Delta Blue

by William H. Lovejoy

  The PA system coughed, then said, “HoneyBee inbound. Major Mitchell, could you cover?”

  He didn’t hear Brad Mitchell’s response.

  McKenna made his rounds, checking the tags on each fuel compartment. The fuel technicians and Brad Mitchell made regular inspections, dating, timing, and signing off on the tags. McKenna did the same, jotting the time, the date, and his initials as he checked each set of pressure and temperature indicators. He looked for leaks at all valve and fitting junctures.

  When he left, he made sure each of the hatchways was fully secured.

  He followed the perimeter corridor on around the hub, stopped and talked to Sergeant Embry for a moment, and directed Dr. Monte Washington back toward his own territory. Washington tended to explore.

  “You see anything green around here, Doctor?”

  The head swiveled. “Sorry, Colonel. Got lost.”

  “Don’t get lost anymore. There’s lots of green, earth side.”

  Washington sneered at him, reached for a grab bar, and shoved off ahead of him. McKenna didn’t think the computer specialist liked him. And didn’t care.

  He reached the Command Center to find Milt Avery manning the main console. The primary screen held a view of the hanger side of the hub, and a radar repeat was shown on Screen 2. There were six more screens, each showing some section of the space station. Screen 8 was an exterior view, the camera trained on the growing Spoke 9B. Three figures in EVA suits were lining up a curved piece of the spoke.

  Avery had been in the astronaut corps before his assignment as deputy commander of the station. He had taken the space shuttles through nine successful missions. A short and quiet man, Avery was not easily perturbed. McKenna thought he would be a good man in a crisis. “Hi, Milt.”

  The colonel turned his head to look at him. “Hello, Kevin. Have you been checking on that Teal Ruby?”

  “All but in the bay, Milt. And I made a pass through fuel storage. Looks fine.”

  “Good,” Avery tapped a line into the computerized log he was working on. “Overton and Pearson said for you to meet them in Sixteen’s dining hall.”

  “Damn. I just passed there. Oh, by the way, I chased Washington out of Corridor Two, near Fourteen.”

  “One more infraction, and I’m going to ask Jim to boot him out.”

  “I could drop him off on my next flight,” McKenna offered. “Say somewhere over Poland.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  McKenna went back to Spoke Sixteen, passing through the four safety hatches. He got a bag of coffee and heated a roast beef sandwich from the Back Home machine, then carted them over to the table where Pearson and Overton had strapped themselves down.

  There was no one else in the compartment, and McKenna figured the general had shooed them out.

  Pearson was studying a mural fixed to one bulkhead. A soft view of Tahiti. There were lots of murals and pictures in the residential spokes.

  “I believe that’s about three miles south of Papeete, Amy. We could pop down there for a couple days.”

  “You including me?” Overton asked.

  “Well, actually, Jim, I wasn’t.”

  “He’s not including me, either,” Pearson said. She sat up against the lap belt and crossed her arms on the table. She had to hold the table edge with her fingers to keep her arms down.

  McKenna forced his sandwich partway out of the pouch and took a bite of it.

  “Amy and I,” Overton said, “had a long talk with Brackman and Thorpe and a couple of experts they found somewhere. The consensus is that the wells, platforms, and ancillary structures are now off-limits. Judging by the infrared and low-light photos of well number eight, the dome is divided internally into three sections, probably living quarters, administrative area, and wellhead section. The dome walls, by the way, are ten feet thick, Styrofoam sandwiched between aluminum sheeting. The well area appears to be completely open under the dome, and the experts say they can interpret the photos to show the wellhead and several turbine generators. Don’t ask me how, Kevin, because the low-light shots were blurry as hell down within the dome. They’re looking at the heat structures. Anyway, on number eight, the wellhead itself is estimated at three hundred and fifteen degrees of temperature. That’s the metal. Temperatures within the well itself are estimated at six hundred and twelve degree Fahrenheit.”

  “Don’t touch it, in other words?” McKenna said.

