High Flight

by David Hagberg

  “What are you telling me? That the Japanese military is gearing up for war?”

  “There’s an outside chance that the Russians might try to pull something in retaliation for their frigate. The entire crew was lost. The Japanese may be gearing up for it.

  “That makes more sense to me.”

  “They didn’t tell us.”

  “They haven’t consulted us about Subic Bay either.”

  “The weather has closed in so it may be a few days before N.R.O. can give us anything further. But why Tanegashima? If the Russians want to start something they’ll tie it to the Sakhalin Island issue. If there’s any action it’ll be up north.”

  “I see what you mean,” Blisk said. “The Samisho should be heading north, not south. But if I catch your full meaning, it’s still thin.”

  “I’m not advocating or predicting a thing, Bob. But this is your island. You tell me. Any unusual incidents around here? Increased activity? Accidents that shouldn’t have happened. Sabotage. Pilfering. Anything at all?”

  Blisk sat back and eyed Moody. “Has Ryland talked to my boss about this?”

  “No. So far this is just between us. I’m here to fill you in on the Samisho, and to answer any questions you might have.”

  Major General Marvin Zweibel was commander-in-chief of all the Marines on Okinawa. He was a fair-minded but tough man who had the reputation of cutting his people off at the knees if he thought something was being hidden from him.

  “Would you be willing to tell him what you’ve told me?”

  “Say the word.”

  Again Blisk eyed Moody speculatively. “I might do that, Don, but for the moment let’s keep this in our bailiwick. I’m saying that because I can’t tell you a thing that might signify anything. Okinawa is doing business as usual. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be, because believe me I hope I’m seeing spooks in the closet.”

  “You have jeopardized all of us,” Reid warned. He’d just come out from the city, and he’d been drinking heavily all day. His eyes were bleary, and he slurred some of his words.

  “There wasn’t anything else I could do, Mr. R.,” Glen Zerkel replied. “You sent me out to gather information, which I did. It was bad luck, that’s all. But no one else saw me, so there’s no way I can be identified. The only man who did see my face is dead.”

  “Maybe you can plant a story that a Japanese man was spotted nearby,” Louis Zerkel said.

  “I’ve already thought of that. But it’ll have to be done with care.”

  “Especially since you yourself might be under investigation by the FBI because of your involvement with General Schey,” Louis took his shot. He had spent the early morning hours redesigning his safeguard system. By eight it was in place within the FBI’s mainframe. Mueller’s tampering would not destroy it. He and Glen were safe.

  “If there ever was a suspicion about me, it has been quashed. And you would be well advised to keep your nose out of places it does not belong. Concentrate on your part of this operation.”

  “Don’t threaten me!” Louis blurted. His face was hot, and he was nauseous. He always felt that way when his anger got out of check.

  “Take it easy, Louis,” his brother cautioned.

  “I don’t have to. They can’t touch us now. I made sure of that last night. As of this morning there’s not a thing they can do. What do you think about that?”

  Reid shook his head in irritation. “Then pack your bags and get out of here you prima donna sonofabitch! But leave the way you came, with nothing except some data on a few floppy disks. Leave the computer equipment that I bought for you and go.”

  The old man walked across the room to one of the terminals and studied the complicated electronic diagram on the screen. He was not an electronics expert so he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was looking at, but he knew it was important. His life had finally come down to this moment in time with two men, both of whom could be classified as insane. Where then did the greater fault lie? With the hand that held the gun, or with the man who directed the gunman? Who said that things begin to fall apart at the edges, but as long as the center holds you’ll be all right? He couldn’t recall, nor was he sure he wasn’t mixing metaphors or something. But his plan was beginning to unravel at the edges, and even the center was getting muddled.

  His name had apparently come up in some discussion over at the FBI, although exactly in what context he’d not been able to find out. A word to a friend of his at State was filtered to the Bureau through a White House staffer, and he was safe for the moment. But he’d been shaken to the core. Everything was coming apart, but it shouldn’t be happening. Not yet.

