“That’s all that bothers you, Colonel Pearson?” Brackman asked.
She frowned. “I think it’s worth a closer look, sir.”
“Who should do the looking?”
Pearson smiled. “I think the First Aerospace can handle it, General.”
“Go for it, then, but let’s keep it damned quiet, Colonel.”
*
When Amy Pearson left Trinity College, she had been prepared to take on the world and make a name for herself.
She had come to realize that there were many ironies in her life. “Taking on the world” had become a reality, rather than an exaggeration. And she was not allowed to make a name for herself. She knew that her name would never achieve household recognition.
And the greatest irony of all: she didn’t care.
Not anymore.
Taking a direct commission in air force intelligence had been impulsive, but she had had good assignments, and she had mastered the technological requirements quickly. Better, her commanders had recognized her qualities, and she had advanced through the ranks faster than her contemporaries.
She was damned good at what she did, and the results were visible. That was the important part. Amy Pearson made things happen. Just look at the meeting with the commander-in-chief of the Space Command.
After the meeting with General Brackman, David Thorpe had taken her to dinner at the officers’ club, then summoned an air force sedan for her. The sergeant driving breezed his way through the southern environs of Colorado Springs, taking Lake Avenue, then the Hancock Freeway, out to Academy Boulevard. Still, by the time he turned onto Fountain Boulevard, it was almost nine o’clock.
She hated wasting time, and she was eager to get started on her new assignment.
After passing through the base’s main gate, the sergeant headed for the sequestered hangars that housed one of the ground-support groups for the 1st Aerospace Squadron. She got out of the car with her briefcase, thanked the driver, then approached the security control in the fence surrounding the hangars.
The air policeman on duty knew her by sight, but he still examined her identification with a critical eye and ran her briefcase through the X-ray machine before opening the gate.
Before she reached the small door set into the back of the hangar, it opened to reveal Maj. Calvin Orison. Known as High Cal because of his rotundity, Orison was the commander of the support detachment.
“Hi, there, Amy.”
“Cal. How are you?”
“Lonely.”
She grinned at him as she stepped over the threshold and into the hangar.
One MakoShark and two Bell JetRangers were parked inside. As soon as she saw that the Learjet assigned to the detachment was missing, she knew.
“Where’s McKenna?”
“Well, now, Amy … ”
“Damn it! He’s supposed to be here.”
“You ever known Kevin to be where he’s supposed to be?” Orison asked.
“That son of a bitch! I want a phone, right now.”
“Take it easy, Amy. Now and then, you got to give the man a little … ”
“Now, Cal.”
Amy Pearson wasn’t much good at letting other people finish their sentences.
*
The summer season in Aspen was the best season by far, Kevin McKenna thought. He preferred warm to cool, hot to frigid. He didn’t mind loafing around a swimming pool, and he absolutely hated loafing around the base of a mountain, trying to splice broken skis or legs together.
The only drawback to summer in Aspen was the lack of snow bunnies.
McKenna and Munoz had checked into separate rooms at the Aspen Inn at seven in the morning. McKenna slept until noon, and Munoz slept until three.
Then they idled around the swimming pool, absorbing the sun’s rays, watching the vacationing teachers, and drinking Bloody Marys. After two drinks, they switched to Bloody Marys that contained only the stalks of celery. In younger days, that weren’t too far behind him, McKenna had never counted his glasses or cans. Now, with unpredictable flying schedules, and especially with the MakoShark, he had fallen into a habit of moderation.
When they went out on the town like this, Maj. Tony Munoz stuck close to Col. Kevin McKenna because he didn’t have the same will power over Bloody Marys, Margaritas, and Johnny Walker.
Munoz was sitting in a canvas-webbed chair at a right angle to McKenna. The Arizonian was a tawny brown, with hard-ridged muscles lining his arms, legs, chest, and stomach. He had dark brown hair that matched his eyes and a smooth, almost round face that suggested that he did not have a care in the world. He didn’t.
