Phantom Strike Page 3

  Demion and Kriswell climbed through the crew door on the forward, port side of the C-130 and locked it after them. One by one, the four turboprops came to life, then the big transport moved out of line toward the taxiway. Half an hour later, the plane was a black smudge on the wavery horizon.

  Hackley, Zimmerman, and Gettman took off next, Gettman’s Phantom dragging what Wyatt thought was an overly thick kerosene vapour trail, though the Phantom was known for its identifiable exhaust signature.

  Ten minutes after that, Wyatt slipped into his pressure suit, buckled on his parachute, climbed the ladder, checked the safety pins on the ejection seat, slid into the cockpit, and settled into the seat of the Phantom numbered 3387. It felt good to be back, he thought, as he locked in the seat and shoulder harness. The crew chief came up the ladder to help him connect oxygen and pressure suit fittings. He settled the helmet on his head, snapped the oxygen mask in place — letting it hang to one side, then hooked into the radio system.

  “All set, sir?”

  “Ready to go, Sergeant. Thanks for your help.”

  “I’m just happy to see ’em flying again, sir.” Even if by a civilian, he thought.

  “Let’s light her up.”

  The crew chief scampered down the ladder and took it away.

  Wyatt ran through his never-forgotten check list, powering up the panel and radios. The inertial navigation system gyros had been activated earlier, using the Auxiliary Power Unit, since they took a while to spin up. He punched in the Davis-Monthan coordinates. He went through the start sequence, setting ignition toggles, and then gave a thumbs-up to the man tending the start cart. The airman signalled back, and Wyatt started turning the turbine. When the RPMs reached thirty-five percent, he lifted the flap and hit the port ignition. The turbojet whined as the turbine built up speed, then whooshed as it took hold on its own. The starboard engine fired a few seconds later. All of the pertinent instruments read in the green.

  Lifting a thumb-and-forefinger okay to the crewmen on the ground, Wyatt released the brakes and rolled forward. When he reached the taxiway, he braked for a right turn, lined up on the yellow guiding line, then braked to a stop.

  Barr and Jordan fell into line behind him.

  Wyatt adjusted the barometric pressure on the altimeter for the setting Demion had gotten during his weather check, dialled in the local ground frequency on the NavComs, then thumbed the transmit button. “Davis Ground Control, Phantom three-three-eight-seven.”

  “Go ahead, eight-seven.”

  “Davis, eight-seven has a flight of three near Hangar B. Requesting permission to taxi.”

  “Phantom eight-seven, you’re cleared for taxi to Runway two-seven right. Switch to Air Control.”

  “Phantom eight-seven, wilco.”

  The three aircraft rolled along at thirty miles an hour as they headed for the assigned runway. In his rear-view mirror, Wyatt checked the planes behind him. The forward canopies were still raised, capturing the hot breeze. It made him think of the take-off lines he had waited in at Ton Son Nhut Air Base.

  Redialling the radios to the air control frequency, Wyatt got immediate take-off clearance, and the three Phantoms turned onto the runway, Barr and Jordan lining up in echelon off his right wing. Wyatt snapped his oxygen mask into place.

  On the inter-aircraft frequency they had agreed on, Wyatt asked, “You two ready?”

  “Yo, Major,” Jordan replied.

  “Can we use afterburner?” Barr begged.

  “No afterburners. We’re not showing off just yet. Let’s hit it.”

  Wyatt ran his throttles forward, released the brakes, and felt nearly thirty thousand pounds of thrust immediately. It shoved him back satisfyingly in his seat. By the time he passed the operations tower, his airspeed was showing 160 knots. A quick glance to his right confirmed that Barr and Jordan were right with him, demonstrating the discipline and ability taught them by seven thousand hours of flight time.

  He eased the stick back a notch and the long, narrow nose ahead of him rose. He felt the lift take over, and, a minute later, the wheels quit rumbling. The Phantoms crossed the Davis-Monthan boundary fence at a thousand feet of altitude and banked into a right turn.

  Wyatt retracted flaps and landing gear and got green lights.

  “Phantom eight-seven, Davis Air Control.”

