Half an hour later, at ninety miles of altitude, McKenna felt the first dragging fingers of atmosphere pulling at the MakoShark. Two red lights in the lower-left corner of the HUD indicated that the computer had begun pumping coolant through the heat shields, as well as initiating cockpit air conditioning.
He watched as the exterior temperature sensors began reporting the effects of aerodynamic heating. The skin temperature on the top side climbed to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Leading edges were already near 700 degrees.
Munoz transmitted the message to Themis. “Alpha, Delta Blue. We’re goin’ black.”
“Copy, Delta Blue.”
When the heat-shield temperatures exceeded 2300 degrees, the surrounding atmosphere was ionized, resulting in a blackout of communications.
In the cockpit, McKenna felt the heat, but it wasn’t entirely uncomfortable. Kind of like hanging around the pool on a summer day in Aspen. More disconcerting was the red-orange film that enveloped the cockpit canopy. He lost all visual contact with his black world.
Four minutes later, as the windscreen began to clear, working down through the colors from burnt orange to amber to yellow, Munoz called Themis. “Alpha, Delta Blue. Altitude two-four-zero thousand feet, velocity Mach twelve-point-six, fourteen minutes to objective.”
“Copy, Delta Blue.”
McKenna had lost track of the number of times he had made the reentry — well over 350 times — but passing through the blackout still made the blood pump and the adrenaline flow. It took several moments to come down from the high.
Coming out of the blackout, the computer put the nose down a trifle, to 32 degrees.
When the speed was down to Mach 6 and the altitude to125,000 feet, McKenna said, “I’m going to take it back, Tiger.”
“You damned barnstormers are all alike. Seat-of-the-pants bullshit.”
That was true to a great extent. McKenna started flying because he liked to fly. Though he had come to trust the computers most of the time, going along for the ride still wasn’t the same.
He said a silent thank-you to the computer, then canceled its control.
Dropping the nose to maintain his speed and glide, McKenna began a wide, wide turn from his heading of 84 degrees to due north.
“That’s Moscow off the port wing,” Munoz said.
“Good night, Moscow.”
The march of night had crossed the British Isles and most of Greenland now, and the lights of Moscow were orderly at eleven-thirty. McKenna could pick out the ring roads. He kept the city off the left wing as he made his turn.
Far ahead, he saw a smudge of light that would be Archangel, on a bay of the White Sea, and just over a hundred miles short of the Arctic Circle.
Beyond the city, the horizon was still bathed in vague light. There wasn’t much darkness in northern latitudes at this time of year. In fact, to the residents of Sweden, Norway, and Greenland, the sun did not go up and down. It descended sideways, barely touching the horizon before beginning a slanted ascent. The MakoShark’s stealthy traits were negated to some degree by the geography of the objective.
Munoz busied himself with system checks of the two pods they were carrying, to make certain that the heat of passage into the atmosphere had not damaged either the infrared and standard cameras or the film cartridges.
“How do they look?” McKenna asked.
“Green lights all the way, Snake Eyes. I’m ready if you are.”
Over the northern end of the Barents Sea, McKenna started his turbojets and dropped to a thousand feet of altitude before turning westward.
Munoz brought up Pearson’s map of the area on the screen, with the well sites noted by yellow dots. On the map, McKenna’s north was almost exactly 270 degrees. Svalbard Island was a mass of green on the left side of the screen.
“No shippin’ this side of the island,” Munoz said. “Radar’s tellin’ me there’s a dozen ships on the other side.”
“Let’s see them, Tiger.”
On his panel screen, eleven red dots appeared. They moved slowly, and most of them cruised around the perimeter of the offshore well cluster. Two seemed to be patrolling the south edge of the ice pack.
“I don’t see any aircraft, Tiger.”
“Nor do I, jefe.”
“All right. I’m going right down the top of the string on the ice. We’ll coast it at four hundred knots and a thousand feet of altitude. On the last two, numbers twenty and twenty-three, I’ll put it on the deck.”
“Go, babe.”
McKenna climbed a few hundred feet to pass over the small island of Northeast Land, then settled back to a level flight at 1000 feet. He lined up with the first well, number twenty-four, using the map on the screen, then looked up through the windshield.
The ice appeared very rugged. Pressure ridges and chasms pocked the surface, but gave him some landmarks. The light was perhaps equivalent to a sixty-watt bulb burning in a very large room, and the surface was a jigsaw puzzle of light and dark patches.
One minute later, McKenna saw a red strobe light. No one had said the domes were identified by beacons. He’d rib Pearson about that.
The dome came up fast. It was geodesic in construction, large triangles fastened together, so that it was a series of flat planes, rather than a true globe. It was larger than he expected, maybe a couple hundred feet in diameter. That would make it twenty stories tall.
“Bingo,” Munoz said. “Got it.”
The next six wells passed quickly under them, McKenna counting them off, checking the map for a heading on the next one. At one point, he glanced out the left side of his canopy and thought he might have seen the running lights of a ship, some ten miles away.
After well nineteen passed under, Munoz said, “Put her down, Snake Eyes.”
He bled off some speed and let the MakoShark descend to 400 feet. McKenna wanted some clearance over the domes, and he had noted that some of the pressure ridges had punched their way a couple hundred feet above the surface.
Well number twenty had floodlights blazing on the helicopter pad, and there was a small chopper sitting in the middle of the marked “X.” Fortunately, there were no people working outside on the pad to watch the silent intruder whisk over them.
McKenna retarded his throttles as they passed over, to further reduce the sound of the engines at the low altitude. As soon as the well appeared in the rearview screen, he advanced the throttles again.
They got the same low, slow shots of well number twenty-two, then McKenna banked into a tight, climbing turn and headed south toward well fifteen.
At 1,500 feet, they approached one of the red dots. McKenna felt a little easier over the dark waters of the Greenland Sea. A ship or an aircraft would have to be in a very good position to spot the MakoShark against the pale sky or the ice now behind them.
The red dot got closer.
“I’m gonna get him,” Munoz said.
The screen went to infrared for a moment, then to the night-vision mode, then back to the map projection.
“It’s a destroyer, Snake Eyes. Wish I had a data bank aboard.”
The U.S. naval commands had access to data bases that stored the unique sonar signatures of vessel propellers and could frequently identify exact ships by their sound. Occasionally, the infrared heat signatures could also be identified. The MakoSharks did have a limited data bank of radar and infrared signatures, but they were restricted to aircraft.
“Well number fifteen coming up,” McKenna said. “Well get all of them at a thousand feet, and take our close-up of number one.”
The circular flight path they followed in order to photograph each well took eleven minutes to cover. Munoz snapped hundreds of photos of the wells, and he took shots of four ships. One of them was the missile cruiser.