Skysweeper

by Don Pendleton

  He slept.

  * * *

  Next morning Bolan and Dr. Peterson were on the flight line at 6:00 a.m. The flight was set for 8:45 but they arrived early to look around. Peterson called up his chopper, a Navy version of the Hughes OH-6, basically an observation craft. Bolan met the pilot and stowed his heavy barracks bag on board.

  "We'll take off twenty minutes before the test plane for a recon around the end of the runway and beyond for a mile or so," Bolan said.

  The pilot nodded. "Yes, sir. Dr. Peterson informed me of the potential problem."

  Bolan liked the flier. His name was Lieutenant J.G. Dan Johnson.

  Dr. Peterson supervised the check of the plane and made sure only the men he authorized were on board. Then he buttoned it up and kept the exterior guards around it as he went through three dry runs of the procedure for this important shot.

  Radio informed him that the missile countdown was going on schedule and blast-off was set for one hour from that moment.

  Dr. Peterson gave Bolan the okay to take off, the test plane would follow in fifteen minutes. Bolan hit the concrete running and jumped into the chopper.

  "Let's fly, Johnson," he said. At once the Executioner opened the barracks bag and pulled out the M-16 with grenade launcher and spotter scope attached, and stood the assembled and loaded Childers shotgun between his knees.

  They received clearance from the control tower and the chopper lifted off. Bolan asked for an inspection of the runway the KC-135 would use. With the tower's permission they buzzed it twice at ten feet and found nothing suspicious. They worked out over the end of the runway, which was still well within the boundaries of the base.

  The Executioner reported to Dr. Peterson that everything looked in order. A few minutes later the converted KC-135 rolled down the concrete strip.

  Bolan's chopper was at one thousand feet then, and he searched the arid ground below him with a pair of binoculars. Two miles to his left near the outer zigzag fence of the center, he saw a puff of dust.

  "Check out that dust devil at nine o'clock on the deck," Bolan said.

  Johnson saw it and took the Hughes chopper down at a steep angle.

  "Damn, that's another chopper," Johnson said. "Son of a bitch is taking off."

  It came off the ground, banked and then worked in closer to the airfield as it circled to gain altitude. Bolan continued scanning the terrain. What he saw made his hands tighten on the glasses.

  "She's got something strapped to her landing struts," Bolan said. "Looks like a ground-to-air missile. Close in, Johnson!"

  The Executioner could see the converted Stratotanker roaring down the runway almost directly ahead of them, three miles away. He saw the chopper lift higher and his own helicopter slid down out of the sky to intercept the slightly larger, civilian craft.

  Bolan checked the landing skids again with his binoculars, and this time he saw the fins and the special nose cone.

  "It's a heat-seeking missile, sure as hell," Bolan said. He grabbed the mike to warn the KC-135 to abort the takeoff, but he was too late. The huge aircraft below gained flying speed and lifted off, heading straight at them and climbing sharply.

  "Keep that ship coming straight ahead!" Bolan yelled into the mike, but he was not sure it got through. If the big plane turned at right angles either way, the chopper slightly below it could turn and get a broadside shot at the converted tanker.

  "Close the gap on that killer bird!" the Executioner shouted.

  "I'm using full throttle!" the pilot said.

  Bolan pulled up the M-16 and triggered a six-round burst at the civilian helicopter. The door on Bolan's chopper had been removed for ease of observation. The rounds would fall short.

  He waited and watched as the big KC-135 roared toward them with all four jets screaming, clawing for power to pull the tons of metal higher into the sky.

  Then the huge airship started to bank. She would be less than half a mile from the enemy chopper below when she made the turn, and broadside.

  They were closer now. Bolan fired three rounds and saw them slap into the aft section of the chopper. The tail section waggled, then the pilot slanted away downwind and out of the best firing position on the KC-135. But Bolan knew position didn't matter that much now. Given the approximate direction, the heat-seeking nose cone on the killer missile would do its own aiming as it homed in on the screaming superheated jet engines.