  “Not with your hand, not with a Wasp. If the wellhead is damaged, or even if the platform’s anchor lines are severed and the platform drifts, snapping off the well casing, all hell will literally break loose. Superheated water and steam spilling into the Greenland Sea will either kill or drive off the marine life. If all of those wells were to let go, the results could be catastrophic.”

  McKenna had already stored a few mental pictures of Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Copenhagen under water.

  “Does Brackman still think we need to find the undersea cables? The last reconnaissance run should have killed that idea.”

  “Oh, he thinks we can find them, all right. Amy had the idea.”

  McKenna looked to her and grinned. “You always do.”

  “We’re going to do some electromagnetic mapping,” she said, holding his gaze with her own.

  He almost made a snappy comment about her use of “we,” then fortuitously did not. She was, after all, part of the team, and McKenna didn’t want to exclude her.

  “Sounds like a damned good idea,” he said.

  And got a smile in return for a change.

  Eleven

  “We set to go, David?”

  Thorpe was in his chair overlooking the operations center, and Brackman went in and stood beside him, looking at the big plotting board on the far wall, through the windows of the crow’s nest. Almost all of the targets currently being tracked were displayed in blue and red.

  “Getting there, Marv. The First Aero put down at Merlin twenty-five minutes ago. We should get word soon on the equipment.”

  Brackman checked the lower right-hand corner of the plotting board. The island of Borneo had three yellow dots on it.

  He tracked back across the map and found Murmansk. There was one green dot superimposed on the city.

  “What are the Soviets sending?” he asked.

  “Sheremetevo’s operations officer is supposed to call me in the next half hour, Marv, but the early word was eight Fulcrums and an AWACS.”

  “This is the first time we’ve ever shown the Reds in green, isn’t it?” the commander said.

  “Grates a little, doesn’t it?”

  Mildenhall Royal Air Force Base on the east side of England had a lavender dot. That would be the Boeing E-3 Sentry. Brackman had decided that he wanted an AWACS of his own aloft to watch over the action. Now that missiles had been exchanged, he was going to maintain much closer scrutiny. Themis could not be relied upon for a constant overhead surveillance because of her orbit, and there was no reason, just yet, to call the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and have a KH-11 moved into an overhead orbit. Besides, that might entail getting the National Security Agency involved and briefed, and the more agencies with an interest, the more difficult it was to reach decisions.

  “Where are you spotting the Sentry, David?”

  “At forty thousand feet over Greenland’s east coast, if that’s all right with you, Marv. It’ll give us the coverage we want, but keep her out of the fray, if one develops.”

  “Overflight permission?”

  “We’ve got it.”

  “Okay, yeah, that’s good. McKenna give you any idea on the timetable?”

  “He said a couple hours or a couple weeks,” Thorpe told him. “It all depends on Benny Shalbot.”

  *

  Col. Pyotr Volontov sat in his borrowed, jury-rigged office half a kilometer from the main runway at Murmansk. He thought the chair was a castoff from the Great War. The iron casters squealed, and the left arm was loose.

  He rubbed his
cheeks with the fingers of his right hand, deciding he should shave before takeoff time. The face mask tended to grate and rub his face raw when he had a stubble of whiskers.

  Volontov had just talked on the telephone with Martina, the dark-haired, fair-skinned woman to whom he was betrothed. The engagement seemed to have become more permanent than marriage, now approaching two years of endurance. Neither Martina Davidoff, who was a medical doctor specializing in obstetrics in Moscow, and whose father happened to be an admiral in the Red Banner Northern Fleet, nor Volontov had yet felt inclined to take that last step.

  There was comfort in their relationship. Each had an escort for the more important social events, and neither had to devise excuses for an unmarried state to parents or friends. On long weekends at Admiral Davidoff’s dacha outside Moscow, they had each other.

  Several times, they had set a wedding date, but acceptable delays had intervened. Volontov was sent on temporary duty to Afghanistan or Egypt or Iraq. Martina had a closely watched experiment of one kind or another under way. Her research absorbed her time like a sponge, and Volontov had his airplanes and the responsibility of his wing command.

