Beyond the outer engines on each wing of the Hercules hung additional aircraft. Each of these was a Model-147SC drone. Originally designed to be high-speed targets with the designation Firebee-II, now they bore the informal name "Buffalo Hunter." In the rear cargo area of the DC-130E was a second crew which was now powering up both of the miniature aircraft, having already programmed them for a mission sufficiently secret that none of them actually knew what it was all about. They didn't have to. It was merely a matter of telling the drones what to do and when to do it. The chief technician, a thirty-year-old sergeant, was working a bird code-named Cody-193. His crew station allowed him to turn and look out a small porthole to inspect his bird visually, which he did even though there was no real reason to do so. The sergeant loved the things as a child will love a particularly entertaining toy. He'd worked with the drone program for ten years, and this particular one he had flown sixty-one times. That was a record for the area.
Cody-193 had a distinguished ancestry. Its manufacturers, Teledyne-Ryan of San Diego, California, had built Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, but the company had never quite managed to cash in on that bit of aviation history. Struggling from one small contract to another, it had finally achieved financial stability by making targets. Fighter aircraft had to practice shooting at something. The Firebee drone had begun life as just that, a miniature jet aircraft whose mission was to die gloriously at the hands of a fighter pilot--except that the sergeant had never quite seen things that way. He was a drone controller, and his job, he thought, was to teach those strutting eagles a lesson by flying "his" bird in such a way as to make their missiles hit nothing more substantial than air. In fact, fighter pilots had learned to curse his name, though Air Force etiquette also required them to buy him a bottle of booze for every miss. Then a few years earlier someone had noted that if a Firebee drone was hard for our people to hit, the same might be true of others who fired at aircraft for more serious purposes than the annual William Tell competition. It was also a hell of a lot easier on the crews of low-level reconnaissance aircraft.
Cody-193's engine was turning at full power, hanging from its pylon and actually giving the mother aircraft a few knots of free airspeed. The sergeant gave it a final look before turning back to his instruments. Sixty-one small parachute symbols were painted on the left side just forward of the wing, and with luck, in a few days he would paint a sixty-second. Though he was not clear on the precise nature of this mission, merely beating the competition was reason enough to take the utmost care in preparing his personal toy for the current game.
"Be careful, baby," the sergeant breathed as it dropped free. Cody-193 was on its own.
Sarah had a light dinner cooking. Kelly smelled it even before opening the door. Kelly came inside to see Rosen sitting in the living room.
"Where's Pam?"
"We gave her some medication," Sam answered. "She ought to be sleeping now."
"She is," Sarah confirmed, passing through the room on the way to the kitchen. "I just checked. Poor thing, she's exhausted, she's been doing without sleep for some time. It's catching up with her."
"But if she's been taking sleeping pills--"
"John, your body reacts strangely to the things," Sam explained. "It fights them off, or tries to, at the same time it becomes dependent on them. Sleep will be her big problem for a while."
"There's something else," Sarah reported. "She's very frightened of something, but she wouldn't say what it was." She paused, then decided that Kelly ought to know. "She's been abused, John. I didn't ask about it--one thing at a time--but somebody's given her a rough time."
"Oh?" Kelly looked up from the sofa. "What do you mean?"
"I mean she's been sexually assaulted," Sarah said in a calm, professional voice that belied her personal feelings.
"You mean raped?" Kelly asked in a low voice while the muscles of his arms tensed.
Sarah nodded, unable now to hide her distaste. "Almost certainly. Probably more than once. There is also evidence of physical abuse on her back and buttocks."
"1 didn't notice."
"You're not a doctor," Sarah pointed out. "How did you meet?"
Kelly told her, remembering the look in Pam's eyes and knowing now what it must have been from. Why hadn't he noticed it? Why hadn't he noticed a lot of things? Kelly raged.
"So she was trying to escape .... I wonder if the same man got her on the barbiturates?" Sarah asked. "Nice guy, whoever it was."