  “Go ahead, Davis.”

  “Eight-seven, you are cleared to thirty thousand feet, heading zero-zero-five.”

  “Roger, Davis, confirm angels thirty, zero-zero-five. Eight-seven out.”

  Barr’s baritone sounded in his earphones. “Now?”

  “Now, Bucky.”

  Wyatt shoved his throttles outboard and past the detents into afterburner, pulling back on the stick at the same time.

  The three Phantoms leapt upward, climbing almost vertically, airspeed reaching past the five hundred-knot mark, looking for the rarified freedom of thirty thousand feet.

  Jesus, I love this.

  *

  The Excelsior Hotel on Bath Road was convenient to Heathrow Airport for the German, or Formsby would not have agreed to it as a meeting place. He did not like to hold such meetings in ostentatious surroundings.

  Neil Formsby got out of his cab in front of the main entrance to the hotel at 6:30 P.M. in the evening. He tipped the doorman just enough to remain unremarkable and pushed his way into the ornate lobby. He stood inside the doors for a moment and looked around.

  Formsby was in evening dress for he had to meet Pamela at D’Artagnan in Regent’s Park immediately after seeing the man from Bonn. In fact, Muenster’s telephone call had almost upset his entire evening. He did not care for unexpected disruptions in his schedule.

  He was a tall man at six-feet, two-inches and always tailored in the latest of immaculate fashion. His dark blond hair was crisply styled to his aristocratic head. Set widely on either side of an aquiline nose, his eyes were hazel and very direct. People who spoke with Formsby thought he was either extremely interested in them or obnoxiously intrusive. Those who thought him impolite also thought that his wide shoulders were padded and his slim torso girdled. They were incorrect.

  Spotting the man who must be his quarry standing near the entrance to the bar, Formsby crossed the deep pile carpet of the lobby toward him. He walked with an obvious limp. The bones of his left ankle were nearly solidified with aluminium pins, and there was almost no flexibility left in the joint.

  “Herr Ernst Muenster?”

  “Yes. Mr. Carrington-Smyth?” The German spoke almost unaccented English.

  “Correct. Shall we?” Formsby lifted a hand toward the lounge.

  “By all means.”

  Seated at a table near the back, after ordering a

  cognac for the German and a single malt scotch for himself, Formsby said, “I appreciate your responding so quickly, Herr Muenster.”

  “Please. It is Ernst.”

  “And Malcolm, if you will. Do you frequently conduct your business face-to-face?”

  “Always. It assures that I will do more business.” Formsby nodded, but remained silent as their drinks were delivered and placed in front of them with a flourish.

  Muenster spent the diversion examining Formsby closely, but then that was the very point of the personal meeting, Formsby thought.

  Muenster appeared to be nearly sixty years of age. What was left of his hair — a fringe that was trimmed close to his skull — was snowy white. His jowls sagged some, an accompaniment to his massive girth. Formsby guessed that he would tip the scales at better than three hundred pounds. His tailors had much to work with, but performed a credible job. The man wore a summer-weight wool worth a thousand U.S. dollars. He also wore a constant half-smile, as if the circumstances he found himself in bordered on the humorous.

  He was not in an amusing business. Herr Ernst Muenster was an arms dealer, but to be honest, an arms dealer of the highest calibre and reputation. Formsby managed to keep the pun to himself.

  When the
waiter moved away, Formsby raised his glass, and his eyebrow, in a toast. “To the point?” Muenster sipped from his crystal glass, then ran his tongue lightly across his upper lip. “I appreciate a man who comes right to the point.”

  “Very well.” Formsby withdrew the single sheet of yellow notepaper from his inside breast pocket and passed it across the table.

  The German scanned it, his eyes hesitating over a couple of the entries. He nodded. “It can be done.”

  “I am encouraged.”

  “Delivery included?”

  “Please.”

  “And End-User Certificates?”

  Formsby shrugged. “Quite up to you, I’m sure.” Muenster nodded. “Expensive, but manageable. The destination will have a bearing. Might I know where that will be?”

  “To be determined at a later date, but certainly on the African continent.”