  Reid turned the monitor’s brightness control down, and the image on the screen faded. Then he turned the contrast control to zero and the image slowly faded to nothing.

  “Gone,” he said, looking up at the Zerkels. “And yet not gone. You’ve done most of the work, Louis, for which I thank you. Now I think I could find perhaps a hundred thousand electronics and computer experts who could finish the job.”

  “Without me your entire scheme will be plastered over every FBI terminal in Washington.”

  “Your name is there too.”

  “I didn’t name myself or my brother.”

  “But I did,” Reid said.

  “Not in my program …”

  “In mine, Louis. Shall we talk about your psychiatrist, or about your InterTech supervisor and his family? Or about the murder of the InterTech night watchman and the fire? You’re implicated in all of those crimes, of course. And in California they still have the death penalty.”

  “You’re forgetting me, Mr. R.,” Glen said. “To this point nobody except us in this room knows I’m involved. I could kill you now, and Louis could find and destroy your program. I don’t think it would be hard for him to do.”

  “And you’re forgetting Bruno. I’ve offered the man one million dollars in gold for his part. What do you think he would do to the people who took that away from him? Or do you think you’re a match for him?”

  “I think between us we could manage to take him out,” Glen said. “He’s a man, not a god.”

  “Why?” Reid asked.

  “Why what?” Glen said, his eyes narrowing.

  “Go through all of this when we’ve made so much progress, when we’re so near to the finish? You haven’t got far to go, have you, Louis?”

  Louis shook his head, but then stopped.

  “Kill me and walk out of here, and the two of you will be hunted fugitives for the rest of your lives. Stay and finish the job and you’ll have enough money to go a very long distance from here, where you’ll be able to insulate yourselves from the grubbiness of leading ordinary lives.”

  “How do we know that Mueller won’t kill us when we’ve done our bit?” Glen asked.

  “We’ve all got our safeguards in place, that’s why,” Reid answered. “Nobody wants to end up on the run or in jail or, in Louis’s case, in the gas chamber. Together we can win. If we separate now, we’ll all lose.”

  “It’s you who is the sonofabitch,” Louis said.

  Reid smiled wanly and nodded. “You are entirely right, my good man, I am indeed a sonofabitch. But right now I’m your rich sonofabitch.”

  “Goddamned right.”

  “How soon before you think you’ll be ready?”

  Louis shrugged. “I don’t know. A few days, maybe a little longer.”

  “Good. Then Glen and I will go over the details of what he learned in Portland. And as soon as Bruno returns with what information he’s gathered, the four of us will decide exactly how we’ll accomplish our mission with the least amount of risk. Anybody have a problem with that?”

  The Zerkels said nothing.

  NINETEEN

  “All right, gentlemen, what have we got so far?” John Whitman asked. It was late, he’d missed dinner, and his stomach was sour from too much coffee and too many cigarettes.

  “We have a substantial
number of criminal acts, but the connection between them, if one exists, is circumstantial at best,” Albert McLaren told his boss.

  Phillip Joyce looked up from the file he was studying. “With Reid off limits for the moment, we’ve got only two choices, John. We either stick with McGarvey, or we take each case on its own merits and pursue the investigations individually.”

  “McGarvey is one tough sonofabitch, but if I’m reading it right, I think he’s in the middle of it all,” McLaren said. “Hell, nothing started to come down until he went to work for Guerin.”

  “Doesn’t make him a criminal.” Whitman played devil’s advocate.

  “Maybe not, but I’d sure as hell pick him as a material witness to any one of these incidents, including the Dulles crash.”

  “If we go after him we’re going to have to watch our step,” Joyce cautioned. “He’s more than a tough sonofabitch. Have you read his file?”

  “The man has done some impressive stuff,” McLaren said.

  “I’ll say. Even the CIA treats him with kid gloves. Did your read about that incident with that Los Angeles-class sub? And then the thing in Iran?”