"You mean that somebody's been working her over, and got her on drugs?" Kelly said. "But why?"
"Kelly, please don't take this wrong ... but she might have been a prostitute. Pimps control girls that way." Sarah Rosen hated herself for saying that, but this was business and Kelly had to know. "She's young, pretty, a runaway from a dysfunctional family. The physical abuse, the undernourishment, it all fits the pattern."
Kelly was looking down at the floor. "But she's not like that. I don't understand." But in some ways he did, he told himself, thinking back. The ways in which she'd clung to him and drawn him to her. How much was simply skill, and how much real human feelings? It was a question he had no desire to face. What was the right thing to do? Follow your mind? Follow your heart? And where might they lead?
"She's fighting back, John. She's got guts." Sarah sat across from Kelly. "She's been on the road for over four years, doing God knows what, but something in her won't quit. But she can't do it alone. She needs you. Now I have a question." Sarah looked hard at him. "Will you be there to help her?"
Kelly looked up, his blue eyes the color of ice as he searched for what he really felt. "You guys are really worked up about this, aren't you?"
Sarah sipped from a drink she'd made for herself. She was rather a dumpy woman, short and overweight. Her black hair hadn't seen a stylist in months. All in all she looked like the sort of woman who, behind the wheel of a car, attracts the hatred of male drivers. But she spoke with focused passion, and her intelligence was already very clear to her host. "Do you have any idea how bad it's getting? Ten years ago, drug abuse was so rare that I hardly had to bother with it. Oh, sure, I knew about it, read the articles from Lexington, and every so often we'd get a heroin case. Not very many. Just a black problem, people thought. Nobody really gave much of a damn. We're paying for that mistake now. In case you didn't notice, that's all changed--and it happened practically overnight. Except for the project I'm working on. I'm nearly full-time on kids with drug problems. I wasn't trained for this. I'm a scientist, an expert on adverse interactions, chemical structures, how we can design new drugs to do special things--but now I have to spend nearly all of my time in clinical work, trying to keep children alive who should be just learning how to drink a beer but instead have their systems full of chemical shit that never should have made it outside a goddamned laboratory!"
"And it's going to get worse," Sam noted gloomily.
Sarah nodded. "Oh yeah, the next big one is cocaine. She needs you, John," Sarah said again, leaning forward. It was as though she had surrounded herself with her own storm cloud of electrical energy. "You'd damned well better be there for her, boy. You be there for her! Somebody dealt her a really shitty hand, but she's fighting. There's a person in there."
"Yes, ma'am," Kelly said humbly. He looked up and smiled, no longer confused. "In case you were worried, I decided that a while back."
"Good." Sarah nodded curtly.
"What do I do first?"
"More than anything else, she needs rest, she needs good food, and she needs time to flush the barbiturates out of her system. We'll support her with phenobarb, just in case we have withdrawal problems--I don't expect that. I examined her while you two were gone. Her physical problem is not so much addiction as exhaustion and undernourishment. She ought to be ten pounds heavier than she is. She ought to tolerate withdrawal rather well if we support her in other ways."
"Me, you mean?" Kelly asked.
"That's a lot of it." She looked over towards
the open bedroom door and sighed, the tension going out of her. "Well, given her underlying condition, that phenobarb will probably have her out for the rest of the night. Tomorrow we start feeding her and exercising her. For now," Sarah announced, "we can feed ourselves."
Dinner talk focused deliberately on other subjects, and Kelly found himself delivering a lengthy discourse on the bottom contours of the Chesapeake Bay, segueing into what he knew about good fishing spots. It was soon decided that his visitors would stay until Monday evening. Time over the dinner table lengthened, and it was nearly ten before they rose. Kelly cleaned up, then quietly entered his bedroom to hear Pam's quiet breathing.
