“Great to see you, Brad, you old throttle jockey,” Curtis said. “Sorry I couldn’t be here earlier, they had me in Europe inspecting some old Russian missile silos.”
“Good to see you too, sir.”
“Can the ‘sir’ stuff, Brad. I’m wearing a suit now, and it’s not a blue suit, either. And don’t look so down in the mouth. We’ve just begun to fight.”
The President took a seat at the big cherry desk, and the others found seats around him. Curtis sat beside Elliott, arranged so that he could watch both him and the President.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” the President said. He turned to his National Security Adviser. “Deborah, go ahead.”
“As you know, Mr. President, the story broke a few hours ago. Along with questions aimed at this administration and myself, the media focused in on the Soviet Union. It was very well prepared—they had statements from our own FAA air traffic controllers, Mexican controllers, a few of our low-level military sources and local police authorities dealing with the F-15 crash near Yuma. They even got statements from air traffic controllers at Managua. The press has damn near re-created the whole sequence of events, and in very short order.
“But when asked directly, the Soviet Union still denies any involvement in the incident, denies that they have an American plane, denies they had a secret agent working in Dreamland, denies everything about James ... Maraklov. But I’ve just received the preliminary report from Rutledge. His CIA confirms that the aircraft that flew through Honduras into Nicaraguan airspace did land at Sebaco Airbase.”
“So we’ve traced it from Dreamland to a KGB airfield in
Nicaragua,” Curtis said, “and the Russians are denying it ever happened.”
“It’s not going to be another Belyenko incident,” O’Day said. “The Russians aren’t going to admit they have it.”
“I agree,” Speaker Van Keller said. “This is no disillusioned young pilot flying his jet out of the country. If they admit they have the XF-34, they admit to an international criminal act, an act of war, in effect ...”
“It looks to me like we have no choice anymore, Mr. President,” Curtis said. “It would be a political and military disaster to allow them to get away with this. Even if they should later admit it, we must do something now. ”
“Never mind the politics, Wilbur, that’s my business. As for the military, what were the Air Force and the DIA doing when this Soviet agent was planted, then allowed to exist so long in a place he gets to be the top pilot in our most advanced experimental aircraft? All right, I need a plan of action.” He looked at Elliott. “General?”
“Yes, sir . . . we need to do two things immediately: first, verify exactly where DreamStar is at Sebaco, and second, show the Russians that we know that DreamStar is there and that we’re prepared to do something strong about it. I propose a flyby of Sebaco by a single high-performance reconnaissance aircraft. No weapons except for self-protection. No ground- attack arsenal. It—”
“I want no weapons at all,” the President said. “Unarmed. If the thing crashes in Nicaragua I don’t want to see pictures of Nicaraguan fishermen dragging American missiles out of the water with their nets. Can you do it without weapons?”
“It’ll be more difficult, but it can be done.”
The President looked skeptical and irritable. This thing was more and more taking on the risks and implications of the Cuban missile crisis . . . “How? A high-altitude jet? I want one aircraft, remember—no escorts, no waves of aircraft—”
“One aircraft,” Elliott said. “And it will be at low altitude. We want there to be no question that the Soviets know we mean business.”
“Not another damned B-52?”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Elliott admitted, “but Managua is very heavily protected, and this would have to be a daylight mission. We would probably lose a B-i or even a B-2 Stealth aircraft. No, no bomber aircraft.”
“How do you expect one aircraft to do the job and still survive?” Van Keller asked. “Use an unmanned aircraft? A drone? A satellite?”
“No, a single aircraft but a very special one,” Elliott said. “Twice through Sebaco on photo runs, in and out, perhaps sixty seconds over the base and five minutes in Nicaraguan airspace. We’ll have what we need.”
Paul Cesare moved closer to the President: “Mr. President, our meeting with the Foreign Relations Committee . . .” “All right, Paul,” the President said. “Wilbur, General Elliott, this is what I want: a single aircraft, unarmed, not more than five minutes over Nicaragua. This will be the only chance you’ll get, so it had better be done right the first time. Wilbur, you have command authority. Brief me tonight.
“One more thing. If you people screw this up I won’t wait until after the election to clean house.”
* * *
As Curtis and Elliott left the Oval Office for the elevators down to the White House garage, Curtis turned to Elliott and said, “I knew the Old Man couldn’t ignore you, Brad.”
“Thanks for the support. I haven’t seen much from the White House lately.”
“There’s more than you think,” Curtis said. “And I’m not just talking about the National Security Adviser.”
Elliott looked at Curtis. “What about her?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. The lady is quite taken with you, personally and professionally. Don’t ask me why—anyone who’d get involved with a pilot can’t have all their marbles. I wouldn’t be surprised if she cooked up this morning’s bombshell in the press. Am I close?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Elliott replied with a straight face.
“Okay, we’ll leave it that way—it’s safer for her too. Besides, everyone around this place has a pipeline to some reporter. There’d be more double-dealing and backstabbing in this place than in the Kremlin if there wasn’t the occasional leak. But get caught at it, suddenly you’re a leper.”
