Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02

by Day of the Cheetah (v1. 1)

  “We’re not there yet,” was all he said.

  The helicopter lifted off once again and sped northwest. Ten minutes later it touched down on another military-looking airfield. As they left the chopper Wendy noticed the helicopter landing pad had been painted with a stylized Indian thunder- bird symbol.

  “What’s this?”

  “One of the best-kept secrets in the Air Force,” he told her. “Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field. This is where the Air Force Aerial Demonstration Team, the Thunderbirds, work and practice even though the unit is based out at Nellis. You know, the Thunderbirds do a lot of demonstrations for the brass and foreign dignitaries here—not to mention that the Thunderbird pilots get the best of everything, being on the road so much—so Indian Springs is an oasis for them out in the middle of nowhere. The base is open to all military personnel, but that’s not widely advertised. I knew the Thunderbirds were gone so I asked the Dolphin pilot to get us permission to land.”

  They walked past immaculately groomed desert landscaped yards and freshly painted buildings to a Spanish-style stucco building with a red tile veranda and cane-ceiling fans. They were seated at a table on the veranda.

  “I’ve been coming to this area for eight years,” Wendy said, “and I’ve been at HWAC for three years, and I never knew about this, or only vaguely if at all. Patrick and I are both so busy . . .”

  He nodded. “The Dolphin pilot enacts a toll for side trips—I think he’s got a Chris Craft on Lake Mead that needs refinishing. Guess who’ll get asked to help.”

  “Well, it’s delightful and I’m glad we came.”

  “You’ll have to tell Patrick about it, if he doesn’t know.”

  “Believe me, I will. I know how important his project is to him, to all of you, but I do wish he’d slow down just a little. Actually I don’t know if he’d take advantage of a place like this even if he knew about it.”

  “Sure he would . . . but he is a busy man.”

  Over lunch he said, “Most people here thought you two would be married by now. You’ve known each other for seven years? Eight?”

  “Eight,” Wendy said. “Ever since the Old Dog flight... God, has it been that long?”

  “That must have been some mission,” Ken said. “I’ve heard about it, of course, but mostly scuttlebutt. I’d like to get the whole story from you someday.”

  She only nodded, smiled briefly.

  “Well, the colonel joined HAWC a short time after that project . . . ended. What about you? You didn’t join HAWC until recently, a little before I came here.”

  “I still had a civilian position in my own laboratory. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t just leave or get reassigned to Dreamland. I started to work more closely with General Brad Elliott and his group, but my home base was still in Palmdale. I visited every chance I could, but Patrick and I were still apart. When they announced the reactivation of the Old Dog project I saw my chance and got assigned to HAWC permanently. What I didn’t expect was that Patrick was going to shoot up like he did under General Elliott. Don’t misunderstand. I knew Patrick was good, very good, but when I first met him he was, believe it or not, thinking about leaving the Air Force and working his family’s business in Sacramento. It’s hard to get promoted by just being the best navigator around. And that’s all I thought he wanted to be. I was wrong. In two years he went from being just another non-technical test-flight crewmember to a project director. He got promoted so fast you’d think there was a time warp. One year after becoming director of his first program he was made chief of a full-blown flight-test development program with state-of-the-art hardware. In another five or six years he’ll have his first star and probably be chief of HAWC soon after.” Through most of this she’d been looking down into her napkin. Now she looked up abruptly. ‘‘God, if I sound like I’m complaining, I’m not. Or I don’t mean too. Just for the record, I happen to love McLanahan even more than I respect him ... Okay, enough of me, what about you? There’s an army of ladies in Vegas waiting to snag someone like you. When are you going to take the fall?”

  He laughed. “The right woman is hard to find, even in the sun belt.”

  “But you’re having a good time looking, right?”

  “I confess ... I’m not suffering.” It had gone well, very well, he thought.

  The waiter reappeared with the check and a message. “Helicopter’s on its way,” he said. “We should head back.” As they waited on the helicopter landing pad a few minutes later, Wendy took a deep breath of warm yucca-scented desert air and looked out at the mountains surrounding the tiny base. “I enjoyed it, Ken. The lunch and the talk. I haven’t gone on like this for a long time. Thanks.”

  “We’ll do it again some time.”

  “I don’t want you to spend too many weekends refinishing some chopper pilot’s boat.”

  “Believe me,” he said, watching her, “it’s worth it.”

  Yes, she could be another source of information ... on the new ECM gear, for example.

  CHAPTER 2

  East Las Vegas, Nevada

  Wednesday, 10 June 1996, 2007 PDT (2307 EDT)

  Maraklov didn’t return to his condominium in the east Las Vegas subdivision of Frenchman Mountain until late that night. The early start and the intense flying had taken their toll, and the lectures he had received from McLanahan and Elliott during the long debriefing didn’t help.

  He locked his car in the carport, took his briefcase, and trudged upstairs to his second-story entranceway. He wasn’t able to get on the Dolphin helicopter back to Nellis and had to bump along in the electric shuttle bus from Dreamland to Nellis. Then twenty hot, steamy minutes on the freeway just to go four exits in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Maybe a cold shower, a cold beer, a casino run.

