The driver found it hard going. Though he’d grown up in these hills, and could remember a boyhood in which a thousand-foot climb was just another footrace with his playmates, he’d been driving the truck for some time, and his leg muscles were more accustomed to pushing down pedals than this sort of thing. What would once have taken forty minutes now took over an hour, and with the place almost in sight he was venomously angry, too angry and too tired to pay attention to things that ought to have been obvious by now. He could still hear the traffic sounds on the road below, could hear the birds twittering in the trees around him, but nothing else when he should have been hearing something. He paused, bending over to catch his breath when he got his first warning. It was a dark spot on the trail. Something had turned the brown earth to black, but that could have been anything, and he was in a hurry to see what the problem was up the hill and didn’t ponder it. After all, there hadn’t been any problem lately with the army or the police, and he wondered why the refining work was done so far up the mountainside in any case. It was no longer necessary.
Five minutes more and he could see the little clearing, and only now he noticed that there were no sounds coming from it, though there was an odd, acrid smell. Doubtless the acid used in the prerefining process, he was sure. Then he made the last turn and saw.
The truck driver was not a man unaccustomed to violence. He’d been involved in the pre-Cartel fighting and had also killed a few M-19 sympathizers in the wars because of which the Cartel had actually been formed. He’d seen blood, therefore, and had spilled some himself.
But not like this. All fourteen of the men he’d driven in the previous night were lined up shoulder to shoulder in a neat little row on the ground. The bodies were already bloated, and animals had been picking at several of the open wounds. The two men he’d dispatched up the mountainside were more freshly dead. Though the driver didn’t fathom it, they’d been killed by a claymore mine triggered when they’d examined the bodies, and their bodies were newly shredded, with major sections missing where the ball-bearing-sized fragments had struck, and with the blood still trickling out. One’s face showed the surprise and shock. The other man was facedown, with a section about the size of a shoe box messily removed from his back.
The driver stood still for a minute or so, afraid to move in any direction, his quivering hands reaching for another cigarette, then dropping two which he was too terrified to reach for. Before he could get a third, he turned and moved carefully down the path. A hundred meters after that, he was running for his life as every bird call and every breeze through the trees sounded to him like an approaching soldier. They had to be soldiers. He was sure of that. Only soldiers killed with that sort of precision.
“That was a splendid paper you delivered this afternoon. We hadn’t considered the Soviet ‘nationalities’ question as thoroughly as you have. Your analytical skills are as sharp as ever.” Sir Basil Charleston raised his glass in salute. “Your promotion was well earned. Congratulations, Sir John.”
“Thanks, Bas’. I just wish it could have happened another way,” Ryan said.
“That bad?”
Jack nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“And Emil Jacobs, too. Bloody bad time for your chaps.”
Ryan smiled rather grimly. “You might say that.”
“So, what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m afraid there’s not much I can say about that,” Jack replied carefully. I don’t know, but I can’t exactly say that, can I?
“Quite so.” The head of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service nodded sagely. “Whatever your response is, I’m sure it will be appropriate.”
At that moment he knew that Greer had been right. He had to know such things or risk being taken for a fool by his counterparts here and everywhere else in the world. He’d get home in a few more days and talk things over with Judge Moore. Ryan was supposed to have some bureaucratic muscle now. Might as well flex it a little to see if it worked.
Commander Jackson woke after six hours’ sleep. He, too, enjoyed that greatest of luxuries aboard a warship, privacy. His rank and former station as a squadron commander put him high on the list of VIPs, and there happened to be a spare one-man stateroom in this floating city. His was just under the flight deck forward. Close to the bow catapults by the sound of things, which explained why one of Ranger’s own squadron commanders didn’t want it. On arrival, he’d made the necessary courtesy calls, and he didn’t have any official duties to attend to for another… three hours. After washing and shaving and morning coffee, he decided to do a few things on his own. Robby headed below for the carrier’s magazine.
This was a large compartment with a relatively low ceiling where the bombs and missiles were kept. Several rooms, really, with nearby shops so that the “smart” weapons could be tested and repaired by ordnance technicians. Jackson’s personal concern was with the AIM-54C Phoenix air-to-air missiles. There had been problems with the guidance systems, and one purpose of the battle-group exercise was to see if the contractor’s fix really worked or not.
Entry into the space was restricted, for obvious reasons. Robby identified himself to a senior chief petty officer, and it turned out that they’d both served on the Kennedy a few years before. Together they entered a work space where some “ordies” were playing with the missiles, with an odd-looking box hanging on the pointed nose of one.
“What d’ya think?” one asked.
“Reads out okay to me, Duke,” the one on the oscilloscope replied. “Let me try some simulated jamming.”
“That’s the bunch we’re prepping for the Shoot-Ex, sir,” the senior chief explained. “So far they seem to be working all right, but…”
“But wasn’t it you who found the problem in the first place?” Robby asked.
“Me and my old boss, Lieutenant Frederickson.” The chief nodded. The discovery had resulted in several million dollars in penalties to the contractor. And all the AIM-54C missiles in the fleet had been decertified for several months, taking away what should have been the most capable air-to-air missile in the Navy. He led Jackson to the rack of test equipment. “How many we supposed to shoot?”
“Enough to tell whether the fix works or not,” Robby replied. The chief grunted.
“That could be quite a Shoot-Ex, sir.”
“Drones are cheap!” Robby pointed out in a most outrageous lie. But the chief knew what he meant. It was cheaper than going to the Indian Ocean and maybe having a shoot-out with Iranian F-14A Tomcats (they had them, too) and then finding out that the goddamned missiles didn’t work properly. That was a most efficient way of killing off pilots whose training went for a million dollars a pop. The good news was that the fix was working, at least as far as the test equipment could tell. To make sure, Robby told the chief, between ten and twenty of the Phoenix-Cs would be shot off, plus a larger number of Sparrows and Sidewinders. Jackson started to leave. He’d seen what he needed to see, and the ordies all had work to do.
“Looks like we’re really going to be emptying this here locker out, sir. You know about the new bombs we’re checking out?”
“No. I met with a tech-rep on the COD flight in. He didn’t talk a hell of a lot. So what the hell is new? Just a bomb, right?”
The senior chief laughed. “Come on, I’ll show you the Hush-A-Bomb.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you ever watch Rocky and Bullwinkle, sir?”
“Chief, you have really lost me.”
“Well, when I was a kid I used to watch Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose, and one of the stories was about how Boris and Natasha – they were the bad guys, Commander – were trying to steal something called Hush-A-Boom. That was an explosive that blew stuff up without making any noise. Looks like the guys at China Lake came up with the next-best thing!”
The chief opened a door to the bomb-storage area. The streamlined shapes – they didn’t have any fins or fuses attached until they were taken topside – sat on storage pallets securely chained down to the steel deck. On a pallet close to the rectangular elevator that delivered them topside was a group of blue-painted bombs. The blue color made them exercise units, but from the tag on the pallet it was clear that they were also loaded with the customary explosive filler. Robby Jackson was a fighter pilot, and hadn’t dropped very many bombs, but that was just another side of his profession. The weapons he looked at appeared to be standard two-thousand-pound low-drag cases, which translated to nine hundred eighty-five pounds of high explosives, and just over a thousand pounds of steel bombcase. The only difference between a “dumb” or “iron” bomb and a guided “smart” bomb was the attachment of a couple of hardware items: a seeker head on the nose, and movable fins on the tail. Both units attached to the normal fusing points, and in fact the fuses were part of the guidance-package attachments. For obvious reasons these were kept in a different compartment. On the whole, however, the blue bombcases appeared grossly ordinary.