In the garage they moved into waiting sedans. “I assume you’ll want to use the command center to run this operation, Brad,” Curtis said as they drove off. Elliott gave him a surprised long look.
Curtis returned it. “Let me guess ... you’re not going to use a bomber—that was my first guess. What’s the hottest machine on your flight line right now? Cheetah. And McLanahan and Powell go with it. How’m I doing? Don’t answer that... You had Cheetah in mind from the start. You’ve got some sort of camera pod rigged up on it, self-protection devices up the ying-yang—you’re going to have to take the missiles off, the President said no.” Elliott allowed a smile. The Secretary had hit it right on the mark. “Cheetah’s been ready to go ever since last night . . . Ever since O’Day agreed to help you. Right?”
“No comment, sir.”
“I like it, General, I like it. You want to send a message— Cheetah will do it.”
CHAPTER 6
Sebaco Military Airfield, Nicaragua
Friday, 19 June 1996, 0643 CDT (0743 EDT)
WORK HAD begun on DreamStar less than three hours after the last transmission from Moscow, and even though he had diverted the plan to dismantle his aircraft, every minute that Andrei Maraklov watched DreamStar’s refit was like another twist of the knife that seemed to be stuck in his gut.
He was standing a few meters in front of DreamStar’s hangar, just a few dozen meters from the flight-line ramp leading to Sebaco’s runway. The hangar doors, which had remained closed to guard against sabotage or espionage, were now wide open because of the huge volume of trucks and workers scrambling in and out. The hangar was guarded by KGB border troops, two stationed every ten meters around the perimeter, along with a manned BMD armored vehicle or BTR-60PB armored personnel carrier on every cardinal point. Workers carried large picture I.D. cards slung around their necks, which allowed the point guards to check I.D.’s against wearers without the workers stopping.
The technicians and engineers assembled to do the job seemed to be even more ham-handed than General Tret’yak had descri
bed. They tore at fasteners they did not understand how to open, yanked at delicate data cables, got greasy hands all over the superconducting antennae arrays. They made notes about everything, in writing and by video camera, but mostly they cared about getting their jobs done on time, not on how well the fighter flew after leaving Sebaco.
Each twist of the worker’s wrench brought home another reality to Maraklov—that along with the delivery of DreamStar to the Soviet Union came the end to his own usefulness. General Tret’yak was correct, of course—DreamStar would be dismantled in ultra-fine detail once it was safely delivered to the Ramenskoye Test Facility near Moscow. It might be flown once or twice, but more than likely its avionics would be activated artifically and all its subsequent “flights” would be confined to a laboratory. If there was no DreamStar, there would be little need for a DreamStar pilot, especially one who would seem more American than Russian. They might create an ANTARES ground simulator to study the thought-guidance system and train future pilots on how to fly DreamStar, but that would not last long. After that, he doubted very much that the Soviet military would allow him to fly or even participate in any way, except as some glorified figurehead . . . until his usefulness there ran out too.
The workers were struggling with a service-access panel on DreamStar’s engine compartment. The senior non-commissioned officer, Master Sergeant Rudolph Artiemov, spotted Maraklov standing outside the hangar, came over to him, gave him a half-salute, pointed to the engine and said something unintelligible to Maraklov.
“Speak slower, Sergeant,” Maraklov said in halting Russian. The technician squinted at him. “Mahtor sestyema smazki nyee khodyaht, tovarisch Polovnik. Vi pahnyemahyo?”
“I don’t understand what the hell you’re saying,” Maraklov exploded in English. The startled sergeant stepped back away. “You’re tearing my damned aircraft apart and you want me to tell you from here if it’s okay? Is that it? Get out of my face.”
“He said the engine-lubrication system access-panel is stuck, Andrei,” a voice said. He turned to see Musi Zaykov beside him, her attractive smile momentarily piercing his gloom. Musi said something to the technician in a stern voice and the sergeant saluted, turned and trotted back to the workers.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that you said he is an incompetent fool, and that you will kill him first and report him second if he is not more careful.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“They say they will have the aircraft ready for a test flight in twelve hours,” Musi said. Maraklov looked at her, then turned away from the open front of the hangar and began walking down the flight line. Musi followed.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” Maraklov said. “I just feel...” Could he trust her? He was beginning to feel he could. She had become something of a confidante over the past few hours. If she was a KGB operative assigned to watch him, she was either doing a very good job, or a very poor one ... “I feel a terrible mistake is being made here . . . they don’t trust or respect my judgment. I brought them the U.S.’s most advanced fighter, and all they can seem to think of is taking it apart. Musi, that is no ordinary aircraft. It is . . . alive. It’s part of me . . . Can you understand any of that?”
“Not really, Andrei. It is, after all, a machine—”
“No ...” But he knew it was useless to try to explain. He changed the subject. “You tell me, Musi, what will they do with me after I return to Russia?”
“You will be honored as a hero of the Soviet Union—”
“Bullshit. Tell me what’s really going to happen.” She seemed to avoid his eyes. “Come on, Lieutenant.”
