There was a curse that came with knowledge. If Bud were to let it stop here, with him, it might be over, and any crucifixion for nondisclosure could be absorbed by him. But that held as much appeal as his old days in Wild Weasels. Soaking up the heat for someone else went against his grain, and that was what would be truly counterproductive. The truth was that it was just too risky to inform the president. Bud could take the rap if it ever did come out, but suspicion would always lead to the president. The damage would be done — and severe. But then it might just bury itself.
“It’s a no-win situation,” Bud observed. “A shitty no-win situation. All in all I’m glad you filled me in, but I didn’t expect it to start like this.”
“D.C. is no Disneyland,” the DDI pointed out. “This is not a fairy tale.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Bud’s sarcasm was directed to no one. “I guess I should have expected less from the brochures.” He rubbed his smooth upper lip while thinking, but the decision was already made. He was just trying to reconcile it with his conscience. “Okay…this stays in this room. If it ever becomes necessary I will inform the president myself. My gut tells me otherwise, but this seems like the best course.” Bud stood, as did the DDI. “I just hope it is.
“Well, I’ve got to get going.” He didn’t but he had to get out of that room. Out of that building.
“Bud, thanks for coming over.” The DCI offered his hand. Bud accepted it, shaking the DDI’s next.
“Thank you, Herb…Greg. Maybe next time it’ll be something mild, like an increase in Chinese SSBN deployment.”
The DCI laughed. “Okay. We’ll see if we can arrange that for you.”
The acting NSA left and was airborne a few minutes later, heading back to the White House through an early-autumn storm. Drummond returned to his office, leaving the director of Central Intelligence alone at his desk. He turned again toward the window and thought for some time of the topic at hand. It made him mad as hell that someone with his authority could go off like a loose cannon and leave the mess for others to clean up. But that was the reality of government. That drew a private smile. His predecessor was enjoying a lucrative slot on the lecture circuit, reportedly pulling down twenty grand a speech. A couple of engagements would buy a lot of coffins.
Maybe, though, it would be over now. Who could pay? No one, he believed, so what was the point in looking back. It was over. Done.
He could not have been more wrong.
Two
ABOVE AND BELOW
The deep shadows of the coming summer evening stretched out from the Greek coast to cover the Aegean Sea in an eerie blue incandescence as the light danced rapidly from the earth below. Andros, a larger island in the chain of many smaller ones, was directly beneath the Clipper Atlantic Maiden as she descended gracefully toward Athens, her stop for the night. She floated downward, the sun low on the horizon but still gleaming brightly off her shiny surfaces. Her sister ship, the Clipper Angelic Pride, was some forty nautical miles behind on a flight from New Delhi, though she would be doing a quick turnaround and flying on to the States overnight, New York being her final destination. The Atlantic Maiden, inbound from Beijing, would continue on across her namesake ocean the next morning on her somewhat special flight.
Captain Bart Hendrickson, the picture of a sturdy Nordic American, loved his job and especially the Maiden, as he called his plane. It was not just his plane. Other pilots flew her, as was the norm in the scheduling of flight crews in the operations of the larger carriers, but he had been very fortunate to rotate into the Maiden two times out of every three over the last nine months.
She was a new — in aircraft life — Boeing 747–400, one of the more recent generation of jet airliners that relied on new technologies to enhance their performance and extend their useful life. The bulk of the advancements were on the flight deck, the cockpit, which now required a crew of just two: the pilot and a first officer. Use of video display-type screens for nearly all of the instrumentation and the condensation and restructuring of information presentation had allowed for a reduction in the crew size from the old four. The move was fought tooth and nail by the pilots’ unions, who claimed that it would be a safety risk. Captain Hendrickson knew that claim for what it was: a complaint that jobs would be sacrificed and the ladder to reach the pinnacle of flying, a captaincy, would have a discouragingly large number of rungs added to it. In the major airlines a pilot could wait up to thirty years to command a jumbo jet. Elimination of the flight engineer position on the flight deck would reduce the number of entry slots and the need for pilots. It was a wise economic move for the carriers to appropriate planes such as the 747–400 and its newer and smaller cousins. Profit margins were shrinking in the industry, making every penny count. Bart Hendrickson, fifty-eight, blond with no hint of gray, and a wearer of the coveted bird wings for thirty-two years didn’t care much for the financial or economic reasons for the changes. The main thing was that he felt flying was safer and, as important, more fun.
“Bart, number three is showing that four percent drop in compression again,” First Officer Adam ‘Buzz’ Elkins announced. He was an old Marine — one was never an ex-Marine — as his taut upper body and the now graying crewcut attested. There hadn’t been a day since his first at Parris Island twenty-two years before that he had let his hair grow beyond the half-inch needles that they were. His brown eyes, set into a tanned face, were passionless, but read like a novel when emotion spurred them.
The captain looked at the engine performance indicator. In earlier days he might have thumped the glass-covered gauge with a finger, but now the needle was represented by a slim video image on the display, and that was merely for quick reference; the digital readout above each engine’s indicator rendered an exact measurement. “It’s probably the compressor.”
“Again. Oh well.” Buzz was not surprised with the problem. The Maiden had needed the primary compressor replaced twice before in the number three engine, the last time less than five months earlier. “Athens doesn’t have the facilities for us.”
“Yeah.” That was one problem, the captain thought. Not every airport could service some of the newer jets. “What was the max flux in compression?”
“Just four percent,” Buzz answered. “Passing one-two- thousand.”
“Roger.” Hendrickson pressed the mike switch, opting for manual operation instead of ‘hot mike,’ which continuously transmitted everything said. Most crews did the same, except in busy times. The ground didn’t need to hear all that was said upstairs. “Athens approach — Four-Two-Two heavy passing one-two-thousand.”
“Roger, Four-Two-Two heavy. Maintain descent to four thousand. Enter pattern on eastern leg at six thousand. Maintain heading until coastal VOR intersect.”
“Roger, Athens. Descending to four thousand. Maintaining two-eight-zero to VOR intersect.”
“Inbound, five-zero miles.” Buzz called out the distance to ‘wheels down.’
Hendrickson acknowledged the announcement, smiling at the half-oval glow where earth met sky. Even glitches couldn’t dampen his spirit, nor the growing sense of nostalgia he was experiencing. The big, beautiful 747–400 could just as easily have been an old Lockheed Constellation, his first command in the Air Force. That moment flashed back in his mind. God! Had it been that long?