Delta Blue Read online

  “Correct.”

  “And we never cared before?”

  “Everybody drills for oil,” Brackman pointed out.

  “All right,” Cross said. “McKenna’s going to shoot some pictures. What else should we be doing? I’m not going to the National Security Council or the President with what you’ve got here.”

  “No, I don’t want to jump the gun,” Brackman said. “I would like a CIA assessment of current German energy sources and uses. Let’s find out if these wells are on-line and pumping oil to the mainland.”

  “Let me talk to Krandall over at Langley,” Mays said. “I can get something quietly.”

  “Good,” Cross agreed. “And I might put in a call to General Sheremetevo. We’ve been pretty open with each other lately, and perhaps his people have some ideas.”

  Vitaly Sheremetevo was a deputy commander in chief of the Soviet air forces, in charge of the PVO (Protivovoz-dushnaya oborona Strany), the largest air defense force in the world.

  “We don’t want to raise any alarms,” Harvey Mays said. “Those people over on the Hill come unglued anytime we bitch about a possible military buildup in Germany.”

  Brackman agreed with Mays. Some people in seats of power were too willing to believe the best about the intentions of adversaries, past, present, and future.

  “Still,” the admiral said, his eyes fixed in thought, “our position is worse if we spring surprises on the politicos. Now that I’ve had my second thought, I believe I will speak to the President. It might be a good idea to have State query the Germans about, say, the success of their venture in the Greenland Sea. That way, we’re on record as having pursued a diplomatic channel.”

  Brackman wasn’t sure he would do it that way, but then he wasn’t the boss, either.

  *

  “Hey, Cancha?”

  Maj. Frank Dimatta spoke into his helmet mike. “Got something, Nitro?”

  “Two somethings. Bearing oh-four-three, we’ve got a solid return. It must be the Air France 747 Josie keeps nagging me about.”

  Capt. George “Nitro Fizz” Williams called Delta Green’s on-board computer “Josie.” For no reason that Dimatta had ever figured out. Before they departed Themis, Williams had programmed Josie with the scheduled commercial flights in their area of operations. It wouldn’t do to latch onto the wrong bird.

  “And the other?”

  “Could be our boy. He’s at our bearing three-four-nine, ninety miles. And his heading is in the general direction of Cape Town.”

  “You want a visual pass, first?” Dimatta asked.

  “Nah. If it’s the wrong one, I just won’t let go of the Wasp.”

  They were lightly armed this trip, just two Wasp II missiles on each of two pylons. The Wasp was a multipurpose missile developed strictly for the MakoShark. While the ordnance pylons could take the modified Phoenix and Sidewinder missiles, as well as pods housing twenty millimeter rotary machine guns, the Wasp II had proved versatile. It had a range of seventy-five miles compared to the Phoenix’s 125 miles or the Sidewinder’s eleven miles. It covered the range at Mach 2.5. The Wasp had retractable fins and a variable exhaust nozzle, useful in low-or no-atmosphere conditions. Targeting was by independent radar-seeker or by visual control, guided by the video camera in the missile’s nose. The WSO could watch the target on his panel CRT and guide the missile toward it by shifting his helmet.

  The warhead was composed of twenty-one pounds of high explosive inside a cone of machined metal containing depleted uranium. It could pierce armored plate, and when it detonated, the cone, scored on the inside surface like a jigsaw puzzle, became shrapnel that ripped and tore at anything in its path.

  “I’m not going to arm the warhead, Cancha.”

  “Fine by me,” Dimatta said. He was an Italian-American from New Jersey who had served as an advisor with NATO forces, in addition to his six years as an air force test pilot. He was dark, easygoing, and a lover of exotic foods. The only thing that really got his adrenaline going was downing hostile aircraft.

  “Seventy miles, and I put him at two-eight-thousand,” Nitro told him. “Let’s take her down.”

  They had been coasting along at 70,000 feet above the dark side of the dark continent after their recon run over Afghanistan and Iran. The outboard pylon on the starboard wing carried a photo reconnaissance pod. It contained high-resolution cameras shooting 2402-type and infrared films.