  Bolan fired again until the M-16 magazine went dry. He saw one hit and again the bird faded downwind. A window in the back of the chopper cabin opened and winks of gunfire showed there.

  "Get me closer!" the Executioner shouted over the noise of the helicopter.

  "Only way is to get on top of them," the pilot called.

  Bolan nodded and the pilot climbed, worked forward slowly to a position about a hundred feet over the top of the enemy bird before the other pilot could see where his attacker had vanished.

  Bolan changed weapons, took the Childers and motioned for Johnson to settle lower over the bird. The civilian pilot must have sensed where the other craft was, as he made several moves to throw off the Navy chopper.

  But Johnson stayed with the craft and was now less than fifty feet over the bird and drifting down. Bolan fired one round from the Childers.

  "Lower!"

  Johnson dropped his bird another thirty feet until they could read the stenciled warnings on the roof below. There Bolan held the Childers in an iron grip and fired straight down into the top of the chopper cabin.

  The slugs ripped into the roof of the chopper. Suddenly the civilian helicopter slanted to the left and began plummeting out of control toward the earth.

  The missile detonated on impact and a large yellow ball of flame mushroomed off the desert, followed by thick black smoke as the civilian chopper and its fuel supply exploded.

  Bolan watched the spot as his helicopter circled at two hundred feet. He took the mike and punched the button.

  "KC-135 Peterson, you are cleared from chopper one to continue your mission. We are out of visual with you. The Tomcats should pick you up shortly."'

  "Roger, Hughes-one. Did we see a second chopper near the boundary line of the center?"

  "Right, you did. But you can scratch that chopper with its heat-seeking missile. It is no longer a factor. Good luck on your shot."

  Johnson took the mike and called in a Navy crash-site team to set up security around the wreckage until the appropriate authorities were notified. He and Bolan took one last look at the jumbled, blackened mass and knew nothing could be alive inside.

  Almost an hour later as Bolan sat in Dr. Peterson's office, the radio contact came through.

  "Shot just completed, exactly on time. Radar shows a one hundred percent successful test. Target destroyed 340 miles altitude and 256 miles down Pacific range."

  Bolan sipped the coffee he had been provided with and then stood. Everyone in the office was cheering and slapping one another on the back.

  The Executioner slipped quietly out the door and headed toward his car.

  As he drove, Bolan wondered if this was the last test, and if the project was over. If so, he still had to find the shadow agent, only now it would be harder.

  14

  Joseph Vishnevetsky sat brooding in his fortified house on Windward Street. Four hours ago he had heard that his chopper had been shot down. It was supposed to wipe out the KC-135, all of its test components and its crew. Crashing the KC-135 would have set back Operation Skysweeper a year. Now the shot had been completed, he had lost two men and the helicopter and the whole program was almost wrapped up.

  "Activate," he said softly to himself. There was no other way. Now was the time to activate and see if the system really worked. There had been several positive results so far in the long program.

  Vishnevetsky descended the stairs to the basement. He walked to the safe concealed behind a movable paneled wall, opened it and took out a yellowed document. He began to read it. It was a complete r
eport on the "debriefing and retraining" of one Lieutenant Roth Ludlow at the Hanoi Hilton late in the Vietnam war.

  Ludlow had been the most responsive of the students in the program, which had involved more than two hundred American officers. Vishnevetsky read again the key activation words, smiled and returned the material to the safe.

  Upstairs he checked his watch. Almost 5:00 p.m. Ludlow was probably still at his desk. He had a habit of working until six or seven o'clock. Vishnevetsky picked up the handset and dialed.

  "Good afternoon, Dr. Ludlow's office."

  It was Kara. Vishnevetsky smiled. "Is he in? I need to speak with Dr. Ludlow."

  "Yes, sir, I'll put you right through."

  Vishnevetsky heard a few clicks, then the phone was picked up on the first ring.

  "Ludlow here."

  "Baseball needs Roth Ludlow," Vishnevetsky said, using the trigger words that had been beaten into Ludlow's subconscious so many years before in Hanoi.

