“That is correct. It buys your absolute loyalty and your willingness to perform on short notice well into the future.”
“How far into the future?”
“Not determined. We see how it goes. But you get paid on each project.”
“And the other five?”
“At the moment, we’ve got four quickie projects on the table…”
Wyatt couldn’t complain about many of the projects he had been handed over the last four years. Usually, they were smalclass="underline" transporting sensitive cargo into sensitive geographical areas, assembling teams of aviation experts to conduct workshops, seminars, and training sessions for governments and non-governments which needed the help. A couple of times, he and Barr had been asked to extract endangered agents from hostile territory. The particularly lucrative contracts had involved the use of live ordnance, but those had only come up three times before.
“The difference might be, Marty, that we’ve never had a mission on this large a scale,” Wyatt said. “With the number of aircraft and people involved, we’ve become way too visible. The risk factor is high. And with the way the politics keep shifting, especially in the Middle East, I expect the go/no-go switch to be thrown on and off.”
“It’s definitely not off,” Church said. “George can tell you why.”
Wyatt scooped up another wedge of the pizza as he looked to Embry.
“We — that’s me and my analysts — think that our fears have been realized. We think the chemical plant is now producing weapons in large quantities.”
“We suspected that going in,” Wyatt said. “That was the rationale for this operation.”
“Yeah, Andy, but when we planned it, we were worried about a small stockpile of delicate weapons under the control of a less-than-delicate administration. Now, it gets worse.”
“How so?”
“One of my people went back through overhead surveillance tapes and made some estimates of the amount of raw materials that have been shipped in to the plant. He also computed the estimated tonnage of fertilizer coming out.”
“And it doesn’t come out equal?” Wyatt asked.
“Not by a long damned shot. Over the last couple of years, we figure we’ve lost track of about four hundred tons of liquid and solid raw material. That’s based on mathematical projections, since we naturally don’t have all of the photographs we might want to have.”
“So they’re storing it inside the plant.”
“But in what form, Andy? If it’s one-hundred-pound artillery shells or missile warheads or wide-dispersal bombs, that adds up to eight thousand units.”
“That’s a bunch,” Wyatt agreed.
“Plus, with our estimates of storage space inside the plant, we don’t think there’s enough room to store that many shells.”
“So they may have moved them?”
“That’s the worry. If we don’t hit them soon, they could spread that ordnance all over the country. As it is, we may miss some of it.”
“How come you didn’t do all this computing earlier?”
“Maybe it’s because we’re human,” Embry said.
Six
It was nearly midnight when the Citation landed.
Janice Kramer was in the office with Ace the Wonder Cat, and she had been ignoring the paperwork stacked on her desk so she could keep an eye on the runway. The Aeroconsultants building was located on Clark Carr Loop, a circle of hangars and offices in the commercial section of the airport south of the east-west runway. From the side window of the single executive office, she had a view down the alley between buildings. It was a clipped view, revealing just a few hundred yards of the west end of the runway and the adobe-styled passenger terminal building on the north side of the runway. The current activity was limited to a few night-scheduled passenger liners. Kirtland Air Force Base, which shared the runway with Albuquerque International, appeared quiet tonight.
She was also monitoring Albuquerque Approach on the radio in the outer office, and she heard Wyatt call in, so she was ready when the Cessna flashed across her limited view of the runway. It slowed quickly, then turned onto the end taxiway and headed directly for the hangar.
Sometimes, she daydreamed about the way things could have been, or might be, and she found herself damning Andy Wyatt for what he was. And she damned herself for putting up with it and waiting feverishly for his plane to come in. She had waited too many nights.
Again and again.
When she pushed herself up out of her chair, Ace sat up on the desk and yawned.
“You can’t be hungry again.”
“Mee-yaw.”
That was “yes” in feline-mongrel, so she went out to the storeroom off the hangar, found a can of 9-Lives tuna, and popped the top off it. She had scooped it into his dish by the time Ace got there. There was very little in Ace’s world that required haste.
Ace never said thanks, either. He just went into a semi-squat and started to nibble.
Kramer went on to the back of the hangar, which abutted the tarmac. There were two business jets in the hangar, both in partial disassembly as they underwent alterations in their technology as well as refurbishing from merely luxurious to ultra-luxurious. One belonged to a Texas real estate developer, and the other was owned by a Hollywood producer. Both men had been referred to Aeroconsultants by a Saudi prince.
Aeroconsultants enjoyed a credible word-of-mouth advertising program. Currently, Kramer had a seven-month backlog of projects, and they were going to back up even further since Wyatt was draining off all of the manpower for the latest Agency contract.
There were only four dim night-lights on, but it was enough to find her way to the back door. She defeated the alarm system, unlocked the door, and pulled it open. A soft warm breeze struck her face, carrying with it the aromas of diesel oil, hot metal, and jet fuel.
A pair of floodlights mounted on the hangar lit up several rows of single-and twin-engined airplanes. Some of them awaited their turns at the hands of Aero-consultants craftsmen, and some of them belonged to employees. Wyatt let them park their planes for free. Bucky Barr’s pristinely restored Bell helicopter was parked at one end, its rotors tethered.
The twin jet braked to a stop in line with parked client aircraft, the nose bobbing lightly, then the engines whined down. When the door opened and Wyatt descended to the apron, Kramer picked up a set of wheel chocks resting nearby and began walking toward him.
Wyatt saw her coming. “Hey, my favourite ground crewman.”
“Crew person,” she said, handing him one linked pair of chocks.
“You just watch. Someday, I’m going to have all the gender-definitive terms down pat.”
“I doubt it.”
“Anyone else around?”
“Just me. If they aren’t in Nebraska, they’re home in bed.”
Together, they chocked the wheels, then Wyatt locked the door. She waited, fingering the new red stripes on the fuselage.
“I thought you weren’t going to show this logo around here.”
“I wasn’t, but if anyone notices, they’ll just think it was a client.”
They walked back to the hangar, and Kramer wrapped her fingers around his arm.
“How was Washington?”
“Near gridlock inside the Beltway.”
“The traffic?”
“That, too. Mostly, the politics and the intellectual capabilities are close to standstill.”
Inside the hangar, Kramer locked the door and reset the alarm. Wyatt walked over to the Texan’s Mystere-Falcon and peeked inside the open door.