“Unfortunately an American is an unacceptable witness in our military court of law,” Tcharin said, “but I believe we have a deal … Colonel McLanahan, the XF-34 is armed with twenty-millimeter shells, two radar-guided missiles and two infrared-guided missiles — not the most modern Soviet weapons but proved effective against your F-16s over the Caribbean. One more item: Maraklov is wounded. We have tested and found his blood at a site here in Sebaco as well as the blood of one of his victims. You have clearance to transit Nicaraguan airspace west and south of Bluefields. Costa Rican approach control frequency for crossing border restricted airspace MRR Three is one-one-nine point six, El Coco Control.”
And the channel went dead. McLanahan told the computer to set the frequency, and he checked the computer flight-information database and double-checked the flight information files for Costa Rica — Tcharin’s information seemed right on.
“Well, you wanted a plan, Marcia,” he said as they approached the border. “I never expected to get it from the Russians, but we’ll take it.”
Pain. Intense, burning.
For at least the past year the pain that always came to Andrei Maraklov when the ANTARES interface was completed was fairly easy to suppress. The concentration and the exhilaration of flying a machine like DreamStar usually did the trick, but this time it wasn’t working. Obviously the shoulder wound was the culprit. Every time he thought about his throbbing left shoulder his body would receive a jolt of pain from the ANTARES system.
So far it didn’t seem to affect his flying performance or his ability to monitor his ship’s functions. In spite of the hard flying that DreamStar had done during the past week she was running perfectly. Her automatic monitors detected a higher than normal level of metal particles in the oil, suggesting an overdue engine overhaul or contaminated oil; other systems detected clogged fuel-metering systems from dirty fuel, moisture in computer components and a few loose panels. He made a mental command to have a list of these items recorded and played back to him just before the next shut-down, to remind him to have them checked. It was a long list, but Maraklov told himself he would have time to check over his bird. In any case, these minor discrepancies did not seem to be affecting DreamStar’s performance.
He was flying in the deep mountain valleys of the Cordillera de Guanacaste mountains of northwestern Costa Rica, staying as low as possible to avoid detection from radar sites at Santa Maria International Airport to the east and Lomas Guardia International to the west. Although Costa Rica had an air force deployed at Santa Maria Airport and a few other small training bases, it was made up of a handful of aging American-built F-5 day VFR fighters to scare away drug smugglers, plus several single-engine piston prop planes for surveillance. The federal military forces were very small — the nation’s popular phrase nowadays was “we have more teachers than soldiers,” and fortunately for him that was true.
It was also true in Costa Rica that most provincial and municipal security (it could not be called “law and order”) came from privately funded and equipped armies, which was legal in this country of only three million people. If you were rich enough you could own a good-sized town in Costa Rica, which could eventually turn into one’s own little nation — including one’s own army, and it was legal for certain citizens to make their own stamps, set prices, deal with other countries, appoint their own judges and mayors.
One such privately owned city-state was Venado, a thirty-thousand-acre plantation in the heart of the Guanacaste Mountains. Two thousand people lived and worked on this plantation, nearly half of whom were soldiers. The entire plantation, the well-equipped army and the airport within it were all funded and maintained by the KGB, one of dozens of secret KGB bases scattered over the world, bases so secret, so well disguised, that most party members outside of a few ranking officers in the KGB knew nothing about them. This was Maraklov’s destination.
Finding the airport was no problem, but making an approach to it in daytime without being seen was going to be difficult. Maraklov had already had to weave around scores of private airstrips dotting the San Juan Valley and the northern Costa Rican jungles to stay out of sight; he could not afford just to shoot directly into Venado, with some farmer or peasant watching his approach and blabbing to his boss or the police. Maraklov’s plan was to hug the northeast rim of the Guanacaste Mountains, stay as deep in the valleys as possible, sweep around the valleys to the southwest and then come back up over Venado from the west. This way, he should be shrouded by mountains almost all the way to landing.
There was another summer storm brewing out over the Pacific to the west as Maraklov started his low-altitude swing to the southeast along the mountain range. His holographic display showed slivers of surveillance radar above him, but most of the energy was blocked out by the tall mountains of central Costa Rica. The area was sparsely settled, but occasional glances out the cockpit showed a few very beautiful haciendas below, where men had retaken the jungle and turned it into lush fields of coffee or fruit. Maraklov throttled back on the power as much as possible, balancing his energy to avoid making as much noise as possible but keeping up his speed to avoid letting anyone on the ground get a good look at him.
The inertial navigation computer warned Maraklov that its precision was not great enough to find Venado with less than the usual quarter-mile accuracy, and since the satellite-navigation unit was unavailable for use (it required a daily code) it recommended that the attack radar be activated in ground-mapping mode to update the computer’s position. Any radar emissions were dangerous, but Maraklov had no choice — DreamStar was not the type of aircraft specifically designed for pilotage or for navigating by use of visual references.
He allowed the computer to activate the radar, which transmitted in thirty-mile range for five seconds, then went back to standby. DreamStar steered west-southwest for a few miles, until the very rim of a beautiful mountain lake could be seen, then began a right turn on top of a ridge-line toward Venado. After an instantaneous mental inquiry he knew that they were exactly four point one nautical miles from the center of the runway. One pass over the field was all it would take to make a radar survey of the field for landing data, and the computer would do the rest. The turbofan engine throttled back to seventy-five percent, the canards moved from cruise position to high-lift position, and the mission-adaptive wings began to reshape for approach speed-
“DreamStar, this is Cheetah on GUARD channel. We’ve found you.
The sudden radio message screamed in Maraklov’s brain like a siren. Instinctively he increased power to ninety percent and reshaped the wings and moved the canards back to high-speed, high-maneuverability position, ready to evade a missile or gun attack. The attack radar also activated in air-to-air search mode for three seconds before Maraklov commanded it to stand by — at this altitude he would see very little on radar, while his own radar energy could be seen for miles by aircraft at higher altitude. He also punched off the Lluyka tanks in preparation for the fight — he hoped he could somehow fool Kalinin into getting him another pair of external fuel tanks. As for Cheetah, by denying DreamStar a long-range cruise capability once again, it had already won a considerable victory.
Maraklov found it hard to believe. Cheetah? Cheetah was here? How was that possible? Who was flying it?
“Got him,” Marcia said. “Brief airborne search radar at one o’clock position. Hot damn. This time the Russians were telling the truth.”