Delta Blue

by William H. Lovejoy

  It was, as far as McKenna was concerned, the minimal ordnance load. Despite the heat shielding on the modified missiles, some did not survive the temperatures of reentry. On average, they lost 12 percent of their missiles to heat-caused malfunction. So far, they had never had one of the 20-millimeter M61 rotating barrel guns fail. But McKenna had been in the air force for too many years. He knew there was a first time for everything.

  “Colonel McKenna,” the PA blared. “Colonel McKenna, please report to the Command Center.”

  “You set that up, didn’t you, Colonel?” Shalbot called to him.

  “Set up what, Benny?”

  “Get yourself paged, just when the work is supposed to start.”

  “Damned right.” McKenna grinned at him.

  It took him four minutes to make the passage, and he found Overton, Pearson, and Sgt. Donna Amber waiting for him, gathered around the primary console below the port.

  Amy Pearson had one of his reconnaissance photographs up on the main screen.

  “Damn. I’m a pretty good photographer,” McKenna said. “The best I know, in fact.”

  Amber smiled at him.

  Pearson said, “The photos are okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “They’ll do. This is the close-up of well number twenty-three. In configuration and dimension, it matches all of the others. The offshore units, of course, are on somewhat triangular platforms with three protruding leg mounts. The ice-based units have a similar, though smaller, subplatform, and they are also fitted with three short legs. That allows them to adjust for irregularities in the terrain.”

  McKenna saw that the platform was actually several feet above the ice, rather than placed directly on it. The one platform leg that was clearly visible in the picture appeared to have a spade-footed base that dug into the ice.

  “We used the helicopter on well number twenty as a dimension reference,” Pearson said. “It was an MBB B0105, marked for the navy, and it has thirty-two-foot rotors. The helicopter pad is seventy-five feet by seventy-five feet. They could actually get three or four choppers on it with a little juggling.

  “On the ice is a twenty-by-twenty shed, which I am assuming contains equipment, storage, and perhaps a couple of tracked vehicles. Except for the leg-adjustment motors and several antennas on top of the dome, all equipment is contained within the dome. The dome has a two hundred and twenty-foot diameter.”

  Which was close to what McKenna had guessed. “Is that tall enough for a drilling rig, Amy?”

  She nodded. “More than enough. I’d guess, however, that the dome skin is particularly thick, for insulation purposes. The antennas on top suggest VLF, UHF, VHF, and FM radio frequency capability. Additionally, the offshore platforms also have radar antennas. From the antenna design, we’re estimating something similar to the High Lark radar used on the MiG-twenty-three. It would have an effective radius of forty-five miles.”

  “All of the offshore wells?”

  “All of them.”

  “They’re operating on I-Band,” McKenna said. “We picked up a few of them on the threat receiver.”

  “As a guess,” General Overton said, “they’d have to stay alert to drifting icebergs. There’s a lot of those this time of year. And if they protrude out of the water far enough, radar might help spot them.”

  “Which suggests that their fleet should include a few ocean-going tugboats,” McKenna said.

  Pearson agreed. “I would think so, but we haven’t seen one as yet”

  “Some of those big bergs would be damned hard to divert,” Overton said.

  “Still, three or four tugs working at the same time could effect enough deviation in course to clear a well,” Pearson countered.

  “Probably. The wells are all still there.”

  “Back to the platforms,” Pearson said. “On the side of the dome opposite the helicopter pad are five storage tanks, perhaps with ten thousand gallons capacity each. On each well, tank number five vents a white, almost translucent, vapor. I’m going to run a spectrograph on it, but I suspect that the tank contains a heating apparatus of some sort.

  “And that’s about all that we’ve learned from these pictures.”

  Pearson tapped a few keys, and one of the infrared photos appeared on the screen.

  “This is well number eight, but all of the offshore platforms have essentially the same characteristics.”

  There wasn’t much to the picture. A hot red center expanding into lighter shades of red, then orange, then yellow, then blue.

  “Given the film we used,” McKenna said, “doesn’t that thing look hotter than it should be?”

  Amber grinned at him. “Right on, Colonel.”

