Boomer ran his gaze over the parked spaceplane. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he could see the subtle differences between it and its unarmed counterparts. He turned back to Martindale with a frown. “Who else in Sky Masters knows about this?”
“Apart from Helen Kaddiri? And the technicians who helped build it?” Martindale said. “No one.”
“Not even General McLanahan?” Boomer asked in surprise.
The other man shrugged again. “Oh, I suspect Patrick may have guessed what I’ve been up to. But if so, he understood the importance of discretion. I’ve kept this project on a strict need-to-know basis.”
“So why are you telling me all this?” Boomer wondered.
“Because, Dr. Noble,” Martindale said, with another thin smile, “now you need to know.”
Boomer snorted. “Yeah, well, it sure as hell would have been nice to find out about all this before Brad McLanahan and I got our tails singed facing off against Mars One. Maybe if we’d flown this spaceplane instead, things would have turned out differently.”
Martindale shook his head. “The S-29B doesn’t have any separate payload capacity, Dr. Noble… as you should remember. Every spare ounce is needed for its offensive and defensive weapons and sensors. So you wouldn’t have been able to carry those reconnaissance nanosatellites of yours into orbit. Besides, it would have been viewed as somewhat impolitic to fly an armed spaceplane so close to what the Russians then asserted was merely a peaceful civilian space station.”
“Maybe so,” Boomer said with a sour tone. His mouth turned down. “Unfortunately, it’s already too late for this S-29B you’ve spent so much money on to make one damned bit of difference. Before the Russians launched Mars One, this bird would have ruled Earth orbit.” Angrily, he nodded toward the big spaceplane. “Sending that Shadow up to tangle with that plasma rail gun of Gryzlov’s would be like throwing a Sopwith Camel into battle against an F-22 Raptor. It would be suicide, not any kind of fair fight.”
Martindale nodded. “I agree. As matters stand, this spaceplane cannot engage in combat in orbit and hope to survive.”
“Then why haul me all the way down here for this little dog and pony show?” Boomer asked cautiously.
Martindale looked at him in surprise. “Isn’t that obvious? The S-29B may not be able to fly safely into orbit, but it can certainly fly elsewhere.” Carefully, he laid out what he had in mind.
When he finished, Boomer stared at him for a few moments. Finally, he shook his head. “And you didn’t see fit to mention any of this to Major Rozek?”
Now it was Martindale’s turn to stare. “Do you really think I should have revealed the existence of a top secret armed spaceplane to a covert ops team preparing to fly deep into heavily defended Russian airspace?”
“Yeah, I guess I see your point.” Boomer sighed. He nodded. “Okay, I’m in. But I’ll need some time to rustle up a crew. My specs called for a crew of four plus the pilots. It’ll take months to train them up.”
Martindale shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, Dr. Noble,” he said with absolute assurance. “I’ve already selected a crew for this spaceplane. In fact, they’ve been training for missions for the past two years.”
“Two years?” Boomer took a deep breath and then let it out in a rush. “You know, you really are one spooky son of a bitch, Mr. Martindale,” he said, half in disgust and half in sneaking admiration.
Martindale nodded serenely. “Yes,” he agreed. “I suppose I am.”
Attu, near the western end of the Aleutian island chain, lay only five hundred nautical miles from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. During the Second World War, the forty-mile-long island’s rugged hills and mountains had been the scene of a horrific eighteen-day battle between occupying Japanese soldiers and the U.S. Army’s 7th Infantry Division. More than four thousand men had died in the struggle over an otherwise unimportant speck in the middle of the Bering Sea. Now, though, the island was ordinarily entirely uninhabited, home only to the graves of the dead and dozens of rare bird species.
That was about to change.
Six hours after taking off from Battle Mountain, the Sky Masters XCV-62 Ranger piloted by Peter Vasey flew toward Attu, cruising at four hundred and fifty knots barely two thousand feet above the sea. Intently, he peered through the cockpit canopy into a dense gray wall of swirling fog. The Aleutians were known for horrible weather — fierce storms and squalls in winter and thick fog in summer.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered. “My old grannie told me stories about the Great London Smog of 1952, where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. But I never thought anyone would be daft enough to try flying through something almost as bad. Not even me.”
Sitting in the copilot’s seat, Major Nadia Rozek smiled wryly. “Your grandmother did not have the benefit of a DTF system, Constable.”
“There is that,” Vasey allowed. Between the detailed maps stored in their aircraft’s computers and periodic, short bursts from its radar altimeter, the Ranger’s digital terrain-following system was ordinarily used for prolonged, very low-altitude flight at high speeds. Together with its radar-absorbent stealth coating, DTF enabled the aircraft to avoid detection and dodge enemy SAMs. Today, the system’s computerized maps and radars had another use — allowing them to fly, with reasonable confidence, in conditions where visibility was practically nil.
Nadia peered down at her display. “Eight nautical miles to our final turn to the airfield.”
“Copy that.” Vasey eased back on the throttles. The muted roar from the Ranger’s four turbofan engines decreased. Their airspeed dropped fast.
They were heading for a runway on the southeastern side of the island, just inland from Massacre Bay. Closed more than a decade ago, Casco Cove Coast Guard Station’s airport was now officially reserved for emergency use only.
“Casco Station, this is Ranger Six-Two,” Nadia said. “Two minutes to final approach fix. Descending through fifteen hundred feet. Airspeed two-five-zero knots, full stop.”
“Ranger Six-Two, Casco Station, roger,” a crisp female voice replied. The airport was back in business, this time run by the men and women of a Scion advance team flown in the day before. “Winds variable between one-eight-zero and two-four-zero degrees, twenty knots gusting to twenty-seven, ceiling indefinite, fog, haze, runway visual range variable between six hundred and zero, altimeter two-niner-four-zero. Runway braking action fair.”
“Six-Two copies.” Nadia brought the XCV-62’s forward-looking passive thermal sensors online and activated its air-to-ground radar. In milliseconds, the aircraft’s computer analyzed the information it was receiving from both sources and overlaid the resulting image across Vasey’s HUD. “Lovely weather.”
“Fiat lux,” the Englishman said appreciatively. “Let there be light.” What had been a view of gray nothingness was now a green-tinted, three-dimensional picture of the rugged island ahead. The steering cues on his HUD slid right. He banked to follow them.
The mass of a steep, sixteen-hundred-foot volcanic mountain slid past off their left side. Snow still crowned its peak. Even in summer, temperatures on Attu never got much above fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The runway loomed ahead, stretching across spongy tundra otherwise marked by old bomb craters, unused roads, and abandoned buildings.