  “Yes. I see.”

  “How about a price?” Formsby asked.

  “To be determined at a later date,” the German told him with a slight increase in the grin. “I will need to check on several items. Demand and supply, you understand?”

  “I do understand. I will ring you the first of the week next.” Lacking a true name and a telephone number for Formsby, the German could not telephone Formsby.

  “Thursday may be a better day,” Muenster said. “I will have to travel some.”

  “Thursday it is,” Formsby agreed.

  They finished their drinks, and Formsby got up and made his way back across the lobby and out the entrance. While the doorman whistled a cab forward, he reviewed the meeting and thought that it had gone well.

  Soon, he would be armed again.

  *

  The brown and tan Nebraska plains stretched from one horizon to the other, seemingly endless at Wyatt’s altitude of fifteen thousand feet, about 12,500 feet AGL — above ground level — at Ainsworth. A few blue dots that were the remains of lakes in July were scattered about. Fifty miles ahead was the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

  “Trees seem to be in short supply,” Barr told him over the radio.

  “We don’t have to build a homestead.”

  Cliff Jordan broke in, “Tally ho, there we go. Eleven o’clock.”

  Wyatt saw the airfield just as Jordan reported it. The long, straight runways broke up the terrain.

  “My God!” Barr said. “What’s that doing here?” Turning slightly left to align himself with the airport, Wyatt touched the transmit button and said, “It was a bomber training base during War Two, Bucky.”

  “Well, it was a big son of a bitch.”

  The concrete runways were wide enough that small aircraft could take off crosswise. Each of the three runways looked to be about ten thousand feet long. Spaced along the north side of the field was a row of massive hangars, their corrugated roofs streaky with rust and dirt. From two miles away, it looked deserted.

  Jordan clicked on, “Can you imagine that place with B-17s, B-25s, and B-36s lining the aprons?”

  “Yeah, Cliff, I sure as hell can,” Barr said, his voice a little awed. He had a soft spot for 1940’s era warbirds.

  Wyatt took them down to five thousand feet and made a pass down the northern runway so they could check conditions. One corner of one hangar, near the dilapidated tower, contained a local flight service. A couple Aeronicas, a Mooney, a Cessna light-twin, and a Beechcraft were parked in a row out in front. In the middle of all that concrete, they looked like exquisite miniatures. A wind sock high on the hangar hung limp. As the three Phantoms shot down the runway in formation, seven or eight figures abruptly burst out of the flight service and peered up at them.

  The runways appeared to be in good repair, though clumps of weeds grew in the cracks between slabs. Some of the outer edges had crumbled, but it was nothing worrisome. There were no painted centre-lines.

  Wyatt banked left to circle around and begin his approach. By the time they reached the eastern end of the approach leg, the other three Phantoms appeared from the southwest. Wyatt’s flight of F-4Es had passed them up a hundred miles back. The C-130 tanker was much farther behind, making the trip at a cruise speed of 330 knots compared to the 550 the Phantoms had been averaging.

  Gettman’s voice came over the air. “Is that our home, Andy?”

  “Sweet home,” Wyatt told him.

  “You don’t suppose there’s someone in, say, L.A., who’d adopt me?” Gettman asked.

  “You’ve been kicked out of every home you’ve been in,” Barr said. “Remember last night?”

  Norm Hackley cut in, “The chart says there’s no airport operations.”

  “True,” Wyatt said. “The flight service has a base radio, if you feel like you need to talk to someone.”

  Wyatt retarded his throttles, dropped his landing gear, and set forty degrees of flap. The Phantom floated in, trailed closely by its identical sisters. The tires squealed as they touched down on hot pavement. He had completed his rundown and turned right onto the taxi strip as Hackley’s flight of three passed overhead behind them, performing their own examinations of the airstrip.

  The flight had taken less than two hours, though they had lost an hour crossing the time zone.

  Rolling down the taxiway, Wyatt raised the canopy. After the dry heat of Arizona, the humidity here was like a slap in the face with a barber’s hot towel. Immediately, the sweat popped on his forehead. The chalky white concrete reflected the sun, and the stillness trapped the superheated air.

