“I wish to hell it was dark,” Conover said over the intercom, “so we could get down in the bushes and get some real shots”
“Patience, Con Man. Soon as Amy-baby reviews all this stuff, she’ll be sending us back for close-ups of the really suspicious spots”
“Yeah, I hope so.”
The 1st Aerospace Squadron crews, while not veterans of Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, or the Persian Gulf, had tasted combat in the New Germany crisis. None of them talked much about it to each other, but Conover knew they were all seasoned, and he suspected that all of them now had some addiction for operating on the edge, for inducing adrenaline production to ever higher levels.
As he made the last half of his turn, Conover eased in power and gained five thousand feet of altitude.
“Video tapes running,” Abrams reported.
The computer constantly tested the craft’s navigational position and the angle and magnification of the camera lens, then automatically imprinted the bottom right corner of the video recording with the date, the time, and the geographical coordinates of the area they were filming. That precluded having the photo interpretation people making a lot of guesses.
The river, and the brown spot on the other side of it, came up fast. Because of the dense, triple-canopied layer of jungle, an oblique camera shot of the target from ten miles away and ten miles high wouldn’t reveal much. In these cases, Conover brought the MakoShark almost directly overhead, then put her nose straight down on the target while Abrams controlled the camera. They only needed a few inches of good video tape. Pearson could always freeze it and study it for as long as she wanted.
The picture on his main screen was now almost entirely of blue sky for Abrams had centered the camera.
“Two seconds, Con Man.”
“Two.”
A couple heartbeats.
“Mark.”
Conover put the nose down and eased back the throttles. The screen flashed from blue into green into brown. The river appeared, and he neutralized his controls.
“Shit,” Abrams said.
The image steadied, then cleared a little as the magnification was backed off a few notches.
“Lumber operation,” Abrams said.
The comment clarified what he was seeing on the screen, the image fuzzed by the high magnification. A thin tributary to the Brahmaputra was jammed tight with logs chained into rafts for floating down to the coast. The rafts stretched up the river for over a mile.
The HUD read forty-eight thousand feet when Conover pulled out of his dive.
“Lot of damned wood,” he said.
“Not going to land a Mako on it,” Abrams said.
“Doubt it.”
“Let’s go south and take up the next leg”
“Why not?”
Flying search patterns could be tedious as hell, but Conover loved flying the MakoShark so much that he didn’t mind a bit. His conscience zinged him a little when he thought about poor old Dimatta and Williams chugging along in a clumsy Gates Learjet.
Aleksander Maslov did not care for either the temperature or the humidity. Both played havoc with, not only human biology and temperament, but also with the sensitive devices invented by man. Delicate electronic circuitry misbehaved and mechanical systems that were not carefully maintained and lubricated gathered rust. Those conditions were potentially life-threatening, and he thought often that lazy ground crewmen did not fully appreciate the threat. He was an ardent supervisor of ground crew operations.
The air conditioner in Maslov’s small house trailer had failed once again, and the interior was sweltering despite his opening the three windows and the single door. If it were not for the privacy he enjoyed in his tiny residence, he would have moved into the new dormitory which boasted central air-conditioning.
Maslov pushed himself off the single narrow bed and stood up. He was tall (186 centimeters) and he had to duck his head slightly to stand upright. He bent over in the tiny lavatory and used the mirror to brush his short-cropped blond hair. When he turned the tap, the cold water, which was all that was available, came out in a clear, slow dribble. He used the washcloth to swab his face, chest, and arms, then toweled off. Passing his palm over his square jaw, Maslov decided he could forego shaving, but double-checked that decision in the mirror. He had sharp green eyes, a result of some long-ago heritage that had invaded his Ukrainian ancestry. His facial skin was taut, normally fair, and now reddened by exposure to the sun. Maslov did not have much experience with southern latitudes, and the sun did not care for him.
He was already wearing khaki shorts and steel-soled shoes, and he pulled on a short-sleeved, khaki shirt as he pushed open the screen door and exited the trailer.
His trailer was one of six parked side-by-side under the jungle canopy that fringed the west side of the clearing. They were backed right up against a wall of dense foliage and thick tree trunks. Twisted clusters of liana climbed high overhead, dripping downward from the branches of trees. In some places, gatherings of exotic flowers added splashes of red and orange and blue.
Twenty meters to the north, a pathway which was more like a tunnel had been slashed into the jungle. It led to the dormitory structures that were less than a hundred meters away, but which was still invisible from his viewpoint. Still farther away was the tin-roofed, opensided structure that protected the water well pumps and the electrical generators. Even from this distance, he could hear the throaty murmur of the diesel engines that powered the five generators. It was a constant drone with which he had come to terms. The lazy calls of parrots and the angry chatter of monkeys drew more attention. There were tigers out there, too, rumored to be man-eaters, but he had not seen one. He had seen a rhinoceros and two elephants, but that had been from the air and many kilometers away.
The clearing that was open to the sky, not counting the space under the overhanging canopy, was only a couple hundred meters wide, but it was over twelve thousand meters long, running north and south. It was not level. There was a definite rise toward the north, and near the center was a disconcerting hump that had not been totally leveled by the engineers, primarily because there was a shortage of engineers. Laid over the mushy ground was a narrow lane of interlocking steel planks. Maslov thought they had originally come from Vietnam, from the Cam Ranh Bay area, but they were now painted in variegated shades of green that disappeared into the jungle when seen from above. At random intervals down the length of the runway were placed four flimsy, tall structures that supported camouflage netting peppered with live vines and plants. From an aerial view, they added contours to the terrain, leaving the impression of a series of small openings in the jungle cover rather than one long clearing. When the runway was needed, they were pulled back under the jungle canopy.
Maslov crossed the runway, walking east. Looking up and down the clearing, he was pleased with the result of their work. Even on the ground, at the south end of the clearing, all he could see were the six trailers and the mottled green wall of the command center which was snuggled back into the eastern edge of the jungle. It had large windows all along this side, overlooking the runway.
Though he knew they were there, he could not see a single one of the aircraft. Revetments had been hacked out of the jungle on the east side. Several of the reinforced parking spaces had been given camouflaged roofs, and the rest had roofs now under construction.
There were four Mikoyan MiG-27 ground attack planes, one MiG-25 interceptor currently in reconnaissance configuration, and six Sukhoi Su-24 attack fighters hidden in the jungle, along with three assorted civilian aircraft. Perhaps the greatest achievement had been their ability to hide the monstrously large Antonov An-72 belonging to Shelepin. Maslov had been in favor of abandoning the huge transport, crashing it into the sea, but had been outvoted. Or out-ordered. And on reflection, Shelepin and Druzhinin had been correct. The transport had been necessary for ferrying in their supplies. There had been millions of kilograms of material carted in from all over southeast Asia. Maslov did not know the details, but he supposed that much of it had been purchased and that much of it had also been surreptitiously acquired from old Soviet caches around the southeast region of the Asian continent.