The two of them had met when Capt. Anthony Munoz had been assigned for a year as a weapons system trainee in McKenna’s squadron. McKenna was a major then and had taken the WSO into the backseat of his F-4D. By the end of the year, the two of them took second place in their class in the Red Flag combat exercises out of Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. With a little finagling, they managed to get Munoz’s temporary duty converted to a permanent assignment.
“It is dark. You realize that, jefe?”
The sun had indeed dropped beyond the western peaks, leaving a nice blush of orange and red on the horizon, and the quick cooling of the mountains was raising goosebumps on McKenna’s chest. A few yellow lamps were lit around the pool, and the surface of the pool itself was lit from below with a soft, bluish tint that wavered from the action of a couple becoming amorous.
McKenna had become so accustomed to rapid changes in temperature that he hadn’t paid attention to the night falling. He only watched for the important things, like unaccompanied vacationing female teachers and secretaries harboring some thought of adventure.
Usually, he was able to attract one or two. At thirty-eight, he was in excellent shape, the stomach flat and hard, the 175 pounds just right for his six-foot frame and heavy bones, the black hair full, a trifle long, and slightly unkempt. His eyes were listed as green on his driver’s license, but actually slipped over into a light shade of gray. His eyes were extremely sharp, not missing much, especially hostile aircraft in otherwise empty-appearing skies. It was one of the reasons he had picked up the nickname, “Snake Eyes.” Another reason was his willingness to take a gamble, now and then. McKenna was an Air Force Academy engineering graduate who had planned on becoming a general. One star, at least. That ambition had eroded slightly after he learned to fly and found out that he was pretty good at it. Not many generals were allowed to fly as much as they would have liked. McKenna had had one tour with the Thunderbirds demonstration team, had flown as a test pilot out of Edwards Air Force Base, and had served as an instructor/liaison pilot in F-15 Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons for the Saudi and Israeli air forces, in addition to standard assignments with USAF wings. A lot of it was boring, and a lot of it was exciting. It got more exciting on the morning, five years before, when Gen. Marvin Brackman called him at the Bachelor Officer Quarters at Edwards.
“McKenna, a couple people I know said you could fly anything with wings.”
“Even if it’s only got half a wing left, General.”
“Would you rather make full colonel or fly?”
“I’ll fly,” McKenna had said.
“Maybe you’ll do both. By the time you get down to the flight line, I’ll have an F-15 cleared for you. I want you at Peterson by ten o’clock.”
It had been a short interview, and McKenna had not returned to Edwards.
“Hey, Kev. I mention it was gettin’ dark?”
“Yeah, Tony. You did.”
“We gonna sit here all goddamned night, lookin’ for what ain’t gonna appear?”
“I saw a couple possibles,” McKenna said.
“So did I. Holdin’ hands with friendly types.”
“Reluctantly, I’ll say today was a bust.”
“Me, I saw one of those, too. Coveted by her husband.”
“That leaves dinner, I suppose.”
“I’ve been known to eat,
” Munoz said.
“Almost anything,” McKenna agreed.
They went up to their rooms to change into sport shirts and jeans, and then met in the lobby. Paring down the list of restaurants by flipping quarters, they ended up with a yuppie place called the Eager Angus, and took a cab out to it. The place was hanging ferns and brass and used brick and cozy nooks, but they got a window booth with a view of Buttermilk Mountain — when it could be seen — and someone had said the prime rib was “really, really” prime.
It was. An inch thick, and juicily rare, and covering an oversized platter. The baked potato melted when McKenna looked at it.
Munoz dribbled black pepper over everything — beef, salad, and potato.
“You think that’s good for you?”
“Hey, amigo. It’s the only damned thing the surgeon general hasn’t banned.”
Halfway through the meal, two young ladies were escorted to a table across the room, on the other side of an unlit, round fireplace full of orange trees.
“Oh shit, oh dear,” Munoz said. “I’m in love.”