Only thirteen feet long, and a scant three thousand sixty-five pounds of mass--nearly half of that fuel--the Buffalo Hunter angled towards the ground as it accelerated to an initial cruising speed of over five hundred knots. Already its navigational computer, made by Lear-Siegler, was monitoring time and altitude in a very limited way. The drone was programmed to follow a specific flight path and altitude, all painstakingly predetermined for systems that were by later standards absurdly primitive. For all that, Cody-193 was a sporty-looking beast. Its profile was remarkably like that of a blue shark with a protruding nose and underslung air intake for a mouth--stateside it was often painted with aggressive rows of teeth. In this particular case, an experimental paint scheme--flat white beneath and mottled brown and green atop--was supposed to make it harder to spot from the ground--and the air. It was also stealthy--a term not yet invented. Blankets of RAM--radar-absorbing material--were integral with the wing surfaces, and the air intake was screened to attenuate the radar return off the whirling engine blades.
Cody-193 crossed the border between Laos and North Vietnam at 11:41:38 local time. Still descending, it leveled out for the first time at five hundred feet above ground level, turning northeast, somewhat slower now in the thicker air this close to the ground. The low altitude and small size of the speeding drone made it a difficult target, but by no means an impossible one, and outlying gun positions of the dense and sophisticated North Vietnamese air-defense network spotted it. The drone flew directly towards a recently sited 37mm twin gun mount whose alert crew got their mount slued around quickly enough to loose twenty quick rounds, three of which passed within feet of the diminutive shape but missed. Cody-193 took no note of this, and neither jinked nor evaded the fire. Without a brain, without eyes, it continued along on its flight path rather like a toy train around a Christmas tree while its new owner ate breakfast in the kitchen. In fact it was being watched. A distant EC-121 Warning Star tracked -193 by means of a coded radar transponder located atop the drone's vertical fin.
"Keep going, baby," a major whispered to himself, watching his scope. He knew of the mission, how important it was, and why nobody else could be allowed to know. Next to him was a small segment from a topographical map. The drone turned north at the right place, dropping down to three hundred feet as it found the right valley, following a small tributary river. At least the guys who programmed it knew their stuff, the major thought.
-193 had burned a third of its fuel by now and was consuming the remaining amount very rapidly at low level, flying below the crests of the unseen hills to the left and right. The programmers had done their best, but there was one chillingly close call when a puff of wind forced it to the right before the autopilot could correct, and -193 missed an unusually tall tree by a scant seventy feet. Two militiamen were on that crest and fired off their rifles at it, and again the rounds missed. One of them started down the hill towards a telephone, but his companion called for him to stop as -193 flew blindly on. By the time a call was made and received, the enemy aircraft would be long gone, and besides, they'd done their duty in shooting at it. He worried about where their bullets had landed, but it was too late for that.
Colonel Robin Zacharias, USAF, was walking across the dirt of what might in other times and circumstances be called a parade ground, but there were no parades here. A prisoner for over six months, he faced every day as a struggle, contemplating misery more deep and dark than anything he'd been able to imagine. Shot down on his eighty-ninth mission, within sight of rotation home, a completely successful mission brought to a bloody end by nothing more significant than bad luck. Worse, his "bear" was dead. And he was probably the lucky one, the Colonel thought as he was led across the compound by two small, unfriendly men with rifles. His arms were tied behind him, and his ankles were hobbled because they were afraid of him despite their guns, and even with all that he was also being watched by men in the guard towers. I must really look scary to the little bastards, the fighter pilot told himself.
Zacharias didn't feel very dangerous. His back was still injured from the ejection. He'd hit the ground severely crippled, and his effort to evade capture had been little more than a token gesture, a whole hundred yards of movement over a period of five minutes, right into the arms of the gun crew which had shredded his aircraft.