  Hangars Four and Five had been leased by Noble Enterprises. The structures were tall, built to allow clearance for the vertical stabilizers of now-antique bombers. Weeds as high as six feet crowded against the sidewalls. Faded, barely legible numbers on the front comers identified the two for which he was looking. Wyatt toed the left brake and turned toward Five just as the giant doors on the hangar began to rumble open.

  Thirty yards from the building, Wyatt stopped, set the brakes, and killed the engines. He was disconnected from his electrical and environmental systems by the time Barr and Jordan parked next to him in a neat row. Wyatt stood up in the cockpit, leaned forward against the windscreen, and looked around.

  Half a mile away, down at the flight service, people were piling into two pickup trucks. They just had to come visiting the tourists.

  Behind him, the engines of Hackley’s flight lost their high pitch as the landing aircraft whistled by.

  Ahead of him, five men stood grinning at him in the open doors of the hangar. Behind them, parked in the cool-looking depths, was a Cessna Citation business jet and a Lockheed C-130 Hercules. The Citation was painted the colour of cream and the Hercules was in pristine plain aluminium, and both carried the thin blue fuselage stripe which was the signature of Aeroconsultants, Inc.

  But the red-trimmed logos on the tails identified them as property of Noble Enterprises.

  Three

  Ace had a white amulet in the middle of his chest and a white circle of fur around one yellow eye, but was otherwise a solid smoke grey. He was about three feet long, from his nose to the tip of his broken tail, and after a round of betting by the technicians, had been weighed in at nineteen pounds. He had wandered into the shop area one morning, a month after Aero-consultants opened its doors for business, and had hung around since then, four years now. He liked to sit on top of things (tool chests, airplanes, the computer terminal in Kramer’s office) and survey his world. Ace was not big on affection. About the only one who was allowed to pet him was Janice Kramer. Anyone, however, could feed him, and Ace went through cans of 9-Lives in lionish fashion. His food bill was a major draw on petty cash.

  After his lunch on Thursday, Ace stretched out on the desk next to the computer terminal and cleaned himself up while Jan Kramer instructed the machine to print out the monthly statements. When he was done with his bath, Ace laid his chin on the telephone and went to sleep. Every once in a while, she reached over and ran her fingers through his thick coat.

  Liz Jordan, Cli
ff Jordan’s wife and the company’s secretary/receptionist/bookkeeper, normally ran the billings, but Kramer liked to operate the computer now and then. In fact, only Kramer, Andy Wyatt, and Bucky Barr could access certain of the data files stored on the hard disk. Anyone trying to get into the files without the proper access codes would only find gibberish when they got there. The files were programmed to self-destruct at the first hint of unauthorized entry.

  Kramer had been with the company from just before the beginning. Freshly out of work and frantically near the end of her savings, she had been submitting resumes to almost anything that appeared in the paper, even the skimpy, blind ads. She had been highly sceptical when one of those submissions brought her a phone call. One of the strange things about the interview with Andy Wyatt was that she had not gone to him. He had flown to Seattle and interviewed her in the lounge at Sea-Tac Airport at five in the afternoon.

  He was a very presentable man in a good suit and conservative tie, with a few hard edges to him, and a no-nonsense, let’s-not-waste-time approach.

  Kramer had worn her best skirted business suit — a creamy beige — with a green silk blouse that complemented her deep green eyes and contrasted nicely with her heavy, dark red hair. The suit dampened some of the more daring curves of her figure and gave her a professional appearance, she thought. She was not yet desperate enough for a job to use her femininity as a drawing card.

  However, as far as she could tell, Wyatt did not even notice. Half the time, he was turned sideways to her, watching the air traffic on the runways and apparently only partially interested in the interview, though his questions were sharply directed.

  He went right to the first, hurtful point. “You got fired from Boeing?”

  “Along with many others, Mr. Wyatt. There was a major cutback in the division.”

  He tapped her resume. “This says you got your law degree from UCLA. Third in your class?”

  “That’s correct. If you feel it’s necessary, I can get the transcripts for you.”

  “You tell many lies?”

  “What! Of course not.”