Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 (21 page)

 
          
“You’d
better reconsider,” Kramer said. “An order from Moscow cannot be ignored. You
know that.”

 
          
“I’ll
consider
it, but only when the
situation justifies the tremendous loss of a trained agent in place. As of now,
it doesn’t. All that’s indicated is that the operation proceed with extreme
caution, which is what I intend to do.” He motioned toward the door. “Now get
out. And you’d better not return directly to your consulate in Los Angeles.
There’s a good chance that you’ll be followed.” He paused, then said: “Go visit
your buddies in Mexico.”

 
          
Moffitt
left first to check the parking area and driveway for tails. Kramer paused
inside the front door.

 
          
“I
will report what you have said. I warn you, do not separate yourself from the
Command any further.”

 
          
Maraklov
said nothing as Kramer looked out the door, got an all-clear flash from
Moffitt’s cigarette lighter, went out.

 
          
After
the agents had departed, James locked and bolted the door—and suddenly felt as
if he was suffocating . . .

 
          
His
mind’s eye could see unmarked cars roaring up the driveway toward his stairway,
plainclothes FBI, CIA and DIA agents, led by Major Hal Briggs, coming up the
stairs, kicking in his door, hauling him away in handcuffs, thrown into the
back of a van with Kramer and Moffitt, who must have been arrested already . .
. The federal authorities would interrogate them, separately, of course. He
could trust Kramer to keep silent, insisting that he and Moffitt be returned to
their consulate, but he was positive Moffitt would spill his guts just for an
opportunity to get back at him. He would be identified as a Soviet agent and
taken into custody, charged with espionage. His career was ruined. He’d never
fly DreamStar again, never experience the indescribable experience of becoming
one with that amazing machine . . .

 
          
Should
he just sit here waiting, or escape right now? Activate his safe’s incendiary
device himself so as to not risk Briggs or one of his men discovering the
trip-wire and disarming the device? He’d take the money he’d hidden, go to
Mexico, maybe further south, maybe to the wild interior of Brazil, out of reach
of both American and Soviet intelligence units. He’d contact Moscow in hiding
until he could be sure he was safe— from his own people as well as the
Americans ... He removed two of the books on the top shelf in front of the
hidden wall safe. In case someone tried to break in he could reach in between
the books, pop open the hidden panel and activate the incendiary device. He
then shut off the lights, poured himself a glass of Scotch whiskey and sat down
in the darkened living room.

 
          
Half
a glass of Scotch later, sleep finally overtook him, but he was not getting any
rest. For the first time since those first few months of his new life in
America
, Andrei Maraklov as Ken James remembered
what real fear, real terror was.

*
 
*
 
*

 
          
Now
that she was a senior civilian contractor on a small military installation,
Wendy Tork’s hours were much more regular than in the early years when she had
spent days in her laboratory, working on some irritating software bug. She
remembered slaving over a computer terminal, staring at a screen full of lines
of computer code. In the early eighties debugging software and artificial
intelligence-based computerized programmers were practically non-existant—human
programmers, sometimes armies of them, had to disassemble a compiled routine,
then read thousands of lines of code to try to find an error. One never knew if
the error was on the screen or a hundred lines away or in a completely different
sub-routine. Once the error was supposedly found, the code was reassembled into
its compact faster form and run. It was a wonder anything as sophisticated as
the B-52 I Old Dog’s electronic countermeasures equipment, Wendy’s first major
military project, ever worked in the laboratory—not to mention in combat. Now
she had computers that designed other computers’ programs, and computers that
checked and debugged
those
computers’
work, and a master computer that supervised all of them. Her job was mostly
telling her computers what their jobs were and receiving reports from them on
their progress. What had taken dozens of scientists and engineers years to
accomplish now took one person a few days. Because of all that she could keep
regular hours, enjoy a four-day work-week—most of the industrialized nations of
the world had switched to a four-day work-week by 1994—and spend more time at
home.

 
          
But
if most of the world had gone to the four-day work-week, the military,
especially military aviators, had not. It seemed to go double for Lieutenant
Colonel Patrick McLanahan. Since Wendy joined HAWC and moved in with him, her
nights had often been long and lonely. Patrick had become an important
administrator and commander at Dreamland research center, and it was not long
before Patrick would call if he
was
going to be home more or less on time.

 
          
Tonight
was one of those. He’d be home around seven, an early quitting time. Wendy
doubted it and was right. She was wide awake when he finally did arrive home.
He walked quietly as he could to the bedroom, tried to fumble his way,
undressed without the lights.

 
          
“Hi.”

 
          
He
threw his flight suit into the laundry hamper. “Sorry if I woke you.”

 
          
“Tough
day?”

 
          
“You
could say so.” He went into the bathroom briefly, then got into bed beside her.
At first as he moved she pulled back with a shiver. His
whole
body was like ice—he’d taken one of his two-minute Navy
shower sponge baths.

 
          
“You are freezing.”

