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  “The NATO forces have given the Su-24 the name Fencer.”

  Al-Qati knew that also. He was already bored.

  “The aircraft matches the American FB-111A in capability. It is a two-seat, all-weather craft that can fly at speeds of Mach 1.2. It is extremely accurate, Major, delivering its ordnance within fifty-five meters of the target. The D model, with which I understand you will be concerned, was put into production in 1983.”

  The lieutenant seemed to know more about al-Qati’s assignment status than he did, and that irritated him further.

  “The D model has been enhanced with an in-flight refuelling system obtained from the French. It carries one thirty-millimetre, six-barrel cannon and up to eleven thousand kilograms of ground attack weapons. These can range from heavy, free-dropped ordnance to air-to-ground AS-7 high-explosive missiles, laser-guided AS-10 missiles, and AS-14 missiles. The most advanced electronics are used for navigation and attack radar. There is also terrain avoidance radar employed. Targeting methods can be either laser rangefinder or marked target seeker.”

  Most of it was gibberish to al-Qati. He was more concerned with motorized infantry tactics and the capabilities of his armoured cars and personnel carriers.

  The lieutenant moved to the front of the room, next to the screen, and with a long metal pointer, began to take al-Qati on a sight-seeing trip of the cutaway drawing. To familiarize al-Qati with the nomenclature, he identified everything in the drawing, from flaps to sensors to chaff dispensers.

  “Do you have any questions at this point?”

  “No, Lieutenant. I have no questions.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Do I have to fly in this bloody thing?”

  “I do not believe so.”

  “Then I know all that I have ever wanted to know.”

  With a sceptical look on his face, the lieutenant said, “Then you are to report to Colonel Ghazi.”

  Al-Qati did not bother thanking his instructor. He got up, left the conference room, and went to wait in the anteroom to Ghazi’s office. After twenty minutes, a man al-Qati did not know emerged from the office, and the male secretary told al-Qati that he could enter.

  For the man who commanded Libyan ground forces, the colonel did not possess a large office. He had made it comfortable, though, with wool carpeting, several antique office furnishings reupholstered in new grey leather, and pastoral paintings hung on the panelled walls. The paintings focused on Neva River scenes outside of Leningrad where Ghazi had once been trained by the Soviets.

  Ghazi got up and came around the desk to give al-Qati a hug. He was bearish in appearance, a typical Arab prototype stuffed with Western foods, which he adored. His body was square and broad, his face the same. He had heavy dark eyebrows shading dark caverns for eyes.

  “Ahmed al-Qati, you appear fit.”

  “Thank you, Colonel. I have been active. And you are well?”

  Ghazi smiled, “Very well. How is El Bardi?”

  “It still awaits me. I have an important exercise under way.”

  The colonel circled the big desk back to his chair. “I know. I am afraid, however, that it must fall to your deputy. Please, Ahmed, sit.”

  Al-Qati sat in one of the two leather straight chairs. This meeting with his superior was not starting well. Al-Qati had never left any operation incomplete before.

  Ghazi was, however, his superior, and al-Qati would not be allowed many negotiating points.

  “You have had the briefing on the Sukhoi bomber?”

  “Yes. It seems to me to be well within the province of the air force.”

  The colonel was not interested in al-Qati’s opinion. “Until a few years ago, the Su-24 was not deployed outside the Soviet Union. The powers-that-be, or were, at Red Army headquarters did not want to risk making the secret electronics accessible to outsiders.”

  Al-Qati nodded. He knew what was coming.

  “You know, of course, that twelve of these fine fighter bombers have been provided to our air force?” “I know this, Colonel.”

  “And with the demise of the Soviet Union, the bombers have become a permanent part of our inventory?”

  He nodded again.

  “And do you also know that the bombers are assigned to Colonel Ibrahim Ramad?”

  “That I did not know,” al-Qati said.

  “Do you know Ramad?”

  “I know him, Colonel.”

  “He is a worthless bastard.”

  Al-Qati smiled for the first time in two days. “That is an optimistic assessment of his character.”

