“Americans from Charm School,” Applegate interrupted, referring to a Soviet KGB facility that was an exact replica of an American town: Only English was spoken; only American food was served; only American clothing was worn; only KGB agents, being trained to impersonate Americans, lived and worked there. “For all we know that run in with the Forger wasn’t an accident,” Applegate concluded, shrewdly embellishing the lie. “We’ll have you picked up and taken to a military hospital as soon as possible. Meantime, I don’t want anyone else to know you’re alive. Whoever they are, whatever they’re up to, they want you dead. Talk to no one, Major. That means nobody. Not even your wife. They may be watching her; may have tapped her phone trying to get a line on where you’re hiding. Got it?”
“I understand, sir,” Shepherd replied dutifully.
“Good. Now, put the doc back on,” Applegate instructed, going on to impress upon the doctor the need for absolute secrecy and cooperation.
The nurse wheeled Shepherd back to the ward. He fell onto the bed, exhausted. Moments later, she returned carrying his flight suit, name stripe still affixed. It had been washed and folded. His cassette recorder and an envelope were on top of it.
“I think these belong to you, Major,” she said, explaining that a comatose derelict several beds down the line was wearing the flight suit over his clothing when brought in the previous evening. The London Hospital’s casualty room served the entire East End, and there was no other facility in the area where the derelict, who, like Shepherd, had been found comatose in the train yard, could have been taken.
Shepherd’s wallet, credit cards, and identification were gone; but the envelope contained what was left of his cash: $63 and a few British pounds that the derelict, who had assaulted him, hadn’t spent before succumbing to a drug overdose.
In upper Heyford, Applegate had given the news to Larkin, who shuddered at the implications. “This whole fucking mission’s on the bubble,” he lamented bitterly, thinking about Fitzgerald and the DCI’s emotional mandate.
“No need for it to burst,” the big intelligence officer counseled. “Shepherd’s just laying there groggy, waiting to be picked up; and we’ve got people who can handle it.”
The two Special Forces guards who had played the role of SPs were given the task. “Kill him and use the same method of disposal,” Larkin ordered; then he and Applegate returned to the computerized data that had been prepared for each F-111 crew by mission planning in Lakenheath.
Each package had been tailored to a specific target. It contained reconnaissance photographs; a foldout route book of the flight plan; and a sequential list of fly-to-points: latitude, longitude, elevation, and brief description of each, the last of these being the target itself.
ANITA was used to enter the alphanumeric target data into a computer in mission planning headquarters. Once encoded, the entire program was copied to tape; the cassette was inserted into a mission data loader, which was taken to the aircraft and cabled to an input port left of the nose wheel, adjacent to the com-cord jack; then with the push of a button, the target data was transferred from the MDL to the Pave Tack computer.
This entire operation was handled by mission planning technicians; however, neither they nor the MDL were indispensable. The data could have been entered directly into Pave Tack computers by pilot or WIZZO via the nav-data entry panel, an alphanumeric keyboard in the cockpit used routinely to correct and update target information in flight.
Larkin and Applegate completed their data review, suited up, and were soon climbing into their F-111s.
The time was 5:13 P.M. when they took off from Heyford with the EF-111 radar jammers. As they streaked skyward, KC-135 tankers were lumbering into the air from Mildenhall. They rendezvoused over Land’s End at the southeasternmost tip of England with twenty-two F-111F bombers from Lakenheath and one E2C Hawkeye.
The latter was the strike control aircraft, a flying radar installation that housed the mission commander and his staff. A saucer-shaped antenna atop the fuselage picked up the transponder signal of every F-111 in the strike force and displayed it on a radar screen. Strict radio silence would be maintained throughout the mission, which meant this was the only contact mission command would have with the bombers.
In precisely 7 hours 11 minutes, the F-111s and their Pave Tack systems, capable of acquiring, tracking, and bombing surface targets at high speed in total darkness, would be doing just that — all but two of them.
15
The time in Washington, D.C., was 12:32 P.M.
Congressman Jim Gutherie had put in a morning’s work and was heading across town in his chauffeured car.
A week had passed since the bombing of the West Berlin disco. Rumors of military reprisals had been rampant but Gutherie hadn’t given them much credence. A hostile act against another nation would have to be cleared with Congress — with his committee — in advance, and no effort had been made to do so. He had spent the weekend with campaign aides, mapping out strategy to reverse his continuing slide in the polls.
For years, his wife had been his most trusted political adviser. Since her accident, it was but one of many things in the congressman’s life that had changed. Monday afternoons were another.
The women with whom he spent them were stunningly beautiful, with faces like models, which they sometimes were. Save for fiery tresses and galaxies of freckles sprinkled over her white skin, the redhead was always naked when he arrived. The blond worked in lingerie. Black stockings hugged her endless legs. Garters framed a tuft of golden wool glistening in the shadow of a bottomless teddy. Its bodice skimmed her upright nipples, which were all that kept it from falling.
The idea of being with another woman, while his wife — a passionate sex partner with whom he was still in love — lay in a hospital bed barely alive, tormented him, and he had sought professional guidance.
His committee work and his exposure to top-secret data narrowed the field to a handful of psychiatrists in the District who had the necessary security clearances.
Dr. David Kemper had been recommended by the CIA. His office was in a mansard-roofed structure on Connecticut Avenue. Its separate entrance and exit spared his patients the embarrassment of running into colleagues.
“You know, I’m wired all the time,” Gutherie said as one session began. “I jog, I work out. It still takes me hours to fall asleep. I’m not myself.”
“Well, what do you think it means?” Kemper asked from behind his neat moustache.
“Beats me. I’m still in love with my wife and everything. I mean, I don’t even know what that’s got to do with it; but lately, I don’t know.”
“Well, what I hear you saying, Jim,” Kemper said with a trace of a smile, “is that you need to get laid.”
“Yeah? Yeah, I guess I do.”
“Anybody in mind?”
“Sort of.”
Six months had passed since Dr. Kemper supported Gutherie’s suggestion that he visit the turn-of-the-century townhouse behind the wrought-iron fence in the 2000 block of Decatur Place just north of Dupont Circle.
Now Gutherie lay in an elegantly furnished room, the blond’s fingertips tracing over his trembling lips, “lost,” as Sister Mary Janice, his eighth-grade teacher once put it, “in the depraved sins of the flesh.”
Gutherie’s breathing quickened in expectation as the redhead straddled his waist with her freckled thighs, then began sliding slowly backwards, capturing the head of his penis inside her. He shuddered as she continued inching back until her tight wetness consumed him. The soothing sense of security and well-being that Gutherie craved spread over him like a warm blanket.