  The telephone rang, startling him out of his review.

  “Colonel Volontov.”

  “Colonel, this is Major Petrov.”

  “Yes, Micha, what is it?”

  “We have a message from General Sheremetevo’s office. Permission is granted for the use of eight MiG-29s, two tankers, and one Airborne Early-Warning craft.”

  “Very well, Micha. We will utilize seven aircraft from the 2032nd. I will fly as lead of the first flight. Tell Major Rostoken that he will lead the second flight and that he is to select the pilots. We will brief at … what time did General Sheremetevo give?”

  “None, Comrade Colonel. We are waiting on a United States Air Force sergeant.”

  *

  Benny Shalbot had bitched for most of the reentry flight from Themis to Merlin Air Force Base. He didn’t like his seat in the passenger module, couldn’t see a damned thing, didn’t like the environmental suit, didn’t like leaving his responsibilities aboard the space station in the hands of his junior, and most of all, he didn’t like Borneo.

  It was too isolated.

  There were none of the right kind of women around. Shalbot did not define his kind of woman.

  What there was at Merlin Air Force Base, however, were the electromagnetic measuring electronics necessary for Pearson’s mapping project. They were not designed for use with the MakoShark, however, and Benny Shalbot also became necessary to Pearson’s project.

  Once on the ground, though, Shalbot ran around Hangar One three times to recondition his leg muscles to gravity, rounded up a large bunch of technicians, confiscated most of the tools and electronic black boxes in sight, and disappeared into the hangar with the three MakoSharks.

  Complaining all the while. He wasn’t happy with the magnetometers they would have to use. “Shoddy, sum-bitchin’ low-tech shit.”

  McKenna and his five squadron members ate lunch in the dining hall.

  McKenna took a long shower.

  Munoz and Abrams went down to the beach to swim with the sharks.

  Nitro Fizz Williams took a short jaunt into the jungle, looking for fruit right off the tree, and arguing with the monkeys. He collected a lot of exotic flowers, and he saw a leopard. He decided to return to the base early.

  The squadron got together again in the evening for dinner, and McKenna sent boxed meals over to the hangar for the technicians. After dinner, they spent an hour going over the mission.

  McKenna and the others found a dormitory bunk room, turned the air conditioning on high, and crawled under the sheets after taking half-hour showers. McKenna tried to invent a shower that would work in space.

  At five-thirty in the morning, the intercom buzzed, and McKenna rolled out of his top bunk, hit the floor on his feet, and pressed the button.

  “This had better be good.”

  “I got you set up, Colonel.”

  “We’ll be there in ten minutes, Benny.”

  Munoz was bright-eyed and ready to go and the others complained bitterly and almost meaningfully when McKenna roused them. They dressed and crossed the dark grounds, still hot and humid, to the hangar.

  Unlocking and slipping through the judas door, McKenna saw the three MakoSharks lined up, noses out, ready to go. Each had two pylons mounted, one gun pod, and four Wasps. Underneath them, the crewmen that Shalbot had bossed were flaked out, slumped against crates and tractors, spread out on the floor. Coke and Pepsi cans, lunch boxes, and candy wrappers were scattered around on the floor and on castered toolboxes. The normal aroma of JP-7 fuel was augmented with the acrid odor of sweat.

  Shalbot, grimy and stained and baggy-eyed, grinned at him. “The sumbitch works, Colonel.”

  “Guaranteed, Benny?”

  “Fuckin’-A.”

  “How’d you do it?” Munoz asked.

  “Wanted to put ’em in a pylon pod, but we couldn’t route the cables. Ain’t enough room without screwing up the pylon mounts. So what we did, we made ourselves some bird cages outta plastic tubing and suspended the magnetometers inside the cage. The cage fits into the pay-load bay, hooks right onto the module-securing hardware. Then we ran the cables through the avionics bay and into the rear compartment. The control setup looks like shit, but it works okay.”

  “Sounds good, Benny,” McKenna said.

