“Oh, shit!”
“Colonel Volontov was piloting it, and he was on approach to the space station. Our surveillance satellites show the station in orbit, but there is no response to radio queries. The Mako appears as a cloud of debris.”
“I’m sorry as hell, Vitaly.”
“Yes, I am, too. He was a good man, Marvin. And I am afraid the station may be in the hands of those who stole your spacecraft.”
“Vitaly, let me take this to a group I’m meeting with now. I’ll call you back in an hour or so.”
Brackman went back to the conference room and interrupted a mini-speech by a junior congressman.
He stood at the head of the table until all of the eyes had turned to him, and then he related what he had learned from Sheremetevo.
McKenna stood up, followed immediately by Munoz.
“Sir, request permission to leave.”
“Hold on, McKenna,” Worth said. “We’re not done here.”
“Senator, a friend of mine has just been killed. My immediate evaluation of the incident suggests that the Commonwealth space station is under hostile control and that Themis is therefore endangered. My sworn duty is to protect the station, not sit in some goddamned room and listen to people bitch all night.”
Munoz spoke up for the first time. “Roger that.”
Worth spluttered, “Now, just a goddamned minute.”
“You are dismissed, gentlemen,” Admiral Cross said.
Chapter Sixteen
Amy Pearson and Donna Amber developed the photographs from Delta Orange’s reconnaissance cameras themselves, using the specialized equipment designed for a weightless environment. The processing vats were sealed, the chemicals pumped in, then evacuated into holding tanks. It took some time to produce the positive images and then run them under the scanner in order to convert them to the more manipulative medium of computer processing.
Frank Dimatta and George Williams hung around, literally, in the corridor outside the compartment, waiting to see the results of their recon run over the hospital in Kampuchea. They had returned directly to Themis at Brad Mitchell’s request so the maintenance chief could create and update a maintenance file for Delta Orange.
Benny Shalbot, having his first chance at the new MakoShark, was bossing a technical crew that didn’t believe anyone at Jack Andrews Air Base, where the craft had been assembled, had progressed beyond the eighth grade. Shalbot would make certain that Delta Orange had been put together properly and that her systems met his standards, which were slightly higher than those of the Air Force.
Pearson opened the hatch to the photo processing compartment.
“Okay, guys, you can come in.”
Dimatta and Williams sailed inside and grabbed handholds near the monitor Donna Amber was operating. She brought the photos up on the screen in the order in which they had been taken.
Pearson held onto Dimatta’s arm and studied the screen intently as each individual frame appeared.
“All right,” Williams said, “this is our first pass, heading east. We’ve all seen the hospital before. Zip forward a few frames, Donna.”
In the first photographs, around the hospital buildings, there were a few faces looking upward. The MakoShark had come in silently at about a thousand feet above ground level, but something, maybe a shadow, had alerted people on the ground, and a few of them had glanced upward in time to catch themselves on film.
Amber advanced the photographs.
“Here’s the four buildings that are east of the hospital proper,” Williams said.
“Looks to me,” Dimatta said, “like they’re about three hundred yards from the administration building. That seems a little far for efficient operations.”
“But then,” Amber said, “there are other buildings at least that far north and south of the administration building. Maybe they just want to give the medical personnel some distance from their jobs?”
“Click it forward a couple more frames, Donna,” Pearson said.
The next two frames moved east of the four structures and showed more jungle and a small clearing.
Pearson concentrated on the image, looking for anything that was incongruous.
And there it was.. Straight lines didn’t happen normally in nature.
“Right there,” she said, tracing her fingernail down the face of the screen.
“You’re right, Amy,” Dimatta said. “That’s a definite line.”
It was barely visible, just a difference in the shading of one part of the photograph with another part.
“Focus on that line, Donna, and blow it up as high as you can,” she said.
With a few keystrokes, Amber instructed the computer to enhance the image.
The vague line in the floor of the clearing zoomed up at them.
“PSP,” Williams said. “Pierced steel planking. It’s been painted to blend with the ground cover, but what makes it stand out is the reflection of the sun. It just doesn’t absorb the light like weeds and grass.”
They searched through all of the photographs and eventually found enough of them to piece together a picture of an elongated clearing divided by camouflage hills. The PSP runway was nearly two miles long. With careful scrutiny, they found other evidence: partial prints of aircraft tires, small ruts leading from the runway back into the jungle. In two shots east of the airstrip, Dimatta saw what he interpreted as parts of camouflaged roofs below the jungle canopy.
“I’d guess,” Pearson said, “that there are a number of revetments along both sides of the runway, hiding aircraft of one kind or another.”
“Delta Green?” Amber asked.
“The strip is long enough,” Dimatta said. “And more worrisome is the fact that it looks as if they have additional aircraft.”
“The hospital worries me,” Pearson said. “If we were approved for an attack on the airstrip, could we avoid the hospital?”
“No sweat,” Williams said.
“Send one MakoShark down each side of the strip, peppering the jungle with Wasp IIs,” Dimatta added. “They’ll never know what hit them.”
“What would it take,” Pearson asked, “ten minutes to move several hundred of those children from the hospital to the airfield?”
“Ah, damn, Amy,” Dimatta said.
“You don’t think they’ve got the kids there for a purpose, Frank?”
Dimatta groaned, but said, “You’re probably right.”
Pearson, Dimatta, and Williams all started giving Amber directions on assembling a composite picture of the entire site for a printout.
“Hey, come on!” Amber said. “Let me do it once, and if you don’t like it, you can all do your own.”
The intercom sounded off. “Photo lab, Command.”
Pearson pushed off Dimatta for the intercom panel. “Colonel Pearson here, General.”
“Amy, we’ve just been ordered to full alert by Brackman. I need you down here. Is Dimatta there?”
“He’s here.”
“He’s to launch immediately.”
Dimatta and Williams had already pushed off for the corridor.
Pearson followed them through the hatchway and deflected herself down the corridor toward Spoke One.
She wondered what the problem was now.
McKenna had probably antagonized the wrong people, but that was nothing new.
Lynn Haggar had been on her latest patrol of Themis for two hours when the alert was sounded. Ben Olsen gave her directions, and she closed on the station, then took up a position twenty-five miles away. Within half-an-hour, both Delta Yellow and Delta Orange launched and moved into defensive postures.
An hour and ten minutes after the first alert, McKenna checked in.