“I have it,” Weston said gently, patting the bloody forearm, holding up the most valuable Sears catalog in existence. “See?”
Sparrow did not see, though his eyes were open. Sparrow was fading from 1989 back into the world of 1952 when all good things seemed possible, when Sparrow could drink to the future, when a man loosely connected to the U.S. State Department was buying every other round and answering to the name of Halcyon. Good days; days to remember as Sparrow lay dying.
TWO
As the little LearJet whistled softly past them on its landing rollout, Ben Ullmer and his assistant, Marie Duchaine, stood outside the Snake Pit and swiveled their heads in unison. “Oughta be a Model Thirty-Six, with all the heavy brass she’s haulin’.” Marie’s expression said she didn’t get it, though an aircraft freak would. Ben Ullmer knew airplanes the way some men knew batting averages, down to the third digit.
He knew top brass, too; the arrival of National Security Agency and Central Intelligence directors on the same flight was absolutely unprecedented. Those two might smile at each other across the table from the President, but each year their cooperation looked more like competition. Ullmer had heard of Dar Weston, CIA’s top man for science and technology, which added up to two CIA nabobs too many nosing around NSA’s Snake Pit.
And a couple of other links in the daisy chain of command were tagging along too. That meant Ben Ullmer would have to make nice to the wingtip oxford brigade. Now, as he often did in moments of stress or deep reflection, Ullmer chewed one of the cigars he never lit, standing near the aircraft fuel pumps and glowering into a bright spring afternoon. Ullmer glanced through the tangle of curly hair on his forearm at his old windup Breitling, the only kind of decoration he would allow his people in the secluded hangars and workshops near Elmira, New York, which NSA people called the Snake Pit. “On time, more’s the pity.” He readjusted the yellow baseball cap with the caterpillar legend to cover his balding head. The cap was a joke: the Snake Pit’s specialty was precisely the opposite of heavy equipment.
With years of Ben Ullmer’s peeves behind her, Marie Duchaine knew that growl well enough to discount half of it. With her glasses pushed into her graying blond hair, Marie could not have read the schedule on the clipboard she carried. With Marie’s memory, she did not need to. “Shall I send the Black Hangar crew home early, Ben?”
“Yeah, clear ‘em outall but Medina.” He watched her, appreciating the fine hips and purposeful stride that could fool a man into thinking Marie was a long jump shy of fifty. Then, “Hold on! It’ll look better if they’re in the library. Won’t kill that bunch to bone up on aircraft specs for an hour.”
“Good idea,” she said without breaking stride, smiling to herself because she knew how Ben hated to waste a single man-hour. He even made his vacations coincide with the annual Oshkosh fly-in, studying the experimental aircraft of amateurs because good ideas lurked in the damnedest places, and Ben’s wife Lorraine had quit trying to change him before their kids left the nest. It was Marie Duchaine, not Ben Ullmer, who accompanied Ben’s wife on her vacations. Small wonder that Marie was almost as much family as she was assistant by now.
Ullmer grunted in satisfaction to see the Lear taxiing toward him because, on the uneven taxi-way at highway speed, it bobbed like a toy. Shake ‘em up a little; do ‘em good. “Damn stupid, is what it is,” he said as he stumped out to the aircraft, talking to no one but his feet, the short arms swinging wide as a weight lifter’s as he walked. Ben’s crews liked to say Ben was built like a garbage can, but nobody had ever found a way to put a lid on him. “CIA thinks we’re leaky, we know fuckin’ well they are, but we let ‘em in here. Call in the National Enquirer while they’re at it…”
The first man out of the Lear was the DIRNSA, Director of the National Security Agency, Charles Foy. NSA folk called their director “Dernza,” this one bending almost double to exit the Lear because of his immense height. Ullmer shook his hand, the hand that could fund or eliminate any project in the Snake Pit by a simple jiggle of a pen, and then offered his blunt paw to the others.
Abraham Randolph was DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, with the demeanor of old money and the face of an aging matinee idol, but Ullmer thought his handshake perfunctory. It was James Darlington Weston, CIA deputy for science and technology, who had the handshake of a C-clamp though he was at least Ullmer’s age. Weston’s brown tweeds and sober tie betrayed membership in the Old Boy network, but Dar Weston’s face had the lines of a man who could laugh when it suited him.
Ullmer waved them toward the office, a two-story brick affair squeezed between windowless metal hangars, and responded to small talk as alwaysbadly. He already knew Foy’s deputy, Bill Sheppard, the country’s top crypto man. A skinny little specimen who walked with quick, precise steps, Sheppard had a reputation for backing the right ideas. He had backed Ullmer’s stealth programs to the hilt, and Ben figured the man must have a backbone of beta titanium.
Ben’s direct superior, Malcolm Aldrich, walked beside him as if to cement a closeness that did not really exist. Aldrich smiled a lot, but behind his Rotarian cheer lay a festering resentment that his subordinate, Ben Ullmer, lay beyond his control. Well, the Snake Pit work and the autonomy it required were Bill Sheppard’s doing, goddammit; let Mal Aldrich piss and moan to Sheppard. Ben had no ambition to rise above Aldrich, but try and convince him of that. Ambition, helclass="underline" no talent for it, either! Georgia Tech had pumped out a helluvan engineer in Ben Ullmer, but no politician. Ben proved it, standing in the hallway: “Mr. Foy, you flew these folks in over my Cyclone fence so I guess they have the need to know. Which tour do you want?”
It was Sheppard who said, softly, “Black Hangar, Ben. You know why we’re here. You can start your briefing.”
“It’s your” He knew Aldrich feared he would say, “funeral.” He almost did. “birds, Dr. Sheppard.” Ben led them to the elevator, talking as they filed in, and inserted his ID card in a slot that seemed only a poor fit of the panelwork. “Okay: NSA’s used CIA aircraft for over thirty years to gather data. U-2, SR-71, Quietstar, stuff from Lockheed’s Skunk Works. I worked there awhile. Good bunch.” The elevator door whispered shut. “A few years back, I was asked to develop some, uh, different delivery systems for NSA. They wanted something that could deliver and retrieve a man or a suitcase nuke, or a sensor packageacross continental distances without detection or landing strips.” His glance toward Aldrich was bland, and Aldrich returned it the same way. Mal Aldrich had fought this project at its inception, and he had lost.
The elevator lurched, an addition to the sinking feeling these CIA people must have felt when they first realized NSA could build its own stealthy birds. When NSA no longer needed CIA aircraft, the locus of power would inevitably shift. Ullmer was unperturbed. “I was ex-Lockheed, and two of my crew in delivery system design were just plain nuts about aircraft: Medina and Corbett.”
From Randolph: “Kyle Corbett?”
Ullmer: “That was the man. He and Medina fought like two cats in a sack but, dear God, how they could cobble up an airchine!”
“Friend of yours, wasn’t he?” Randolph glanced at Weston, who only nodded with a faraway look.
“Hard to make friends with a guy like Corbett. Damn shame, to die at the peak of his abilities,” Ullmer said.
“At least it must’ve been quick,” Weston said. “And I gather he finished the job.”
Ullmer shrugged. “The part that dealt with flying an airchine, yeah. First we built a series of stealth studies, flyin’ breadboards, so to speak. The Blue Sky project.” He saw Dar Weston’s quizzical glance. “You know, invisible airplanes; nothin’ but blue skies do I see.” Ullmer sang it, evidently in the key of “Z,” and saw pained smiles of recognition.