  Ghazi inclined his head in agreement. “The Leader felt it imperative that we monitor Ramad’s program, as well as integrate it with current ground forces strategies. You are to be the liaison between Ramad’s project and my office.”

  This was not likely to be a fruitful assignment.

  “What is the nature of this project?” al-Qati asked.

  “It is, of course, a bombing program. What we want, what Ramad suggests, is that his bombers could be utilized in close infantry support. You are to evaluate the methodology, make any suggestions you like, and report the results to me.”

  “And I am to watch Ramad?”

  “Of course, but that is between you and me.”

  There was something to be gained here, al-Qati thought. “It would be quite difficult, Colonel.”

  The commander frowned. “Why is that?”

  “Ramad outranks me. I should have more stature.” The frown evolved into a lopsided grin. “You are blackmailing me, Ahmed al-Qati.”

  “Not at all, Colonel. Certainly, I am due.”

  The colonel nodded slowly. “Very well. I will talk to the Leader about it.”

  Despite the promise of a long-delayed promotion, al-Qati was still extremely disappointed. He did not want to be stuck in the middle of some hot, barren airfield with an aggressive and ambitious bomber commander. He wanted to be back on the beaches of the Mediterranean, where he had established his headquarters. He wanted to be involved in the action and movement of his BMPs and BMVDs as they wheeled across the desert, securing the border from Egyptian invasion. Which was not going to happen, anyway.

  But it was well to be prepared.

  Al-Qati believed in preparation.

  He also believed in the promising young lady he had met in Tobruk two months before.

  *

  Martin Church hit his intercom button and said, “Okay, Sally. Send him in.”

  Church was Deputy Director for Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had fifteen years of field experience backing him up, experience that had thinned his brown hair and etched deep wrinkles across his forehead and at the outer edges of his nose. His face was lightly scarred from acne.

  In addition to holding an excellent reputation for his field work, Church was a competent administrator. He had a multi-tracked mind capable of following dozens of current operations. He synthesized concepts well and kept the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and the Executive Director abreast of developing operations and shifting intelligence estimates. He also attempted to keep his office out of media trouble, which was a primary responsibility of the DDO’s office. Church would never be faulted for his dedication to country and duty.

  George Embry entered the office through the wide door and plopped in a chair on the other side of the desk. Protocol was not one of Embry’s major priorities. Embry, who ran the North African Division, and who usually made some jealous comment about the DDO’s view of the Virginia countryside, skipped the comment today.

  “You look pissed, George.”

  “I am pissed.”

  “Do I get to know about it?”

  “Marianne Cummings?” Embry said.

  Church had to think for five seconds. “We’ve got her undercover somewhere. On the Med.”

  “Right, in Tobruk. She’s been there seven weeks, and she just about had Ahmed al-Qati roped in.”

  “Okay. I’ve got it placed.”
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br />   “Tripoli just recalled al-Qati.”

  “Goddamn it!” Church exclaimed.

  “I already said that myself, Marty. Now we have to start all over, and we have to convince her to seduce someone else.”

  Four

  After a group briefing in the morning — which was more of a conference than a briefing since everyone got a word or two in — Wyatt fired up the Citation and flew to Lincoln, Nebraska. They were using the Cessna as their air taxi. Popping into Lincoln with a C-130 or an F-4 was guaranteed to attract unwanted attention.

  Before starting his approach to the airport, he made a wide circle of the city. The grid of the streets delineated blocks of heavy foliage; elms and shrubbery were profuse, fed by the high humidity. It was a pretty city in the summer, just as he remembered from his four years at the university. In midsummer, the plots of grass had the barest tinge of yellow. The State Capitol dominated the central part of the city, and traffic was heavy on the east-west O street which passed by the university’s main campus.

  Lincoln, and to the east, Omaha, had been wonders of metropolitan sophistication to Wyatt at one time. Raised on a farm close to Norfolk, in the north-eastern part of the state, he had come to the university naive, and he had left it still naive, but with a degree in engineering and an Air Force ROTC commission.

