McKenna studied the two of them for a minute, then told them about the hospital and the anomalies in the infrared photos. “Go over the photos we’ve got, then you’ve got the next recon over Kampuchea. Pearson wants a daylight, low-level pass. Don’t take any chances, though. Go in high, zip down for the shots, and get out.”
Dimatta felt his pulse pick up rate. Finally, there was going to be some action.
“This is a real hospital, Kevin?” Williams asked.
“It’s real. And it’s damned unpleasant.”
“You ought to see those kids,” Munoz said. “Second thought, you don’t wanna see them.”
“Be careful,” McKenna said.
“Roger that,” Dimatta said. “Are you going to be here?”
“Tony and I have to make a quick trip to Washington.”
“Muy pronto,” Munoz said. “They can’t run the place without us.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Dimatta said. “While all of this is going on?”
“I’m tryin’ to get the coordinates on a couple of House and Senate offices,” Munoz said. “We’ll light ’em up with a couple of Wasp IIs.”
“While I think about it, Tony,” McKenna said. “Go out to the hangar and tell the guys to pull the ordnance.”
“Ah, hell, Snake Eyes! Just one?”
Pearson had tried to sleep for a few hours, but not successfully. She was impatient, waiting for the daylight photographs to be shipped to her.
After giving up on sleep, she had taken a sponge bath, then heated a hamburger for a midnight snack. She went back to her office in Spoke One and powered up the console.
Her incoming message board was lit, so she called up the messages.
CIA field agents had located two more of the defected Mako trainee pilots, Averyanov and Yevstigneyev. The former was flying cargo planes out of Buenos Aires under an assumed name, and the latter was being paid by la Sûreté, the French secret service, for all of the knowledge he presumably held. He had been in debriefings for the past four months.
Pearson updated their dossiers, then removed them from the batch in her suspense file. She called up her outline of the phantom organization and deleted the two pilots from the “Rank and File” line. That left Bryntsev, Maslov, and Nikitin unaccounted for.
Her outline was getting thinner, rather than filling out, and that was not what she wanted.
On the “Locale” line, she deleted China, Vietnam, and Korea. With the sightings of Pavel and Shelepin in Phnom Penh, she felt confident in pinpointing that location. She keyed in Phnom Penh as the location in Kampuchea, but felt that there had to be more than one site. They weren’t flying the MakoShark out of the capital city. She added the Khmer Hospital and Clinic with a question mark.
Her next message was a copy of an FBI report, forwarded to her by David Thorpe. Two of the four men found shot at the dry lake had been tentatively identified. One had been a waiter in a San Francisco restaurant for over two years. The other had recently entered the United States on an Israeli passport issued to one Iztak Milstein. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, had been asked to backtrack him.
The third message provided a manifest of the aides and military people who had disappeared along with Anatoly Shelepin when his aircraft departed the Soviet Union. On her outline, Pearson created a new line entitled “Staffing” and added the names and their specialties. They ranged in rank from corporal to major, and they were proficient in the fields of computers, communications, logistics, administration, and finance.
Now the outline was filling out, and unfortunately, it was padded with the kinds of people who made up military organizations. If Anatoly Shelepin had political aims, he was backing them up with a paramilitary group of some kind.
Not of some kind, she corrected herself. An air force. They had a MakoShark, and that was about all they needed. She wrote a quick cover memo, then sent the updated outline to Thorpe in Cheyenne Mountain.
The space station was in an elliptical orbit at forty-five degrees of inclination from the Earth’s poles. At the lowest point of the orbit, it was 290 miles above the Earth. The apex was at 340 miles. The orbital period was seven hours and twenty-two minutes.
One of the computers in the station kept track of the major satellites in orbits that came close to that of Soyuz Fifty. Of primary interest were a Chinese communications satellite and the American space station which were both in polar orbits. The Chinese satellite held a mean orbit of 270 miles, and the space station Themis was also in a circular orbit with an average altitude of 220 miles.
Because of the orbit characteristic of Themis and Soyuz Fifty, and because of the differing speeds at which they travelled, they were rarely in close proximity. Approximately at forty-day intervals, they closed to within fifty-eight miles of each other, but the pass was fleeting and usually went unnoticed and unremarked.
Maslov was not particularly worried about the United States satellite at this point in the operation. For one thing, the purpose of satellites was to focus on the Earth. Surveillance satellites rarely looked up; their designed intent was to look down. And communications satellites did not care one way or the other.
Even the porthole near which he was tethered was aimed downward, currently eyeing the ice mass of Antarctica. It was nearing summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and he could imagine the migrations about to take place, moving scientists onto the continent for their annual examination of things environmental and geologic.
The monitor next to the porthole displayed a view from the exterior camera. By working the joystick next to the monitor, he could aim the camera as he pleased. Turning the lens to the right and upward, he was rewarded with a view of the magnificent MakoShark. It was parked above the station and was attached to it by one slim nylon line. There was no one in it; Boris Nikitin had made his first journey across the abyss and into the station. He was sleeping now.
Aft of the station, secured by yet another nylon rope to the nuclear module, was the HoneyBee nose cone with its cargo of precious fuel. Maslov and Nikitin had moved it into orbit with the station, then refueled the MakoShark, as their final chore of the morning.
Maslov worked the camera controls and swung the camera to the left, then aimed it downward. He backed off the magnification, and the image of the warhead diminished in size.
It was tethered to the station by its umbilical cord, plugged into the receptacle that had been installed earlier. The second stage propulsion component was now reattached to the warhead with the sensitive explosive bolts. Access hatches all around the nose cone and the second stage were wide open. Bryntsev and Filatov floated near two of the hatches, occasionally poking their helmeted heads inside the hull as they reconnected cable connectors between the nose cone and the second stage.
Corporal Filatov was becoming less clumsy in his space maneuvers as his fear eroded and his reflexes became accustomed to the new environment. His progress was much quicker than Maslov had expected for the man had never been in the Air Force. He was a specialist in the SS-X-25 ground-launched missile system. It was he who would sit at the console in the end module and program the ICBM.
“Soyuz, this is Baikonur Flight Control.”
The radio call startled him.
Maslov used the video control joy stick as a foundation to turn himself toward the communications console. One radio was set to monitor the cosmodrome’s frequency, and other radios were tuned to other frequencies.
“Soyuz, this is Baikonur Cosmodrome. Come in.”