Again, Slick’s inference was that Beck wasn’t part of the team.
Again, Beck let it pass: he was too busy trying to plot the vector of the approaching aircraft precisely enough to help Thoreau—who was now on a secure channel to the 727, telling it exactly what he wanted it to do—block the unidentified aircraft’s view of the 727.
“This bogey of yours could be just another scheduled or nonscheduled flight, Slick,” Beck said with neutral precision: “Everybody’s having a rough time without radar handovers from ground controllers.” The vector on which the other aircraft was approaching was not one that was commonly used for commercial traffic; no international airports had been able to rejoin the grid of international control radars which had once handled transoceanic traffic: the various militaries had preempted all available replacement electronics in a futile attempt to make up for lost satellites.
“Yeah,” Slick gave back, “and your mother might have known your father.” Then: “Here’s the rest of their team—a trawler coming up over the horizon, three o’clock.”
Beck had been adopted by an American couple in the Foreign Service, just one of countless war babies from Eastern Europe. He was about to let Slick know that, as far as Beck was concerned, Ashmead’s deputy had just stepped over the line, when Ashmead cut in smoothly: “Come on, kids, this is no time for a family squabble. If I make this right, we’re about to be in a heap o’ trouble—that bogey’s way too fast for a commercial anything and the trawler’s there to pick up the pieces—the serum, if they’re lucky—and pick off the survivors. Listen up, all stations: we’ll hold this evasive course—” he gave new headings “—for five minutes. Over and out, El Al 10.” When the 727 was offline, Ashmead continued: “If after that time the bogey’s still closing, we’re going to veer off and get our tails out of here, maximum speed, maximum countermeasures.’’
Beck sat back and fiddled with his headset, casting a glance at Slick, who didn’t look up from his radars. Then he said: “I can’t let you do that, Rafic. Our responsibility is to bring that plane safely into Houston.”
“Our responsibility, Beck, is to bring this plane safely into Houston.”
“But the serum—”
“I told you,” Ashmead reminded him patiently, “that I would have preferred to have both cases on board this aircraft. I know I can get this one home; I’m not sure about El Al 10.”
El Al 10 was the flight designation for the 727.
“But Yael and Jesse…” Beck trailed off. Thoreau certainly knew that Ashmead was proposing to use the 727 as a decoy, sacrifice it and everyone on board in order to get the P-3B clear, and Thoreau wasn’t arguing.
But it was too late to call back the words: “If it weren’t for you, Casper,” Slick said into his com mike, “Yael and Jesse would be here with us and your Magyar buddy and that Saudi sweetheart Patrick’s mooning over would be with the rest of the sitting ducks.”
Beck thought he heard Thoreau swearing softly, as if his hand were over his bead mike, but that was all.
Beck wasn’t going to argue with Slick; he bent his head to his radars and worked desperately to come up with some piece of information that would invalidate Ashmead’s theory that the approaching plane was an enemy attack aircraft.
He couldn’t. Finally he sat back and said, “Look, let’s try the International Hailing Frequency—what could it hurt?”
“If they don’t see us any more,” Thoreau responded, “it could hurt a lot. Anyway, Ivan doesn’t let his pilots have International Hailing on the theory that it facilitates defection. I say we just stay on this heading and see if they fly by or indicate that they’ve scoped us. Three minutes, fifteen seconds more.”
“Soviets? ” Beck was trying to stay what seemed an ineluctable tide of paranoia coming over his headset in tight, short breaths. “Why assume that—”
“Beck,” Ashmead said wearily, “stay off this channel unless you’ve got relevant technical data. The rest of us are trying to save our butts up here.”
In the three minutes remaining, Beck thought of Yael Saadia, pregnant and exhausted, and the impeccable dossiers she’d prepared on every member of the fact-finding commission; and of Thoreau, who loved her; and of Jesse, the sharpshooter from the Galilee, most easygoing of the team.
At two minutes he thought he heard murmured off-mike a short argument, something about search-and-rescue capability.
Then he heard Slick light a cigarette, the scratch of the match loud in his phones, and say, “Damn, it’s gonna happen.”
Then the P-3B veered sharply, banked, and climbed, and there was nothing he could do but watch the blips on his scope until the 727 fell abruptly off it.
At least he wasn’t on the open com channel to hear the 727’s pilot—Beck’s pilot for the last three years—when he realized the P-3B was leaving him to fend for himself, or his attempts to contact the pilot of the attacking aircraft.
Watching it in silence wasn’t any easier to take, but the silence didn’t last long: from the flight deck came a heated argument between Thoreau and Ashmead as to whether it was worth it to go back and look for survivors.
“What’ll we do if we find any, Thoreau? Wave? Just get our butts out of here and count your blessings.”
It was another half hour before it was clear that the other aircraft was gone, on its way to Algeria or Libya, judging from its course, and Beck dared to leave his station long enough to go to the head and retch.
When he came back, Slick was standing by his console, headset collaring his throat: “Ready to go tell those five remaining dips how that 727 was shot down by a Soviet fighter escort, Casper? Or don’t you have the stomach for it?”
“You can’t prove it was a Soviet—”
“Look, Mister INR honcho, you’ve killed more friends of mine than the Forty-Minute War.” Slick’s eyes were very bright as he took off the headset. “I’m about out of patience with you altogether. If it weren’t that I figure Thoreau’s got the rightful first shot at you, I’d tell you just how and when you’re going to die. If you could have kept your MIT mouth shut, Yael and Jesse would be right here, with us, safe—not down there.” He pointed to the deck, below which was ocean. “Now, you and I have got to get something straight—smart doesn’t cut it with me; I was at Oxford, read what I needed to at Baliol, and all I learned was that grades don’t mean squat in the real world. And you’d better learn that when Rafic doesn’t tell you something, he’s telling you something.”
“You mean you people knew this was going to happen?”
“Nobody knows this kind of thing’s going to happen. We had some data, we interpolated, we took a calculated risk. What were we supposed to do, wait around to visually ID a Soviet Il-76 Mainstay AWAC fitted out to fuel-feed her Foxhound fighter escort, and get ourselves killed, maybe? Foxhounds have a look-down, shoot-down mode with radar-guided missiles. Now, you want to tell ’em, or shall I?”
“But why would the Soviets—”
Slick shook his head in disgust: “You just don’t listen, do you? You think they want us to haul this serum home? When we wouldn’t even share it with the Israelis? When they would have bought it from Dow for as many rubles as he could carry? Jesus, man, you’re just plain functionally inept, you know that? Now, if you don’t have enough balls to step out there and explain what just happened, I may not wait for Thoreau to decide whether he wants you for himself.”
Beck was about to suggest to Slick that the two of them have it out then and there when the flight deck partition slid back and Thoreau came through it unsteadily.