  “He’s killed some people. He’s an assassin …”

  “Excuse me, Al, but assassins usually take their targets out in a lot more civilized manner. Not usually face to face, and not usually with ten-to-one odds against them. Shit, the Russians respect him! I’m telling you that if we go after him we’d better get some help, and we’d better keep our distance. I don’t want to end up in a body bag.”

  “He’s just a man. He can’t take on the entire Bureau.”

  “Take it easy,” Whitman interrupted. “Nothing here says the man is directly involved.”

  “Then why did he accept a job with Guerin Airplane Company?” McLaren shot back.

  “You’re forgetting the man’s file,” Joyce said.

  “What?”

  “I think the real question is why did Guerin hire him. McGarvey’s not a businessman, he’s not an airplane designer or engineer or electronic technician. He kills people. So what’s Guerin doing hiring a killer? What’s more, hasn’t the CIA always denied—even to us—that it uses assassins? Yet it sent over his file to us. And there can’t be any question about what it contains. You tell me what’s going on.”

  “Are we getting caught in the middle of some political game?” McLaren asked.

  “Ken Wood seems to think it’s a possibility,” Whitman admitted.

  McLaren groaned and sat back. They met in a small conference room across the hall from Whitman’s office so they had more space to spread out their case files. The long table was loaded.

  Joyce opened another file. It was a brief case history of McGarvey’s last job for the CIA. “You can argue that he harbors some anti-Japanese sentiment.”

  “Not so uncommon.”

  “Guerin is worried about a Japanese buyout that maybe the White House is ignoring because of the Tokyo Economic Summit. Somehow Guerin’s brass found out that McGarvey has bad feelings about the Japanese, and I assume the Japanese feel the same way about him. They also found out just who and what he is, and that he has the respect of the CIA and presumably even the Russians. Are you following me so far?”

  “I’m not sure that I am,” Whitman admitted.

  “If the Japanese are forced into making a big mistake, maybe the White House would have to sit up and take notice after all.”

  “The days of the Chrysler bailout are over,” McLaren said.

  “Right,” Joyce replied sardonically. “The first step after they hire McGarvey is to negotiate with the Russians for a factory. Can’t be making the Japanese happy. Did Mr. Wood tell you what kind of politics he was talking about?”

  “Only concerning Reid. The State Department asked us to back off, and someone at the White House agreed. That’s politics.”

  “But no mention was made about McGarvey?” Joyce asked. “No one has asked us to back off?”

  “No.”

  “The CIA has been extraordinarily cooperative with us, sending over these files. Who’d they come from? Do we have a name?”

  “Howard Ryan, the Agency’s general counsel,” Whitman said.

  “What are you getting at?” McLaren asked his partner. “You have the look.”

  “I’d say we were being directed toward Mr. McGarvey.”

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t know, and I find that curious, don’t you?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “If we investigate each incident—and I think there’ll be more—we could get bogged down. But if we go after McGarvey, we might get somewhere.”

  “Do you think he has his own agenda?” Whitman asked.

  “I don’t know that either,” Joyce answered. “But I do know that Mr. McGarvey booked a business-class ticket from Portland to Detroit …”

  “What the hell is he doing in Detroit?” McLaren asked.

  “That’s anybody’s guess, but he’s already left there on his way, via Seattle, to Tokyo. What do you suppose he’s up to this time?”

  Technical Sergeant Tony Person removed the last of the six screws holding an electronics panel marked HEAT MONITOR/ALARM, ENGINE, PORT in its rack aboard Air Force One parked in its hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. He pulled the unit out and shunted its connectors through a Tektronix dual-trace scope and spectrum analyzer and back into the twenty-seven-pin receptacle in the rack. It was the eleventh subassembly he’d run diagnostic checks on so far today. There were a lot more to go.

  His headset was connected to the aircraft’s intercom system. “Jim, I’m ready to power up Hotel Mike slash Alpha, Port.”