  His aerial tour of the city brought back memories of his parents. They had died when a tornado twisted then-farmhouse from its foundation in 1972, the year of his last tour in Vietnam. By then, he had been committed to a career in the Air Force, and he had willingly turned over his interest in the 320-acre farm to his sister and her then-new husband. In the intervening years, he had occasionally considered how much simpler his life would have been if he had just gone back to Norfolk.

  As he called air control for landing permission, Wyatt thought that there were only two things wrong with Lincoln, Nebraska. The hot, sticky summers and long, frigid winters were one. He much preferred the dry heat of New Mexico at five thousand feet of altitude. Secondly, they needed a professional football team. The Kansas City Chiefs were too far away, and in another state, to generate widespread loyalty, and without their own pro team to diffuse fan interest, the fans achieved near mania over Big Red. Wyatt didn’t think it was healthy. He was biased, of course. He had tried out for the football team as a freshman and didn’t make the first cut.

  He parked the airplane in the general aviation section and ordered the tanks topped off, then crossed the blistering tarmac to the waiting room and pulled open the glass door. A frigid dollop of refrigerated air smacked him in the face.

  After getting a Coke from the machine, Wyatt went to the public telephone hanging on the wall and used his secondary credit card number — he never saw the bills, but they always got paid — to call Washington.

  He reached the recording he expected: “No changes at this time.”

  Hanging up, he carried his Coke to one of the couches and sprawled out on it to wait for Gering and Harris.

  The girl behind the counter, restocking aviator paraphernalia in the glass case, glanced surreptitiously his way from time to time, but Wyatt only smiled at her. In his go-to-hell-or-bust days, he’d have been leaning on this side of the counter in two seconds. There had been a lot of such adventures, and misadventures, in his early hot-shit pilot years. Like Barr, he had been married once, but Tracey had found solace in a bottle and another pilot while Wyatt had been detached from Homestead Air Force Base for special duty in Grenada. The divorce wasn’t good for his career; the Air Force preferred stable families, at least superficially stable.

  He had finished his Coke by the time he saw the United 737 touching down, then taxiing toward the commercial terminal. Forty minutes later, Gering and Harris tumbled out of a taxi and into the waiting room, hauling overnight bags.

  “Jesus, boss!” Gering said. “I thought it was hot in Albuquerque.”

  Arnie Gering was twenty-seven years old, fair-haired, and red-skinned. He had prominent freckles on his cheeks. He had graduated with high grades from several specialized aviation schools, and he was a wiz with hand tools, machine tools, and diagnostic electronics. He was overtly ambitious, and he wasn’t afraid to ask Jan Kramer for raises in his pay, which he did regularly.

  Wyatt pointed to one of the air-conditioning outlets. “Enjoy it while you can, Arnie. It gets warmer at the next stop. Why so sour, Lefty?”

  “I hate flying commercial,” Harris said. “Don’t like leavin’ the drivin’ to somebody I don’t know.”

  Harris was close to fifty, grey-haired, and with a grey tinge to his skin. He too was a master engine mechanic, but he had been around airplanes so long that he was proficient, though not certified, in a number of other specialties.

  “Come on over here, guys,” Wyatt said, leading them to a group of chairs stuck in the corner.

  They sat down, leaning toward each other, and Wyatt asked, “What did Jan tell you?”

  “Just to get on the airplane,” Harris said. “That you’d give us the word once we got here.”

  “Here’s the word,” Wyatt said. “Mum.”

  “Mum?” Gering asked.

  “That’s right. What we’ve got here is a classified project, and if you don’t think you can keep it to yourselves — I mean, Amie, not even your girlfriend, and Lefty, not your wife, we’ll get you a return plane ticket.”

  The two of them knew, of course that some of Aeroconsultants’ pilots and technicians disappeared sporadically to resurface days or weeks later with no explanations. Wyatt wasn’t about to enumerate or amplify on any of the company’s history with secret projects.

  Harris asked, “Is it illegal, Andy?”

