“Only if we don’t get caught,” Delaney replied. “I can think of about a dozen regulations we’re breaking here.”
Norton was sure of that. In his indoctrination—which took place in the days after he was recruited at Fallon and before he went up to St. Louis to collect Delaney— he’d been told everything that was about to happen to him was top secret and that he should not discuss it with anyone, not even other members of the project team. This was peculiar. Norton had been involved in secret ops before, and never had there been a ban on the individual members discussing the situation. But apparently none of those ops had been as secret as this. It was strange, though. This weird place. The way they were drawn together. The way they were recruited. Was the CIA just getting better? Or was there another reason the clamp was so tight?
He didn’t know.
Since Delaney had been brought in, there had not been the opportunity for them to have a conversation. So did that mean they couldn’t discuss their shared experience now? Would it be against the rules? Would anyone be listening in if they did?
They began walking down the long camouflaged run-way. They were quiet at first. The afternoon was upon them. The base seemed deserted—as usual. Yet voices were on the wind.
In just a few moments, Norton was sweating again. The sun was that hot.
“If I didn’t get a break from that Tin Can soon, I was going to flip,” he finally told Delaney.
“Join the club,” his colleague replied. “I’ve been spending so much time inside that thing, I’m having nightmares. It’s like people are whispering to me when I’m trying to go to sleep. Think the Spooks might be programming that in? You know, filtering suggestive stuff to us subconsciously?”
“If these people can build all this and get away with it,” Norton told him. “I’d say they are capable of anything.”
Delaney gave out a long moan. “Just what I need, something to make me even more paranoid. This place really gives me the creeps.”
Norton couldn’t disagree with him. Seven Ghosts Key was a very odd place. There were at least a couple hundred people on site. Yet the island always managed to looked deserted due to its surfeit of subterranean facilities. As a result, the feeling of isolation was almost overwhelming. There were no other islands to been seen in any direction. No airplanes ever seemed to fly overhead. No boats ever seemed to be sailing on the horizon. Yet the island was located close to one of the busiest maritime areas in the world.
Even the origin of its name was weird. When he first arrived here, Norton had been told by one of the CIA officers that the island’s facilities had been built in the late 1950’s to launch raids on Cuba, which was just over the horizon. At that time, the island was known simply as Green Rock Key. Then, sometime in the mid-sixties, something very strange happened. One dark and stormy night, as the story went, seven CIA employees assigned here simply disappeared. They went to sleep one night, but in the morning their bunks were empty and unmade. The island was searched thoroughly, as were the waters surrounding it. No boats were missing, no aircraft had landed or taken off during the night. Yet no trace of the seven individuals was ever found.
Hence the name change.
Under the circumstances, it was a little bit of history that Norton could have done without.
After five minutes of walking in the brutal sun, he and Delaney finally reached their destination: the fake yacht club at the southern tip of the island. Here sat a dozen aging yachts and fishing boats, vessels on hand to help maintain the illusion that this place was little more than a private rich man’s fishing club.
Some of the yachts were so old, though, they were probably antiques. It was obvious none of them had been out to sea in decades. They had no engines, no sails. They were simply props.
He and Delaney climbed aboard one called Free Time. It was an elderly charter boat, a forty-four-footer with a huge open deck and sixteen fishing chairs set up on its stern. Norton and Delaney settled into the two seats closest to the shade, and Delaney dipped into his cooler. A six-pack of tall Budweiser’s was buried under a small mountain of ice inside.
“Where did you manage to get that?” Norton asked him.
“The mess hall guys have a private stash in the meat freezer,” Delaney said, passing Norton a brew. “I told one of them I’d take him for a ride in the Tin Can some night. He’s nuts about flying in that thing. Says he’ll get us as much booze as we want, just as long as we give him a spin around the block every once and a while.”
Norton just shook his head. He had not seen a beer or any alcohol since being on the island, nor did it ever dawn on him to look for any. Delaney, on the other hand, had been here less time than he had, and yet he’d managed to secure a six-pack and a future supply.
That was Slick….
“Skoll!” Delaney said, tapping cans with Norton. Both took a long deep slurp of the cold beer. It felt like gold running down Norton’s throat. For the first time since coming to this place, he actually felt his muscles start to relax.
“So,” Delaney said with a burp. “Have you figured it out yet?”
“Figured out what?” Norton asked in reply.
“What the hell are we doing here?”
Norton swigged his beer again, then wiped the cool can across his hot forehead.
“You’re asking the wrong person,” he replied. “They keep telling me we’ll all be briefed soon. But all I’ve been doing is playing in the Can. …”
Norton let his words drift away. This was true. Though he’d been on the island for nearly two weeks, he still had no idea exactly why the CIA had brought him and the others here. Again, the security surrounding the project was that tight.
“Well, I guess we’ll know soon enough.” Delaney sighed. “Then we’ll probably be complaining that we know too much.”
They sat and drank for a few moments in silence. A light breeze blew in on them, reducing the temperature a few degrees to about a hundred or so.
Delaney broke the silence again.
“So, what kind of a chopper have you been flying in the Tin Can?”
Norton bit his lip for a moment. Was he really supposed to be talking about this?
He sipped his beer. What the hell. .. why not?
“Well, because the simulator is rigged for an attack chopper, I just assumed it was an Apache,” he answered finally.
Delaney nodded. The AH-1 Apache was the U.S. military’s premier attack copter, and hands down the best aircraft of its kind in the world. It was a frightening aerial weapon, small, quick, heavily armed, survivable.
“But those simulators ain’t no Apaches,” Delaney said. “They handle too big. Fly too big. And the control panel is ass-backwards. It’s like I’m reading right to left, instead of the other way around.”
Once again, Norton had to agree. The setup as presented in the Tin Can was cockeyed. In any aircraft he’d ever flown, the layout of the instruments had a rationale behind it. Fuel gauges were all grouped in one spot, environmental controls in another, electrical supply in another, and so on. The controls were allocated in such a way that the pilot could review them quickly and the eye was naturally drawn to their location after just a few hours of experience. But the controls in the simulator seemed to be for a helicopter whose cockpit panel had been thrown together slapdash, with logical placement no more than an afterthought. Fuel gauge here, auxiliary fuel gauge way over there. Ammo supply here, firing sequence button way up here. Many things about the control layout seemed foreign and didn’t make sense to him. Plus many of the controls weren’t even marked.