Skyhook (15 page)

“No accounting for the political world, Lou.”

“Amen.”

“I’m in flight right now and hustling my tail back there for that very reason, to get this thing stamped and sealed at the final briefing in the morning. I assume the list of attendees will be the same as we discussed?”

“Bad assumption.”

“Really?”

General Lou Cassidy sighed on the other end. “I just found this out ten minutes ago, Mac, but the Secretary of Defense has postponed the acceptance briefing for two days. It’ll be Friday now.”

“But… that’s right up against the deadline.”

“Can’t be helped. The secretary is requiring everyone to be there, beginning with himself, the joint chiefs, our mild-mannered Air Force secretary, and the other key uniformed players, and they can’t all make it in the morning. In fact, the secretary is in London.”

Mac sat in thought for a few seconds. “Okay, if we’ve got two days, let me keep this plane and crew and take them back home. I can use the time better back in Anchorage.”

“Suit yourself. Just be here on time. I can’t unveil and approve this without my project commander.”

Mac replaced the receiver and got to his feet as the copilot came out of the cockpit. “Ah, just the man I was coming to see.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Turn us around, please, Lieutenant. Back to Elmendorf. You fellows will lay over for forty-eight hours, and then we’ll try it again. The meeting’s been postponed.”

The copilot’s face fell slightly, but he nodded without protest and returned to the cockpit as Mac sat down next to his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Jon Anderson, repeating the news. “I know these boys were expecting to be home tonight, but it can’t be helped.”

“Just as well, sir,” Anderson replied, watching the boss raise an eyebrow. “We’ve got something going on I need to brief you about.”

“What’s up?”

“Sir, do you recall yesterday I mentioned that we had learned of the loss of a civilian aircraft, an old private amphibian, that went down in the general vicinity of where our test flight was Monday night?”

“Yes. And I asked you if we could have had anything to do with it, and you said no. You’re not telling me there’s a change in that assessment?”

“No, sir. But there’s more you need to hear.”

“Go on.”

Anderson outlined the basics of the Albatross’s loss and what the NTSB had discovered so far. “They’re pretty sure the airline pilot who owned it just got sloppy, tried some scud-hopping, got too low, and caught a wingtip.”

“What’s your point, Jon?”

He sighed. “I’m not sure there is one, sir, other than to keep you completely in the loop. But things are unfolding a bit in Anchorage. The man’s daughter flew in yesterday, and so far she’s visited the FAA and the Coast Guard, apparently looking for radar tapes that might show the track of her father’s aircraft.”

Mac sat forward. “Radar tapes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s she trying to prove?”

“That her father wasn’t negligent, I suppose. She thinks one of his propellers may have hit a ship in the fog, causing the crash.

That’s why she went to the Coast Guard. They reported that over to us.”

“Did they help her? Did they … give her any tapes?”

He shook his head.

“How about the FAA air traffic control people?”

Again the lieutenant colonel shook his head, this time with a mild smile. “She hasn’t asked for the Coast Guard tapes directly yet, but we expect she will.”

“What’s her name?”

“April Rosen. She’s an American, living in Vancouver, Canada.

Twenty-six years old. A young corporate staff vice-president for one of the U.S. cruise ship lines that’s based there.”

Mac nodded. “And did her dad hit a ship?”

“Probably. But the FAA thinks he was just being reckless.”

“But… what’s worrying you, and now me, is that any of those radar tapes could reveal our test aircraft’s presence in the same area and at a very low altitude. That could spark questions we don’t want, especially not at this late date.”

Jon Anderson was nodding. “Yes, sir. My concern exactly. Our security people have been watching her, and from all indications this young lady is sharp and very persistent, and I believe she poses a threat to the program.”

“That’s a premature conclusion, Jon. I mean, she can think whatever she wants and ask as many questions as she wants. What would

worry me is her getting hold of any real evidence leading to some cage rattling and maybe some media action, and before we know it, they’re stumbling onto our sideshow and getting a few foreign intelligence services interested. Can we somehow help this young woman secretly without tipping our hand? You know, silently make sure she gets what she needs in terms of radar tapes without revealing our presence?”

