Avery, the deputy commander, was earthside, on a week’s leave, and Overton was the man in charge. The commander of Themis was forty-four years old and carried the image of that fatherly airliner captain. He had dark hair graying nicely at the temples and steady gray eyes. At six-four, he was tall but solidly built.
He looked around from his station near the porthole as McKenna floated into the center.
“Your birds all sound, Kevin?”
“We may have to change a radio on Red, but otherwise, we’re in great shape, Jim.”
“Good. I think Colonel Pearson is going to want you to wring them out a little.”
McKenna grinned. “How come she always gets what she wants?”
Pearson stuck her head out of her cubicle, then pushed her way out of it. “Because I know what I’m doing, McKenna.”
The light blue jumpsuit did nice things for her.
And for McKenna.
She also wore a matching headband to hold all that gorgeous red hair in place since gravity wouldn’t do it for her.
“Of course you do, Amy. I trust you.”
“That’s a one-way street,” she told him.
McKenna sighed and thought, one of these days…
At eight in the morning, the sun was already high on Zeigman’s right shoulder. It was not as high as it would have been if he were flying at a normal altitude.
The sea was sixty feet below, the white caps visible, the spray glinting as a twenty-knot wind whipped the waves. On his left oblique, dark storm clouds were brewing, their tops roiling, but they were a couple hundred miles away. He would be long gone before the squalls hit.
He had picked up the crosswind half an hour before and had had to alter his course a little. The airplane was skittish at this altitude if he got his left wing too low.
Skittish airplanes never bothered Mac Zeigman. He had been flying since he was fifteen, taught by an uncle from Hannover in an old Aeronica. By the age of eighteen, he had commercial and instrument ratings, as well as some experience flying helicopters and jet aircraft. For six years, he had roamed the world, flying whatever presented itself, for whatever the client would pay.
Zeigman’s given names were actually Gustav Matthew, but an Australian he had met in Pakistan had decided on, “Hey, Mac,” and he had adopted it. He had never considered himself a Gustav or a Matthew, anyway.
Wherever he was in the world, Zeigman lived his life to the full, and it had aged him quickly. At thirty-two, his life was mapped in the small burst veins of his nose and upper cheeks. His face had a red glow resulting from rich food, Kentucky bourbon, Japanese wine, and good German beer. What had once been a relatively handsome face sagged a little now. There were bags under his washed brown eyes from late party nights and early flight mornings. His hair was thick and dark and widow-peaked. The body was still hard and lean, with only a bit of a paunch. He burned off calories with steady work and frequent high-adrenaline escapades. His work was what he loved.
And for the past five years, his work had been steady. Zeigman had been recruited by Oberst Albert Weismann to a direct commission as a hauptmann in the German air force, and a year later, promoted to major. Since he was already a squadron commander, he expected to be an oberstleutnant very soon.
Weismann commanded the Zwanzigste Speziell Aeronautisch Gruppe (20.S.A.G.), comprised of Zeigman’s Erst Schwadron, Metzenbaum’s Zweite Schwadron, a transport squadron, and a helicopter unit. The air group supported the GUARDIAN PROJECT and was based at New Amsterdam Air Force Base near Bremerhaven. The seaport offered Zeigman nearly any form of revelry he could have hoped for.
The Luftwaffe offered him the kind of flying he required.
Zeigman’s squadron was equipped with twelve Panavia Tornados. A multination, multicompany — Aeritalia, British Aerospace, and Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm — design and production effort, the Tornado met several combat roles. It was equally capable of battlefield interdiction, counter-air strike, close air support and air superiority functions. In the ADV (Air Defense Variant) model, originally built for the Royal Air Force, it took on the additional tasks of air defense and interception. The 1st Squadron of the 20th Special Air Group had ADV models.
It was a dual-seat fighter with variable-swept wings, adjustable from 25 to 67 degrees of sweep. A key characteristic was the exceptionally tall vertical stabilizer, also steeply swept back. With Texas Instrument’s forward-looking and groundmapping radar, Foxhunter Doppler navigation radar, and a GEC Avionics terrain-following radar, the Tornado could go almost anywhere its pilot wanted it to go, and in the worst of weather conditions.
And when it got there, it could use its IWKA-Mauser 27 millimeter cannon or any of up to 9,000 kilograms of free-fall, retarded and guided bombs or a variety of air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles. The 1st Squadron’s Tornados were generally armed with air defense weaponry such as the AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles.
And the Tornado got wherever it was going at 2300 kilometers per hour. Major Zeigman loved it.
Frequently, like this morning, Zeigman performed his patrol without his backseater. He preferred solitude when he was flying, and when the visibility was good, he didn’t need the radar or weapons control.
At sea level, Zeigman was using fuel rapidly, though he was holding the fighter at 600 knots, well below its top speed. He did not care. Somewhere, 9,000 meters above him, was his tanker.
When he saw the tip of Svalbard Island rise on the horizon, Zeigman turned to a heading of 340 degrees. Three minutes later, a ship appeared in his windscreen. He adjusted his heading once again, and headed directly for it.
Two miles out, he identified the silhouette as that of the missile cruiser Hamburg, the flagship of der Admiral Gerhard Schmidt. Grinning to himself, he lost yet more altitude, to less than twenty feet above the wave tops.
Obviously, since he had not been challenged, the cruiser’s radar had missed him, lost him in the clutter of radar return off the waves.
Dialing his radio to the frequency assigned to the marine division of the VORMUND PROJEKT, Zeigman thumbed the transmit button on the stick and yelled into his helmet microphone, “BANG!”
He pulled up abruptly, rolled inverted, and passed over the ship, in front of the bridge, fifty feet above the foredeck.
There was consternation on the decks, seamen running wildly about. White faces pressed against the bridge’s windshield, heads swiveling to follow him.
Zeigman gave them the finger, a gesture he had learned from American mercenaries in Zaire and Angola.
Rolling upright, he continued his patrol, and when the radio began to squawk with indignant German naval demands, he switched frequencies again.
Within five minutes, he reached the first of the platforms, Bahnsteig Seeks. Passing within a mile of it, he did not devote much of his attention to activity aboard the platform. He had seen them before, and they all looked alike.
Instead, he scanned the skies and the seas for intruders. That was the job, and the job, as always, was boring. Once in a while, he would see a few fishing boats out of Greenland, but unless they approached within a couple miles of a platform, they were left alone.
Only military vessels and aircraft of any nation were to be challenged, and though Zeigman often hoped for such a confrontation, none had yet materialized.