  Far to the northeast, night would be falling on Mali and Ghana. Below, and to his left behind him, Dimatta could see the lights of Kananga, Zaire. The lights of other small towns and villages were visible, too, but they were infrequent and spread wide apart. Africa was mostly dark.

  At 30,000 feet, Dimatta started bringing the speed back until he dropped below the sonic threshold. He saw a flash of cream lightning against the earth. The moon reflecting off a piece of the Sankuru River.

  “All right, good,” Williams said. “He’s making two-two-oh knots. That’s about right.”

  Their target was an elderly Beechcraft Super-18, a reliable twin-engined light cargo or passenger plane forty years past its prime. Pearson’s information had this one headed toward a rowdy tribe in South Africa with a load of AK-47s, RPGs, a few flamethrowers, and a million rounds of ammunition.

  The screen in front of Dimatta showed the target clearly, about forty miles away. The Air France jetliner was to the east now, a hundred miles away.

  “You think Pierre’s going to see this, Nitro?”

  “Nah. Not a Wasp trail at this distance. Hey, this guy’s going down in rain forest so thick, they’ll never find the pieces.”

  “ELS?”

  “Emergency Locator Signal? On an old C-fifty-four? You got to be kidding, Cancha. Even if that plane went down, the owners wouldn’t want it found.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Cancha give me a heading?” Frank Dimatta had picked up his nickname in the air force as a result of his frequent use of the crunched words, “can cha.” Since then, he had consciously tried to avoid it, but it slipped out once in a while.

  “Let me have four points to port … yeah, that’ll do it. I’ve got thirty miles, and I’m going to video. Give me number one.”

  The screen in front of Dimatta abruptly shifted to a night-vision enhanced image, but it was from the point of view of the Wasp II on the outboard side of the port pylon. The rain forest was a rippling green blanket. Williams zoomed the lens, searched left, right, then down, and found the tiny black speck moving across the blanket. The speck got larger, took on the shape of an airplane.

  Dimatta dialed in “Pylon 2,” on one selector, then “1,” on the next selector, raised the flap, and armed the missile’s propulsion system. The WSO controlled the arming of the warhead.

  “Missile’s hot.” He thought he felt his blood pumping faster.

  “Got it. No warhead. Targeted.”

  The orange target symbol appeared on the screen, lapped over the large black speck.

  “Launching.”

  The picture on the screen jiggled as the missile leaped from its launch rail. Williams was guiding the Wasp with his helmet, shifting minutely if the target symbol drifted off the Beechcraft. As the supersonic missile closed, Williams reduced the zoom power of the lens.

  In a second, Dimatta saw a real airplane.

  A second later, he knew it was a Beech Super-18.

  The focus was on the left wing … the wing grew large in the screen … the fuselage disappeared … huge engine nacelle …

  The engine whipped past, then the view was of green forest, then blackness as the missile crashed into the jungle.

  The WSO immediately shifted to the MakoShark’s video system and found the Beechcraft.

  It was in an abrupt left turn, diving for a few thousand feet, then straightening out.

  “Right on,” Nitro said. “That son of a bitch is going to be wondering what it was for the next ten years. He knows he was one meter away from eternity, but he doesn’t know how or why.”
/>   “That going to be enough? Want another one?” Dimatta’s vision felt super-keen. Everything was so clear. He loved it.

  “Nah, not yet. Let’s watch awhile.”

  The MakoShark was ten miles from the Beech now, and Dimatta retarded the throttles some more. The HUD registered 400 knots. He nosed over and began to lose altitude at a thousand feet a minute.

  Williams let Josie guide the video camera, having locked it onto the target.

  The Beech seemed to be staggering. The pilot couldn’t keep it level or flying straight for a few seconds. Finally, he got his nerve back and began to climb.

  “Someday, we’re going to fuck up and actually hit one of these bastards,” Dimatta said. “Pearson might even stop giving us practice targets.”

  Pearson didn’t know they actually fired missiles at live people. Whenever her intelligence net found some bad guys transporting contraband, she passed it on to Dimatta and Williams, strictly, she said, for the purpose of practicing night interceptions.

  “Someday, if we’re lucky,” Nitro said, “the President’s going to turn us loose on drugs and gunrunners.”