  He punched his code in the lock’s keypad. The door was already unlocked. He pushed it open a crack. No lights on. The lights were programmed to come on in the evening when the door was opened. Someone had overridden the programming, someone was inside his apartment . . .

  All he had for a weapon was his briefcase. Maybe he should have gotten out of there and called the cops, but the less he had to do with them, the better. He reached through the door and flicked on the lights. He strained against the faint street noises behind him but heard no sounds from inside. He flung the door open, letting it bang on the doorstep. Still no sounds.

  He slowly crossed the threshold, looked down the hallway into the living room. Stereo, TV, VCR all in place. Of course, a burglar was the last thing he was worried about—he’d almost welcome that. There were others more dangerous.

  He moved to the fireplace, picked up a poker and made a fast search of the apartment. Nothing. No sign of forcible entry, nothing missing. One more place to check.

  He stood up on a stool and removed six books from the top shelf of the built-in bookshelves in the living room. On the back wall of the bookshelf he pressed on a board and a section sprang open about a half inch, revealing a panel hiding the steel door to a small wall safe. He had installed the safe himself shortly after moving into the apartment—one of the precautions he had taken years earlier, along with carefully arranging things in his drawers to help detect intruders, when he got his assignment to Las Vegas.

  Instead of opening the hidden panel fully, he reached behind the panel with one finger and disconnected a wire leading from the door inside to the combination safe behind the panel. The wire was connected to an incendiary device inside the safe; if the door had been opened more than a finger’s width the device inside the safe would incinerate the contents. The safe obviously had not been—

  A faint, lingering odor. Cigarettes, or an old stale cigar. He did not smoke. He turned . . .

  “Sloppy of you, Captain James.” The voice came from behind him. He braced along the wall. A quick leap, a hard push and—

  He heard the metallic click, and another voice: “Come down from there, Maraklov, before you hurt yourself, or worse.”

  Slowly he rep
laced the trip wire on the safe’s hidden panel, closed it and stepped off the stool. Turning, he saw two men, one standing directly behind him holding a weapon, the other man seated on his sofa. He noted the weapon—not a pistol but a taser, a gun that shot small electrified darts. The darts, connected to the taser gun by a thin wire, were charged with twenty thousand volts at low amperage with the press of a trigger, causing instant paralysis. The dart only buried itself a fraction of an inch into the skin, but with a strong electric current from the taser short-circuiting the victim’s nervous system, he was powerless to pull or shake it free. A potent weapon—quiet, effective but non-lethal. That last encouraged Maraklov. They wanted him, but they didn’t want him dead.

  He turned to the man on the couch. Henry Kramer was fiftyish, short, bulky but not fat, thin dark hair and beady eyes. He was dressed in a dark ill-fitting suit with a thin dark tie, looking too much a caricature of what he was—a conniving Soviet KGB agent, far more serious and dangerous than he looked.

  “What are you doing here, Kramer?” Maraklov tried to control his anger as he also looked at the younger man with the taser. “Put that away. Look, you people are crazy to come here—”

  Moffitt, the younger agent, lowered the taser but did not put it down. “We were worried about you, Captain James. And you should have locked your door before searching your apartment. We not only were able to get behind you, but found out where your safe is. You seem to be getting complacent . . .”

  Maraklov forced himself to answer. He locked the front door, closed the blinds and began replacing books on the shelf. “Now what are you really doing here?”

  “Captain,” Kramer said, “people are displeased. The information stream you have been supplying has become a trickle.”

  “I told you why in my last report. Perhaps you’ve not had time to read it. They’re cracking down on security at HAWC like never before. Major Briggs has been given the widest leeway to stop security leaks, and they’ve been promised full cooperation from the federal judges in Las Vegas. That means not only searches of military property at Dreamland and Nellis but legal searches of private non-military residences too. They could even get, probably have gotten, authority for wiretapping, no-knock searches and arrests at any time. I thought it was Briggs in here already.”

  “We have connections at the federal courthouse,” Kramer said. “If there has been cooperation between the military and the federal courts I’m sure an anonymous tip to the Las Vegas papers will stir things up. A report about widespread military authority to search private residences? They go crazy over such things here. Especially the press. Our perestroika caught some of it.” Kramer studied Maraklov. “Are you saying tightened security is your reason for not supplying one photograph of the XF-34A fighter plane or its components in over three weeks?”

  “They haven’t let me be alone with the plane or its technical data since then. I was able to be alone with a set of the aircraft’s technical layouts a week ago but discovered an unusual change in the schematics that I didn’t understand ... a dogtooth modification to the wings—”

  “A what?”

  “A special wing design that creates two dilferently performing wing structures on one surface. On a mission-adaptive wing like DreamStar’s, the dogtooth might increase its capabilities twenty percent.”

  “A significant development indeed,” Moffitt said. “Why didn’t you report this? If they left you alone with the specifications why did you not photograph them?”

