“Tigers Three and Four, reverse course. You have missed him.”
Only briefly did Zeigman think about trying to contact the unidentified airplane on an international frequency. If he did communicate with it, the pilot might give in quickly.
And ruin a perfectly good shot.
His speed climbed to Mach 1.
Altitude 2,500 meters. Pulling out of the vertical dive.
The shadow taking form.
Delta wing. Long, long fuselage.
It was alerted. Started a right, climbing turn.
Without thinking about it, his fingers had run automatically through the sequence of arming two of his Sky Flash missiles.
He switched his radar to active.
Nothing. Only the aircraft of his own flight.
He tried the IR seeker.
A bare flicker.
The missiles would not track on radar-homing or infrared.
He flicked the switch that selected guidance from the hand controller.
The aircraft — it had to be a MakoShark — almost centered in the gun sight.
Launch.
Flash of rocket fire.
Trails arcing toward the climbing delta shape.
Concentrating hard with the hand controller. Up, now, and to the right.
Homing in.
The four bogies had appeared abruptly from the right side of the screen, almost over well number twenty-one.
Pearson gasped, “Damn it!”
McKenna studied the screen readouts, checking altitudes, then thumbed the microphone. “Cancha, you’ve got bogies almost directly ahead. There’s a pair at six-two-hundred and another two spread out at three-zero-thousand. I don’t think they’ve spotted you.”
“Roger, Snake Eyes. Can we go radar?”
“Hold off. I don’t want them homing one in on you.”
Waiting.
No blip for Delta Green.
The two low-level targets changed course slightly.
The high-level fighters started to dive.
“Okay, Cancha. They’ve got you. Hold course twenty seconds, then go to one-one-zero and start climbing. Seven-zero percent throttles.”
Waiting.
The tension in the Command Center was palpable.
The blip of one German fighter was losing altitude fast, now moving back to the east.
“Command, Radar. Two missiles launched.”
“Scramble, Cancha!”
“We see ’em, Snake Eyes. No sweat. Can I punch this bastard out?”
McKenna sighed and looked at Overton. The general kept his face passive. Pearson’s eyes were wide.
“You’ve been fired upon, Delta Green. Fire at will.”
“Hot damn!” Dimatta said over the intercom.
“Give me two Wasps, Cancha,” Williams said.
Dimatta’s arm reached out for the armaments panel even as his helmet was levered full back against the collar of the flight suit so he could look upward. The two missiles coming at them were black pupils surrounded by harsh white eyes.
He glanced at the armaments panel, hit pylon two and missiles one and two.
Looked back at the missiles.
Now.
Slammed the throttles full forward.
The MakoShark accelerated abruptly.
The missiles flashed by behind them, headed for the ice. He didn’t watch for impact.
Roll hard right, pull the hand controller back.
On its side, the MakoShark looped back toward the first two fighters. The one that had fired its missiles at them slashed the night above, trying to pull out of its dive and regain altitude.
The enemy had to be up high, looking down, to spot them, unless they went to active radar.
“I need radar, Cancha.”
“Take it.”
The radar image flickered onto the screen.
The MakoShark radar could scan for new targets while simultaneously tracking and holding up to twelve targets. As Dimatta pulled out of his sideways loop, rolling upright, he saw the orange sight scooting across the screen, guided by Williams’s helmet.
“Lock on one,” Williams said. “He’s at three thousand. Next one’s higher.”
Dimatta pulled the hand controller and the nose went up.
“Lock on two.”
“Go, Nitro”
“Committed… launched.”
The tracks of the two missiles appeared on the screen, spreading out, homing on the active radars of the two fighters.
The fighters went into evasive action as their threat receivers detected the Wasps.
“They’re Tornados,” Williams said.
“Were,” Dimatta corrected him.
The radar screen indicated the other two were in a tight circle at five thousand feet. One of them started to dive toward them. More tentatively, the second one followed his leader.
Dimatta continued into a right turn, headed north.
On his left, a bright splash of white against the semidark sky partially killed his night vision.
“That’s one,” Williams said.
Another splash of light.
“And two.”
The threat receiver sounded in his earphones.
“Incoming locked on,” Williams said.
Dimatta hit the Tac-1 frequency. “Snake Eyes?”
“That’s enough, Cancha,” McKenna said. “Lesson taught.”
“Kill the radar, Nitro.”
“Done.”
Again, he rolled onto his right side and pulled the nose into a tight loop. The hostile missile, having lost its radar target, missed them by half a mile.
At Mach 1.8, they passed over the last well a few seconds later.
“That last picture’s going to be blurry, Cancha.”
“Way it goes, sometimes.”
Dimatta wasn’t going to review this mission in his mind for a while, not until they returned to Themis, but his blood felt as if it were singing in his veins.
He wasn’t even hungry.
And behind him, he thought that two German Tornadoes were frantically searching a barren landscape for him.
And finding only fragments of Tornadoes.
Ten
The Hochkommandieren was composed of the commanders-in-chief of the army, the navy, and the air force. Along with innumerable advisors, staffers, and flunkies. The overflowing headquarters building and three annexes were located in Bonn, close to the civilian government to which the High Command reported.
The three men who headed Germany’s military establishment took themselves and their charter very seriously, and they took the civilian government somewhat less seriously. Chancellors and legislators, they reasoned, could not possibly understand the fine nuances of strategy, tactics, overt and covert operation, and proud tradition.
Gen. Felix Eisenach understood the subtle distinctions that existed between the civilian and the military leaderships. The civilians wanted a strong, world-respected posture for Germany without paying too much for it, and they set that policy for the High Command, leaving the strategy for achieving it to men who had fought as youngsters in, and been soundly defeated by, World War II.
With the sting of memory still aching in their minds and with the annual debate and underfunding of military appropriations by liberal thinkers in the Bundestag, the marshals, generals, and admirals had been pressured to look elsewhere for funding to meet their charter.
They found the necessary support in a loose confederation of bankers, entrepreneurs, and financial manipulators of like mind. The confederation operated under the VORMUND PROJEKT. Where the shortsighted tinkers and tailors who made up the Bundestag failed to provide, the GUARDIAN PROJECT supplemented. The bankers, naturally, sought more than military and national stature. They were looking for long-range profits and were already beginning to see them in increased employment, an expanding industry, and a growing economy. The revenues from the sale of new energy flowing from the Greenland Sea was already meeting the debt obligations of capital investment and would show a sliver of profit in this fiscal year.