  “Cross your fingers and anything else you can cross.”

  “Let’s go find a hot one and a cold one,” Williams said.

  “Can … give me a heading.”

  Eighteen minutes later, Dimatta found the infrared landing lights and put the MakoShark down smoothly at Jack Andrews Air Force Base in the middle of Chad in Northeast Africa. Most of them called it “Hot Country,” because it was.

  During daylight hours, it was forbidding territory. Located on the southern edge of what was known as the Bodelo Depression, the nearest village, Koro Toro, was over a hundred miles away. It was rough and rugged desert composed of clay and sand sediment without one redeeming feature. The temperatures could reach 124 degrees and often did.

  At night, it wasn’t much less forbidding. A good moon gave the terrain surrounding the base the appearance of a lunarscape. Pale, wind-sculpted rock and sand formations. It looked dead; nothing moved. The air was clear, though, and the stars shown with exceptional brilliance.

  Like Wet Country, Merlin Air Force Base, the base in Chad was semi-covert. The MakoSharks could operate in the barren reaches rather freely during daylight hours, but when they were in residence, they were parked and serviced inside Hangar One, just in case the airbase was being observed by satellite or Foxbat reconnaissance craft. There were three more hangars and a single massive three-story residential building that contained dormitory rooms, apartments, recreation rooms, and dining facilities.

  Also like Wet Country, Hot Country served as a launch and recovery base for the HoneyBee resupply rockets. The launch complex was located to the west of the main base, linked to it by a twin set of railroad tracks.

  The HoneyBee vehicle was state-of-the-art in rocketry. It was forty-six feet long and nine feet in diameter, segmented into four compartments — nose cone, which contained the electronics; payload bay; fuel compartment; and propulsion system. For launch, there was an additional booster engine that was jettisoned at 300,000 feet and was not recovered.

  The reentry shroud over the nose cone, cast in ceramic, was good for six or seven return trips into the atmosphere and was then replaced.

  In a typical mission out of either Chad or Borneo, supplies brought in by C-123, C-130, and C-141 cargo transports were stored in Hangar Four and packed into cargo modules. In Hangar Three, recovered rockets were refurbished, then moved to Hangar Two for final calibration, fueling with the solid-fuel pellets, and insertion of the cargo modules. From there, the Honey Bee was moved to one of the three launch pads on cradled flatcars and craned into position.

  The launches had become so routine that they were now less than spectacular to the people involved with them. Depending on time and relative position, a HoneyBee generally achieved rendezvous with Themis in about three hours. In nine years, only four Honey Bees had been lost on launch and seven had malfunctioned in space, but been recovered. Six had been destroyed upon reentry or recovery.

  Recovery was also routine. The vehicle descended by parachute and was netted by specially fitted C-130 Hercules aircraft. The C-130 attempted its first pass at about 30,000 feet, so that if it missed, it would have time for a couple more passes. As it flew above the top of the parachute, a loop of cable trailing from the aircraft snared the parachute shrouds, then the rocket was winched aboard, sliding into a rollered cradle in the plane’s cargo bay. It was the same system occasionally employed to rescue downed pilots.

  Occasionally, the Hercules missed its quarry, and the HoneyBee splashed down in the sea or crunched down in the desert. Then, the Chinook helicopters took over.

  It was important to complete recovery for the HoneyBees frequently came back with cargo aboard. Pharmaceutical concoctions formulated in the almost pure vacuum and zero-gravity of space, electronic components assembled in the same conditions, biological experiments, and ultraclear telescopic photographs were a few of the services performed by the air force for contract customers. The air force was highly paid for these services, and for transporting client employees — biologists, chemists, engineers — to Themis for short stints of duty.

  Transportation of client personnel was accomplished aboard the Mako, and there were six of them based at the three support airbases. It was McKenna’s idea. They were an unarmed and unstealthy version of the MakoShark, finished in flat white, and they served an additional purpose. The Mako was a platform for McKenna’s training of flight crews before he made final evaluations of the crew and introduced them to the MakoShark. Dimatta and Williams had spent four months in a Mako.