Anderson sighed and chewed his lip. “I don’t know, sir. We don’t know what’s on those tapes. But you need to know that the FAA’s apparently become a wild card in this.” He outlined the hospital-room confrontation between Walter Harrison and Captain Arlie Rosen.

“How do we know about this, Jon?” Mac asked, cocking his head slightly and draining the remainder of the diet Coke. “I assume we don’t have surveillance cameras in every hospital room in Anchorage.”

“That would be an interesting thought, sir. Scary, but interesting.”

“I’m watching you, Anderson,” Mac said, pointing two fingers at him with one eye closed in mock seriousness.

Jon Anderson laughed and shook his head. “We found out by pure chance. The representative of the National Transportation Safety Board is a friend of one of our program security men. They play racquetball together, and I’m told the NTSB guy was very upset about the interview and very talkative.”

“Loose lips.”

“Sorry?”

Mac laughed. “Oh. An old World War Two expression. And before you ask and insult me, the answer is no, I’m far too young to have been in World War Two.”

“I have a career, sir. I wasn’t about to make any snide comments … that your hearing aid might pickup.”

“I heard that! The actual phrase was Loose lips sink ships,” and it’s still valid. That’s why it’s so damned hard to run a black project in the middle of a civilian community. I’m amazed we’ve done as well as we have in the past three years, with only one significant security breach.”

The cabin steward appeared silently with another diet Coke and Mac took it as he shook his head, his eyes falling on a striking twilight painting of the Washington Monument mounted on the aft bulkhead of the cabin.

“I suppose I don’t have to say, Jon, that we need to watch both this Harrison character and Ms. Rosen very carefully.”

“No, sir, you don’t, and our security people will.”

“I worry about security being handled by our”—he mouthe the words as if they were sour—“office of special investigations. I don’t want any cowboy lieutenant in civilian clothes getting excited and riding off to do something illegal. But… have them harvest each and every one of the original radar tapes from FAA, Coast Guard, Navy, and whoever else might have electronic evidence of our test flight that evening. Set them up in the briefing room back at El mendorf for tomorrow.”

“General, what do we do if the Gulfstream does show up on one of those radar tapes?”

Mac smiled and shook his head. “Why, there was never any Gulfstream in the area to begin with, was there?”

“Ah, no, sir.”

“Right. So how could it possibly show up on whatever tape we send back?”

Anderson nodded. “Understood.”

“Actually,” Mac added, “we’ll see the raw data radar return on all of them, I suspect, but without a data block generated by a transponder, which we kept off, it’s just another unidentified aircraft flitting around the state. I don’t want to see anything that might lead Ms. Rosen to think we were involved with her father’s plane.” He paused and peered closely at Anderson, who had lowered his eyes. “There isn’t any possibility of that, is there?”

“No, sir, of course not. But I had already figured you’d want those tapes. I’m ready to move on it.” Lieutenant Colonel Anderson began to get up but Mac caught his sleeve, studying his eyes.

“Jon, just a second. You’re sure that we could not have had anything to do with the loss of that Albatross?”

The colonel finished standing and shook his head vigorously. “No, sir. Absolutely not! The coordinates I have for where that ditching, or crash, occurred are a long way away from the surface track of our test Gulfstream.”

“But,” the general said as he raised a finger, “you were concerned enough to check.”

There was a momentary twitch in Anderson’s expression, and Mac noticed. “Jon, look at me. As I told you when you became my aide, I’ve got to know everything you know, without exception. You withhold anything from me, no matter how noble the intent, and I’ll personally ride your shredded ass out of the Air Force.

Understood?”

“Honestly, sir, I’m telling you everything I know, and I would never—”

Mac cut him off with a single look of warning and a raised index finger. “Just get the tapes and set up a secure viewing room for zero eight hundred in the morning.”

chroedinger had spent all afternoon mulling the indignities of the morning and was unprepared for yet another assault on normalcy when Ben burst through the door hours ahead of the schedule.

There were no actual words formed in Schroedinger’s mind to define his discomfited response, merely a disgusted consciousness of the continued attack on the predictability of his world. He would need to find a way to demonstrate his displeasure to Ben, he decided. And there were many options available to a creature with claws in a house with furniture.