  Pearson looked up, then said begrudgingly, “Yes. It does. I would expect the dome to be exceptionally well-insulated, to allow men to work in that environment, but we’re seeing more heat loss than we should. Then, too, there’s some heat loss into the sea that surprises me.”

  “There might be some heat generated by the pumping of oil through the casing,” Overton suggested.

  “Or from rotating drills, if they’re still drilling,” McKenna added.

  “But not that much, McKenna,” Pearson said.

  “So you want more IR?”

  “Yes. We’ll use Type thirty-fifty on one camera and Type thirty-ninety on the other. Maybe I can extrapolate from the two sensitivities.”

  “When?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “Donna, you want to page the troops for me? We’ll meet in the exercise compartment.”

  “Sure thing, Colonel”

  As McKenna waited for the door to open, he heard Amber’s voice on the PA. “First AS flight crews report to Compartment A-four-seven.”

  On board Themis, the flight crews were assigned to separate residential spokes, again for safety reasons. When they met as a squadron, they used the large exercise space in the hub as a briefing room.

  When he floated through the hatchway into the exercise compartment, he found all but Munoz accounted for. The fitness maven, Nitro Fizz Williams, was pumping spring-loaded iron, his feet planted firmly against a wall. Dimatta was upside down, chinning himself on the upper bar of a Nautilus machine, which might have required a couple ounces of effort. Will Conover was dressed in a pair of blue shorts and a T-shirt, the scars on his arms white against otherwise tanned flesh. He had ridden an F-16 into Edwards with landing gear that collapsed on touchdown. He tore up his arms getting out of the flaming wreckage. Do-Wop Abrams had a cassette stereo pounding out Bo Diddley’s “Detour.”

  This was the first time they had all been together in over a week. Since most of their assigned missions could be accomplished by one MakoShark, they frequently missed each other in the transit between the space station and the earth side bases.

  Dimatta aimed a pouch of Coke at him, then gave it a nudge with his finger. “Here you go, Kev.”

  “Thanks, Cancha. Where’s Tony?”

  “Where else?”

  “Asleep. We’ll give him a couple minutes.” McKenna caught the floating soft drink, pulled the flexible straw loose from the side of the pouch, and sucked on it. The Coke was cold.

  When Munoz arrived a few minutes later, bright-eyed from plenty of sleep, McKenna said to Abrams, “Jack, you want to put Bo on hold?”

  Abrams killed the tape.

  McKenna briefed them on Pearson’s concerns about the oil wells in the Greenland Sea, as well as his and Munoz’s earlier flight.

  Though all of the men in the room would rather be at the controls of a MakoShark, McKenna strictly enforced a Space Command regulation limiting the number of flight hours per week. A groggy or fatigued pilot or systems officer could easily destroy a MakoShark. At three-quarters of a billion dollars per copy, they weren’t expendable. Delta Red was the only reserve machine, though a MakoShark coded Delta Orange was in the final stages of completion at Jack Andrews Air Force Base in Chad. It wouldn’t be ready for flight trials fo
r another month, or even two.

  The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty agreements allowed for one more craft, but appropriations had not been forthcoming from Congress. Under START, the U.S. had given up forty of a planned seventy-two B-2 Stealth bombers, but had been allowed to develop six MakoSharks. In McKenna’s mind, the six aerospace fighters were the equivalent of all seventy-two B-2s.

  “Any questions on where we stand so far?”

  “Nope,” Conover said. “Who gets the next shot?”

  “You and I, Will, are close to max on flying time, so Frank gets the next one. I want you and Jack to hit the sack and stand by, just in case we need another run.”

  “I get to sack out, too?” Munoz asked.

  “Your turn to play operations officer, Tiger. The paperwork awaits you.”

  “Shucks.”

  “Hot damn,” Dimatta said. “And we go armed? I saw Shalbot and Embry working on Delta Blue.”

  “You’re armed, Cancha, but only I get to pull the trigger. We clear on that?”

  “Clear, Snake Eyes.”

  Nitro Fizz Williams, the backseater, said, “Do we finish the run at Jack Andrews?”

