It was two o’clock in the morning aboard Themis when Pearson called Wet Country and had someone there go rouse McKenna from a nap.
Army Sergeant Don Curtis was manning the communications console, but Donna Amber was still hanging around after her shift. General Overton, Colonel Avery, Major Haggar, and Captain Olsen, her WSO, were also crowded into the compartment called the radio shack or floating outside the hatchway.
Lynn Marie Haggar was stylishly slim and four or five inches taller than Pearson, and her dark hair was trimmed short, framing a heart-shaped face. Her eyes were a clear, clean aqua blue, and her ivory smile might have moonlighted for toothpaste ads. Pearson pictured her as a short-haired Naomi Judd. She appeared completely at ease in the light blue jumpsuit that was so convenient to living aboard a space station.
Amy Pearson was not jealous of her, but she sometimes wondered what it would be like to be in a more active role, flying hot combat craft instead of probing the innards of computer data bases.
Ben Olsen, her backseater, was short and wiry-muscled, with Scandinavian fairness in flesh, eyes, and hair. He wore a lopsided grin most of the time, as if he found most of life amusing in some way. Today, he wasn’t grinning.
McKenna’s voice finally came through, echoing slightly as a result of the radio scramblers on both ends of the transmission.
“McKenna here, Amy-baby.”
Pearson let her voice drop a tone or two toward icy. “Colonel McKenna, we have present General Overton, Colonel Avery, Major Haggar, and Captain Olsen.”
“And I’ve got the rest of the gang here, Amy, all waiting for you to give us the word.”
He sounded a little too flippant, but she wouldn’t say anything about it just now, naturally. Her relationship with McKenna had become more complicated than she had ever planned, and Amelia Pearson believed in maintaining professional protocol.
“What is your situation, Colonel?”
“Cancha and Nitro Fizz have departed for Hot Country to start flight trials on the new bird. Delta Yellow and Delta Blue are hot and ready to go, except for a minor hitch.”
“Hitch?” Pearson asked.
“General Cartwright has sealed the base, and us on it, until his security problem is resolved. I expect that will be resolved as soon as he gets off the phone with Semaphore.”
Pearson glanced at Jim Overton, who simply raised one eyebrow.
“Country Girl?” McKenna asked.
“We can launch within ten minutes, Colonel,” Haggar responded.
“Colonel Pearson?” McKenna asked, finally getting to the formality she expected with so many people in hearing range.
“I’ve had to work with several assumptions,” she said. “First, the window of opportunity existed for about an hour. Cancha landed at four-oh-three, and Delta Green was serviced by a few minutes before five. The intruders took off with her some time between five and six. It was already getting light by then, and the assumption is that they headed west to stay under cover of darkness.”
“But they could have entered the base earlier than that, couldn’t they?” Overton asked.
“Certainly, General. Any time during the night. Then just waited until Delta Green landed.” She knew what he was getting at. If they rode their hang gliders into the base sifter Delta Green’s unannounced arrival, then they likely had been signalled by someone from within the base. The security examination would have to determine whether or not there had been an insider involved. She looked to him for other questions.
“Go on, Colonel.”
“We’ve backtracked the tapes for our infrared sensors, as well as for those of the reconnaissance satellites in the area at that time. There is no indication that the rocket motors were utilized.”
There was no technological development yet available for disguising the infrared signature of the MakoShark’s rocket exhaust, especially when full thrust was required for orbital insertion. Most rocket burns, however, lasted for about four minutes, with the maximum burn around nine minutes. Observers on the ground probably mistook the burns for meteorites entering the atmosphere.
“My second assumption, then, is that Delta Green was not taken into orbit. At least, not yet. We will be searching to the west of Borneo, and we will be looking for landing strips of concrete or asphalt, which are at least two miles long. They will not be in populated areas, of course, and they will have available some form of cover: hangars, jungle canopy, camouflage netting.
“I have designated three search areas.” Pearson nodded to Curtis, and he pressed a button sending the maps to receivers at Wet Country.
“Coming up on the printer now,” McKenna said.
“Zone One is Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Zone Two is the Indian Subcontinent. Zone Three is, I’m afraid, the entire continent of Africa.”
“What are we going to do for the rest of the day, enamorada?” Munoz asked.
Pearson cleared her throat. “The crosshatched portions of the maps are areas you can eliminate for population, political, or other reasons. The yellow areas are probably iffy for geographical or topographical reasons. The blue-shaded areas are the most suspicious. Those are where a MakoShark could be landed and hidden.”
“Nice job, Colonel,” McKenna said without being condescending, a tone she sometimes searched for in his voice.
“On short notice, it’s the best I could come up with in order to initiate a physical search.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “Country Girl, you’ve got Zone Three. Con Man, you’re on Two, and we’ll take One. We’re going to have daylight for much of this, so we’ll keep the altitude high. Stay around five-zero-thousand and use your video cameras on magnification.”
“Do we want to mount recon camera pods?” Abrams asked.
“I don’t think so,” McKenna said. “We’re not trying to document anything just yet. If we run into something, the video tape will be sufficient. Also, let’s avoid air traffic, people. We don’t want anyone spotting us and alerting some trigger-happy air defense force. Questions?”
There were none and McKenna told them to take off.
Haggar and Olsen pushed their way out of the radio shack, eager to be on the way and doing something.
Pearson followed them out of the compartment, aiming herself toward her office cubicle.
Now that she had the squadron started on one segment of the search, she was impatient to get her own intelligence investigation under way.
Her search, she was certain, would be more fruitful than shooting around in the skies, looking for a tiny MakoNeedle in an earthen haystack.
McKenna, Munoz, and the Delta Yellow crew were already dressed in their environmental suits, and they left the ready room and turned into the hallway leading to the hangar proper.
Emerging into the brightly lit aircraft area, McKenna saw that the ground crews were lolling around the workbenches at the back, sitting on the floor or the benches themselves. Both of the MakoSharks had their canopies closed and appeared to be all buttoned up.
General Cartwright and the aide he had brought with him from his last assignment, Major Mikos Pappas, stepped from the elevator to the upper floor and control tower.
McKenna took one look at the crewmen, then told his squadron members, “Wait here.”
He crossed the hangar and caught up with Cartwright near the exit door.
“General.”
Cartwright stopped and turned toward him. “Colonel?”
“Have you spoken to General Brackman yet?”
“No, Colonel. I have nothing to report to him as yet.”
Despite how he often felt about petty officiousness in the military, McKenna did not often go around superior officers. He had asked Cartwright to talk to Brackman, rather than going directly to the Space Command boss himself.