Three hundred miles off the Colombian coast, USS Ranger turned into the wind to commence flight operations. The battle group was composed of the carrier, the Aegis-class cruiser Thomas S. Gates, another missile cruiser, four missile-armed destroyers and frigates, and two dedicated antisubmarine destroyers. The underway replenishment group, with a fleet oiler, the ammunition ship Shasta, and three escorts, was fifty miles closer to the South American coast. Five hundred miles to seaward was another similar group returning from a lengthy deployment at “Camel Station” in the Indian Ocean. The returning fleet simulated an oncoming enemy formation – pretending to be Russians, though nobody said that anymore in the age of glasnost.
The first aircraft off, as Robby Jackson watched from Pri-Fly, the control position high up on the carrier’s island structure, were F-14 Tomcat interceptors, loaded out to maximum takeoff weight, squatting at the catapults with cones of fire trailing from each engine. As always, it was exciting to watch. Like a ballet of tanks, the massive, heavily loaded aircraft were choreographed about the four acres of flight deck by teenaged kids in filthy, color-coded shirts who gave instructions in pantomime while keeping out of the way of the jet intakes and exhausts. It was for them a game more dangerous than racing across city streets at rush hour, and more stimulating. Crewmen in purple shirts fueled the aircraft, and were called “grapes.” Other kids, red-shirted ordnancemen called “ordies,” were loading blue-painted exercise weapons aboard aircraft. The actually shooting part of the Shoot-Ex didn’t start for another day. Tonight they’d practice interception tactics against fellow Navy aviators. Tomorrow night, Air Force C-130s would lift out of Panama to rendezvous with the returning battle group and launch a series of target drones which, everyone hoped, the Tomcats would blast from the sky with their newly repaired AIM-54C Phoenix missiles. It was not to be a contractor’s test. The drones would be under the control of Air Force NCOs whose job it was to evade fire as though their lives depended on it, for whom every successful evasion involved a stiff penalty to be paid in beer or some other medium of exchange by the flight crew who missed.
Robby watched twelve aircraft launch before heading down to the flight deck. Already dressed in his olive-green flight suit, he carried his personal flight helmet. He’d ride tonight in one of the E-2C Hawkeye airborne-early-warning aircraft, the Navy’s own diminutive version of the larger E-3A AW ACS, from which he’d see if his new tactical arrangement worked any better than current fleet procedures. It had in all the computer simulations, but computers weren’t reality, a fact often lost upon people who worked in the Pentagon.
The E-2C crew met him at the door to the flight deck. A moment later the Hawkeye’s plane captain, a First-Class Petty Officer who wore a brown shirt, arrived to take them to the aircraft. The flight deck was too dangerous a place for pilots to walk unattended, hence the twenty-five-year-old guide who knew these parts. On the way aft Robby noticed an A-6E Intruder being loaded with a single blue bombcase to which guidance equipment had been attached, converting it into a GBU-15 laser-guided weapon. It was, he saw, the squadron-skipper’s personal bird. That, he thought, must be part of the system-validation test, called a Drop-Ex. It wasn’t that often you got to drop a real bomb, and squadron commanders like to have their fair share of fun. Robby wondered for a moment what the target was – probably a raft, he decided – but he had other things to worry about. The plane captain had them at their aircraft a minute later. He said a few things to the pilot, then saluted him smartly and moved off to perform his next set of duties. Robby strapped into the jump seat in the radar compartment, again disliking the fact that he was in an airplane as a passenger rather than a driver.