  The HoneyBee and the Mako aerospace vehicles were the overt side of the operations. Though the MakoShark was known to exist by friendly and unfriendly governments, its capabilities were still a tightly kept secret.

  Dimatta and Williams stayed with Delta Green until it was parked in Hangar One, then performed their post-flight checklist. A second MakoShark, tentatively coded Delta Orange, was parked next to them, but it was a month or more away from completion. When they were finished, they walked over to the nearly deserted dining room, which was always open, and sat at a table by the window. The view was of flat expanses of sand, a few clumps of brush, and far off, the flat gray runway.

  The menu was limited outside of the normal three meal times, and Dimatta was forced to settle for reheated sauerbraten.

  George Williams ordered a salad heaped with tomatoes and cucumbers and red onions and sprouts, oil-and-vinegar dressing on the side. No nighttime chef was going to overdo the dressing for him. Williams was a fitness freak. At six-two and 160 pounds, he appeared five or six years younger than his thirty-three. The bright red hair and green eyes added to his youth.

  When their plates were delivered, Williams said, “You know what they put in that stuff, Cancha?”

  “Yes. And I wholeheartedly approve.” Dimatta forked a chunk of the beef into his mouth and closed his eyes, savoring the flavor.

  “It’s going to clog up your whole system.”

  “I’ll die a happy man. Your problem, Nitro Fizz, is you don’t know how to enjoy life.”

  “You’re going to die before your time.”

  “We may all die before our time,” Dimatta said. “But you’ll have ulcers, worrying like you do. Me, I’ll be fat and satisfied. And if we had any unattached women around here, I’d be more satisfied.”

  The hub was gigantic, a cylinder of 300 feet of diameter by 200 feet of width. One half of it was constructed like a honeycomb, containing twenty-eight cells, eight of them large enough to accept a Mako or MakoShark behind closed doors. The smaller cells were used to port resupply rockets or for the containment of fuel and other stores.

  On the interior end, each of the hangar cells had a window and control station overlooking the hangar. From there, the docking operator could suck the oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere out of the hangar, open the outer doors, guide the Mako or the MakoShark insi
de, and then close the doors and recharge the atmosphere. The MakoSharks were kept out of the view of satellite eyes and earthbound telescopes. Additionally, it was much easier to service the craft inside the mother ship. Bobbing around in clumsy spacesuits outside the space station encouraged accidents.

  McKenna spent part of the morning — Themis’s artificial day was keyed to Eastern Standard Time — supervising the servicing of Delta Blue. The interior, vaultlike door to the hangar was open, and technicians moved freely into and out of the hangar, propelling themselves through the zero gravity with accustomed ease. Grab bars were spaced throughout the hub for the purpose of initiating or arresting movement.

  Delta Blue floated in the middle of the hangar, secured only by a half-dozen bungee straps. With her momentum matched to that of Themis, the straps were necessary only to prevent rotation or fore-and-aft movement if a technician pushed off her skin too hard. The dark-blue finish seemed to absorb light from the fixtures mounted all around the gray-painted bay.

  The cockpit canopies and the payload bay doors were open as a service technician scurried about with a vacuum hose, seeking any trace of dirt or dust. Minute, foreign objects floating in the station’s atmosphere were taboo. The passenger module had been removed and lashed to one side of the cell, along with another passenger module and several cargo modules. One of the nice things about a weightless environment was that almost any heavy task could be accomplished by one person.

  Fuel hoses from the feeder outlets of the hub were attached to the craft, tended by another technician. A flashing red strobe light mounted in one corner indicated that fuel was being transferred. To further emphasize the danger of that operation, a low-toned chime kept repeating itself.

  Inside the pressurized hangar, environmental suits were not necessary, and everyone, McKenna included, wore the light blue jumpsuits that had evolved as the clothing of choice aboard Themis. They were comfortable, allowed freedom of movement, and were easily maintained. The soft-soled boots were incorporated as part of the jumpsuit.

  When the tech with the vacuum was finished with the forward cockpit, McKenna pushed off the wall, shot across thirty feet of space, and grabbed the windscreen. Twisting around, he pulled himself down into the seat and locked his toes under the rudder pedals to hold himself in place.