Acht nodded. “Good move, if it works.”
President Longmire paused. “Cyndi, you said the negotiations should proceed at the Cabinet level.…” He moved his head and squinted at Adleman. “Bob, what do you think?”
Adleman straightened; his mind clicked into high gear, assimilating events from the past few days. “She’s right, Mr. President. Decisive negotiations — and I’d go even higher: I’m probably the one that should sign the deal. We should push this now, take the bull by the horns and demonstrate to the Philippine government that this is one of our top priorities. Regardless of what we’ve said in public, the bases are too important to lose. Sending anyone below me to open the talks would be a slap in their face.”
The Secretary of State placed his elbows on the table and extended his hands. “No high-level emissary has negotiated with the Philippines since Madame Aquino’s visit decades ago. Even our negotiation of reopening Clark and Subic was at the assistant secretary level. Properly briefed, Mr. Adleman could use his position to tilt the scales in our favor, wrap up a new treaty, and ensure our foothold in the Far East until the end of the century.”
Longmire coughed again. He motioned with his hand to Adleman. “Bob, have Francis’ people get you up to speed on the lease arrangements. Let’s get you out there within three weeks.”
He turned to General Newman, weakly. “How does that fit with the aid the Philippine Constabulary is getting, Dave?”
“They’ve got more than enough to last them, Sir.” He cracked a grin. “Bullets, rifles, blankets — you name it. And like I said, there’s nothing for them to use the HPM weapon against, anyway.”
The Philippine Constabulary officer tapped a pencil on his desk. The damned Huks, he thought. How do they keep doing this? But he knew the answer — information was the most abundant commodity on the black market. They had stolen one truck — ten percent of the total convoy. And from only one convoy out of ten. Which meant the Huks now had one percent of the total military aid given by the U.S. government.
The amount was miniscule, and a greater percentage of the aid would be missing during the next year from pilfering. The only missing item that disturbed the officer was the high-power microwave weapon. It was one out of five that the U.S. had sent.
The officer knew the percentages. And he also knew what had happened to the last officer who had commanded a unit that the Huks had raided.
He didn’t want to be a scapegoat.
He stopped tapping his pencil. The PC Commandant would never learn of the missing truck. Men were constantly being killed during PC exercises, so that could be explained … even though seventeen dead men was an unusually high number.
What the PC commander didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Chapter 1
Clear and minus thirty degrees outside the cockpit window, thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean. Blue sky diffused into a mottled green where the jungle lay on the horizon. Five miles below them the Pacific Ocean looked like tiny ripples on a broad landscape of blue-green flatness, the clouds fluffy wisps. Strung out over a three-mile line flew five aircraft, four of them fighters, following a lumbering KC-10.
First Lieutenant Bruce Steele craned his neck around the cockpit of his aging F-15E Strike Eagle. It may have been one of the oldest fighters in the inventory, but it still packed more punch on air-to-ground than the F-22 and F-35 combined.
Miniature color TV monitors were inlaid next to switches, buttons, and other instruments on the crowded cockpit panel. A heads-up display jutted up directly in front of him. Cockpit gray clashed against the rest of the color-filled outside world. He felt like he was flying a high-tech video game.
Bruce spotted the other aircraft by their contrails, dense white plumes of water vapor spewed from the engines. Just visible two hundred miles in front of him rose a volcanic hill, protruding thousands of feet above the surrounding jungle but still miles beneath the fighters. A voice came over his headphones.
“Maddog, Lead. Estimate ‘feet dry’ in twenty miles. Prepare to descend. Remain in loose route.”
Bruce squinted out the cockpit to where the ocean ended. The “feet dry” warning confirmed Bruce’s estimate that they’d soon fly over land. His helmet filled with the sounds of the other fighters confirming his orders. One after another the clipped replies came:
“Two.”
“Three.”
Bruce clicked his mike. “Four.”
The lead aircraft kicked off a message to the Air Force version of the giant DC-10, the KC-10 tanker that had escorted them across the “pond,” as the Pacific Ocean was affectionately called. The dual-seated F-15E had a cruising range of more than twenty-eight hundred miles and could certainly make the hop over part of the pond — from Anderson AFB in Guam, where they had left some eight hours ago.
But Murphy’s Law reigned supreme in the Air Force: if something was going to go wrong, then it usually did. So rather than have the fighters cross the long stretch of deep water alone, a KC-10 tanker accompanied the crafts and kept them refueled.
As the flight began to descend from its cruising altitude, Bruce heard the voice of his navigator and backseater, Charlie Fargassa.
“I got a lock on the TACAN, ’sassin.” Charlie pronounced Bruce’s call sign “Assassin” in two syllables.
Bruce went “hot-mike”: he flipped the mike to transmit within the fighter only. “That’s a rog. Ready to stretch those legs?”
“You said it. I could piss for a week.”
Bruce grinned. For the last eight hours he had been forced to use a “piddle pack” to urinate. Besides being inconvenient and uncomfortable, the device made Bruce nervous — he didn’t like the possibility of loose liquid in the cockpit.
Charlie was another matter. The older man — by all of six years — refused to use the piddle pack, and instead opted to grit his teeth and bear it. When the Wing Commander back at Luke Air Force Base had made the equipment mandatory, Charlie steadfastly refused to be “plugged in.”
Charlie needed a little needling, just to drive the point home. “Twenty more minutes. Can you handle it, Foggy?”
Again, silence. Then weakly, “That’s a rog, Assassin.”
Bruce nearly gagged trying not to laugh. It felt good to be heading into a new place, a new environment. Damn good.
Bruce was on top of the world. And passing through thirty thousand feet, that was literally true.
He absently rubbed his left ring finger, feeling the absence of his wedding band. Wearing rings while flying was strictly against regulations, and good common sense. If Bruce had to start rummaging through the cockpit, or suddenly flip switches, there was a chance his ring would catch on a protrusion or allow electrical arcing. If he were lucky, he’d only tear some skin away. For the unlucky, entire fingers could be lost.
But it wasn’t merely the missing wedding ring that felt strange; it was knowing that he would never put it back on.
The divorce had been finalized the day before he left Luke for the trip to Clark. Ashley. The memory still hurt — the times they had together and the promise of what was to come. You would think that after ten years together, including two years of marriage, you would learn something about the other person. No surprises, nothing major, but just pleasant, gentle discoveries …