The abuse had begun there. Paraded through three separate villages, stoned and spat upon, he'd finally ended up here. Wherever here was. There were sea birds. Perhaps he was close to the sea, the Colonel speculated. But the memorial in Salt Lake City, several blocks from his boyhood home, reminded him that gulls were not merely creatures of the sea. In the preceding months he had been subjected to all sorts of physical abuse, but it had strangely slackened off in the past few weeks. Perhaps they'd become tired of hurting him, Zacharias told himself. And maybe there really was a Santa Claus, too, he thought, his head looking down at the dirt. There was little consolation to be had here. There were other prisoners, but his attempts at communicating with them had all failed. His cell had no windows. He'd seen two faces, neither of which he had recognized. On both occasions he'd started to call out a greeting only to be clubbed to the ground by one of his guards. Both men had seen him but made no sound. In both cases he'd seen a smile and a nod, the best that they could do. Both men were of his age, and, he supposed, about his rank, but that was all he knew. What was most frightening to a man who had much to be frightened about was that this was not what he had been briefed to expect. It wasn't the Hanoi Hilton, where all the POWs were supposed to have been congregated. Beyond that he knew virtually nothing, and the unknown can be the most frightening thing of all, especially to a man accustomed over a period of twenty years to being absolute master of his fate. His only consolation, he thought, was that things were as bad as they could be. On that, he was wrong.
"Good morning, Colonel Zacharias," a voice called across the compound. He looked up to see a man taller than himself, Caucasian, and wearing a uniform very different from that of his guards. He strode towards the prisoner with a smile. "Very different from Omaha, isn't it?"
That was when he heard a noise, a thin screeching whine, approaching from the southwest. He turned on instinct--an aviator must always look to see an aircraft, no matter where he might be. It appeared in an instant, before the guards had a chance to react.
Buffalo Hunter, Zacharias thought, standing erect, turning to watch it pass, staring at it, holding his head up, seeing the black rectangle of the camera window, whispering a prayer that the device was operating. When the guards realized what he was doing, a gun butt in the kidneys dropped the Colonel to the ground. Suppressing a curse, he tried to deal with the pain as a pair of boots came into his restricted field of vision.
"Do not get overly excited," the other man said. "It's heading to Haiphong to count the ships. Now, my friend, we need to become acquainted."
Cody-193 continued northeast, holding a nearly constant speed and altitude as it entered the dense air-defense belt surrounding North Vietnam's only major port. The cameras in the Buffalo Hunter recorded several triple-A batteries, observation points, and more than a few people with AK- 47s, all of whom made at least a token shot at the drone. The only thing -193 had going for it was its small size. Otherwise it flew on a straight and level course while its cameras snapped away, recording the images on
2.25-inch film. About the only thing not shot at it were surface-to-air missiles: -193 was too low for that.
"Go, baby, go!" the Major said, two hundred miles away. Outside, the four piston engines of the Warning Star were straining to maintain the altitude necessary for him to watch the drone's progress. His eyes were locked on the flat glass screen, following the blinking blip of the radar transponder. Other controllers monitored the location of other American aircraft also visiting the enemy country, in constant communication with RED CROWN, the Navy ship that managed air operations from the seaward side. "Turn east, baby--now!"
Right on schedule, Cody-193 banked hard to the right, coming a touch lower and screaming over the Haiphong docks at 500 knots, a hundred tracer rounds in its wake. Longshoremen and sailors from various ships looked up in curiosity and irritation, and not a little fear for all the steel flying in the sky over their heads.
"Yes!" the Major shouted, loudly enough that the sergeant-controller to his left looked up in irritation. You were supposed to keep things quiet here. He keyed his mike to speak to RED CROWN. "Cody-one-niner-three is bingo."
"Roger, copy bingo on one-niner-three," the acknowledgment came back. It was a false use of the "bingo" code word, which ordinarily meant an aircraft with a low fuel state, but it was a term so commonly used that it made a more than adequate disguise. The Navy enlisted man on the other end of the circuit then told an orbiting helicopter crew to wake up.
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