To protect them from overflight surveillance, the MakoSharks were parked and serviced inside Hangar One. Three more hangars and a massive three-story residential building comprised the rest of the main base.
“Let’s have a picnic,” George Williams said.
“You’re shitting me,” Dimatta told him.
“It’s almost five o’clock.”
“And the damned temperature is ninety-five.”
“Be brave.”
“The hell with being brave,” Dimatta said.
But they got two box lunches from the kitchen (a huge chef’s salad for Williams and meatball heros for Dimatta) and a six-pack of iced beer. Williams selected the direction, and they walked west.
Dimatta spread a blanket at the foot of a small dune and they sat down. The sweat was pouring off his forehead. The sun was off in the west, reconsidering its impulsive decision to go down.
“There should be a launch in about twenty minutes,” Williams said.
“Nitro, this is nuts, sitting out in the middle of the damned desert, watching a launch that’s so routine it’s like watching a dishwasher.” He chomped into his sandwich and thought that the cook could have been more generous with the spices used in the meatballs.
Hot Country, like the Borneo base, provided launch and recovery services for the HoneyBee resupply rockets. The launch complex, located west of the main base, was linked to it by a twin set of railroad tracks. Behind them in the gigantic hangars were specially fitted C-130 Hercules aircraft utilized as the recovery vehicles for the rockets. The C-130 made its first attempt to capture a HoneyBee descending by parachute at about thirty thousand feet. That way, if it missed, the aircraft would have time for a couple more passes. 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. When the Hercules missed its prey, which happened infrequently, and the HoneyBee splashed down in the sea or crunched down in the desert, the Chinook helicopters were used to recover the hulk.
The HoneyBee vehicle 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, non-recoverable booster engine that was jettisoned at three hundred thousand feet. 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 profile, supplies stored in Hangar Four were packed into the cargo modules. At the back of Hangar Three, a recovered rocket was examined and refurbished, then moved to Hangar Two for final calibration, fueling with the solid-fuel pellets, and insertion of a cargo module. The HoneyBee was then moved to one of the three launch pads on a small railroad flat car.
Upon launch, a HoneyBee generally achieved rendezvous with Themis in about three hours. In ten years, only four HoneyBees had been destroyed during launch, and nine had malfunctioned in space. Six of them had disintegrated upon reentry.
Many of the HoneyBees returned to Earth with cargo aboard. Pharmaceutical formulas and electronic components assembled in the zero gravity and nearly pure vacuum of space were making new inroads on technological frontiers. The Air Force’s contract clients performed biological experiments and shot fantastically clear telescopic photographs. The fees charged by the Air Force for these services were extremely high, as were the first-class tickets aboard a Mako for biologists, chemists, engineers and other scientists who wanted short stints of duty aboard Themis.
Dimatta and Williams had spent quite a few months transporting snotty passengers in a Mako before McKenna recruited them for the hot aerospace fighter. Neither wanted to go back to the mundane duties of a shuttle crew.
“What do you think,” Williams asked cautiously.
“What do I think of what?”
“The new bird, asshole!”
They had taken Delta Orange on its first hop in the afternoon, a round trip that lasted less than ten minutes. The objective was only to test takeoff and landing profiles and instrumentation. Dimatta had not exceeded five hundred knots.
“It’s all right,” he said. “They’re all a little different, and I haven’t quite found the controller touch I want.”
“Yeah. I wonder how they’re doing?”
“Who’s doing?”
“The search. Maybe we should call Snake Eyes.”
“I bet he’ll let us know if there’s any progress,” Dimatta said.
“I wish we weren’t sitting around here.”
“Soon as we get Orange straightened out, we’ll be back in the fray.”
“I find the son of a bitch who took her, I’m going to take him apart one organ at a time,” Williams vowed.
“Not without my help.”
Williams nodded morosely and forked a chunk of lettuce into his mouth. He chewed slowly and thoroughly.
Dimatta figured Williams’s mother had told him to do it that way.
Williams said, “It’s not the same, Gancha. Can’t come up with a name for her.”
Dimatta didn’t have to ask for clarification. Williams had always called Delta Green’s computer Josie for undisclosed reasons.
“Don’t try so hard, George. It’ll come.”
“I don’t think so.”
Their combined depression was interrupted by the squawk of a siren from the vicinity of Launch Pad Two. Red and blue strobe lights erupted in the gathering dusk. Figures in silver protective suits scattered for bunkers.
The squat HoneyBee sitting on the pad lost its only companion as the gantry tower slid away.
Seven minutes elapsed.
Dimatta finished his first sandwich, opened another beer, and started on the second sandwich. For some reason, the meatballs tasted spicier.
Since the rockets used the pellet form of solid fuel, launches were much safer than in the past, and the countdowns were considerably foreshortened.
White-hot flame spewed from beneath the pad, and the rocket lifted off, slow as heavy cream. After a moment’s indecision, the rocket abruptly accelerated, now trailing white vapor. The roaring thunder of ignition rolled across the dunes, and by the time it reached them, the HoneyBee was a mile high. In minutes it was a mote on the darkening sky, indistinguishable except for the vapor trail.
“I wish to hell I was on board that thing,” Williams said.
“No, you don’t,” Dimatta told him. “It’s all remote controlled. You wouldn’t have a damned thing to do.”
McKenna caught a ride back to Themis on a milk run Mako carrying foodstuffs to replenish the stores of Army Staff Sergeant Delbert O’Hara, the chief Steward aboard the station. Almost all of the station’s food was pre-prepared Earth-side, brought up in refrigerated bins, and stored in the hub. It was transferred to the dining modules as needed by O’Hara, who reported to Deputy Commander Milt Avery. O’Hara did a credible job with what he had to work with, making frequent changes in his offerings and developing new recipes of his own for the specialists on Earth to develop into pouchable products.
Though it pained him to do so, McKenna rode in the cargo bay, in one of the passenger modules, since he would never usurp the flight command of one of his pilots, in this case, Navy Commander Art Ingram. McKenna used the Mako craft as the screening and training program for pilots — or in the naval tradition of Ingram’s case, aviators — who might eventually graduate to command of the MakoShark. The Mako pilots never got close to a MakoShark until McKenna was ready for them to do so, and he knew that all of them yearned to do so. If Brackman had been successful in obtaining a new MakoShark this year, he had already selected Ken Autry, commanding Mako Three, as its pilot. Now, with Delta Green gone, it appeared as if the schedule was again going to be delayed.