His red SAC phone buzzed. He quickly grabbed it and said, "Whittenberg."
"Yeah, Rodg," came the reply, "it's Bernie."
Whittenberg was never so glad to take a phone call. "Hello, Omaha. I can't tell you how good it feels to hear a friendly voice."
"I read you," said CinCSAC Bernard Dooley. "I've been talking with Bergstrom about this Intrepid deal — he's got us at DEFCON Two, so I can't gab for long. Haven't talked to you since our SR-71 flyby. Just wondered how you were holding up."
Whittenberg chuckled for the first time in a long time. "I feel as if I were in the twenty-seventh mile of a twenty-six-mile race."
Dooley allowed himself a litde laugh, too. "I hear ya… Bergstrom said you had a little 'surprise' going up to hit the Russkies."
"Yeah," replied Whittenberg, his grimness returning. "They sure surprised us on the Constellation. I don't know if you saw it, Bernie. It was horrible — maybe worse than the Challenger. Dammit, I should have known something was screwy with that satellite."
The CinCSAC lent a sympathetic ear to his friend. "C'mon, Rodg. Lighten up. Your guys knew the score. So did my SR-71 crew. That's what we get paid for. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't. You did the best that you could with an impossible situation."
Whittenberg sighed. "Yeah. My best."
"C'mon. " Dooley's voice became harder. "We've got these fucking Bolsheviks in a box now, only they don't know it yet. It's our turn to spring a surprise. If your space fighter doesn't nail the Intrepid, my stealth boys will."
There was a pause, until Whittenberg said quizzically, "Stealth?"
The moment Whittenberg popped the one-word question, Dooley knew he'd just violated security. Apparently his friend had been kept out of the loop on the decision to use the stealth bombers. "I guess Bergstrom didn't tell you," he said finally.
"Tell me what?" queried Whittenberg, not masking his curiosity.
Dooley felt chagrined, but figured his friend had a right to know what was happening. He proceeded to explain how the stealth bomber prototypes were currently flying through Iranian airspace — on a bearing of true north toward the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Barbara Kelso, Whittenberg's secretary of four years, kept herself busy in the outer office by working on the CinC's backlog of correspondence. Although a civilian and not privy to all the details on the Intrepid affair, her perceptive antennae told her something very big was afoot. So she'd packed a bag from home and made up her mind to stay at her post until this business was settled.
Her phone buzzed. "General Whittenberg's office," she said in her soft Missouri accent.
"Barbara?"
"Yes."
"This is Peter," said Lamborghini in a surprised voice. "What on earth are you doing there at this time of night?"
"The same reason you're at Vandenberg, Colonel," replied Kelso. "Or is it Edwards this time?"
"It's Vandenberg. I guess nobody can keep a secret from the CinC's secretary. Is the general free?"
Kelso looked at her phone board. The red light was on, indicating that Whittenberg was talking to Dooley. "I'm sorry, Colonel, he's on the phone with General Dooley at SAC right now. You know how it is when those two get together. Should I break in?"
"No," Lamborghini said quickly. "No, don't do that. Just take a message, please."
"Certainly."
Lamborghini took a few moments to phrase what he was going to say in precise language. "I'm afraid I have to leave now. Just tell the general that I've left an envelope with the base commander here… If for any reason it becomes necessary, tell him I would appreciate it if he gave the envelope to Juliet personally."
Kelso shuddered and a lump formed in her throat. "I'll tell him, Peter."
"Thank you, Barbara."
Lamborghini hung up the phone, then walked out of the small anteroom and into the preflight suit-up area. Monaghan was already wearing his helmet. Lamborghini nodded to the airman, who stepped forward and carefully lowered the pressure helmet over the colonel's head, then sealed it with a quarter turn. Lamborghini raised the visor and plugged a tube into his suit from the portable briefcase-sized air conditioner. Lastly, he pulled on his flight gloves and screwed the aluminum wrist seals shut. He and Monaghan were wearing the full "closed" orange space suits — the kind worn by the flight crews of the SR-71.
The two aviators walked out of the crew area and into a van that would transport them to the Titan 34-D gantry. They were escorted by two white-suited technicians, and the journey was made in silence. One Air Police car with armed guards traveled in front of the van, another behind. The convoy pulled up to the gantry, and the party of four disembarked to walk to the elevator.
The service gantry for the Titan 34-D was like any at Cape Canaveral, except it possessed an aluminum-leafed canopy that prevented the launch vehicle from being observed by Russian spy satellites. When the rotating portion of the gantry rolled away, the leaves of the canopy folded back like a lady's fan.
The elevator stopped and the party exited to walk down the gantry access arm — just as the Constellation's crew had done less than twenty-four hours before. The ground crew at Vanden-berg, however, was somber.
Monaghan and Lamborghini doffed their boot slippers and stepped into the clean area, where they disconnected their air-conditioning hoses and allowed the ground crew to help them squiggle into the Kestrel's tandem seats. Mad Dog went first, followed by his friend. They connected the air-conditioning and oxygen tubes to their suits and closed the visors, then Monaghan lowered the canopy. After the closed light lit up on his panel, Mad Dog said through the voice-activated intercom, "Commo check."
"I read you five by five," responded Lamborghini evenly.
Monaghan began his instrument check. "You've been awful quiet, Hot Rod."
From a zippered pocket Lamborghini extracted a small photograph of Juliet and their two daughters. He wedged it between a couple of toggle switches on his control panel. "Yeah," he said finally. "I was just wondering."
"Wondering what?" asked Monaghan.
"Wondering if the Russians have any more ASAT surprises up there we don't know about.
They looked as if sorcery had taken wing — like two giant black batwings cruising menacingly through the clouds. If an aviation historian had been granted a close-up peek at the unearthly objects, he'd probably say they resembled the old YB-49 Flying Wing, and indeed, the Flying Wing was part of their heritage and pedigree. But whereas the Flying Wing was designed with the intent of reducing aerodynamic drag, the stealth bomber was designed with a much different purpose in mind— it was conceived, designed, and built to be invisible to radar.
After World War II, the marriage of aviation, radar, missiles, and electronics caused a new, intriguing axiom to emerge, and that was: If the enemy could see you, he could kill you. So compelling was this axiom that it ultimately triggered a quest for the perfect warplane — an invisible warplane. One that could not be detected by the omnipresent tentacles of enemy radar. However, in designing an invisible airplane, there was a fundamental "Catch-22."