Phantom Strike

by William H. Lovejoy

  Ace stopped hissing now that Gering had moved away, but he remained alert, his hind legs tensed for another launch.

  She glanced quickly at the computer screen:

  SPECIAL PROJECTS

  CONFIDENTIAL FILES — ACCESS CODE REQUIRED

  ENTER PASSWORD: BLUE DA-

  Gering had been attempting to hack his way into the special projects files.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded again.

  Gering was regaining some degree of composure. “I’m working late.”

  “Working on what?”

  “Damn it! Can’t you see I’m scratched up. Why don’t you declaw that damned cat?”

  The blood continued to seep from the cuts, obliterating the freckles on his sunburned face.

  “I don’t give a shit about your face, Arnie. How did you get in here?”

  She checked the door and jamb, but couldn’t see any scratches. Gering had a key to the building, but not to this door. Maybe he had used a credit card on the lock.

  “It was open,” he said.

  “This door is never unlocked at night.”

  “It was open.”

  “What are you after?”

  Gering cleared his throat. “I was just checking on that job we did in Nebraska.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, shit. Lefty and I only got a lousy two grand apiece. We ought to get as much as the others are getting.”

  Kramer moved sideways across the room, facing him, and closing in on the desk. She reached out and gently stroked Ace’s neck.

  She could feel the bunched up muscles under his skin. Ace wasn’t going to relax just yet.

  “You’re fortunate to have received a bonus at all.”

  “I’m entitled to more.”

  “How much more, do you think?”

  “Well, I want to know what the others are getting.”

  “Forget the others,” she said. “How much do you think you’re worth?”

  Gering grinned at her. “I ought to get another five thousand.”

  “Maybe you’ll find a job somewhere that will pay you that much more.”

  His grin faded. “What? You can’t fire me.”

  “I can’t? Seems to me I’m the one who hired you. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “You fire me, and I go right to the newspapers,” Gering said.

  “With what?”

  “There’s something screwy about that deal. You just watch, Kramer. Some reporter will dig into it.”

  “And visit you in jail, too?”

  “Jail?”

  “Breaking and entering. Attempted theft of proprietary information.” She picked up the phone and dialled a nine and a one.

  “Hold on, damn it!”

  Kramer kept her forefinger poised over the button. “Get out, Arnie.”

  With a face turning redder than normal, and still holding his handkerchief to his cheek, Gering spun around and stomped out. She waited until she heard the front door slam, then dropped the telephone back in its cradle and settled into her chair.

  She took a deep breath, She was more rattled than she thought she had been.

  Damn. Where are you, Andy?

  Grabbing the phone, she dialled the number in Washington and got the answering machine, which simply said, “Yes?”

  At the beep, she said, “This is Klondike. There’s a problem with Icarus, and someone had better call me fast.”

  Twenty minutes later, which was pretty fast for Washington, the phone rang.

  It was a male voice she had never heard before.

  “Klondike, I’d like a password.”

  “Sugar time,” she said.

  “And I’ll say, ‘mustard.’”

  “Who are you?”

  “Urn, I’m someone knowledgeable about all of Icarus. What’s the problem?”

  She told him about Gering.

  “And you canned him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that may have been a little precipitous.”

  “I can’t have someone working here that I can’t trust,” she said, jotting a note to have all the exterior locks changed in the morning. Also the security alarm codes.

  “Yes. You’re probably correct.”

  “I know I am.”

  “I’ll check into it.”

  “And you call me back,” she said. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  She hung up. Ace the Wonder Cat promptly flopped on top of the phone.

  “You deserve a medal, you know that?”

  Ace got busy cleaning his claws.

  *

  The single airstrip in Northfield, Maine, was a tiny one, but long enough. The F-4s had used every available foot of its length without having to deploy the drag chutes, and as soon as the last Phantom — seven-seven, flown by Wyatt — was down, the runway lights had promptly been extinguished.

