The runways appeared to be in good repair, though clumps of weeds grew in the cracks between slabs. Some of the outer edges had crumbled, but it was nothing worrisome. There were no painted centre-lines.
Wyatt banked left to circle around and begin his approach. By the time they reached the eastern end of the approach leg, the other three Phantoms appeared from the southwest. Wyatt’s flight of F-4Es had passed them up a hundred miles back. The C-130 tanker was much farther behind, making the trip at a cruise speed of 330 knots compared to the 550 the Phantoms had been averaging.
Gettman’s voice came over the air. “Is that our home, Andy?”
“Sweet home,” Wyatt told him.
“You don’t suppose there’s someone in, say, L.A., who’d adopt me?” Gettman asked.
“You’ve been kicked out of every home you’ve been in,” Barr said. “Remember last night?”
Norm Hackley cut in, “The chart says there’s no airport operations.”
“True,” Wyatt said. “The flight service has a base radio, if you feel like you need to talk to someone.”
Wyatt retarded his throttles, dropped his landing gear, and set forty degrees of flap. The Phantom floated in, trailed closely by its identical sisters. The tires squealed as they touched down on hot pavement. He had completed his rundown and turned right onto the taxi strip as Hackley’s flight of three passed overhead behind them, performing their own examinations of the airstrip.
The flight had taken less than two hours, though they had lost an hour crossing the time zone.
Rolling down the taxiway, Wyatt raised the canopy. After the dry heat of Arizona, the humidity here was like a slap in the face with a barber’s hot towel. Immediately, the sweat popped on his forehead. The chalky white concrete reflected the sun, and the stillness trapped the superheated air.
Hangars Four and Five had been leased by Noble Enterprises. The structures were tall, built to allow clearance for the vertical stabilizers of now-antique bombers. Weeds as high as six feet crowded against the sidewalls. Faded, barely legible numbers on the front comers identified the two for which he was looking. Wyatt toed the left brake and turned toward Five just as the giant doors on the hangar began to rumble open.
Thirty yards from the building, Wyatt stopped, set the brakes, and killed the engines. He was disconnected from his electrical and environmental systems by the time Barr and Jordan parked next to him in a neat row. Wyatt stood up in the cockpit, leaned forward against the windscreen, and looked around.
Half a mile away, down at the flight service, people were piling into two pickup trucks. They just had to come visiting the tourists.
Behind him, the engines of Hackley’s flight lost their high pitch as the landing aircraft whistled by.
Ahead of him, five men stood grinning at him in the open doors of the hangar. Behind them, parked in the cool-looking depths, was a Cessna Citation business jet and a Lockheed C-130 Hercules. The Citation was painted the colour of cream and the Hercules was in pristine plain aluminium, and both carried the thin blue fuselage stripe which was the signature of Aeroconsultants, Inc.
But the red-trimmed logos on the tails identified them as property of Noble Enterprises.
Three
Ace had a white amulet in the middle of his chest and a white circle of fur around one yellow eye, but was otherwise a solid smoke grey. He was about three feet long, from his nose to the tip of his broken tail, and after a round of betting by the technicians, had been weighed in at nineteen pounds. He had wandered into the shop area one morning, a month after Aero-consultants opened its doors for business, and had hung around since then, four years now. He liked to sit on top of things (tool chests, airplanes, the computer terminal in Kramer’s office) and survey his world. Ace was not big on affection. About the only one who was allowed to pet him was Janice Kramer. Anyone, however, could feed him, and Ace went through cans of 9-Lives in lionish fashion. His food bill was a major draw on petty cash.
After his lunch on Thursday, Ace stretched out on the desk next to the computer terminal and cleaned himself up while Jan Kramer instructed the machine to print out the monthly statements. When he was done with his bath, Ace laid his chin on the telephone and went to sleep. Every once in a while, she reached over and ran her fingers through his thick coat.
Liz Jordan, Cliff Jordan’s wife and the company’s secretary/receptionist/bookkeeper, normally ran the billings, but Kramer liked to operate the computer now and then. In fact, only Kramer, Andy Wyatt, and Bucky Barr could access certain of the data files stored on the hard disk. Anyone trying to get into the files without the proper access codes would only find gibberish when they got there. The files were programmed to self-destruct at the first hint of unauthorized entry.
Kramer had been with the company from just before the beginning. Freshly out of work and frantically near the end of her savings, she had been submitting resumes to almost anything that appeared in the paper, even the skimpy, blind ads. She had been highly sceptical when one of those submissions brought her a phone call. One of the strange things about the interview with Andy Wyatt was that she had not gone to him. He had flown to Seattle and interviewed her in the lounge at Sea-Tac Airport at five in the afternoon.
He was a very presentable man in a good suit and conservative tie, with a few hard edges to him, and a no-nonsense, let’s-not-waste-time approach.
Kramer had worn her best skirted business suit — a creamy beige — with a green silk blouse that complemented her deep green eyes and contrasted nicely with her heavy, dark red hair. The suit dampened some of the more daring curves of her figure and gave her a professional appearance, she thought. She was not yet desperate enough for a job to use her femininity as a drawing card.
However, as far as she could tell, Wyatt did not even notice. Half the time, he was turned sideways to her, watching the air traffic on the runways and apparently only partially interested in the interview, though his questions were sharply directed.
He went right to the first, hurtful point. “You got fired from Boeing?”
“Along with many others, Mr. Wyatt. There was a major cutback in the division.”
He tapped her resume. “This says you got your law degree from UCLA. Third in your class?”
“That’s correct. If you feel it’s necessary, I can get the transcripts for you.”
“You tell many lies?”
“What! Of course not.”
“Then I don’t need the transcripts, do I?”
“Oh. No, you don’t.”
“Can you tell a lie if you need to?”
She had to think about that one. This was not an interview like any she had ever read about or experienced. “I don’t know. Are you talking about legal matters?”
“If the security of your nation were involved?”
“That’s what Fawn Hall thought.”
“If Baghdad was going to poison Seattle’s water supply?”
She hesitated once again. “I suppose I could, if the rationales were justifiable.”
“You’re up-to-date on aviation law?”
“Very much so.”
“How about office administration?”
“I think I could handle that. I worked in my father’s accounting office through high school and while I was attending college at the University of Washington.”