“Loose lips.”
“Sorry?”
Mac laughed. “Oh. An old World War Two expression. And before you ask and insult me, the answer is no, I’m far too young to have been in World War Two.”
“I have a career, sir. I wasn’t about to make any snide comments… that your hearing aid might pickup.”
“I heard that! The actual phrase was ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ and it’s still valid. That’s why it’s so damned hard to run a black project in the middle of a civilian community. I’m amazed we’ve done as well as we have in the past three years, with only one significant security breach.”
The cabin steward appeared silently with another diet Coke and Mac took it as he shook his head, his eyes falling on a striking twilight painting of the Washington Monument mounted on the aft bulkhead of the cabin.
“I suppose I don’t have to say, Jon, that we need to watch both this Harrison character and Ms. Rosen very carefully.”
“No, sir, you don’t, and our security people will.”
“I worry about security being handled by our”—he mouthed the words as if they were sour—“office of special investigations. I don’t want any cowboy lieutenant in civilian clothes getting excited and riding off to do something illegal. But… have them harvest each and every one of the original radar tapes from FAA, Coast Guard, Navy, and whoever else might have electronic evidence of our test flight that evening. Set them up in the briefing room back at Elmendorf for tomorrow.”
“General, what do we do if the Gulfstream does show up on one of those radar tapes?”
Mac smiled and shook his head. “Why, there was never any Gulfstream in the area to begin with, was there?”
“Ah, no, sir.”
“Right. So how could it possibly show up on whatever tape we send back?”
Anderson nodded. “Understood.”
“Actually,” Mac added, “we’ll see the raw data radar return on all of them, I suspect, but without a data block generated by a transponder, which we kept off, it’s just another unidentified aircraft flitting around the state. I don’t want to see anything that might lead Ms. Rosen to think we were involved with her father’s plane.” He paused and peered closely at Anderson, who had lowered his eyes. “There isn’t any possibility of that, is there?”
“No, sir, of course not. But I had already figured you’d want those tapes. I’m ready to move on it.” Lieutenant Colonel Anderson began to get up but Mac caught his sleeve, studying his eyes.
“Jon, just a second. You’re sure that we could not have had anything to do with the loss of that Albatross?”
The colonel finished standing and shook his head vigorously. “No, sir. Absolutely not! The coordinates I have for where that ditching, or crash, occurred are a long way away from the surface track of our test Gulfstream.”
“But,” the general said as he raised a finger, “you were concerned enough to check.”
There was a momentary twitch in Anderson’s expression, and Mac noticed. “Jon, look at me. As I told you when you became my aide, I’ve got to know everything you know, without exception. You withhold anything from me, no matter how noble the intent, and I’ll personally ride your shredded ass out of the Air Force. Understood?”
“Honestly, sir, I’m telling you everything I know, and I would never—”
Mac cut him off with a single look of warning and a raised index finger. “Just get the tapes and set up a secure viewing room for zero eight hundred in the morning.”
SEVENTEEN
WEDNESDAY, DAY 3 ANCHORAGE
Schroedinger had spent all afternoon mulling the indignities of the morning and was unprepared for yet another assault on normalcy when Ben burst through the door hours ahead of the schedule.
There were no actual words formed in Schroedinger’s mind to define his discomfited response, merely a disgusted consciousness of the continued attack on the predictability of his world. He would need to find a way to demonstrate his displeasure to Ben, he decided. And there were many options available to a creature with claws in a house with furniture.
“Hi, fellow,” Ben said as he breezed through without so much as a session of ear scratching. Schroedinger watched him charge across the den and pull various things from a desk drawer, things Schroedinger had sniffed before and found uninteresting. Ben, it seemed, liked to pay far more attention to his things and his computer than to his cat, and in a feline frame of reference, such an attitude was simply inexplicable.
The 3,500-square-foot home Ben had purchased for Lisa and himself three months before her death was tucked into a new subdivision on the flanks of the Chugach Mountains bordering the east side of Anchorage. All the way back from the base Ben had been fighting the image of Lisa standing before the picture window in the upper-story den with their real estate agent, squealing with delight at the sweeping view of the city. The decision to buy had been made on the spot, and the night of delighted lovemaking that followed had been a thank-you of sorts.
Ben had tried repeatedly to get the image out of his mind. It inevitably triggered a deep sadness, and a feeling that had been growing precipitously of late, the simple longing for feminine companionship. It was the same disturbing instinct Lindsey had inadvertently twanged the day before.
So much for that, Ben thought, bitterness overlaying his thoughts of Lindsey. She’d used him, was using him, wagging her shapely tail to keep him under control.
That’s unfair, he corrected himself. She wasn’t making a pass. It was me who was thinking prurient thoughts.
Nonetheless, the sudden loss of trust in what had appeared to be a growing friendship hurt.
The refrigerator yielded a poor selection limited to bottled water and a few soft drinks, and he opted for the water before moving to the living room, aware that he couldn’t recall the details of the drive home. He plopped in the big easy chair Lisa had insisted he buy when they moved in, and wondered who would mourn him if he crashed on the upcoming test flight.
Phyllis, his only sibling, would be momentarily hysterical when the news reached her palatial North Dallas home. With their folks gone, Phyllis would arrange the funeral and make all the requisite noises, but in the end, they had never been close enough as adults for his passing to alter her life.
The flight! There was no doubt that whoever had contaminated the basic program would strike again, and this time succeed. Someone wanted the program to fail and Uniwave to go under. There was no doubt that he and the two pilots would die. And he would be condemning someone else to perish in his place if he elected to stay on the ground.
He glanced over at Schroedinger and smiled, puzzling the cat even more. He needed to make arrangements for Schroedinger, and that thought triggered an image of Nelson, who would be the only Alaskan genuinely saddened by his passing.
Dammit! Nelson had left a message the day before on his voice mail and he’d forgotten to get back to him. Ben came out of the chair with enough haste to startle Schroedinger. He found his handheld database PDA and located Nelson’s cell phone number, then punched it into the portable handset.
Nelson Oolokvit was contemptuous of the label “Eskimo.” Ben remembered his explosion one night at a clumsy question from a California tourist with a dilettante concern for Native Americans.
“If you call me an Eskimo one more time, sister, I’m gonna find an uulu and gut you!” he’d raged, waving a beer in the woman’s face. “Go find yourself a frozen Athabascan to patronize! I’m from Kotzebue. I’m Inupiat. I’ve never lived in a damned igloo, and I know better things to do with a female than rub noses with her, okay?”