“Got it,” said Dar, “but what in God’s name is a googol?”
“Ten to the hundredth power, sir,” said Hinshaw. “It just means ‘a lot.’ I was exaggerating, sir.” He spoke like a contrite college prankster.
It broke the tension for Dar, who clapped the young electronics expert on the back gently and managed a smile. “You’re entitled; you’re part of the solution, not the problem, and you’re responding wonderfully. I suppose the next question is, will there be room in a Neptune for us?”
“Room for ten men and a googolplex of sandwiches,” Hinshaw replied, his eyes sparkling. “A whole lot.”
Ullmer: “They as loud as ever? I used to be Lockheed myself.”
” ‘Fraid so, but there’s a head onboard, too. It’s not too bad when a man can take a leak in comfort,” Hinshaw replied. “Without jet pods on the wings a P2V will loiter for, I don’t know, at least twelve hours. The flight crews will know, sir.”
A deep rumble filled the hangar, and Dar saw the massive doors trundling aside. Slowly approaching the hangar from the concrete ramp was a tiny tractorlike vehicle, towing a dull blue behemoth from the past Dar saw the twin engines with their tremendous propellers, remembered the mind-numbing drone of the wartime transport that had dropped him into Greece. It did not seem possible that they would be chasing down the most sophisticated aircraft on earth in these vintage brutes.
Ullmer was speaking to young Hinshaw again, not whispering but clearly not intending his words to carry.
“That’s not my field either,” said Hinshaw. “The P2V has a little bomb bay of sorts for antisub duty. Whether you could fit a pod of fifties on, I don’t know. Some blue-suiters from Eglin are already waiting for you, sir.”
As Dar listened, his depression returned. Eglin Air Force Base and its blue-clad weapon wizards could provide a stunning array of armaments, including some that were still under test at Eglin. Dar found himself hoping that the nastier Air Force stuff could not be quickly adapted to a naval aircraft.
Hinshaw turned toward his primary job and a dozen technicians after promising that the two operating X-Band sets would be installed in P2V’s before dawn. The third set was an enigma, missing parts that might or might not be found.
Ben Ullmer’s face was set in a way that would not reveal much. “We’ve got to see the weapons people. I hate it as much as you do, but both sightings had Corbett heading south.” The second sighting, by an off-duty National Parks ranger twenty miles from Waycross, Georgia, had been a fluke. The ranger knew something about wildlife, and had called in an official query as to the possibility of a California condor loose near the Okefenokee. NSA listening devices had isolated his call; they were that good. Unruh, claiming to be a model airplane builder, had interviewed the ranger by telephone and realized what the man had seen without alerting him to its significance. Unruh was that good, too.
With every datum pointing to a southerly course by Black Stealth One, Bill Sheppard would be paying close attention to Dar’s decisions. “You’re a decent man, Ben,” Dar said. “We’ll do what we’re supposed to do.”
A tinny beep began to sound rhythmically at Ullmer’s side. He raised his hand to reveal a second wristwatch, a modern type with all the latest functions. Ben punched a button, stopping the noise. “Fucking pills,” he swore, and fumbled in his pockets as they began to walk to the offices at one side of the hangar.
He needs a high-tech watch, but he still wears that old windup thing too, thought Dar. I guess a man can be high-tech and old-fashioned as well Maybe you can’t hang on to both sets of values without a kind of innate decency. And I wonder if I have enough of that to matter.
The weapons people included three “blue-suiters” and two civilian experts from Eglin, one of whom Dar knew slightly. They had been briefed only on the target’s basic capabilities. As to the unspoken details, an Air Force colonel observed dryly, “Tonight’s story in the Atlanta Constitution about that missing stealth airplane with the hostage is, we can all agree, purest coincidence. Right?”
No one smiled or answered him aloud. Dar’s silent answer was, You only thought you were a career man, Colonel Koons.
The mounting of machine guns would have taken too long; rocket pods even longerto Dar’s intense relief. It was Dar’s civilian acquaintance, Ernie Evanchow, whose solution came from left field. Short and grizzled like Ullmer, but with a young man’s quickness, Evanchow suddenly sat up straight after an hour of silent slouching. He spent a minute slashing feverishly on a piece of paper with a flowpen before holding up a sketch.
The sketch depicted a tiny parachute with a very long wire hanging beneath. “Hanging from the wire is United Technology’s latest caper, gentlemen,” Evanchow said, using the flowpen as a pointer. “The size of a rolled newspaper, mass about four kilos; sensor sets it off when it’s thirty meters above the ground. They’re airdropped from a munition pod the size of a barrel, about a hundred to the pod. Antipersonnel, actually. We call it Project Buckshot and we’ve got four pods at Eglin. Each of these little rounds is actually a submunition; it fires steel cubes downward in a conic pattern. Best of all, the firing sensor is sonic. Even if your airplane is plastic, it should bounce an echo.” He stopped, then said, as if passing on a tidbit of rare entertainment, “But the round wouldn’t have to fire to bring down a light aircraft.”
Only Ullmer got it at first. “You don’t even have to energize the warheads,” he said, “if the wire’s long enough.”
“Wire’s two hundred meters long”Evanchow nodded“hundreds of feet of wire hanging down with the live round on one end and a little drag chute on the other. Anything that flies through a forest of those little beauties will end up dragging ‘em along, chutes and all. Hell of a lot of drag, probably enough to bring the target mushing down pretty fast. If the pilot were good enough, he might manage a landing he could walk away from. Take us hours to disarm those warheads, though.”
Dar: “How many hours?”
Evanchow, after a brief mental calculation: “Three, maybe four per pod. You don’t want to rush that kind of work.”
“I say, go to it,” Dar announced.
Ben Ullmer, sitting next to Dar, spoke very softly into his ear. “This is the sticky point. Think about Sheppard’s reaction when he learns we’ve disarmed them all.”
The others were pretending not to listen. “You know what I’m thinking about, Ben.”
“So am I. So let’s ask for twice as many Buckshot pods as they can disarm before dawn. We take both kinds. We try the disarmed type first, if we get Corbett where we want him.”
And that was how it happened that each sturdy old P2V was loaded with one fully-armed Buckshot pod and one with disarmed rounds.
Before the supper he did not really want and the sterile room in officer quarters that he honestly dreaded as only a lonely man can, Dar checked in with Terry Unruh on a line that was both secure and scrambled. “You know where I’ll be,” he said after answering Unruh’s first questions, “so don’t hesitate to call me if anything breaks. I’ll be airborne by seven a.m.”
Unruh: “Only one more thing so far; a third sighting, I’m afraid.”
Dar, elated: “Afraid, hell! When and where?”
“About six this evening, by a Florida state patrolman who was looking up at a Peterbilt cab when your man Corbett flew over, heading south. I interviewed him myself, Hornet. The man hunts, and he knows a vulture from an eagle, or claims he does. Says this wasn’t anything he’d ever seen and its tail feathers didn’t look right, which made him think of a bulletin he’d seen when he went on-shift. He said, and I quote, ‘God damn if it didn’t just pop into sight like a ghost, tryin’ to look like a buzzard.’ I suspect Corbett has found out how to use that chameleon mode; Sheppard’s certain of it.”