  “Stand by,” Staff Sergeant Jim Spallaci radioed. He was on a work scaffold beneath the unbuttoned port engine.

  Like the other twenty technicians on the team, he and Person had been going over the President’s airplane with a fine-tooth comb for three days. Their NCOIC Chief Master Sergeant Gene Mazorsky was a stickler for details. But so was his boss, Captain Robin Woodhaven. If Mazorsky was a zealot, the captain was a maniac. She had more to prove because she was a woman in a predominantly male career field.

  Before and after every flight, Air Force One was thoroughly checked out by Mazorsky’s raiders, as they called themselves. And just prior to a long flight—especially a trans-Atlantic, or in this case a trans-Pacific, flight—the preventative maintenance routines were ultra-rigid. But the President’s airplane was a Guerin P522, the same type of aircraft that had gone down at Dulles, and this time they were practically pulling the bird apart and rebuilding her.

  Each of the five sections on the team had a specific area of responsibility—electrical, structures—including the aircraft’s skin, engines, flight controls, and hydraulics systems. But cooperation was orchestrated directly by Mazorsky. They were a well-oiled machine, the best against any standard in any air force or any private sector anywhere in the world.

  “Starting on line one, pulse GO-One,” Spallaci came back.

  GO-One was the interrogative signal that the monitor /alarm subassembly sent to the engine-mounted sensor rack when the system was first powered up. The subassembly said it was ready for action and asked the engine sensors if they were ready.

  Person hit the start button on his test set, which simulated the power-up procedure that would be initiated by the crew above in the cockpit. The GO-One pulse showed up on the oscilloscope against the timing grid.

  “Shit,” Person said half under his breath.

  “Looks good,” Spallaci radioed.

  “Stand by. I’m sending you GO-One again. I had what looked like one-tenth-hertz delay.”

  “Maybe you were out of phase there, because it looked good on the frame.”

  Person shut off the power to the subassembly for a moment. “Here it comes.” He hit the start button, and again the GO-One pulse showed up very slightly delayed.

  “It’s good out here,” Spallaci radioed.

  “I’m still off,” Per
son replied. “Is Sergeant Mazorsky on the floor?”

  “Right here,” Mazorsky said at the open access hatch in the cockpit floor above. “What’s the problem?”

  “Jim, he’s up here with me,” Person radioed. He looked up. “I’m catching a phase delay or shift on the heat monitor/alarm GO-One.”

  “Let me see the book.”

  Person handed up the schematic diagram of the subassembly, and Mazorsky studied it for a few seconds. “GO-One is routed through the main CPU chip, but we’re using the new sensor frame and harness. Run it again.”

  “I’m sending you GO-One again,” Person radioed. He shut down the subassembly’s power, waited a moment, then hit the start button. As before GO-One was slightly delayed on Person’s scope.

  “Right on,” Spallaci said.

  Person looked up. “It’s good at the engine.”

  “They probably built a phase delay into the CPU to accommodate the new frame and harness,” Mazorsky said. He handed the schematic back down. “It’s within parameters, but log it anyway.”

  “You got it, Sarge.”

  Bruno Mueller parked his rental car in the lot in front of the low-slung modern Oakland Airport Commission building in the industrial park across the airport from the main terminal. In the distance he could see the control tower rising up across the main east-west runway, and to the north the rotating radar antennae and communications dishes that were used by the tower and by Air Traffic Control. The air smelled of burned kerojet, and as he got out of his car a big jetliner took off with a window-rattling roar.

  He was pushing his luck sticking around here this long. Sooner or later someone would think to call the editors at High Technology Business or Aviation Week & Space Technology magazines to ask about him and find out that no one had heard of Thomas Reston. But he wanted to learn more. As incredible as it seemed, passengers entering the terminal were required to submit to an electronic search of themselves and their luggage, but no such security measures were required of someone entering Air Traffic Control or the tower where a terrorist could do more harm.