  "What did you say?"

  "Baseball needs Roth Ludlow. You will call this number in two hours exactly: 375-4444. Remember that number." And Vishnevetsky repeated the numbers.

  * * *

  Roth Ludlow wrote 375-4444 on his note pad. Then the line went dead. He hung up the phone and shivered.

  Quietly he repeated the words. "Baseball needs Roth Ludlow." He said them ten times, then told Kara he was leaving for the day and left his office through a rear exit. He seldom did that.

  Ludlow drove home in a daze. At his house he sat in his den and stared at the wall. Far-off images began to appear on the white wall and he saw the jungles of Vietnam float in. He felt the heat and the constant humidity and slapped a mosquito.

  He ducked under a branch and the small Oriental behind jabbed at him with a rifle. Ludlow hurried down the trail.

  The prison camp had been pure agony. He lived through bits of it again, and then he was in the room with Dr. Moskalenko. The kind-looking colonel was talking softly to him and Ludlow had to listen carefully to hear all the words.

  "Baseball needs Roth Ludlow."

  "Yes," Ludlow said. "Baseball does need Roth Ludlow, but will it ever give me a chance?"

  "Roth Ludlow will be given a chance to play. He must only wait for his call. Wait for his call. Wait for his call."

  Then Ludlow was back in the whitewashed room with no windows and the metal bucket over his head, his hands tied behind him. Two men kept pounding on the bucket with thin metal rods. There was no actual physical damage, but the constant battering of metal on metal slowly drove him out of his mind. Just before he collapsed they stopped and pushed him under a cold shower, then fed him a glorious meal and brought in a small Chinese woman for him.

  Ludlow was so detached, so fearful, so cowed that he could do nothing but sit and watch as the woman undressed and tried to seduce him without success.

  Roth Ludlow shook his head.

  "No, dammit, no! I am not in Vietnam! I am not in Vietnam! I am in Ridgecrest, California. I work at the Naval Weapons Center. I am head of Operation Skysweeper!" He heard his wife come into the room and it took him several moments to focus on her. The jungles of Vietnam faded and he tried to relax.

  "Tough day?" she asked.

  He nodded. She had seen him in one of his mind flashes and understood. She was a trained psychologist. She put some music on his stereo cassette deck and he tried to relax.

  "I'll work it out," he said and she nodded and left, knowing he wanted to struggle with it by himself. She went downstairs, used the other line and called Dr. Urick at the Branch Clinic at the center. Quickly she filled him in on the little she had heard.

  "It's not a usual mind flash, doctor, but close. He is having a tremendous battle with his subconscious, I would say. I have no idea why, and you know he never talks about it." She listened for a few moments. "Yes, I know. Whatever we can do to make him well again is what we're after."

  Beth Ludlow hung up with a deep frown. She came back upstairs to the den and stood there looking at her husband.

  Roth Ludlow lifted his head and saw his wife standing at the door. He felt something grating on him. He had a phone call just before he left the office, but he could not remember what it had been about. What was it? He tried but it would not surface. Probably unimportant.

  Where did this sudden feeling of tension come from? He felt he was ready to blow up, as though there was something he had to do but he was not quite sure what it was.

  Again and again his experiences in Vietnam flashed into his mind, and he thought about that ridiculous colonel who had been so nice toward the end. For a while there Roth almost believed that Moskalenko would help him and the other prisoners. But he never did, just talked and talked. One of the other captured American officers said he was sure the Russian colonel was trying to hypnotize Ludlow. But he did not let it happen and a few days later they stopped taking him in for his retraining interviews.

  Now Ludlow shook his head. What was the matter with him? He had a dozen big jobs waiting for him on his desk, and here he was at home thinking about what happened thirteen years ago.

  Ridiculous! He should go right back to the office and get to work. He felt a sudden pain in his stomach and he bent over to relieve it. What in the world was that? He remembered a few similar pains when he was at the Hanoi Hilton, but he had not even thought of them in years.