  Parked in the weed-choked field off the edge of the runway were the six fighters, the two C-130s, and an unmarked Falcon business jet. Two dark blue tanker trucks without identification other than Maine license plates, manned by men in blue denims without insignia, moved among the aircraft, topping off the fuel tanks. Across the runway, a few civilian small aircraft were parked in an unlit area. The few buildings on that side of the field appeared to be deserted, and Wyatt could be assured that they were. Embry’s people would have threatened or bribed anyone who wanted to hang around the airport at night.

  Most of the Noble Enterprises crew were inside the Hercules transport, filling up quickly on MREs.

  Wyatt and Barr sat with George Embry inside the Falcon’s cabin. Embry had brought along coffee and club sandwiches, and every time he took a bite out of his, Wyatt felt guilty about the guys stuck with the military rations.

  Embry lifted fourteen manila envelopes from the attaché case resting on the table between their seats. “Documentation,” he said.

  “Is it any good, though?” Barr asked.

  “The best. Social security cards, credit cards, flying and driving licenses, some nifty passports, the works. Before I leave, we’ll collect all of the ID you guys have. I’ll ship it back to Albuquerque for you.”

  Embry passed Wyatt a thicker envelope. “Operating cash, in case you run into any emergencies.”

  Wyatt opened the envelope and spilled the bills on the table. There were U.S. dollars in fifties and twenties and a few hundreds, French francs, Algerian dinars, CFA francs for Chad, and Libyan dinars.

  “It adds up to around ninety thou, U.S.,” Embry said.

  “This getting charged against my contract, George?”

  “Nah, this is a freebie. Just in case anyone has to hitchhike out of the country.”

  “Or the continent,” Barr added.

  Wyatt divided the rubber-banded stacks, kept about a fourth of it, and shoved the rest to Barr.

  “Gee, thanks, Daddy.”

  “Split it up with the others, Bucky.”

  “My guys,” Embry said, “are loading a couple cardboard boxes on the transport. That’s the small arms you asked for, as well as the maps, radios, and other crap for the survival packs.”

  “We won’t be needing those,” Barr said.

  “Thanks,” Wyatt said.

  “On the Nebraska end,” Embry said, “I’ve arranged for a team that will hit there in the morning. By nine o’clock, there won’t be any evidence that you were ever there.”

  “Except for eyewitnesses,” Wyatt said.

  “Can’t avoid that, can we?”

  “I don’t think anyone will ever have to testily,” Barr said. “And if they do, they’ll only remember us as hardworking gentlemen who spread a few bucks around.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Embry said. “Okay, brief me on the mission.”

  “I thought we’d done that a couple months ago,” Wyatt told him.

  “There’s not a doubt in my mind that you’ve made some changes in the tactics, and Church wants to b
e fully aware of every phase.”

  “There’s just one, well maybe two, little alterations,” Barr said.

  Wyatt explained, point-by-point and chronologically, the plan he and Barr had prepared subsequent to the skeletal mission profile he had previously laid out for Church.

  “Hot damn!” Embry said. “I like your changes. If the computers back at Langley knew about them, they’d up your chances a bit.”

  “You ran a game scenario on us?” Barr asked.

  “Of course. Standard procedure.”

  “How did it come out?” Barr wanted to know.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Come on, George. You can count on me to overcome the odds anyway.”

  “The machine suggested a seventy-four percent success ratio.”

  “Before we made the changes,” Wyatt said.

  “Before you made the changes. I’ll bet you upped it by ten or fifteen percent.”

  “Comforting,” Barr said.

  “Any time you’re ready,” Wyatt said, “we’d like to hear about this new and urgent deadline. You also mentioned some fatalities.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got a source inside the country, and she’s gotten close to an army lieutenant colonel.”

  “Army?” Wyatt asked. “We aren’t going up against the army, are we?”

