The decision made, his mind started to range. The delegation was arriving in an American C-144, the transport version of their Hustler bomber. Another sign of who was really behind this sudden offer. He guessed the moment the Triple Alliance got the information they needed, that aircraft would be off to Washington, on full reheat all the way. Or at least as far as its fuel tanks would take it. Hawaii perhaps?
Now logically, he should make the Triple Alliance negotiators sweat blood for the data but was that really such a good idea? If he gave them the information they asked, as earnest money so to speak, the Americans would get it faster and speed was of the essence. That would allow The Triple Alliance to score markers with the Americans and they would owe Taiwan for those markers.
If he looked at the short term, he could screw down the prices the Triple Alliance was demanding. He looked at the list again. The Australians wanted how much for a Monash II? He shuddered at the number. But the medium and long term suggested that giving the information would be the better deal. The revered Admiral Yamamoto had been a great poker player, Soriva thought. Time to follow his example and gamble. It never hurt to be an American friend, one only had to look at Russia to see that.
Soriva sighed and wrote out an order for his technical staff to prepare a package of documentation on the fire control system for the Hiryu long-range anti-aircraft missile, the Katana medium-range and the Tanto short-range missiles. He thought for less than an instant and specifically added instructions to include the operational details of the new electro-optical adjunct to the guidance system for each.
That matter concluded. Soriva moved to more traditional affairs. Kawachi had been refloated and towed into Kaohsiung harbor. She was repairable although the work would take years. Nevertheless it would be done. One day, she would be the flagship of the Taiwan fleet, and one day, somehow, somewhen, she would regain her place in the Imperial Navy. One day.
Iwate International Airport, Taipei, Taiwan
International was a joke. The airport was a single runway, a single building, a shambles of wrecked and semi-scrapped aircraft and a handful of decrepit but workable ones. The airport building was shabby, the paint peeling of its walls, the door not quite properly on its hinges. Amongst the decaying disorder, the sleek Superstream looked horrendously uncomfortable, rather like a gently-raised heiress who suddenly found herself living in a skid row hostel, which, if anybody had asked the aircraft, was exactly how she did feel.
The delegation from The Triple Alliance emerged from the cramped interior of the executive jet to the cavalcade of cars that awaited them. As they came down, a group of sailors started unloading packages of books from a van and taking them to the pod under the C-144 that served as its cargo bay. The Ambassador grimaced and gave Sir Eric a US hundred dollar bill. She’d gambled Soriva would make them sweat for the information and it wasn’t often she lost a bet.
Once again she reminded herself not to underestimate the man, his inoffensive air as a genial if slightly naive civil servant was belied by the fact that he had been the head of the Indian intelligence services for more than a decade and nobody held that position without being both skilled and ruthless. About the only mistake she knew he had made was his assumption that she’d had something to do with the death of John F Kennedy. She hadn’t, his death really had been an accident, but Sir Eric had never quite believed that. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t considered the possibility but she had decided that the potential risks far outweighed the possible gains.
As the delegation drove off to start the tortuous negotiations, the C-144 turned around to take off again with its vital load of manuals and documentation. On one point, Admiral Soriva had been wrong. The aircraft would not fly on full reheat all the way back to Washington It couldn’t, it didn’t have the fuel. Instead it was heading back to Clark Field in the Philippines. There, the YB-70 was waiting for the cargo and it would make the flight back to Washington at full speed. The YB-70 could do something that the C-144 could only dream about, it could cruise at speeds well over Mach 3. It was a strange fact that the YB-70 consumed less fuel per mile at Mach 3 plus than it did at subsonic speeds. To all intents and purposes, the YB-70s cruising speed was its maximum speed. That meant it cruised almost a thousand miles per hour faster than the C-144. The result of that differential was that the flight from Clark Field to Washington would take less than six hours.
CHAPTER SEVEN: RECOVERY
Sinai Desert, south of Gaza.
“She’s gone Mike, we can’t change that. We’ve got to get out of here. That fire is a ‘Come get us’ sign for everybody in a hundred miles.”
Eddie Korrina was right and Kozlowski knew it. The column of smoke over Marisol’s wreckage was rising hundreds of feet into the air. The crew had made a beautiful eject, landing a couple of miles away from the crash site yet within visual distance of each other. Dravar and Korrina had walked over to where Kozlowski was sitting on the sand, watching the smoke rising over Marisol’s grave. He was staring at the site, hardly aware of anything else. Then, he shook himself and stood up.
“I know, I know. It’s just, you know. I just feel there should have been something we could have done, they shouldn’t have taken us down like that. Not a bunch of Caffs.”
“Mike, there wasn’t anything we could do. We were way too low and way too slow and the Caffs hit us with something we’d never met before. There was nothing we could have done.”
Kozlowski shook his head, he felt as if a part of his soul had been ripped out. “I know that as well. We’ve got to get back and tell the brainiacs what happened so they can work out why it happened. By the way I don’t know which one of you banged us all out but it was a good call. The rate we were spinning, another split second and the G-force would have been too high for an eject.”
The other two crewmen looked at each other, confused. “Mike, we thought you ejected us. I was still trying to identify the signal on that damned missile when the seat fired.”
Kozlowski frowned, Marisol’s last scream was still echoing in his ears. “Guys, it’s getting close to sunset. We’ll head west until midnight then swing to the coast. The Caffs know the book as well as we do, they’ll be expecting us to go straight for the sea. They’ll have patrols out to intercept us. There are a lot of bad people out there who’d just love to get their hands on any SAC crew let alone one from an RB-58 outfit. So we’ll head west then north. Standard beacon drill. Two minutes transmission every twenty minutes but we’ll hold off for a couple of hours. Then I’ll transmit on the hour, Eddie, twenty minutes past, Xav, 40 minutes past. The SEALs will be looking for us, if they aren’t ashore by now they soon will be. Let’s go guys.”
The crew set off, walking towards the setting sun and being careful to avoid getting skylined as they crossed the dune lines. Being silhouetted against the setting sun might look dramatic but it was terminally unsmart. Ahead, the red disk was just touching the horizon, behind them, Marisol’s funeral pyre still stretched into the darkening sky.
Sinai Coast, south of Gaza.
Most traffic accidents happen at dusk. When the sun sets, the weakening light isn’t strong enough to activate one set of receptors in the eye but is too strong for the other. Evolution designed the human eye to work in daylight or at night and, given a chance, it works fairly well in both. But, dusk is the gap between and there, the eye doesn’t work very well at all. It flickers between its two optimum settings, detail is washed out, depth perception is messed up. The eye makes shapes out of random patterns and makes random patterns out of shapes. It sees things that aren’t there and fails to notice the things that are. Dusk was a very good time for the SEALs to do their thing.