  “I hope so,” Dimatta said. “I could use a decent meal.”

  “Right back here,” McKenna told them. “Amy wants her film.”

  “Well,” Dimatta said, “we both want something.”

  The leer on Dimatta’s face made halfway clear his own desires, though McKenna wasn’t certain whether the pilot would rather have a shot at Pearson or at some hostile aircraft.

  *

  Malcolm Nichols spun the helm, and Walden heeled hard to the left. The small ice floe, protruding barely eighteen inches out of the water, but probably weighing ten tons, passed by on the starboard side.

  “Jesus, Mal. That was close.”

  “It’s okay, Jennifer. Danny saw it in time.”

  Danny Hemmings was up on the bow, watching for such things. He was dressed in a fur-lined parka, but Nichols could see him shivering from time to time. It might be summer above the Arctic Circle, but any breeze at all dropped the relative temperature considerably.

  Nichols kept his eyes on Hemmings, halfway fearful of missing some urgent signal from his lookout.

  The Walden was a forty-two-foot sport fisherman, an old Hatteras with a wooden hull and thirty years of creaks, but it handled rough seas well. The seas were, in fact, relatively calm, with just a slight chop moving before a ten-mile-per-hour wind.

  The boat’s name and home port — Boston — were roughly stenciled on the aged white paint of her transom. The more important identification was painted in two-foot-high green letters along both sides of the hull: GREENPEACE.

  Nichols had given up the open flying bridge the day before, when the winds became more frigid. He manned the secondary controls behind the windshield of the salon. It was warmer, but his vision was severely restricted, and Danny Hemmings and Margot Montaine, the French girl Danny had met in Cherbourg, had been taking turns on the bow.

  Jennifer Pearl brought him a fresh mug of coffee. “Thanks”

  “What do you think we’re going to find, Mal?”

  “Damned if I know, but the captain of that Greenland fishing boat said something’s fucking with the marine life. Well just cruise by those German wells, maybe sample the water a little.”

  The Walden had been taking on supplies in Trondheim, Norway, when Nichols met the fishing boat’s master in a waterfront dive. They shared a bottle of aquavit, and Nichols learned that large gams of whales were migrating out of the Greenland Sea. It was not a normal migration, the captain told him. Additionally, the fleets were finding that the fishing had become less bountiful over the last few years. The captain eagerly pointed a finger in the direction of the Germans, detailing the two times he had been turned away from the oil fields by German naval vessels.

  “You think an oil spill?” Jennifer asked him.

  “It’s been known to happen,” he said unnecessarily. “Damn sure, we’ll know soon.”

  “If we find the wells.”

  No one aboard the old cruiser was a navigator. Old charts, dead-reckoning, and flipped coins were the height of the Walden’s technology.

  “We’ll find them,” Nichols vowed.

  *

  Maj. Wilhelm Metzenbaum commanded the Zweit Schwadron of the 20.S.A.G. His pilots flew the Eurofighter, a single seat, delta-winged air defense fighter. Similar in appearance to the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, it also had attack capabilities, able to transport ten 454-kilogram bombs in addition to two external fuel tanks. The prototype had first flown in late 1990, and Metzenbaum’s squadron had been the first to be fully outfitted with the new fighter.

  Metzenbaum and his wingman, Hauptmann Mies Vanderweghe, were currently armed in the interceptor mode, with Skyflash 90 air-to-air missiles. They had completed their circuit of the oil fields, and Metzenbaum flew alongside the tanker, waiting while Vanderweghe approached the tanker’s boom. Metzenbaum had topped off first.

  Metzenbaum was an eighteen-year veteran of the Luftwaffe. He had flown any aircraft the commanders had put in front of him, and he had flown it well. A short and dark man, with a thick black mop of hair, he was married and had two children, twin boys, who were about to enter the University of Frankfurt. Behind his back, the men in his squadron called him “Bear,” not only because of his gruff demeanor, but because of the dense mat of dark hair that covered his chest and back.

  He listened to the boom operator: “That is good, Panther Two. A little more to your left … ”

  A voice on his tactical frequency interrupted. “Panther Leader, this is Platform Six.”

