When Munoz arrived a few minutes later, bright-eyed from plenty of sleep, McKenna said to Abrams, “Jack, you want to put Bo on hold?”
Abrams killed the tape.
McKenna briefed them on Pearson’s concerns about the oil wells in the Greenland Sea, as well as his and Munoz’s earlier flight.
Though all of the men in the room would rather be at the controls of a MakoShark, McKenna strictly enforced a Space Command regulation limiting the number of flight hours per week. A groggy or fatigued pilot or systems officer could easily destroy a MakoShark. At three-quarters of a billion dollars per copy, they weren’t expendable. Delta Red was the only reserve machine, though a MakoShark coded Delta Orange was in the final stages of completion at Jack Andrews Air Force Base in Chad. It wouldn’t be ready for flight trials for another month, or even two.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty agreements allowed for one more craft, but appropriations had not been forthcoming from Congress. Under START, the U.S. had given up forty of a planned seventy-two B-2 Stealth bombers, but had been allowed to develop six MakoSharks. In McKenna’s mind, the six aerospace fighters were the equivalent of all seventy-two B-2s.
“Any questions on where we stand so far?”
“Nope,” Conover said. “Who gets the next shot?”
“You and I, Will, are close to max on flying time, so Frank gets the next one. I want you and Jack to hit the sack and stand by, just in case we need another run.”
“I get to sack out, too?” Munoz asked.
“Your turn to play operations officer, Tiger. The paperwork awaits you.”
“Shucks.”
“Hot damn,” Dimatta said. “And we go armed? I saw Shalbot and Embry working on Delta Blue.”
“You’re armed, Cancha, but only I get to pull the trigger. We clear on that?”
“Clear, Snake Eyes.”
Nitro Fizz Williams, the backseater, said, “Do we finish the run at Jack Andrews?”
“I hope so,” Dimatta said. “I could use a decent meal.”
“Right back here,” McKenna told them. “Amy wants her film.”
“Well,” Dimatta said, “we both want something.”
The leer on Dimatta’s face made halfway clear his own desires, though McKenna wasn’t certain whether the pilot would rather have a shot at Pearson or at some hostile aircraft.
Malcolm Nichols spun the helm, and Walden heeled hard to the left. The small ice floe, protruding barely eighteen inches out of the water, but probably weighing ten tons, passed by on the starboard side.
“Jesus, Mal. That was close.”
“It’s okay, Jennifer. Danny saw it in time.”
Danny Hemmings was up on the bow, watching for such things. He was dressed in a fur-lined parka, but Nichols could see him shivering from time to time. It might be summer above the Arctic Circle, but any breeze at all dropped the relative temperature considerably.
Nichols kept his eyes on Hemmings, halfway fearful of missing some urgent signal from his lookout.
The Walden was a forty-two-foot sport fisherman, an old Hatteras with a wooden hull and thirty years of creaks, but it handled rough seas well. The seas were, in fact, relatively calm, with just a slight chop moving before a ten-mile-per-hour wind.
The boat’s name and home port — Boston — were roughly stenciled on the aged white paint of her transom. The more important identification was painted in two-foot-high green letters along both sides of the hulclass="underline" GREENPEACE.
Nichols had given up the open flying bridge the day before, when the winds became more frigid. He manned the secondary controls behind the windshield of the salon. It was warmer, but his vision was severely restricted, and Danny Hemmings and Margot Montaine, the French girl Danny had met in Cherbourg, had been taking turns on the bow.
Jennifer Pearl brought him a fresh mug of coffee. “Thanks”
“What do you think we’re going to find, Mal?”
“Damned if I know, but the captain of that Greenland fishing boat said something’s fucking with the marine life. Well just cruise by those German wells, maybe sample the water a little.”
The Walden had been taking on supplies in Trondheim, Norway, when Nichols met the fishing boat’s master in a waterfront dive. They shared a bottle of aquavit, and Nichols learned that large gams of whales were migrating out of the Greenland Sea. It was not a normal migration, the captain told him. Additionally, the fleets were finding that the fishing had become less bountiful over the last few years. The captain eagerly pointed a finger in the direction of the Germans, detailing the two times he had been turned away from the oil fields by German naval vessels.
“You think an oil spill?” Jennifer asked him.
“It’s been known to happen,” he said unnecessarily. “Damn sure, we’ll know soon.”
“If we find the wells.”
No one aboard the old cruiser was a navigator. Old charts, dead-reckoning, and flipped coins were the height of the Walden’s technology.
“We’ll find them,” Nichols vowed.
Maj. Wilhelm Metzenbaum commanded the Zweit Schwadron of the 20.S.A.G. His pilots flew the Eurofighter, a single seat, delta-winged air defense fighter. Similar in appearance to the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, it also had attack capabilities, able to transport ten 454-kilogram bombs in addition to two external fuel tanks. The prototype had first flown in late 1990, and Metzenbaum’s squadron had been the first to be fully outfitted with the new fighter.
Metzenbaum and his wingman, Hauptmann Mies Vanderweghe, were currently armed in the interceptor mode, with Skyflash 90 air-to-air missiles. They had completed their circuit of the oil fields, and Metzenbaum flew alongside the tanker, waiting while Vanderweghe approached the tanker’s boom. Metzenbaum had topped off first.
Metzenbaum was an eighteen-year veteran of the Luftwaffe. He had flown any aircraft the commanders had put in front of him, and he had flown it well. A short and dark man, with a thick black mop of hair, he was married and had two children, twin boys, who were about to enter the University of Frankfurt. Behind his back, the men in his squadron called him “Bear,” not only because of his gruff demeanor, but because of the dense mat of dark hair that covered his chest and back.
He listened to the boom operator: “That is good, Panther Two. A little more to your left… ”
A voice on his tactical frequency interrupted. “Panther Leader, this is Platform Six.”
The speaker from Bahnsteig Seeks sounded agitated.
Metzenbaum depressed the transmit button. “Platform Six, Panther Leader.”
“Are you still in my area, Panther Leader?”
“Affirmative. Two hundred kilometers away.”
“We have a small boat approaching, estimated at four kilometers distance.”
“That close?”
“It must be a wooden boat, without a radar reflector in operation, Panther Leader. Radar picked it up only moments ago.”
“Panther Leader to Platform Six. I will investigate. Panther Two, you will return to base.”
Metzenbaum was at 7,000 meters. He eased the stick to the right, brought his left wing over, and went into a turning dive, stopping the turn when he reached a heading of 245 degrees. The speed climbed from 450 kilometers per hour to Mach 1.2. He leveled out at 1,000 meters.
Thirteen minutes later, Metzenbaum saw the red strobe light atop Bahnsteig Sechs, and to the south of it by a couple of kilometers, the white cruiser. A minute later, he made out the letters on the side of the boat.
Ah, damn.
Metzenbaum had no quarrel with the goals of some of the environmental groups, but some of the more fanatical groups utilized tactics that irritated him. Ramming a nuclear aircraft carrier with a small boat seemed to him both ineffective and suicidal.