He helped McLanahan to his feet and led him to the open cargo ramp at the rear of the Osprey. He was strapped in beside Briggs at the flight-engineer’s station.
“Headquarters building,” Briggs radioed to the pilot. “Helipad one should be big enough for the Osprey—”
“No,” Patrick said. “I want to go to the hangar ramp. Right now.”
“General Elliott is waiting—”
“I’m not going to supervise a bunch of guys crawling around in the mud, putting little flags on chunks of metal and body parts. We know what happened to the Megafortress — James shot her down, he killed six people, he damn near killed my wife … I want to go to the hangar ramp right now. That’s an order.”
Briggs shook off his immediate surprise at Patrick calling Wendy his wife. He pushed his boom microphone away from his lips and bent closer to Patrick. “You know me better than that. I take orders from Elliott, and sometimes not from him. It’s how I do my job. Tell me what you want and convince me it’s better than what the man with the four stars wants.”
“Hal, believe me, DreamStar will blow right past the F-15s out of Davis-Monthan.”
“Eight jockeys in Eagle Squadron won’t buy that.”
“Listen, I’ve flown against DreamStar for a year. If DreamStar has any more weapons on board, a whole air wing of F-15s won’t be able to bring him down. Even if he doesn’t, James has the skill and the hardware to evade them. Those pilots have never seen DreamStar in action. If the F-15s can’t bring him down before he enters Mexican airspace, he’ll lose them.”
“So what are you going to—?” Briggs cut himself off. It wasn’t hard to figure out what McLanahan wanted to do— “you’re gonna take Cheetah …?”
“It’s the only fighter that can take on DreamStar head-to-head. And J. C. Powell is the only pilot that can do it. I want Powell and Sergeant Butler to meet me at Hangar Four with a fuel truck. If he can, I want Butler to get MMS out there with missiles or at least some twenty-millimeter cannon shells.”
“And then what? Chase him down? He’s got a huge lead on you; you won’t stand a chance—”
“He’s only got two hours’ worth of fuel on board, maybe less,” Patrick said. “He’s got to land it somewhere.”
“How the hell are you supposed to know where?”
“Those air defense units will be tracking him. They’ll be able to pinpoint his location, even three or four hundred miles into Mexico. If he tries to land we’ll know about it. And unless he’s removed or deactivated them, Cheetah has telemetry and tracking equipment on board that can direct us toward him. But we need to act now, Hal. If we wait he could get clean away. The Mexicans aren’t going to be much help. They don’t exactly love us anymore.”
Briggs paused. McLanahan was obviously beside himself over the crash, and about Wendy — did he say his wife? — but what he was saying did make sense. If Dreamland’s security forces couldn’t stop DreamStar, there seemed little chance that a squadron of Air Force reservists from Arizona could do it.
Hal looked at Patrick. “You said your wife?”
“We were married two days ago. We were going to tell everybody tonight.” They were both silent for a moment, then Patrick asked: “How about it, Hal?”
Briggs thought about it a few moments longer, then nodded. “Hey, you’re a colonel, Colonel.” He reached over to the flight-engineer’s console, flicked a switch on the communications panel, dialed in channel eight — the discrete channel for the flight-line maintenance section. “I was told to deliver you a message from the general and assist you in complying with those orders. You can do anything you want. Talk on the radio, tell Butler to do something. Look here, this radio was even on Butler’s frequency, you can plug in and talk to him any time you want.”
Briggs swiveled his microphone back and hit the interphone button. “Pilot, looks like I might have miscalculated. This Osprey is too big to land on the Headquarters helipad.”
“No, Major,” the pilot radioed back. “It’s plenty big enough. I can—”
“I don’t think we can chance it. Some pretty strong gusts kicking up out there.”
“It’s clear and calm, Major Briggs.”
“Better not chance it. Drop us off at the hangar ramp.”
The pilot shrugged, keyed his radio button to request different landing instructions.
McLanahan clicked on the radio. “Delta, this is Charlie on channel eight. How copy?”
A few moments later Sergeant Ray Butler replied: “This is Delta mobile, sir. Go ahead.”
McLanahan glanced at the navigation readout on the flight engineer’s console. “I’m fifteen minutes from touchdown on the hangar ramp, Ray. Meet me at Hangar Four. Repeat, Hangar Four in fifteen mike. Urgent. Over.”
“Fifteen mike at Hangar Four. Copy that,” Butler replied. “Does this have to do with our recent fireworks here, sir?”
“It does, Delta. You may want to see that the ramp is clear in front of Hangar Four. Over.”
“I understand, Charlie. I’ll be ready. Delta out.”
Twelve minutes later the Osprey set down in the center of the hangar ramp and carefully taxied over to Hangar Four. McLanahan disembarked the cargo ramp and found an army of maintenance trucks surrounding the hangar. Cheetah had already been rolled out of the hangar and a fuel line had been hooked up to its single-point refueling receptacle on the left-side service panel.
Sergeant Butler trotted up to a surprised McLanahan with a sheaf of papers on a clipboard and a pen. “You must’ve forgotten to sign all these requests for maintenance support, sir,” he said with a straight face. “You made this request last week—don’t know how we missed getting all this signed off.” McLanahan nodded — obviously Butler wanted the same thing he did, but he was still going to make sure his paperwork was straight. “You wanted gas, long-range fuel tanks, five hundred rounds uploaded with the M61B2 cannon, two AIM-9R infrared short-range missiles and four AIM-120 medium-range active radar missiles. I got everything? Oh, you also wanted that video camera taken off, didn’t you? Good. Sign here.”
McLanahan signed all the blocks. “Thank you, sir,” Butler said. “Sorry about the paperwork shuffle, sir. My mistake. Won’t happen again … I trust you’ll take care of any problems General Elliott might have with my … procedures.”
“Nothing wrong with your procedures, Sergeant.”
Butler allowed a smile. “Have a good flight, and good hunting. We should be ready to go in twenty minutes, maybe less. Captain Powell is over there. I’m very sorry about the Megafortress, sir. Well, gotta go.” Butler handed Patrick his flight helmet, saluted and trotted back to the maintenance supervisor’s truck.
J. C. Powell met McLanahan halfway to Cheetah. He slapped his hands together. “We’re going hunting?”
“If I don’t my get ass court-martialed first, yes.”
“I heard Ken James stole the plane? I don’t believe it. I always suspected the guy was a little whacked out but not this …”
“He’s more than a little whacked out. He’s jumped head-first into the shallow end, or something a lot worse.”
“Such as?”
“Something Briggs said a few days ago … that his security problems started when James arrived at Dreamland about a year and a half ago. Briggs even suspected Wendy, who happened to get here at the same time.”
“You mean, you think Ken James was some kind of damn spy?”
“It would answer a lot of questions, wouldn’t it?”
“The guy’s an Academy grad, passed every security screening check I have — probably more. I’m only a ninety-day wonder and I had to jump through some pretty small hoops—”