman didn’t know the distance of the photo, which was fairly great, but the platform appeared to him to be larger than normal.

  “The rate of expansion has been considerable,” Pearson went on. “Five platforms were moved into position in the first year, nine in the second year, and the balance, including the sites on the ice, within the last year. Support ships for the pipe-laying operation have been at work for the entire three years.”

  The screen again reverted to the map, but this time, dotted lines indicated the paths of pipelines interconnecting all of the wells.

  “Any questions about the physical layout, gentlemen?”

  Brackman studied the map, then asked, “Is every drilling rig still in the same place in which it was first situated, Colonel?”

  “Yes sir, it is. That is the first point that prompted my curiosity. I would have expected that some wells would have come in dry and the drilling equipment moved to another site.”

  “So would I,” Brackman admitted. “But you have a second point to make?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  A series of photographs came up on the screen, each one held for viewing for about three seconds. There were flights of Panavia Tornados, Dornier 228s, and Eurofighters, usually in pairs. There were several patrol boats, a couple of missile frigates, two missile cruisers. All of them wore the markings of the reunified German air force and German navy.

  Brackman wasn’t surprised at the photos. After the reunification of East and West Germany, there had ensued a long period of economic chaos. In an effort to create jobs and increase the standard of living for her citizens, t
he new Germany had opened dozens of industrial plants and shipyards in the east. Many of them produced military aircraft, ships, and other materiel under license from other manufacturers. The military men in countries belonging to a downsized NATO had voiced some alarm, but the politicians were certain that everything was under tight control. Germany needed an economic boost that didn’t require foreign aid from Britain, France, the Soviet Union, or the United States.

  Germany was merely rebuilding her defensive capability to counteract the loss of NATO forces stationed within her borders. She still suffered some paranoia from a history of conflict with the Soviet Union.

  And Brackman suffered, too, when he thought of Rhein Main, Wiesbaden, New Amsterdam, Hahn, Bitburg, Spangdahlem, Ramstein, Sembach, and Zweibrucken air bases, all built with American dollars. The German flag flew over them now, and the German Luftwaffe controlled their skies.

  “These aircraft and ships,” Pearson said, “are patrolling the pipelines and wells of the Bremerhaven Petroleum Corporation.”

  “No shit?” blurted General Thorpe.

  “No lie, sir.”

  “What’s the frequency?” Brackman asked.

  Pearson didn’t even refer to notes. “So far, sir, we have tentative identification of eleven naval ships of three thousand tons displacement, or greater, continually on station. We don’t know the exact ships.”

  A tap of the console brought eleven more dots to the screen, these in blue. Brackman noted that the ships were well positioned on the perimeter of the well-drilling operations.

  “The ships are relieved about once a month,” Pearson said. “In the air, patrol flights originating primarily from New Amsterdam make a circuit four times a day, but the flights are staggered. There is no set routine.”

  “How many nations patrol their oil fields, Colonel?” Thorpe asked.

  “There are some, General Thorpe. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, for instance. British naval units pass frequently through the North Sea oil fields. However, most of these examples involve oil fields that are nationalized. Very few private oil companies rate security from their governments. And none receive security coverage at this volume or frequency.”