  The speaker from Bahnsteig Seeks sounded agitated.

  Metzenbaum depressed the transmit button. “Platform Six, Panther Leader.”

  “Are you still in my area, Panther Leader?”

  “Affirmative. Two hundred kilometers away.”

  “We have a small boat approaching, estimated at four kilometers distance.”

  “That close?”

  “It must be a wooden boat, without a radar reflector in operation, Panther Leader. Radar picked it up only moments ago.”

  “Panther Leader to Platform Six. I will investigate. Panther Two, you will return to base.”

  Metzenbaum was at 7,000 meters. He eased the stick to the right, brought his left wing over, and went into a turning dive, stopping the turn when he reached a heading of 245 degrees. The speed climbed from 450 kilometers per hour to Mach 1.2. He leveled out at 1,000 meters.

  Thirteen minutes later, Metzenbaum saw the red strobe light atop Bahnsteig Sechs, and to the south of it by a couple of kilometers, the white cruiser. A minute later, he made out the letters on the side of the boat.

  Ah, damn.

  Metzenbaum had no quarrel with the goals of some of the environmental groups, but some of the more fanatical groups utilized tactics that irritated him. Ramming a nuclear aircraft carrier with a small boat seemed to him both ineffective and suicidal.

  Throttling back, he reduced his speed to 400 kilometers per hour and dove on the boat. On the first pass, he went by at thirty meters of altitude, the noise of his passage rocking the man standing on the bow. He grabbed for the bow rail and hung on for dear life. The boat slowed.

  Metzenbaum dialed the international marine channel on his secondary Navigation/Communication radio.

  He spoke in English. “Greenpeace boat, this is Major Metzenbaum of the German air force.”

  There was no response.

  “Greenpeace boat … ”

  “What do you want, Major?” The voice was nasal, with just a twang of anxiety in it.

  “You are cruising in restricted waters. You must turn back.”

  “That’s damned nonsense, Major Whoever-you-are. We are in international waters, and we’ll go where we want to go.”

  Metzenbaum circled wide to the south, climbing a few meters.

  “Greenpeace boat, I inform you that you are in water
s under control of the Bremerhaven Petroleum Corporation. It is dangerous to go too close to the well. You must turn back immediately.”

  “It’s a free sea,” the male voice told him.

  Metzenbaum had only air-to-air missiles with him, but he was not going to hit anything, anyway, he hoped. With his rudder, he tightened his turn and lined up on the boat. Arming one of the Sky flashes, he dropped the nose of the Eurofighter until the cruiser appeared in the bottom left of the gun sight. He would not use the computer-targeting mode.

  The fighter dove and closed rapidly on the boat, and Metzenbaum aimed fifty meters to the right of it, then pressed the commit button on the stick. The missile leapt from its guiding rail.

  Flash of white-hot exhaust.

  Plume of seawater.

  Silent thump of explosion under the surface of the sea.

  Another, taller plume erupted from the ocean.

  “Jesus Christ! Hey, you son of a bitch! You’re shooting at us!”

  “You must turn back now,” Metzenbaum said.

  The cruiser went into a wide turn toward the south as Metzenbaum gained altitude and prepared for a long series of figure eights.

  He called New Amsterdam on the squadron’s frequency. “Second Squadron, Panther Leader.”

  “Go ahead, Panther Leader”

  “Prepare to scramble Panthers Seven and Eight. They will need to relieve me in approximately forty minutes.”

  Metzenbaum heard the klaxon sound over the open radio circuit.

  *

  It was eight o’clock at night, still very light over the Greenland Sea.

  Delta Green had been circling at 40,000 feet, taking the high-altitude infrared shots that Pearson wanted, and waiting for the two fighters and the tanker to clear the area before making the pass at 5,000 feet. The WSO had picked them up much earlier on the 200-mile scan. He had then gone passive with the radar, and just now activated it for three sweeps.

  “Well, shit!” Williams said. “The guy just fired a missile into the sea.”

  Doing what we do to unsuspecting Super 18s, Dimatta thought. “No target?”

  “None that I could see on the screen. I’ll go active in a minute for another sweep.”