“I think I’ve lost five pounds just walking around these damned hangars,” he said.
“Doesn’t show yet,” Demion said.
“You sure you want to fly with me today, Jim?”
“But I have noticed your face seems thinner,” Demion said. “Don’t you think he’s better-looking, guys?”
“Julie seems to think so,” Kriswell said. “How you making out there, Bucky?”
“You know she’s carrying a three-point-six grade average in high school? She’s a smart kid. Debate, FHA, and thespians, too.”
“I noticed she’s carrying about, what, thirty-four, twenty-two, thirty-four?” Demion said.
Barr gave him a pained expression. “Get off it, James. She wants to go to Chadron State College and become an English teacher. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“So she’s a candidate?” Wyatt asked.
“Yeah, I think so. I’ll know more in another week.”
Only Demion, Kriswell, and Wyatt knew about Barr’s foundation because they were on the board of directors, fulfilling the number required by the regulations governing tax-exempt corporations. Barr was the executive director and the screening committee and the entire unpaid staff. He poured some of his excess cash into the foundation each year, and each year he personally found one or two kids — usually girls — for whom the foundation provided college scholarships. The unadvertised educational foundation was currently supporting eleven college students. Barr didn’t want every girl he met to grow up and become a money-grubbing Raylene Delehanty Barr.
“The guns on board the Herc?” Wyatt asked.
“We got guns,” Barr said. “Captain Dinning will be a happy man when he see them come back.”
Barr and Demion were making a stop at Davis-Monthan to return the M61-A cannons. Since they had decided against them for the mission, they had also decided to turn them in. It might lower the stress levels of the local Air Force types at Davis-Monthan, and it might preclude having the Treasury’s Bureau of Firearms get excited, just in case some of that paperwork fell through the cracks and actually arrived at the Bureau.
“I’ve got my shopping list,” Demion said.
“And I’ve got a couple things to add to it,” Barr said, ripping the page out of his notebook.
“And I’ll take off for Washington,” Wyatt said.
“What do you suppose they want?” Kriswell asked.
“Who the hell knows?” Wyatt said. “They’ve probably decided to call it off.”
“Personally,” Barr said, “I think that’d be a real shame.”
“You’re just bloodthirsty,” Demion said.
“That’s me, the New Hampshire vampire.”
“One-and-a-half million dollars,” Martin Church said.
“A steal,” George Embry, who was standing at Church’s window enjoying the view, told him.
“From us, maybe. What do we get for it?”
“You really want to know?”
“Damned right,” the DDO said.
The North African desk chief turned from the window and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “How come you get the best view in the house, Marty?”
“Come on.”
Embry dug a ragged-edged piece of notepaper from his pocket and scanned it.
“Let’s see. There’s four ALQ-72 countermeasures pods. That presupposes some airborne resistance, you know?”
“I know. Wyatt’s being overly cautious, maybe.”
“Wyatt wants to get out of there with the same number of people he takes in,” Embry said. “Can’t say as I blame him.”
“What else?”
“There’s thirty-six Mark 84 five-hundred-pound bombs. That’s the ground attack complement. For the fun stuff, we’ve got twenty-four AIM-9L Super Sidewinders. Like I said, a bargain.”
“Do we need it all?”
“You’re trying to save money?” Embry asked.
“It’s a new era.”
“You want to start a war, Marty, you got to pay for it. There’ll be more bills coming in.”
Church sat silently for a moment. He, and others, were committed to the operation, and he didn’t know why he was quibbling over what amounted to peanuts in the total scheme of things. Perhaps because in the back of his mind was a ghastly image of the results.
“What about Cummings?” he asked, to shift the subject from dollars and cents.
“Marianne? She’s spending a lot of time on the beach, enjoying herself. No further contacts with al-Qati.”
“Why don’t you have her make some calls? Maybe she can run him down somewhere.”
“Marty.”
“Yeah, I know. Okay, just have her cross her fingers.”
“There is one little thing,” Embry said.
“Which you’ve saved for last?”
“I always save the best for last, Marty.”
“Well, damn it, tell me!”
“This is kind of third-hand, but then, since we’re so short of assets there, everything we get out of Libya is third-hand. Cummings doesn’t have corroboration yet.”
“George.”
“Ahmed al-Qati has been promoted to lieutenant colonel and attached to Ibrahim Ramad’s command.” “This tells you what, George?”
“You remember Ramad? He’s air force, and he disappeared from the Tripoli military staff when they got the Sukhoi bombers. The consensus at the time, though never substantiated, was that he’d been given responsibility for developing a long-range bombing program. That was reinforced when our French friends gave them the aerial re-fuelling technology.”
“Do we know where he’s located?”
“We have a good idea that he’s at Marada Base, the one they buried in the sand. That’s where the bombers are flying from, anyway.”
“So what’s al-Qati got to do with Ramad?”
“Exactly!”
“Goddamn it, George.”
“Ahmed al-Qati is a superb tactician and strategist in ground warfare. My people think that marrying the two of them means they’re developing a coordinated air-and-ground attack scheme.”
“So it’s just good military planning,” Church said. “Contingency planning.”
“Except that we also know that Marada Base is located thirteen miles from what the Leader describes as his agricultural chemical plant.”
Church thought about that for a moment, then said, “You want to send me the dossiers on those two people, George?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Ibrahim Ramad glanced sideways at al-Qati who was sitting in the bombardier/navigator’s seat next to him. With the helmet and the oxygen mask, very little of his face was visible. His eyes were unreadable; they stared straight ahead at the onrushing desert.
The undulating desert unrolled before them with amazing, dizzying speed. The velocity indicator stood at Mach 1.1. The aircraft bounced lightly upward and downward as the terrain-avoidance radar instructed the automatic pilot to maintain a one-hundred-meter ground clearance above the sand dunes and wadis. The E-Scope on the instrument panel, with its “ski-tip” line imposed over the computer-generated drawing of the terrain ahead, showed how close the Su-24 approached the tips of dunes. The Head Up Display currently displayed the symbol for the bomber in the centre of the screen, the symbol rising and falling as the aircraft responded to commands from the computer to change its vertical position.
They were so low that the horizons had pulled in on them, making their world much smaller and more isolated. Ramad could see nothing outside the canopy that bespoke of life. Looking backward and down, he could see the snouts of the missiles on the outboard pylons. The wings were in their swept-back configuration, and the missiles were mounted on the pivoting pylons. The bombs were shorter and not visible from his position. They were attached to the inboard pylons, which were fixed to the solid, inner portion of the wing. Four more missiles were affixed to fuselage hard-points.