  “Get right to the point, don’t you, Lefty? Let’s just say that anything you’ll be doing is not illegal. You might, however, see some things that skirt the boundaries in a civilian sense. I won’t elaborate beyond that.”

  “Who are we working for?” Gering asked.

  “You don’t want to even speculate about that, Arnie. Not with anyone.”

  “Are some of the other guys working on this?” Harris asked.

  “Yes. And we work strictly on a need-to-know basis. Some people will know more than you, and they know less than others. But no one talks about it.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s some kind of overtime pay involved?” Gering asked.

  Wyatt grinned at him. “We’re looking at about four weeks work, Amie, but I’ll only need the two of you for around ten or twelve days. For that, you get a flat two thousand dollar bonus, and you can’t talk about that, either, because people might want to know how you earned it.”

  “I’m in,” Gering said.

  “This wouldn’t be considered hazardous duty pay, would it?” Harris asked. He had served in Vietnam as a Marine.

  “No, Lefty. Just the same risks you take working around volatile fuels and fluids normally. We take the same precautions as we ever do.”

  “Well, I’ve got to call my wife and tell her something.”

  “The cover story we’re using is the salvage and rebuild of a corporate jet that belly-landed in North Dakota. We’re not close to telephones.”

  “I’d better call Jackie, then,” Gering said. “She’d be too happy to think I ran off with some new chick. Come to think of it, she’ll probably worry about the farmer’s daughter. They have farms in North Dakota, Andy?”

  “A few. But tell her the closest one is seventy miles away.”

  “That’ll do it.”

  *

  Las Vegas looked dusty and washed-out under the midday sun; the glare was subdued, but it always was from fifteen thousand feet.

  Barr made a wide, left-hand circle of the city, losing altitude and coming back to the east. Ahead of them, Lake Mead was a shimmering mirror dropped on the beige earth.

  Cliff Jordan was in the co-pilot’s seat. He was a compact man at five-eight, with steady hazel eyes and a ruddy complexion marred by a three-inch scar on his left cheek. There w
ere more scars on his left arm and torso, the result of pancaking his F-14 Tomcat onto the deck of the America. The crash occurred after a sortie over Baghdad when he had taken some triple-A hits in the aft end of the plane. Until he slammed the fighter into the arresting cable, he didn’t know the landing hook had been damaged. The Tomcat hit the wire, hesitated, then broke free, slewing sideways, collapsing the landing gear, and then rolling up on its left wing. The plane didn’t go over the side of the carrier, but it tore up Jordan and his backseater.

  After the Iraqi war, and as the Navy downsized, Lieutenant Commander Jordan opted for an early retirement arranged by some shadowy people who knew Andy Wyatt.

  Barr heard himself called on the radio. “Lockheed two-nine, you have a Continental seven-six-seven coming out of McCarran. Hold your present altitude for one minute and give him about five thousand.”

  “Roger, Nellis. Two-nine copies,” Jordan said as Barr eased the throttles forward.

  Barr leaned forward to peer downward through the windscreen. He found the Boeing 767 as it cleared the outer markers of the civilian airport. As he continued his turn, the passenger liner passed beneath.

  “Lockheed two-nine, you are cleared for descent and landing.”

  “Two-nine, Nellis. Roger.”

  Barr scanned the instruments, then turned his head and looked back at the flight engineer’s station and checked the readouts there.

  “Hey, Cliff, we forgot the engineer.”

  “Little late to worry about it, don’t you think?”

  “Problem with our air force, it’s not fully staffed.”

  “I agree. The Navy was so much more efficient.”

  “More efficient than what?”

  “Than Congress, for one.”

  “You got a point.”

  Barr kept backing off the throttles and losing altitude. The C-130 came around to a northerly heading and he levelled the wings.

  “Think we ought to use the landing gear, Cliff?” Barr asked.

  “I’m all for it. Maybe some flaps, too.”

  “If you insist, and whenever you’re ready.”

  Jordan deployed the gear and flaps, and Barr felt the big transport bounce upward with the added lift. He drained off more power with the throttle levers.