  “His name is al-Qati, and he heads up their special forces unit. They’ve been training with the bomber command that apparently will deploy CW weapons. The commander is a guy named Ibrahim Ramad, a full bird. They’re doing coordinated air and ground attack exercises.”

  “Are these the Sukhois?” Wyatt asked.

  “Su-24s, right. So, this is the major change I’ve got for your mission.”

  Damn. Jan was right about last-minute changes.

  Embry unrolled a large reconnaissance map and spread it over the table.

  “This is the base at Marada, or near Marada.”

  “You want us to hit an air base?” Barr said. “What the hell happened to the chemical plant?”

  “You get to do both of them now.”

  “We’re short about four aircraft, in that event,” Wyatt said.

  “It can’t be helped, Andy. Hell, I didn’t know about this until this morning, a couple hours before I called you, and we’re flat out of time.”

  Wyatt studied the map, which was actually a blown-up recon photo. There wasn’t much to be seen except for an antenna complex and a runway.

  “It’s underground,” Barr said.

  “Right. See these shadows here, look like wide lines?

  Those are the entrance doors to the subsurface hangars. You can barely make them out, but there are six ramps, leading down to the doors, see here? The runways are painted in camouflage, but we’ve known about this base for years. You’ll be able to locate it, as well as the chem plant, by geographical coordinates. They’re listed right here.”

  “Those hangar doors will be blast doors,” Wyatt said. “We’d have to catch them when they’re open if we want to slip a couple heavyweights in there.”

  “Yeah, I know. This is the way it goes. Your primary objective is the chemical plant, which is about ten miles north of Marada Air Base. The secondary target is any Sukhoi you can catch on the ground. We’d like to put a dent in their long-range bombing capability. Third target, if the opportunity presents itself, is the base.”

  Wyatt looked at Barr.

  “Why not?” Barr said. “I’m bound to have a couple bombs left over after I knock out the chemical plant.”

  “You sound like you’re doing the whole damned thing alone,” Embry said.

  “I could, but these other hot-shit pilots wanted to come along.”

  “All right,” Wyatt said. “The decision to target the planes and the air base means that there’s a new development somebody in your building doesn’t like.”

  “Ahmed al-Qati told my source that Ramad intends to hit three Ethiopian refugee camps with nerve, toxic, and psychological agents.”

  “Shit,” Barr said.

  “It’s supposed to prove to outsiders what they can, and will, do, which is deliver CW over a long range. I guess they’re also interested in evaluating the results of each agent.”

  “What camps?” Wyatt asked.

  “Unknown.”

  “On August second. What time?”

  “Also unknown. My agent will attempt to learn the take-off time, but she can’t probe too deeply without risking herself.”

  “Do you have independent corroboration?”

  “No,” Embry admitted. “We’re trying, but my source is reliable, and we don’t want to wait and risk having her be right and us be wrong.”

  “You going to the UN with it?”

  “I don’t play at those levels, Andy. My guess is that the time line is too tight for a round of high-level diplomatic discussions and less-than-veiled threats.”

  “We’re not set up, not armed, for an interdiction mission,” Wyatt said.

  “I know, and we’re not suggesting that you go play dogfighter with a bunch of MiGs and Sukhois. We figure if we can cause enough damage at the plant and the base, they’re going to forget about Ethiopians, at least for a little while.”

  “That’s good,” Barr said, “because I’m not a dog-fighter. Lover and wild horse rider, yes, but dogfighter, no.”

  Wyatt studied the map for awhile, then said, “I don’t think we need to know the take-off time. I’d hate to go in there and hit a bunch of them on the take-off run, yet allow one or two bombers to escape and light out for Ethiopia. Or when they know they’re under attack, they just might divert them to Tel Aviv. The best bet is to hit them early and hard enough to shake them out of the fantasy.”

  “I second that thought,” Barr said.

