But it was well to be prepared.
Al-Qati believed in preparation.
He also believed in the promising young lady he had met in Tobruk two months before.
Martin Church hit his intercom button and said, “Okay, Sally. Send him in.”
Church was Deputy Director for Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had fifteen years of field experience backing him up, experience that had thinned his brown hair and etched deep wrinkles across his forehead and at the outer edges of his nose. His face was lightly scarred from acne.
In addition to holding an excellent reputation for his field work, Church was a competent administrator. He had a multi-tracked mind capable of following dozens of current operations. He synthesized concepts well and kept the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and the Executive Director abreast of developing operations and shifting intelligence estimates. He also attempted to keep his office out of media trouble, which was a primary responsibility of the DDO’s office. Church would never be faulted for his dedication to country and duty.
George Embry entered the office through the wide door and plopped in a chair on the other side of the desk. Protocol was not one of Embry’s major priorities. Embry, who ran the North African Division, and who usually made some jealous comment about the DDO’s view of the Virginia countryside, skipped the comment today.
“You look pissed, George.”
“I am pissed.”
“Do I get to know about it?”
“Marianne Cummings?” Embry said.
Church had to think for five seconds. “We’ve got her undercover somewhere. On the Med.”
“Right, in Tobruk. She’s been there seven weeks, and she just about had Ahmed al-Qati roped in.”
“Okay. I’ve got it placed.”
“Tripoli just recalled al-Qati.”
“Goddamn it!” Church exclaimed.
“I already said that myself, Marty. Now we have to start all over, and we have to convince her to seduce someone else.”
Four
After a group briefing in the morning — which was more of a conference than a briefing since everyone got a word or two in — Wyatt fired up the Citation and flew to Lincoln, Nebraska. They were using the Cessna as their air taxi. Popping into Lincoln with a C-130 or an F-4 was guaranteed to attract unwanted attention.
Before starting his approach to the airport, he made a wide circle of the city. The grid of the streets delineated blocks of heavy foliage; elms and shrubbery were profuse, fed by the high humidity. It was a pretty city in the summer, just as he remembered from his four years at the university. In midsummer, the plots of grass had the barest tinge of yellow. The State Capitol dominated the central part of the city, and traffic was heavy on the east-west O street which passed by the university’s main campus.
Lincoln, and to the east, Omaha, had been wonders of metropolitan sophistication to Wyatt at one time. Raised on a farm close to Norfolk, in the north-eastern part of the state, he had come to the university naive, and he had left it still naive, but with a degree in engineering and an Air Force ROTC commission.
His aerial tour of the city brought back memories of his parents. They had died when a tornado twisted then-farmhouse from its foundation in 1972, the year of his last tour in Vietnam. By then, he had been committed to a career in the Air Force, and he had willingly turned over his interest in the 320-acre farm to his sister and her then-new husband. In the intervening years, he had occasionally considered how much simpler his life would have been if he had just gone back to Norfolk.
As he called air control for landing permission, Wyatt thought that there were only two things wrong with Lincoln, Nebraska. The hot, sticky summers and long, frigid winters were one. He much preferred the dry heat of New Mexico at five thousand feet of altitude. Secondly, they needed a professional football team. The Kansas City Chiefs were too far away, and in another state, to generate widespread loyalty, and without their own pro team to diffuse fan interest, the fans achieved near mania over Big Red. Wyatt didn’t think it was healthy. He was biased, of course. He had tried out for the football team as a freshman and didn’t make the first cut.
He parked the airplane in the general aviation section and ordered the tanks topped off, then crossed the blistering tarmac to the waiting room and pulled open the glass door. A frigid dollop of refrigerated air smacked him in the face.
After getting a Coke from the machine, Wyatt went to the public telephone hanging on the wall and used his secondary credit card number — he never saw the bills, but they always got paid — to call Washington.
He reached the recording he expected: “No changes at this time.”
Hanging up, he carried his Coke to one of the couches and sprawled out on it to wait for Gering and Harris.
The girl behind the counter, restocking aviator paraphernalia in the glass case, glanced surreptitiously his way from time to time, but Wyatt only smiled at her. In his go-to-hell-or-bust days, he’d have been leaning on this side of the counter in two seconds. There had been a lot of such adventures, and misadventures, in his early hot-shit pilot years. Like Barr, he had been married once, but Tracey had found solace in a bottle and another pilot while Wyatt had been detached from Homestead Air Force Base for special duty in Grenada. The divorce wasn’t good for his career; the Air Force preferred stable families, at least superficially stable.
He had finished his Coke by the time he saw the United 737 touching down, then taxiing toward the commercial terminal. Forty minutes later, Gering and Harris tumbled out of a taxi and into the waiting room, hauling overnight bags.
“Jesus, boss!” Gering said. “I thought it was hot in Albuquerque.”
Arnie Gering was twenty-seven years old, fair-haired, and red-skinned. He had prominent freckles on his cheeks. He had graduated with high grades from several specialized aviation schools, and he was a wiz with hand tools, machine tools, and diagnostic electronics. He was overtly ambitious, and he wasn’t afraid to ask Jan Kramer for raises in his pay, which he did regularly.
Wyatt pointed to one of the air-conditioning outlets. “Enjoy it while you can, Arnie. It gets warmer at the next stop. Why so sour, Lefty?”
“I hate flying commercial,” Harris said. “Don’t like leavin’ the drivin’ to somebody I don’t know.”
Harris was close to fifty, grey-haired, and with a grey tinge to his skin. He too was a master engine mechanic, but he had been around airplanes so long that he was proficient, though not certified, in a number of other specialties.
“Come on over here, guys,” Wyatt said, leading them to a group of chairs stuck in the corner.
They sat down, leaning toward each other, and Wyatt asked, “What did Jan tell you?”
“Just to get on the airplane,” Harris said. “That you’d give us the word once we got here.”
“Here’s the word,” Wyatt said. “Mum.”
“Mum?” Gering asked.
“That’s right. What we’ve got here is a classified project, and if you don’t think you can keep it to yourselves — I mean, Amie, not even your girlfriend, and Lefty, not your wife, we’ll get you a return plane ticket.”
The two of them knew, of course that some of Aeroconsultants’ pilots and technicians disappeared sporadically to resurface days or weeks later with no explanations. Wyatt wasn’t about to enumerate or amplify on any of the company’s history with secret projects.