“I’ll go with that.”
“George?”
Embry took off his glasses and nodded slowly. His eyes seemed redder, more fatigued, with the glasses removed.
“Yeah, all right, Andy. You call the final shots. I’ll keep pushing my gal, and update you if we learn more about the H-hour.”
“Anything else we need to know?”
Pursing his lips, Embry said, “Marty didn’t want me to tell you this, so keep it to yourselves, huh?”
Wyatt and Barr both grunted.
“You may get there, and then we’ll tell you to turn around and come home.”
“What the hell?”
“It seems that Icarus isn’t approved by all the higher-ups just yet.”
“Well, goddamn it!” Wyatt said. “Stupid old me, I thought you people had your act together before you extended the contract.”
“With the information we just got, the DCI is scrambling to touch bases with everyone who counts, and we’ll know more in the morning.”
“For Christ’s sake!” Barr exclaimed. “You guys are living up to your negative publicity.”
“You can punch me out, Bucky, but I swear I didn’t know. I do believe, with what Mari… with what my asset has provided, that the DCI will have a stamp of approval by morning.”
“This is pretty damned balled up,” Wyatt said.
“I agree,” Embry said. “I always plan for something to go wrong, but this one can’t get much worse.”
It did.
Just as Barr and Wyatt were deplaning, one of the Falcon’s pilots stuck his head out of the cockpit. “Mr. Embry, scrambled call for you.”
Wyatt waited while Embry picked up a phone. He mouthed the name, “Church.”
Embry uh-huhed and huh-uhed a couple times, swore three times, and then said, “Yes, sir.”
When he hooked the receiver back on its bulkhead cradle, Wyatt said, “What now?”
“Your man Gering?”
“Oh, shit!”
Embry told him about the confrontation between Gering and Kramer.
“She’s all right?”
“She’s fine. She fired the guy on the spot. Church is going to have some people take a close look at him.”
“You just can’t count on anyone, anymore,” Barr said.
“Come on, Bucky, let’s get this circus airborne before any more clowns show up.”
Ferry flights were supposed to be boring, but Barr was enjoying himself. Not more than three months before, he believed he’d never again fly a hot fighter plane.
He loved the F-4, and this one was greater than ever with all of the new systems.
Settled comfortably in his seat, with the autopilot directing operations, he had reviewed his new passport and accompanying documentation. His name was Jack O. Milhauser, and he had a couple matchbooks from a New Jersey topless bar as well as a thin catalogue of X-rated videos. He figured he knew what the “O.” stood for, and he thought he would give Kramer hell about the persona she had set up for him. She had probably laughed all the way through it.
If she was still there when they got back. He was going to have to prod Wyatt some more. Though they had been best friends for so long he had forgotten the starting date, he knew that Wyatt could be pretty damned obstinate about some things. His first marriage had soured him on the emotive aspects of life.
Barr also knew, based on his own experiences and the rotating roster of women he dated, that he wasn’t particularly qualified as a matchmaker. Maybe Wyatt knew something he didn’t know. Hell, he didn’t know what to do.
He was sure that Kramer’s problem involved frustrated love, but he couldn’t just shove Wyatt into something he didn’t want to do.
Life was a bitch sometimes.
Like for some Ethiopians he had never met, but knew he’d like if he ever did. He thought about that for awhile, to get his mind off Wyatt and Kramer.
Checked the skies around him. The lightening skies were cloudless, but were full of Phantoms, unarmed but with twin drop tanks slung beneath the wings. Wyatt and Gettman were ahead of, and a quarter-mile above, him. Zimmerman was riding his right wing, and Hack-ley and Jordan had paired off a half-mile to his left.
At thirty-two thousand feet, he could see the dawn coming at him, shooting spears of light off the Phantoms above. It was coming up on four A.M. local, which was just a solid expanse of darkened ocean. A glance at his fuel state told him that it was also time for an F-4 breakfast. They had taken off from Maine at eleven-fifteen Eastern Daylight Time, two hours behind the Hercs, and had just about reached their fuel limit.
The problem with this leg of the trip was that it was forty-two hundred miles long, and the F-4s, with a low-consumption cruise at 550 miles per hour, could plan on running out of fuel twice, at sixteen hundred miles and at thirty-two hundred miles. The C-130s, even with a maximum overload take-off weight of 175,000 pounds, could extend themselves to five-thousand miles and complete their share of the journey with ease.
The Phantoms needed a couple refuellings apiece, but their tanker didn’t have the capacity to meet that need.
Wyatt and Barr had figured it as closely as they could, poring over almanacs and meteorological studies for average prevailing winds at various altitudes. Without the drag of weapons and pylons, but with the drag of drop tanks, and with careful manipulations of the throttles, it was going to be possible. Each jet would get one full refuelling and, later, another six-tenths refuelling before the tanker’s fuel bladders were drained. Depending on tail winds, they might have to do some coasting to make Quallene on fumes.
They would also have to hope that their penetration of the African shoreline went unnoticed. There wasn’t much tolerance for wasting fuel in radar-dodging manoeuvres. They would cross the coast low, wishfully below possible radar coverage, but those few minutes would consume fuel at high rates.
Barr hit the transmit button. “Hey, Big Yucca, you see Thirsty yet?
Only Wyatt was utilizing his radar occasionally, so as not to advertise six radars.
“About thirty miles ahead, Bucky. What’s your state?”
“I can wait a while.”
Wyatt asked each pilot for his fuel state, and, after the replies, said, “Yucca Six, then Four, then Two, then Five, then Three.”
A few minutes later, Ben Borman came up on the Tac Two channel.
“I count six still with us. You see me?”
Barr had already located the tanker, several miles ahead and a thousand feet above. She was clearly defined against a brightening sky.
He rogered the query when his turn came.
After Jordan and Gettman had had their chances, Barr took a sip of water from the baby bottle tucked into his harness, then eased in throttle and gently closed the gap between himself and the C-130F.
The refuelling hose was fully extended from the port wing, seeming to float below the Hercules. The small airfoils near the tip allowed the operator to fly the tip within a short range, making the last manoeuvres to dock the tip in the receiving aircraft’s fuel receptacle. He could see Borman, though not clearly, in the Plexiglas bubble at the rear of the tanker.
“Atta way, Bucky, come on a tad more.”
“What the hell’s a ‘tad more,’ Ben?”
“Up ten feet. Speed’s matched.”
Barr was studying the end of the hose, which was just above him. He opened the refuelling receptacle, which was located on the top of the fuselage, behind the canopy.
A bad spot of air, a misdirection with the stick or throttles, and that heavy tip could do devastating things to canopies and pilots.
He eased back the stick a notch.
The hose lowered on him.
“Don’t go getting the hiccoughs, Denny,” Barr cautioned Maal.