  Embry licked his lips. “Church thought it would be good to catch them in the open, on the ground. You cause some secondary explosions of CW ordnance, and we’d have gas all over the area, maybe sucked into the underground ventilation system. Goodbye Marada Air Base.”

  Barr whistled through his teeth.

  Wyatt sagged back in his chair. “That is an interesting thought, George.”

  “We knew we’d have casualties hitting the chemical plant,” Embry reminded him.

  “Yeah, but a whole air base? What’s the composition?”

  “The Sukhoi bomber wing and a fighter/interceptor/ strike wing of four squadrons. MiG-23s and MiG-27s.”

  “That’s a lot of people,” Wyatt said.

  “Look what they’re planning, just for a test, Andy. And keep in mind that we’re targeting military capacity, not poor, damned hungry people.”

  “You haven’t confirmed it, yet,” Wyatt said.

  “Look, Wyatt. I don’t think we’ll find a confirmation. We just don’t have enough assets in the area. And we’re not here to debate the targets. You’re the contractor; we pay the freight and you do the job.”

  “We’re not backing out, George. But as the commander on site, I’m going to reserve judgement relative to the final attack profile. We’ll buy the three targets, but we’ll remain flexible about the approach. Let’s not forget that we’re the ones with our asses on the line and that time-over-target is going to be damned slim. Bucky?”

  “I’ll go with that.”

  “George?”

  Embry took off his glasses and nodded slowly. His eyes seemed redder, more fatigued, with the glasses removed.

  “Yeah, all right, Andy. You call the final shots. I’ll keep pushing my gal, and update you if we learn more about the H-hour.”

  “Anything else we need to know?”

  Pursing his lips, Embry said, “Marty didn’t want me to tell you this, so keep it to yourselves, huh?”

  Wyatt and Barr both grunted.

  “You may get there, and then we’ll tell you to turn around and come home.”

  “What the hell?”

  “It seems that Icarus isn’t approved by all the higher-ups just yet.”

&nb
sp; “Well, goddamn it!” Wyatt said. “Stupid old me, I thought you people had your act together before you extended the contract.”

  “With the information we just got, the DCI is scrambling to touch bases with everyone who counts, and we’ll know more in the morning.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Barr exclaimed. “You guys are living up to your negative publicity.”

  “You can punch me out, Bucky, but I swear I didn’t know. I do believe, with what Mari… with what my asset has provided, that the DCI will have a stamp of approval by morning.”

  “This is pretty damned balled up,” Wyatt said.

  “I agree,” Embry said. “I always plan for something to go wrong, but this one can’t get much worse.”

  It did.

  Just as Barr and Wyatt were deplaning, one of the Falcon’s pilots stuck his head out of the cockpit. “Mr. Embry, scrambled call for you.”

  Wyatt waited while Embry picked up a phone. He mouthed the name, “Church.”

  Embry uh-huhed and huh-uhed a couple times, swore three times, and then said, “Yes, sir.”

  When he hooked the receiver back on its bulkhead cradle, Wyatt said, “What now?”

  “Your man Gering?”

  “Oh, shit!”

  Embry told him about the confrontation between Gering and Kramer.

  “She’s all right?”

  “She’s fine. She fired the guy on the spot. Church is going to have some people take a close look at him.”

  “You just can’t count on anyone, anymore,” Barr said.

  “Come on, Bucky, let’s get this circus airborne before any more clowns show up.”

  *

  Ferry flights were supposed to be boring, but Barr was enjoying himself. Not more than three months before, he believed he’d never again fly a hot fighter plane.

  He loved the F-4, and this one was greater than ever with all of the new systems.

  Settled comfortably in his seat, with the autopilot directing operations, he had reviewed his new passport and accompanying documentation. His name was Jack O. Milhauser, and he had a couple matchbooks from a New Jersey topless bar as well as a thin catalogue of X-rated videos. He figured he knew what the “O.” stood for, and he thought he would give Kramer hell about the persona she had set up for him. She had probably laughed all the way through it.