McKenna turned to look. “With the blonde or the brunette?”
“Doesn’t matter. You get your quarter out, we flip.”
“Don’t gulp your food, Tony.”
Just before McKenna was ready to call his dinner complete, a waiter showed up at his elbow.
He looked up.
“You wouldn’t happen to be Colonel McKenna?”
“If I said no?”
“I’ll tell the caller to try somewhere else.”
“Ah, hell. I’d better not.”
McKenna got up and followed the waiter into the foyer and picked up the phone.
“McKenna.”
“Damn you, McKenna. I’ve been calling all over Aspen. I’ve made nineteen calls. You’re always, always supposed to leave word.”
“I’m having dinner. It’s very good.”
“We have to take off in an hour.”
“Not good,” he told her. “We’re just about to meet two lovely young ladies. Or perhaps you’d like to join us, Amy? Could be fun.”
“We’re leaving in an hour,” she insisted.
“No hurry. I figure about three A.M.”
“We have an assignment”
“Oh. Well, that’s different.”
*
The MakoShark was absolutely the most beautiful thing Maj. Wilbur Conover had ever seen. Its heritage was SR-71 Blackbird, but the air force’s design team — from Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Boeing, Hughes, and Rockwell — had gone far beyond a design that was twenty-years’ advanced for 1964, when the Blackbird first flew.
Like the Blackbird, the MakoShark was delta-winged, with a long, long fuselage, and flattened. Chines along the side of the narrowing forward fuselage gave it a visual pancake appearance.
The resemblance stopped there. She did not have rudders. Rather, the wing tips canted upward at seventy-degree angles, leaning outward, to serve as rudders. She did not have the cylindrical nacelles protecting her propulsion systems. The housings were elongated rectangles with rounded edges, and the wing appeared to pass through them. Forward, at the bottom of the wing, the nacelle curved upward to its opening. Jutting out of the opening was the ramjet cone which was not actually a cone as on the SR-71s, but a very wide and flexible triangular piece now blocking the entire mouth of the nacelle. The turbofan engines were not in alignment with the intake, but raised above it, sucking their air supply from an upward-curving tunnel. The reason for that configuration was that spinning turbine blades were excellent radar reflectors. With the blades not directly behind the intake, the possibility for radar contact was reduced.
Similarly, with the jet engines mounted well forward in the long nacelle, their exhaust was channeled slightly downward in another curving tunnel that was wrapped with tubing carrying freon gas. The refrigerant cooled the exhaust considerably, so that by the time it exited the tail pipe, its infrared signature was practically nonexistent at 70 percent throttle settings. Infrared tracking sensors just might pick up a small signal at 90 percent throttle, and would at 100 percent.
But they wouldn’t know what they had. An infrared signal with no radar return?
To further diminish the radar cross-section, the turbofan blades were not made of metal. They were plastic, combined with carbon fiber for strength. While some designers had experimented with engines made of ceramics — not detectable on radar, the MakoShark’s designers had elected to stay with the more reliable and higher output metal-encased engines, using plastic and carbon and polymer for weight-reduction and RCS-control wherever they could get away with it. The engines were, however, enclosed in a honeycombed structure that diffused and absorbed radar probes.
The rocket motors were mounted inboard of the jet engines, in the same nacelles, and were also protected from radar by the honeycomb layer. There was just enough metal in the MakoShark to give it a radar return about the size of a bald eagle when it was within five miles of the transmitter.
Because every ounce of thrust from the rocket motors was necessary for its mission, there was no way to disguise the infrared signature when the craft was flying on rocket power.
Usually, however, the burns did not last for more than four minutes. Nine minutes was the max. Shooting stars, way out in the stratosphere. Meteors burning up. Nothing to be concerned about.