“Hi, fellow,” Ben said as he breezed through without so much as a session of ear scratching. Schroedinger watched him charge across the den and pull various things from a desk drawer, things Schroedinger had sniffed before and found uninteresting. Ben, it seemed, liked to pay far more attention to his things and his computer than to his cat, and in a feline frame of reference, such an attitude was simply inexplicable.

The 3,500-square-foot home Ben had purchased for Lisa and himself three months before her death was tucked into a new subdivision on the flanks of the Chugach Mountains bordering the east side of Anchorage. All the way back from the base Ben had been fighting the image of Lisa standing before the picture window in the upper-story den with their real estate agent, squealing with delight at the sweeping view of the city. The decision to buy had been made on the spot, and the night of delighted lovemaking that followed had been a thank-you of sorts.

Ben had tried repeatedly to get the image out of his mind. It inevitably triggered a deep sadness, and a feeling that had been growing precipitously of late, the simple longing for feminine companionship. It was the same disturbing instinct Lindsey had inadvertendy twanged the day before.

So much for that, Ben thought, bitterness overlaying his thoughts of Lindsey. She’d used him, was using him, wagging her shapely tail to keep him under control.

That’s unfair, he corrected himself. She wasn’t making a pass. It was me who was thinking prurient thoughts.

Nonetheless, the sudden loss of trust in what had appeared to be a growing friendship hurt.

The refrigerator yielded a poor selection limited to bottled water and a few soft drinks, and he opted for the water before moving to the living room, aware that he couldn’t recall the details of the drive home. He plopped in the big easy chair Lisa had insisted he buy when they moved in, and wondered who would mourn him if he crashed on the upcoming test flight.

Phyllis, his only sibling, would be momentarily hysterical when the news reached her palatial North Dallas home. With their folks gone, Phyllis would arrange the funeral and make all the requisite noises, but in the end, they had never been close enough as adults for his passing to alter her life.

The flight! There was no doubt that whoever had contaminated the basic program would strike again, and this time succeed. Someone wanted the program to fail and Uniwave to go under. There was no doubt that he and the two pilots would die. And he would be condemning someone else to perish in his place if he elected to stay on the ground.

He glanced over at Schroedinger and smiled, puzzling the cat even more. He needed to make arrangements for Schroedinger, and that thought triggered an image of Nelson, who would be the only Alaskan genuinely saddened by his passing.

Dammit! Nelson had left a message the day before on his voice mail and he’d forgotten to get back to him. Ben came out of the chair with enough haste to startle Schroedinger. He found his handheld database PDA and located Nelson’s cell phone number, then punched it into the portable handset.

Nelson Oolokvit was contemptuous of the label “Eskimo.” Ben remembered his explosion one night at a clumsy question from a California tourist with a dilettante concern for Native Americans.

“If you call me an Eskimo one more time, sister, I’m gonna find an uulu and gut you!” he’d raged, waving a beer in the woman’s face. “Go find yourself a frozen Athabascan to patronize! I’m from Kotzebue. I’m Inupiat. I’ve never lived in a damned igloo, and I know better things to do with a female than rub noses with her, okay?”

“Who’s this?” a voice was saying on the other end of the phone as Ben snapped back to the present. The voice was slightly clipped and accented, the aftereffects of American English overlaid on a childhood of his native tongue.

“Nelson?”

“You called his phone and you’re surprised to get him?” Nelson said, chuckling. “At least I answer my phone, unlike some other people who let machines do it for them.” The sounds of a raucous bar filtered through from the background, voices talking loudly over an even higher volume of a country-and-western song. It was Shania Twain, her words coming through like a coda to the conversation.

“Okay, so you’ve got a car. That don’t impress me much!”

“Nelson, this is Ben.”

“What? It’s too damned loud in here. Who?”

“Ben. BEN COLE.”

“Oh. Ben. Hello. Where are you?”

“At home.”

“Well, get your scrawny computer geek ass down here to Charlie’s and join me for a few beers. I’ll even buy you a Guinness if you’ll actually drink it this time.”