  “Yeah, well, I got to get the WSOs up on Delta Blue and explain how to make this stuff work.

  While Shalbot conducted his tutoring session, the weapons systems officers standing on the wing around the open cockpit, McKenna went to a phone on the hangar wall, called the duty officer, and dictated a message to him for the base commander. All of the technicians who had worked for Shalbot on the retrofit were to get three-day passes and a free round-trip flight to Singapore.

  Then he composed a message for Volontov in Murmansk, using the codes he and the Russian had agreed upon when they met in Chad.

  “This goes to Murmansk, Colonel?” the duty officer said. “In the USSR?”

  “That’s right, Lieutenant.”

  “I, uh, I wonder if, uh, maybe I should wake the base commander?”

  “Not necessary, Lieutenant. If that message isn’t on its way in five minutes, I’ll have the chairman of the Joint Chiefs give you a call to confirm it.”

  “Yessir. Right away, sir.”

  When Shalbot was through with his teaching session, he and the backseaters slipped down the ladder from Delta Blue’s rear cockpit. The technicians began to groan and moan, then crawled to their feet.

  McKenna thanked them for their work and said, “You all get the rest of the day to sleep, then you’re off to Singapore for a couple days.”

  “All right! … way to go … damn sure!”

  “Not me,” Shalbot said.

  McKenna looked at him.

  Shalbot poked a thumb over his shoulder at the MakoShark behind him. “Those boxes won’t take the ride outta the atmosphere, Colonel. Ain’t designed for it. You’re going to have to recover at Chad. If you get me a ride on a Lear, I’ll meet you there and pull the tape cartridges. We’ll leave the magnetometers at Chad.”

  “Damn, that sounds sensitive. How well are they going to stand up under normal flight, Benny?”

  “They weren’t designed for use on attack planes, Colonel. I don’t want you pulling more than three G’s.” McKenna looked to Munoz. “What’s that do to our flight schedule, Tiger?”

  “No more than three G’s? Hang on.”

  Munoz scrambled up the ladder and into his cockpit to use the computer. Four minutes later, he stood up and leaned out of the cockpit.

  “We can still do it tonight, if we hustle out of here, Kev. We’re gonna lose sixteen minutes, acceleratin’ that slowly. But we can still hit the objective before dawn. We’re gonna come out the other end nice and bright, though. It might be a little dicey.”

  “Okay
, we’ll do it, anyway,” McKenna decided. “Suit up, guys. Benny, you’re an ace.”

  Shalbot looked at the stained concrete. “Just get me a Learjet, Colonel. I always wanted my own Lear.”

  McKenna went back to the phone on the wall and called the duty officer again to send a second message to Pyotr Vorontov. He also issued orders to wake up two pilots for Shalbot’s Learjet.

  The three MakoSharks were off the ground at six-forty in the morning, Borneo time.

  Three hours and twelve minutes later, on the northern side of the equator, over seven thousand miles from Merlin Air Force Base, they descended from 100,000 feet.

  It was two-fifty-six in the morning, and the sun was already rising in the northern latitudes, though still low on the horizon.

  Crossing the Austrian border, McKenna pressed the stud for the Tac-1 frequency, already set in a scrambling mode. “Delta Flight, break.”

  “Yellow gone.”

  “Green doing it.”

  On either side of him, Dimatta and Conover began to pull away. The three MakoSharks would make the single run northward flying parallel, but with forty miles between each of the craft. Shalbot had said that would give the mapping coverage a slight overlap.

  “Alpha One, Delta Blue.”

  “Go ahead, Blue.” Overton was on the microphone.

  “Six minutes to IP, on schedule.”

  “Copy, Blue.”

  “Semaphore, Delta Blue,” McKenna said.

  “Delta Blue, this is Semaphore,” General Thorpe said.

  “Semaphore, did you get my message about the need for a Hot Country recovery?”

  “Roger. The boss wants to know when we started having tech sergeants running the air force.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have any promotion allocations for my squadron,” McKenna said, “but I want him to be a master sergeant by the time we get back. Can master sergeants run the air force?”