The trailing edge of the delta wing was curved, again for antiradar purposes, and contained the oversized flaps, elevators, ailerons, and trim tabs. Every surface was ultra-smooth, finished in the deep midnight-blue paint that made the MakoShark disappear into the night a hundred yards from an observer. Placed in appropriate locations were the tiny exhaust nozzles of the thruster system. Where the air was rarified and the craft’s attitude unaffected by the movement of control surfaces, the thrusters were utilized. There were no rivets to be exposed; every joint was bonded. There were also no telltale insignia, no aircraft numbers.
The cockpit was located just behind the needle nose, behind the forward avionics bay. The canopies were flush with the lines of the fuselage. Directly aft of the cockpit was the technician-accessible compartment containing more avionics and the computers. Behind that compartment was the pay-load bay — twenty-two feet long by ten feet wide, and behind that, in the tapering fuselage, were the primary fuel tanks feeding the JP-7 aviation fuel to the jet engines.
The payload bay was multipurpose, accepting a variety of modules. A bomb rack module, a cargo module, and up to two passenger modules could all be jacked into place. The passenger modules weren’t very comfortable. Each of them was nine feet long, containing four airline-type seats, environmental control, and a large TV screen on the forward bulkhead. Passengers didn’t like to feel trapped in a windowless, plastic cocoon; they had to be given a view of something. Almost anything would do.
Additionally, four pylons could be fitted to the wing, just inside the engine nacelles. The pylons accepted external fuel tanks, cargo pods, electronics modules, and a variety of lethal weaponry.
Very beautiful in its sleekness and its functional utility, Wilbur Conover thought. And this was his very own. His Delta Yellow.
Capt. Jack Abrams entered the windowless hangar and walked up behind him, his shoes clicking loudly on the concrete floor. “How long are you going to moon over her, Con Man?”
Conover turned to grin at his WSO. “Hell, I don’t know. Couple more hours.”
Abrams shook his head, which reflected the fluorescent lights mounted high in the ceiling. He had gone bald long before he reached forty, and he compensated with a bushy mustache. His pate was smooth, but his face was heavily lined, mirroring a mind that worried about lots of things — equipment breakdowns and the health of his pilot among them.
Conover was three inches taller than Abrams’s five-ten, blond and blue-eyed, and his demeanor was almost the exact opposite of his WSO’s. He laughed a lot, got hung up in a romance whenever he could, devised pranks and practical jokes for many
victims, and used the company’s computers to design elaborate scams. Fortunately, he had never attempted to put one of his cons into operation. Since little, unexpected glitches frequently occurred in his practical jokes, he might well have ended up in jail.
Conover had been born in Albany, then reared by an uncle and aunt in New York City when his parents were killed in a boating accident. He had blazed his way through Columbia University, then joined the air force.
Conversely, Jack Abrams had been born, raised, and schooled in New York, then immigrated to Sacramento with his parents. He attended the University of California at Berkeley before entering the air force.
The two of them had not met until they were recruited by Kevin McKenna, but since that time, two years before, had been almost inseparable.
“C’mon, Will. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning. She’s fueled and ready to go. Let’s you and me find a San Miguel.”
The fueling crews had topped off Delta Yellow’s liquid and solid fuels half an hour before. The cargo module was loaded. There was nothing to do now but wait.
“Okay, couple beers.” Conover headed for the door, and Abrams fell in beside him.
“I’ll take you on at Ping-Pong.”
“Why do you put yourself through this, Do-Wop? I whip you every time.”
“I’ve been practicing.”
Conover took one last look at his MakoShark before stepping out into the oppressive heat.
The hangar was two stories tall, with administrative offices and storage space on the second floor. Abrams described the hangar as “humongous.” At the moment, it contained three C-123s, two business jets, a T-37 jet trainer, two Bell JetRangers, and a single Mako — the unarmed and un-stealthy version of the MakoShark, in addition to the MakoShark.
The two men mushed their way toward the residential areas under a very hot sun. The humidity was similar to a wet dishrag pressed against Conover’s face. He didn’t much care for layovers at Wet Country, the nickname for Merlin Air Force Base.
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