“Going down. How’s the camera?”
“You wanna see?”
“No, just tell me.”
On the outboard starboard pylon was mounted one of the reconnaissance pods. It was capable of capturing true video, night vision, and infrared images.
“I’m runnin’ night and infrared, monitorin’ the infrared on my CRT. Looks good to me. Got a nice shot of a truck motoring into Kampong Thum.”
“That’ll thrill Amy.”
“Anything for a good cause. Angels five, distance to target four-six.”
McKenna concentrated on keeping the MakoShark steady. The cameras were gimbal-mounted and gyro-stabilized, but a smooth shooting platform helped. He kept an eye on the radar altimeter, monitoring altitude above ground level.
“Flatten the glide,” Munoz said. “We’re at four-thousand, two thou AGL, and that’ll give us a wide picture.”
McKenna nudged the hand controller back and eased the turbojet throttles forward to maintain his speed. The HUD reported airspeed at 420 knots.
“Distance now one-nine miles.”
“See anything yet, Tiger?”
“Some hot spots ahead on the left. That’s gonna be our hospital.”
A few seconds later, McKenna glanced through the left side of the canopy. Down in the blackness of the jungle, a few lights winked at him. Those would be the exterior lampposts around the hooches and dormitories that he had noticed while walking the grounds. At midnight, he didn’t expect many of the patients to be up and around. He hoped not, anyway. A patient up in the middle of the night meant pain and crisis.
“I don’t see shit,” Munoz said.
“Nothing?”
“No. Let’s make another pass. Hell, let’s make a buncha passes. Get the hospital, too.”
They made four passes over the region, then headed back toward Borneo.
Munoz, having monitored what the camera was seeing, wasn’t optimistic about the results.
And when Munoz wasn’t optimistic, neither was McKenna.
Amy Pearson received copies of the surveillance tapes at two in the afternoon, two in the morning in Borneo. She put Val Arguento and Donna Amber on two of the monitors in the radio shack, and the three of them went through the tapes at ultra slow speed, looking for any anomalies at all.
Then they switched monitors and double-checked each other.
Then they ran side-by-side comparisons of the night vision and infrared tapes.
She pointed out the reference points she was aware of from her visit to the site. “There. That’s the administration building”
“Still some heat in those shingles,” Arguento said. “Makes a nice rectangle.”
“And the cross on the roof is easily identified on the night vision shot,” Amber said.
“That building right there handles blood diseases,” Pearson said.
They went over the tapes slowly, heading east.
“Now, these buildings, we didn’t see,” Pearson said.
There were four of them, and a little farther east were a half dozen small pale spots that could have been anything.
“They’ve got the crosses on their roofs,” Amber said. “They must belong to the complex.”
“And they’re large,” Arguento added. “How about housing for the medical personnel?”
“That’s possible,” Pearson admitted. “We saw a few places that Lemesh said were dedicated to staff, but maybe not all of them. We weren’t invited to tour them.”
“Now, wait!” Arguento said. “Freeze it there.”
The night vision image displayed a variegated series of greens depicting jungle, a few small hills, and several clearings. The infrared picture alongside it showed blues, oranges, yellows, and red, in a similar pattern. There wasn’t much blue; it appeared in rambling strings only where several small streams ran.
“Look here,” Arguento said, using his finger to trace an area on the photo. “See the shape of this orange area? It’s just barely out of the reds, just a little cooler”
“I see it,” Pearson said.
It was an irregular pattern, without definite shape, except that it was elongated.
“So the ground’s a little cooler down the center of the clearings?” Amber asked.
“Right. It should be cooler back under the jungle canopy. Then, here’s another problem. The cool area runs right under the hills.”
Pearson glanced back at the night scope shot. There were four small, foliaged hills that prevented the area from being one large, long clearing.
Or did they?
“Camouflage, you think, Val?”
“I’m not staking my stripes on it, Colonel. Hell, there’s nothing else in the photos that causes alarm. No vehicles, no tanks, no nothing.”
“Just four hills that shouldn’t be cool,” she said.
“That’s it,” he agreed.
“If the Air Force gave out bonuses, I’d see that you got one.”
“Maybe you can talk to the President, or something,” Arguento said.
The Chief of Staff of the Air Force was on his way to Capitol Hill, summoned to a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee. He was in his car when Brackman reached him.
“What’ve you got, Marv?”
“Colonel Pearson thinks she’s found a covert airstrip.”
“Where?” Harvey Mays asked.
“Kampuchea. Northwest of Phnom Penh, way out in the jungle.”
“Good a place as any, I guess. Better than most. She’s sure of it?”
“I think she is, yes.”
“And you?”
“Hell, Harvey. I looked at the pictures. It could be. And then again, maybe not.”
“Give me odds that will buy us some time with the people I’m going to be talking to, Marv.”
“You bastard,” Brackman said. “Sixty-forty might be pushing it.”
“I don’t think they’re good enough, but I’ll try it. McKenna on his way?”
“Haven’t reached him yet, Harvey.”
“Well, get on it. They want to talk to him.”
“Do you really want me to take a commander out of the field in the middle of a crisis?” Brackman asked.
“No. But we haven’t yet declared a crisis, and I don’t see another choice, Marvin.”
Anatoly Shelepin, whose codename was “Admiral” now that the operation was underway, spent a restless night. He got up in the early morning and had fruit and tea for breakfast.
He kept looking at the telephone, but it would not ring for him.
He kept waiting for Yelena’s footsteps to tell him that she was awake.
And then he could wait no longer.
He placed his call and waited for the interminable connections to be made. He really needed to have one of the scrambled radios of his own.
“Yes?”
“It is a beautiful morning,” he said.
“And promises to be a grand day.”
“What word?”
“Captain just took off with the second component.”
“The second? Already?”
“We have decided to accelerate the program,” Oleg Druzhinin told him.
“Then the first is already in place?”
“Connected to the umbilical. Within six or seven hours, we will have a complete system.”
“Thank you.”
Shelepin hung up, not quite believing that they were a day ahead of schedule.
The New World Order was a superpower.
Chapter Fifteen
Frank Dimatta and George Williams met with McKenna and Munoz in the ready room. McKenna wasn’t in the best of humor. He hadn’t been for some time. He appeared a little tired, and there was a half-day’s growth of whiskers on his cheeks.
“How’s the bird doing?” he asked.
“It’s all right,” Dimatta said.
“She’s tip-top,” Williams said. “Next time out, we’ll drag race you.”