“Let me have four points to port… yeah, that’ll do it. I’ve got thirty miles, and I’m going to video. Give me number one.”
The screen in front of Dimatta abruptly shifted to a night-vision enhanced image, but it was from the point of view of the Wasp II on the outboard side of the port pylon. The rain forest was a rippling green blanket. Williams zoomed the lens, searched left, right, then down, and found the tiny black speck moving across the blanket. The speck got larger, took on the shape of an airplane.
Dimatta dialed in “Pylon 2,” on one selector, then “1,” on the next selector, raised the flap, and armed the missile’s propulsion system. The WSO controlled the arming of the warhead.
“Missile’s hot.” He thought he felt his blood pumping faster.
“Got it. No warhead. Targeted.”
The orange target symbol appeared on the screen, lapped over the large black speck.
“Launching.”
The picture on the screen jiggled as the missile leaped from its launch rail. Williams was guiding the Wasp with his helmet, shifting minutely if the target symbol drifted off the Beechcraft. As the supersonic missile closed, Williams reduced the zoom power of the lens.
In a second, Dimatta saw a real airplane.
A second later, he knew it was a Beech Super-18.
The focus was on the left wing… the wing grew large in the screen… the fuselage disappeared… huge engine nacelle…
The engine whipped past, then the view was of green forest, then blackness as the missile crashed into the jungle.
The WSO immediately shifted to the MakoShark’s video system and found the Beechcraft.
It was in an abrupt left turn, diving for a few thousand feet, then straightening out.
“Right on,” Nitro said. “That son of a bitch is going to be wondering what it was for the next ten years. He knows he was one meter away from eternity, but he doesn’t know how or why.”
“That going to be enough? Want another one?” Dimatta’s vision felt super-keen. Everything was so clear. He loved it.
“Nah, not yet. Let’s watch awhile.”
The MakoShark was ten miles from the Beech now, and Dimatta retarded the throttles some more. The HUD registered 400 knots. He nosed over and began to lose altitude at a thousand feet a minute.
Williams let Josie guide the video camera, having locked it onto the target.
The Beech seemed to be staggering. The pilot couldn’t keep it level or flying straight for a few seconds. Finally, he got his nerve back and began to climb.
“Someday, we’re going to fuck up and actually hit one of these bastards,” Dimatta said. “Pearson might even stop giving us practice targets.”
Pearson didn’t know they actually fired missiles at live people. Whenever her intelligence net found some bad guys transporting contraband, she passed it on to Dimatta and Williams, strictly, she said, for the purpose of practicing night interceptions.
“Someday, if we’re lucky,” Nitro said, “the President’s going to turn us loose on drugs and gunrunners.”
“Cross your fingers and anything else you can cross.”
“Let’s go find a hot one and a cold one,” Williams said.
“Can… give me a heading.”
Eighteen minutes later, Dimatta found the infrared landing lights and put the MakoShark down smoothly at Jack Andrews Air Force Base in the middle of Chad in Northeast Africa. Most of them called it “Hot Country,” because it was.
During daylight hours, it was forbidding territory. Located on the southern edge of what was known as the Bodelo Depression, the nearest village, Koro Toro, was over a hundred miles away. It was rough and rugged desert composed of clay and sand sediment without one redeeming feature. The temperatures could reach 124 degrees and often did.
At night, it wasn’t much less forbidding. A good moon gave the terrain surrounding the base the appearance of a lunarscape. Pale, wind-sculpted rock and sand formations. It looked dead; nothing moved. The air was clear, though, and the stars shown with exceptional brilliance.
Like Wet Country, Merlin Air Force Base, the base in Chad was semi-covert. The MakoSharks could operate in the barren reaches rather freely during daylight hours, but when they were in residence, they were parked and serviced inside Hangar One, just in case the airbase was being observed by satellite or Foxbat reconnaissance craft. There were three more hangars and a single massive three-story residential building that contained dormitory rooms, apartments, recreation rooms, and dining facilities.
Also like Wet Country, Hot Country served as a launch and recovery base for the HoneyBee resupply rockets. The launch complex was located to the west of the main base, linked to it by a twin set of railroad tracks.
The HoneyBee vehicle was state-of-the-art in rocketry. It was forty-six feet long and nine feet in diameter, segmented into four compartments — nose cone, which contained the electronics; payload bay; fuel compartment; and propulsion system. For launch, there was an additional booster engine that was jettisoned at 300,000 feet and was not recovered.
The reentry shroud over the nose cone, cast in ceramic, was good for six or seven return trips into the atmosphere and was then replaced.
In a typical mission out of either Chad or Borneo, supplies brought in by C-123, C-130, and C-141 cargo transports were stored in Hangar Four and packed into cargo modules. In Hangar Three, recovered rockets were refurbished, then moved to Hangar Two for final calibration, fueling with the solid-fuel pellets, and insertion of the cargo modules. From there, the Honey Bee was moved to one of the three launch pads on cradled flatcars and craned into position.
The launches had become so routine that they were now less than spectacular to the people involved with them. Depending on time and relative position, a HoneyBee generally achieved rendezvous with Themis in about three hours. In nine years, only four Honey Bees had been lost on launch and seven had malfunctioned in space, but been recovered. Six had been destroyed upon reentry or recovery.
Recovery was also routine. The vehicle descended by parachute and was netted by specially fitted C-130 Hercules aircraft. The C-130 attempted its first pass at about 30,000 feet, so that if it missed, it would have time for a couple more passes. As it flew above the top of the parachute, a loop of cable trailing from the aircraft snared the parachute shrouds, then the rocket was winched aboard, sliding into a rollered cradle in the plane’s cargo bay. It was the same system occasionally employed to rescue downed pilots.
Occasionally, the Hercules missed its quarry, and the HoneyBee splashed down in the sea or crunched down in the desert. Then, the Chinook helicopters took over.
It was important to complete recovery for the HoneyBees frequently came back with cargo aboard. Pharmaceutical concoctions formulated in the almost pure vacuum and zero-gravity of space, electronic components assembled in the same conditions, biological experiments, and ultraclear telescopic photographs were a few of the services performed by the air force for contract customers. The air force was highly paid for these services, and for transporting client employees — biologists, chemists, engineers — to Themis for short stints of duty.
Transportation of client personnel was accomplished aboard the Mako, and there were six of them based at the three support airbases. It was McKenna’s idea. They were an unarmed and unstealthy version of the MakoShark, finished in flat white, and they served an additional purpose. The Mako was a platform for McKenna’s training of flight crews before he made final evaluations of the crew and introduced them to the MakoShark. Dimatta and Williams had spent four months in a Mako.