           
“Sorry.” She allowed him to curl up
beside her, his warm breath on the back of her neck, punctuated by a kiss, then
another. A moment or two later he asked, “How was your day today?”

 
          
“The
morning was busy—I finally finished the software upgrades for the Megafortress.
Pretty quiet this afternoon, I came home early.”

 
          
“Sorry
about standing you up for lunch.”

 
          
“That’s
okay. It looked like you were pretty busy. Anything serious with the plane?”

 
          
“No.
Some over-G warnings showed up on the computer readouts, but we couldn’t find
any damage. We worked right through lunch. I could have used some of the Nellis
O-Club’s roast beef after that flight this morning.”

 
          
Wendy
hesitated. “I didn’t have lunch at the Officer’s Club.” “You ate at the
cafeteria at HAWC?”

 
          
“No
... I had lunch at Indian Springs.”

 
          
She
could feel his body tense. “Indian Springs? What’s at Indian Springs?”

 
          
“The
Thunderbirds Club.”

 
          
“You
went to Indian Springs Auxiliary Field? How did you
get there?”

           
“The Dolphin dropped us off.”

 
          
“Us?”

 
          
“Ken
James and me.”

 
          
“Ken
James took you to Indian Springs Field for lunch? Why?” '

 
          
“Why
not? I’ve never been there before. Ken made it sound like he goes there all the
time.”

 
          
“I
didn’t know the Dolphin ever stopped out there . . . Honey, I don’t think it
would be a good idea to go to Indian Springs again.”

 
          
“Why?”

 
          
“Well,
it’s a restricted-use field. It’s supposed to be for official business—”

 
          
“Sure.
Whatever you say, Patrick, but Ken seems to go there a lot.”

 
          
“Indian
Springs is the fighter pilot’s hangout. But Ken also has a habit of stretching
the rules. I don’t think there’s any problem, but let me check it out . . .”

 
          
“Okay.”
She hoped it ended there. She was already sorry she’d brought it up at all.

 
          
“Damn
it, if James can even find a rule, he’ll stretch it every last inch he can.”

 
          
“He
says you grounded him and J. C. Powell today.”

 
          
“He
said that? Damn it, that stuff is supposed to be classified.

 
          
He
and J.C. came close to killing each other this morning. I should bust them both
but I can’t. J.C. is maybe the best pilot in the unit and one of the few that can
keep up with DreamStar in our flights. And James is the only one that can fly
DreamStar with any effectiveness. I can’t even officially reprimand them until
the project is declassified. I don’t know if it’s possible to train another
pilot for DreamStar, and I can’t afford to put this project any more behind
schedule. So, I gave them a slap on the wrist . . . they’re only grounded until
the next scheduled sortie. Next week ... So to celebrate, James takes you to
lunch at a restricted base and I have Elliott giving me the hairy eyeball all
afternoon ...”

 
          
“I’m
sorry. It’s just that—”

 
          
“And
I’m sorry to sound like a pompous, jealous . . . except when you’re concerned
...”

 
          
And
then she was in his arms, and there was no more time— or need—for talk.

Dreamland

Thursday, 11 June 1996, 0712 PDT (1012 EDT)

 
          
“You
realize, Patrick,” Dr. Alan Carmichael said, “that nothing at all may happen.”

 
          
McLanahan
and Carmichael were in a special steel-lined chamber early the next morning.
More a huge underground vault, the chamber contained the original laboratory
version of the ANTARES thought-controlled flight-and-avionics system. Concerned
more with performance in the early years of the project than size, the chamber
housing the ANTARES system was massive—the size of a basketball court. The
complex was controlled by its own super-fast CRAY computer that, even though
encompassing state-of-the-art very high-speed integrated circuits,
artificial-intelligence electronics capable of performing billions of
computations a second, was larger than a refrigerator and had to be cooled with
liquid nitrogen at two hundred seventy-five degrees below zero.

 
          
In
the center of the three-story chamber, dwarfed by massive banks of electronics
gear and environmental system ducts, was an F-15 single-seat fighter simulator.
It had none of the advanced multi-function displays and laser-projection
devices of Cheetah—it still used ordinary electric artificial horizons and
pneumatically driven altimeters and turn-and-slip indicators, and most of those
were barely functioning. The ejection seat was an old Mark Five “Iron
Maiden”-type seat from the early 1980s, stiff, straight-backed, and
uncomfortable, its special anti-G padding and shoulder harnesses having been
cannibalized for spare parts long ago.

 
          
Patrick
was not secured in that ejection seat, but neither was he free to move. He was
wearing an early non-cushion version of Ken James’ metallic-thread flight suit.
It was far more bulky than the actual operational model, with thick fiber-optic
bundles interwoven all around the suit, circuit boxes attached to every
conceivable inconvenient point on Patrick’s body, and, unlike James’ suit, this
experimental model had no integrated cooling systems built into it. Icy blasts
of cold air were directed on Patrick to help keep him cool, and when the skin’s
resistance was completely unbalanced by sweat and vascular dilation on account
of the extreme temperatures inside the suit, the session would be ended.