“I ... I don’t know, Andrei.” Her voice now seemed to lose its easy tone, to become almost stiff, as though she were reciting. “You will be welcomed, of course . . . following that, you will be asked to participate in the development of the aircraft for the Air Forces—”
“I want to know what kind of life I’ll have in Russia. I want to know if I’ll have a future.”
“You ask me to predict too much, Andrei.” Her tone changed again. “In my eyes you are a hero. You have done something no one thought possible. But there are . . . people who are distrustful of any foreigner—”
“I’m not a foreigner.” Or was he?
“Andrei, I know what you are, but you know what I mean .. . You do not speak Russian. You must understand that there will be less trust at first.” She took his hands in hers. “Could it be, Colonel Andrei Maraklov, that it is perhaps you who do not trust us?”
Maraklov was about to reply, stopped himself. She was right. The U.S. bias toward the Soviet Union had taken hold and was his now—distrust, fear, the works, in spite of the show of glas- nost and perestroika.
He smiled at Musi, pulling her closer. “How did you get so smart, Lieutenant Musi Zaykov?”
“I am not so smart, Andrei. I think I understand how you feel. Living in Nicaragua for a year, feeling the resentment from the people, isolated in this little valley—it is easy to mistrust, even hate, those you do not understand or who seem not to understand you.” She moved in closer to him, her lips parting. “I love it when you say my name. I wish you’d do it more often.”
And then she kissed him, right there on the little service road next to the flight line. “I know you don’t trust me, Andrei, not yet. But you will. Just trust your instincts and I will mine ...”
Without another word they turned their backs to the flight line and headed back to the officer’s quarters hidden in the trees beyond. They shut themselves in her quarters, and Maraklov gave himself up to the remarkable skills of this woman who exorcised all his earlier doubts and made him, for the moment, even forget about DreamStar . . .
Over the Caribbean Sea
0825 EDT
“She’s about as maneuverable as an elephant,” J. C. Powell said irritably, “and five times as heavy.”
Powell and McLanahan had just completed their second refueling from a KC-10 Extender refueling aircraft from the 161st Air Refueling Group “Sun Devils” out of Phoenix, the same unit—and, in fact, the same crew—that had refueled Cheetah just in time after their flight through Mexico. They were now at twenty thousand feet, still flying in tight formation with the tanker, so close that on radar screens from Texas to Florida to Cuba to the Cayman Islands to Jamaica they seemed like one aircraft—which was what they wanted.
J.C. had the throttles at full power to keep up with the KC-io, but after a few minutes the KC-io pilot noticed the trouble the loaded F-15 fighter was having and backed off on its power. There was plenty of reason for Cheetah’s sluggish performance. In addition to sixteen-hundred-gallon FASTPACK fuel tanks near each wing root, Cheetah carried an AN/ALC-189E reconnaissance pod mounted on the centerline stores station. The two-ton recon pod carried four high-speed video cameras that pointed forward, aft and to each side, along with data transmission equipment that allowed the digitized imagery from the cameras to be broadcast via satellite directly back to Dreamland for analysis. On each wing Cheetah also carried a 6oo-gallon fuel tank, which normally gave it a cruising range of nearly three thousand miles.
That cruising range was considerably shorter with the recon pod mounted; it was even shorter with Cheetah’s other special stores: two QF-98B Hummer electronic drone aircraft, small single propfan-engined aircraft that carried several computer- controlled radar jammers. The two Hummer drones, one mounted on each wing, were preprogrammed to follow a specific flight path after being released. They carried no weapons. Their flight paths would take them close to known Nicaraguan and Soviet early warning radar sites, where their jammers would disrupt the radars long enough for Cheetah to make its run toward Sebaco. After flying close to the coastal radar sites, the drones would fly northeast toward recovery ships near Jamaica—if they survived the expected Nicaraguan air defenses.
“You boys sure go around looking for trouble,” the pilot of the Phoenix-based tanker said over the s
crambled VHF radio. “Twenty-four hours ago I thought we’d all be in the stockade. You must lead charmed lives.”
“We found a few regs we haven’t violated yet,” J.C. said.
“You’re coming up on your start-descent point,” the nav on the KC-10 said.
“One minute.”
“Time for one more fast sip before you leave?” the pilot asked.
“I think we’ve had enough,” J.C. said. “Thanks for the gas.”
“Thank your boss for getting us out of trouble with the brass,” the pilot said. “I saw what was left of my retirement flash before my eyes. You boys take it easy down there. Sun Devil starting a climbing left turn. Out.” The KC-10 wagged its wings once, then began a steep left turn and a sharp climb, heading toward its destination in San Juan.
“Nav computer set on initial point,” McLanahan reported. On J.C.’s laser-projection heads-up display a tiny “nav” indicator flashed on the screen, indicating that the computer was directing a turn. J.C. hit the voice-command switch on his control stick.
“Autopilot on, heading nav.”
“Autopilot on,” the computer-generated voice replied. “Heading nav mode. Caution, select altitude function. ” The computer reminded J.C. that no autopilot function had been selected for holding altitude. Cheetah started a right turn, heading southwest.
In the aft cockpit McLanahan was completing his checklist items for drone release. “Release circuits safety switch to consent,” he told Powell. J.C. flipped a switch far down on his left instrument panel.
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