  James turned to him. “Because I think it’s a fake. Or it could be. A plant. A trick. They may want me to see the dogtooth wing—and then they want to see if the dogtooth shows up on a satellite photograph of a Russian fighter at Ramenskoye or in a supposedly secure telephone message to Moscow. The dogtooth looks like a notch in the wings and is visible on satellite photography. It’s not just me. I’m sure they showed something different to each of the key players—a tail modification drawing to Powell, a nozzle mod to Butler ... Major Briggs probably cooked up dozens of these tests for security leaks. Mine was the dogtooth ...”

  “You are sure these are fakes?”

  Maraklov had to pause, even though he knew the hesitation, no matter how slight, would make Kramer and Moffitt suspicious. Then: “No, I’m not sure. The dogtooth design has been incorporated in numerous advanced fighters—it would be possible for our designers to use a dogtooth wing without stealing the idea from the Americans. But I’m sticking to my hunch: I think the dogtooth wing is a fake. And that's why I didn’t report it.”

  “But if it is not,” Moffitt said, “our own designers will be that much farther behind in our design. Don’t you think you should have at least reported this finding? It would have alerted our agents that Dreamland has stepped up counter-espionage and security effects. Don’t you think that is worth a report?”

  “You people don’t seem to get it. If I report this stuff as soon as it happens it makes it that much easier for Briggs and his men to hunt down the source of the leaks. I won’t jeopardize my cover or anyone else’s over something like this. I must be able to choose my own time, place and method of reporting activity and transferring information.”

  “It seems you are becoming a bit squeamish, Captain James,” Moffitt said.

  “You work with Harold Briggs and half the military security police breathing down your neck all day ...”

  “That’s enough. Both of you.”

  Moffitt pressed. “I think Captain Kenneth James is becoming comfortable in his surroundings,” Moffitt said. “He makes a lot of money, he has a nice apartment, attractive American women. Could it be he does not want to risk losing his rich life for the Soviet people?” Moffitt suddenly switched to Russian. “Remember, Captain? Your people? The ones you swore to protect? The ones who gave you this mission—”

  “Speak English, dammit,” Maraklov ordered. Anger and confusion were in his voice. Moffitt looked at him with some surprise.

  “Is it possible,” Moffitt said in Russian, “you don’t understand what I’m saying? Or is this just a part of your little game, Comrade Maraklov—?”

  “Don ’t use that name. ” Maraklov lowered his voice, but the anger was in his face. “My name is Kenneth James. I’m from Rhode Island. I’m an officer in the United States Air Force—”

  “You are Andrei Maraklov,” Moffitt pressed in Russian. “You are a Russian KGB deep-cover agent assigned to the top-secret Dreamland research laboratory in the United States. You—”

  “I said speak English . . . neighbors, they could hear you—”

  “Can you hear me? What are you ... an American or a Russian—?”

  “I don’t understand a goddamned word you’re saying. ” He turned to Kramer. “You’d better get him out of here, Kramer, before he ruins the whole deal.”

  “You can drop the act,” Moffitt said, this time in English. “This is not a test in your Connecticut Academy—”

  “That is enough,” Kramer told Moffitt, on his feet now. “Stop trying to bait him—he is trained to deny any knowledge of his past.” He turned to James. “But our North American Command is concerned, Kenneth. You give them less each contact. We were ordered to investigate. An immediate face-to-face meeting was necessary—”

  “Well, you’ve had it. I’ll get the information, but tell them I’m the only one who can control how and when I do it. It’s possible the level of security intervention is so high they’ll be forced to terminate the extensive searches soon. Otherwise no one will be able to get any work done. But we’ve got to take it easy. We can score a major espionage coup if we stay patient.” He did not add that it was no act, his not understanding their Russian. He really had lost it... He hadn’t quite realized it himself until now . . .

  “We cannot afford to be patient,” Kramer said. “Our charge is to use every means to acquire this technology and build the DreamStar fighter plane. Our development of the aircraft must be parallel with the Americans’. A great deal has been invested to put you i
n place. For two years they’ve been patient. Now progress has stopped. Something must be done—”

  “If you’re going to pressure me like this, I might as well stop everything before I’m caught. You might as well bring me in—” He shocked himself, saying it. It was the last thing he wanted.

  Kramer looked at him. “An interesting suggestion.”

  “What? The Command is considering bringing me in? That’s ridiculous—”

  “Why?”

  “It’s what they call biting off your nose to spite your face. I am in place here, Kramer. Fully in place. It would take another generation to develop another agent placed so high in the top-secret American military research organization ...” Kramer took a deep breath. “The lack of information was the last deciding factor, but the idea had started long ago—”

  “What idea? What the hell is going on?”

  “Our project to build our own version of the DreamStar aircraft was virtually doomed from the start. We knew about the F-15 fighter known as the Cheetah, of course—the Americans took it to the Paris Air Show. We built our own version shortly afterward, and with improvements it has become almost as formidable as the American version. But when we discovered what the Americans had planned for the next generation of fighter aircraft ... no one believed that thought- controlled aircraft would become reality in his lifetime. Now suddenly the Americans had one in the air. Naturally we did everything in our power to learn about the technology, including authorizing the plan to put you in the Dreamland research area—”

  “I don’t see the problem, Kramer. Everything’s going as planned.”