She dodged sideways, and he landed lightly on the wall beside her.
“Got something for you,” he said.
“Not out…”
He held up his hand. Between his thumb and forefinger was a pair of silver eagle rank insignia.
She fastened her eyes on his. The gray of his irises was light, maybe a little amused, but warm.
“I’d like you to have mine,” he said.
“Kevin…”
“These were my father’s,” he said. “He was Army, but they work about the same way.”
No one aboard the space station wore rank insignia except for those newly promoted.
“Thank you.”
He unzipped her jumpsuit a few inches — with her eyes darting back and forth for intruders — and inserted his left hand inside the suit’s left shoulder and used his right hand to position the eagle, then snapped the pin clasps in place. He reversed his hands to fasten the insignia on her right shoulder.
When he was done, he floated a couple feet away, then snapped a crisp military salute that she hadn’t known he was capable of performing.
“Congratulations, Colonel Pearson.”
She returned the salute smartly. “Thank you, Colonel McKenna.”
She felt like crying.
“Now, can we get back in the sack?”
“Damn you, Kevin.”
“I don’t want you to get maudlin,” he grinned.
The last of the Space Command’s Learjets at Merlin Air Base had taken off from the single runway at seven o’clock the night before, taking with it General Delwin Cartwright and his aide, Major Mikos Pappas.
Lynn Haggar didn’t know where the two of them were going, nor did anyone else as far as she could tell. The rumors had a new commandant coming in, but they might have been optimistic rumors.
Heaven on Earth was rampant with rumors, but then it was no different than any other military enclave in the world. There would be nothing to talk about if not for conjecture sworn to as fact.
She was eating breakfast with Olsen, Conover, Abrams, and Munoz after having succumbed to a four-hour nap which had rejuvenated her. Not, apparently, as much as a similar nap had revived Jack Abrams. He had poured half a bottle of picante sauce over his scrambled eggs.
“Tell me what in the hell is that supposed to be,” Ben Olsen said.
“That, Swede, is a Frank Dimatta Special,” Abrams said, working the sauce into the eggs with his fork.
“Aren’t you confusing excess with taste, Do-Wop?” Haggar asked.
“Of course not. I’ve seen him do this many times.” Abrams took one forkful, savored it, closed his eyes in pain, then proceeded gamely on with his breakfast.
“Looks good to me,” Munoz said and dumped the rest of the jar’s contents over the two eggs on his plate.
Haggar decided to ignore the two of them and finished her orange juice, then her grapefruit while half-listening to the banter.
She liked all of them, much as she liked and loved the three brothers she had grown up with in Atlanta. Sometimes, she found humor in the way they struggled to be macho fighter jocks and still obviously tried to avoid what they thought might be interpreted as sexual harassment. Only Tony Munoz was unconcerned about what he might say to her, and he was so good-natured, she would never have taken anything he said as anything but the good humor it was.
Breakfast over, they left the room full of people who were eating roast beef and steaks for dinner and walked back to Hangar One.
Deltas Red, Yellow, and Blue were all prepared for flight. As soon as they saw the flight crews enter the hangar, the ground crews began to assemble for final chores.
“I wish to hell Snake Eyes would quit screwin’ around and get back here,” Munoz said morosely.
“Go back to bed, Tony,” Olsen told him. “The search is the boring part. If it gets interesting, I’ll give you a wake-up call.”
Munoz stood to one side and watched while the Yellow and Red crews slipped into their environmental suits.
Haggar stood still while her crew chief vacuumed her, then climbed the ladder to her cockpit, slid over the coaming, and settled into the reclining seat. The crew chief followed her and helped connect the communications and nitrogen/oxygen fittings.
“I’m buttoned in,” Ben Olsen told her over the intercom system.
“Ditto,” she said. “Okay, Sergeant, how about giving us a tow?”
“Coming right up, ma’am,” he said, then scampered down the ladder.
Olsen was right. This was projected to be another boring day, in terms of contact possibilities. Since not one of the high-tech surveillance systems roaming the skies had detected a reentry burn in the last hours, McKenna had put them back on search patterns. Conover and Abrams were going to cover the area of Southeast Asia that McKenna and Munoz had abandoned when their fuel feed valve stuck open, and Delta Red was headed back to Africa.
After she and Olsen completed their pattern, they would put down at Jack Andrews in Chad for a rest break.
And listen to Dimatta and Williams moaning over their loss, no doubt.
She felt the MakoShark shudder gently as the tractor took a strain on the tow bar. Releasing the brakes, Haggar cleared her mind for the checklist.
Delta Yellow moved slowly out of the hangar, eager for her task.
And looking back over her shoulder, Haggar saw Munoz standing in the middle of the hangar, looking as downcast and lost as he possibly could.
She wondered if he were acting.
Colonel Aleksander Maslov had planned this mission carefully.
General Shelepin had always told him that knowledge was power, and his knowledge of the American aerospace capabilities, though limited in detail, was precise enough to give him an advantage.
He knew, for instance, that the massive radar aboard the American space station had a range of around four hundred miles or 643 kilometers.
He and Nikitin had boosted the HoneyBee attached to the MakoShark to an altitude of three hundred miles and then accelerated slowly, conserving fuel, until they had, seven hours later, slowed and parked the HoneyBee in an orbit on the other side of the Earth from the space station. Like Themis, the supply rocket was in a polar orbit. The American satellite completed a revolution around the North and South poles every 3.6 hours. Though it was in a higher orbit, the rocket’s velocity had been increased until it, too, required the same amount of time to complete an orbit. The computer calculations developed by Boris Nikitin had been very precise.
They had then slept for several hours because Maslov knew also that the Americans would have been looking for his reentry into the atmosphere. Their surveillance satellites were everywhere.
As a copilot trainee, Maslov had accomplished the reentry into the atmosphere twice, and he had an excellent mind. He forgot nothing, and even if he had, the checklist on the small screen kept him honest. The first reentry of the New World Order’s MakoShark into the atmosphere above northern China was flawless.
At twenty-five kilometers of altitude, Nikitin said, “Altitude is… sixteen miles, Aleks. The velocity is Mach four-point-six. All systems are cooling down.”
“Excellent, Boris. We are now veteran spacemen.”
“I am relieved to have the maiden flight completed. I admit it.”
“Nonsense, Boris. We accomplished our mission exactly as planned. Proper planning will always tell.”
Conserving rocket fuel, Maslov put the MakoShark into a long, shallow parabolic curve toward the south. It was after nine o’clock at night when they crossed the northern border of Kampuchea and started the turbojets.
With the use of the GPS navigational system and the night vision lens, they found New World Base without problem. Sixty kilometers to the south, Maslov could see the lights of Kampong Thum.