  "Baseball needs Roth Ludlow, phone 375-4444.'' He said the words out loud and frowned. Now what in hell did they mean? Baseball needs Roth Ludlow? Ridiculous. Sure, he had played ball in high school and then in college, but he was not a star, not about to be drafted by a major league club.

  The more he thought of the phrase the more familiar it sounded. He repeated it in his mind, then gradually said it again and again until he could think of nothing else. After ten minutes of saying the words over and over in his mind, he sat down at his desk and dialed the number.

  When the phone rang on the other end he pressed the receiver tightly to his ear. Sweat popped out on his forehead and a small rivulet coursed down his nose.

  "Yes''"

  "My name is Roth Ludlow, First Lieutenant, United States Air Force. Serial number 542-24-7706-FR."

  "Very good, Lieutenant Ludlow. You will leave your home, tell your wife you are going out for some new headache pills you heard advertised. Then come directly to 1444 Windward and ring the front door bell three times. You will be met. You are doing extremely well in this test, Lieutenant. Remember, come at once, make the excuse to your wife and hurry, we have many miles to travel before daylight."

  Ten minutes later Ludlow stopped his car in front of the house on Windward. He was met by a man who asked for his keys. Ludlow watched while his car was driven through a gate and into an attached garage and the door closed. Then they went into the house.

  A small balding man with fat pink cheeks met him and nodded curtly.

  "Dr. Ludlow! It's so good to meet you at last. My name is Moskalenko, you may remember me from your past. Now, we have much work to do."

  Vishnevetsky used the Moskalenko name to reinforce the programming. Now he saw that Ludlow had dropped into a deep hypnotic trance as a result of the trigger words. He had made the phone call and used his own name and former rank and serial number, which further deepened the hypnotic trance. He was ready for his instructions.

  Vishnevetsky led the physicist to the basement, beside the soundproof target range and into another room where a variety of lights, slides and other instruments had been assembled.

  The lights were dimmed and Ludlow was shown a series of tv clips and movie film on some of the worst sequences to come out of the Vietnam war. In one, women and children ran in flames from napalmed huts. Living color showed blood pouring from military and civilian casualties. Twisted charred corpses of human beings were displayed. A dramatic shot of a U.S. Air Force plane strafing, bombing and napalming a target that appeared to be a hospital plainly marked with a red cross, came on the screen.

  Ludlow sa
t through the five-minute film without a change of expression. Then Vishnevetsky went through some of the same series of hypnosis-deepening exercises that Ludlow had experienced in the Hanoi Hilton.

  There followed a break for Cokes and doughnuts, then back to the training.

  "Lieutenant Ludlow, you will answer the following questions to the best of your ability, holding back nothing. How did the testing go today with the missile shot?"

  "Perfectly. It was a total success. We have achieved all of the test parameters we set out to complete."

  "What is the next step in Operation Skysweeper?"

  "We will finalize the hardware, further develop our actual laser nozzle and continue a program of refinements on containing the dispersant qualities of the beam itself."

  'The actual hardware, the beam technology and the firing apparatus are all finished testing and ready for application?"

  "That is correct."

  "What is your estimation of the date when these satellites could be in operational orbit?"

  "That is not a part of my task. I have no idea."

  "This man working with you, Mack Scott. Who is he?"

  "I am not sure. He isn't CIA or DIA or he would have said so. That is what Peterson tells me."

  "Where is he staying?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Thank you, Lieutenant, you are doing extremely well. Now I will give you some suggestions, some orders. You will listen and memorize them carefully. When I am done here, you will proceed to your office and carry them out. You will be cheerful and optimistic, you will be pleasant and you will do everything you are instructed. Do you understand?"

  "Yes, sir!"

  "Fine. The first thing you will do tomorrow morning will be to shave and dress carefully here from clothes provided. Then you will go to your office at the usual time..."

  15

  Dr. Roth Ludlow got out of his car in the parking lot and walked briskly to his office. Kara, his secretary, had an especially bright smile for him this morning and he felt unusually full of vigor. He had so much to get done today, and he was going to jump on it with relish.