After the normal preflight ritual, Commander Jackson felt vibration as the turboprop engines fired up. Then the Hawkeye started moving slowly and jerkily toward one of the waist catapults. The engines were run up to full power after the nosewheel attachment was fixed to the catapult shuttle and the pilot spoke over the intercom to warn his crew that it was time. In three stunning seconds, the Grumman-built aircraft went from a standing start to one hundred forty knots. The tail sank as it left the ship, then the aircraft leveled out and tipped up again for its climb to twenty thousand feet. Almost immediately, the radar controllers in back started their systems checks, and in twenty minutes the E-2C was on station, eighty miles from the carrier, its rotodome turning, sending radar beams through the sky to start the exercise. Jackson was seated so as to observe the entire “battle” on the radar screens, his helmet plugged into the command circuit so that he could see how well the Ranger’s air wing executed his plan, while the Hawkeye flew a racetrack pattern in the sky.
From their position they could also see the battle group, of course. Half an hour after taking off, Robby noted a double launch from the carrier. The radar-computer system tracked both new contacts as a matter of course. They climbed to thirty thousand feet and rendezvoused. A tanker exercise, he realized at once. One of the aircraft immediately returned to the carrier, while the other flew east-southeast. The intercept exercise began in earnest right about then, but every few seconds Robby noted the course of the new contact, until it disappeared off the screen, still heading toward the South American mainland.
“Yes, yes, I will go,” Cortez said. “I am not ready yet, but I will go.” He hung up his phone with a curse and reached for his car keys. Félix hadn’t even had the chance to visit one of the smashed refining sites yet and they wanted him to address the – “The Production Committee,” el jefe called it. That was amusing. The fools were so bent on taking over the national government that they were starting to use quasi-official terminology. He swore again on the way out the door. Drive all the way down to that fat, pompous lunatic’s castle on the hill. He checked his watch. It would take two hours. And he would get there late. And he would not be able to tell them anything because he hadn’t had time to learn anything. And they would be angry. And he would have to be humble again. Cortez was getting tired of abasing himself to these people. The money they paid him was incredible, but no amount of money was worth his self-respect. That was something he should have thought about before he signed up, Cortez reminded himself as he started his car. Then he swore again.
The newest CAPER intercept was number 2091 and was an intercept from a mobile phone to the home of Subject ECHO. The text came up on Ritter’s personal computer printer. Then came 2092, not thirty seconds later. He handed both to his special assistant.
“Cortez… going right there? Christmas in June.”
“How do we get the word to Clark?” Ritter wondered.
The man thought for a moment. “We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t have a secure voice channel we can use. Unless – we can get a secure VOX circuit to the carrier, and from there to the A-6, and from the A-6 to Clark.”
It was Ritter’s turn to swear. No, they couldn’t do that. The weak link was the carrier. The case officer they had aboard to oversee that end of the mission would have to approach the carrier’s commanding officer – it might not start there, but it would sure as hell end there – and ask for a cleared radio compartment to handle the messages by himself on an ears-only basis. That would risk too much, even assuming that the CO went along. Too many questions would be asked, too many new people in the information loop. He swore again, then recovered his senses. Maybe Cortez would get there in time. Lord, wouldn’t it be nice to tell the Bureau that they’d nailed the bastard! Or, more properly, that someone had, plausibly deniably. Or maybe not. He didn’t know Bill Shaw very well, and didn’t know how he might react.
Larson had parked the Subaru a hundred yards off the main road in a preselected spot that made detection unlikely. The climb to their perch was not a difficult one, and they arrived well before sundown. The photos had identified a perfect place, right on the crest of a ridge, with a direct line of sight toward a house that took their breath away. Twenty thousand square feet it was – a hundred-foot square, two stories, no basement – set within a fenced six-acre perimeter four kilometers away, perhaps three hundred feet lower than their position. Clark had a pair of seven-power binoculars and took note of the guard force while light permitted. He counted twenty men, all armed with automatic weapons. Two crew-served heavy machine guns were sited in built-for-the-purpose strongpoints on the wall. Bob Ritter had called it right on St. Kitts, he thought: Frank Lloyd Wright meets Ludwig the Mad. It was a beautiful house, if you went for the neoclassical-Spanish-modern style, fortified in hi-tech fashion to keep the unruly peasants away. There was also the de rigueur helicopter pad with a new Sikorsky S-76 sitting on it.