“Let’s check that one out,” Malloy said at once. He’d learned not to trust electronics-and besides, it was a perfectly good excuse to take their Night Hawk off the ground. “Sergeant Nance, head out to the bird.”
“You bet, Colonel.” The sergeant stood and moved toward the door.
“Tim, you stay here. We’ll try it inside and outside, and get a range check, too.”
Thirty minutes later, the Night Hawk was circling around Hereford.
“How’s this, Noonan?”
“Loud and clear, Bear.”
“Okay, good, we’re about, oh, eleven clicks out, and you are coming through like Rush Limbaugh across the street. These digital radios work nice, don’t they?”
“Yep.” Noonan got in his car, and confirmed that the metal cage around him had no effect on performance. It turned out that the radios continued to work at over eighteen kilometers, or eleven miles, which wasn’t bad, they thought, for something with a battery the size of two quarters and an antenna half again the length of a toothpick. “This’ll make your long-rope deployments go smoother, Bear.”
“How so, Noonan?”
“Well, the guys on the end of the rope’ll be able to tell you when you’re a little high or low.”
“Noonan,” came the irate reply, “what do you think depth perception is for?”
“Roger that. Bear,” the FBI agent laughed.
CHAPTER 28
BROAD DAYLIGHT
The money made it far easier. Instead of stealing trucks, they could buy them with cashier’s checks drawn from an account set up by a person with false identification papers, who’d also been wearing a disguise at the time. The trucks were large Swedish made Volvo commercial vehicles, straight or nonarticulated trucks with canvas covers over the load area that proclaimed the names of nonexistent businesses.
The trucks came across the Irish Sea to Liverpool on commercial ferries, their interiors laden with cardboard cartons for refrigerators, and passed through British customs with no trouble, and from there it was just a matter of driving within the legal limit on the motorways. The trucks traveled in close formation through the West Country, and arrived near Hereford just before dusk. There, at a prearranged point, they all parked. The drivers dismounted at the local equivalent of a truck stop and headed for a pub.
Sean Grady and Roddy Sands had flown in the same day. They’d passed through customs/immigration control at Gatwick with false papers that had stood the test of time on numerous previous occasions, and again proved to their satisfaction that British immigration officers were blind as well as deaf and dumb. Both of them rented cars with false credit cards and drove west to Hereford, also along preplanned routes, and arrived at the same pub soon before the arriving trucks.
“Any problems?” Grady asked the Barry twins.
“None,” Sam replied, accompanied by a nod from Peter. As always, the members of his unit made a show of sangfroid, despite the pre-mission jitters they all had to have. Soon everyone was there, and two groups, one of seven and one of eight, sat in booths, sipping their Guinness and chatting quietly, their presence not a matter of interest to pub regulars.
“They work pretty good,” Malloy told Noonan, over a pint in the club. “E-Systems, eh?”
“Pretty good outfit. We used a lot of their hardware at HRT.”
The Marine nodded. “Yeah, same thing in Special Operations Command. But I still prefer things with control wires and cables.”
“Well, yeah, Colonel, sir, but kinda hard to do two paper cups and string out of a chopper, ain’t it?”
“I ain’t that backward, Tim.” But it was good enough for a grin. “And I ain’t never needed help doing a long wire deployment.”
“You are pretty good at it.” Noonan sipped at his beer. “How long you been flying choppers?”
“Twenty years-twenty-one come next October. You know, it’s the last real flying left. The new fast-movers, hell, computers take a vote on whether they like what you’re doing ‘fore they decide to do it for you. I play with computers, games and e-mail and such, but damned if I’ll over let them fly for me.” It was an empty boast, or nearly so, Noonan thought. Sooner or later, that form of progress would come to rotary-wing aircraft, too, and the drivers would bitch, but then they’d accept it as they had to, and move on, and probably be safer and more effective as a result. “Waiting for a letter from my detailer right now,” the colonel added.
“Oh? What for?”
“I’m in the running for CO of VMH-1.”
“Flying the president around?” Malloy nodded. “Hank Goodman’s got the job now, but he made star and so they’re moving him up to something else. And somebody, I guess, heard that I’m pretty good with a stick.”
“Not too shabby,” Noonan said.
“Boring, though, straight and level all the time, no fun stuff,” the Marine allowed, with a show of false distaste. Flying in VMH1 was an honor for a captain, and command of it was the Corps’ way of showing confidence in his abilities. “I ought to know in another two weeks. Be nice to see some Redskins games in person again.”
“What’s up for tomorrow?”
“Right before lunch, practice low-level insertion, paperwork in the afternoon. I have to do a ton of it for the Air Force. Well, they own the damned aircraft, and they are nice about maintaining it and giving me a good flight crew. I bet airliner pilots don’t have to do this, though.” Those lucky bastards just had to fly, though their brand of flying was about as exciting as a paint-drying race, or maybe a grass-growing marathon.
Chavez hadn’t yet gotten used to British humor, and as a result the series television on the local stations mainly bored him. He did have cable service, however, and that included The History Channel, which had become his favorite, if not Patsy’s.
“Just one, Ding,” she told him. Now that she was close to delivery time, she wanted her husband sober at all times, and that meant only one beer per night.
“Yes, honey.” It was so easy for women to push men around, Domingo thought, looking at the nearly empty glass and feeling like another. It was great to sip beer in the club and discuss business matters in a comfortable, informal setting, and generally bond with his people but right now he was going no farther than fifty feet from his wife, except when he had to, and she had his beeper number when they were apart. The baby had dropped, whatever that meant-well, he knew it meant that delivery was imminent, but not what “dropped” signified. And now it meant that he could only have one beer per night, though he could be stone sober with three . . . maybe even four ….
They sat in side-by-side easy chairs. Ding was trying both to watch TV and read intelligence documents. It was something he seemed able to do, to the amazed annoyance of his wife, who was reading a medical journal and making some marginal notes on the glossy paper.
It wasn’t terribly different at the Clark home, though here a movie cassette was tucked into the VCR and was playing away.
“Anything new at the office?” Sandy asked.
At the office, John thought. She hadn’t said that when he’d come back from out in the field. No, then it had been “Are you okay?” Always asked with a tinge of concern, because, though he’d never well, almost never-told her about the things he did in the field, Sandy knew that it was a little different from sitting at a desk. So, this was just one more confirmation that he was a REMF. Thanks, honey, he thought. “No, not really,” he said. “How about the hospital?”
“A car accident right after lunch. Nothing major.”‘
“How’s Patsy doing?”
“She’ll be a pretty good doc when she learns to relax a little more. But, well, I’ve been doing ER for twenty-some years, right? She knows more than I do in the theoretical area, but she needs to learn the practical side a little better. But, you know, she’s coming along pretty well.”
“Ever think you might have been a doc?” her husband asked.
“I suppose I could have, but-wasn’t the right time back then, was it?”
“How about the baby?”
That made Sandy smile. “Just like I was, impatient. You get to that point and you just want it to happen and be done with it.”
“Any worries?”
“No, Dr. Reynolds is pretty good, and Patsy is doing just fine. I’m just not sure I’m ready to be a grandma yet,” Sandy added with a laugh.
“I know what you mean, babe. Any time, eh?”
“The baby dropped yesterday. That means he’s pretty ready.”
“‘He’?” John asked.
“That’s what everybody seems to think, but we’ll find out when it pops out.”
John grumbled. Domingo had insisted that it had to be a son, handsome as his father was-and bilingual, jefe, he’d always added with that sly Latino grin. Well, he could have gotten worse as a son-in-law. Ding was smart, about the fastest learner he’d ever stumbled across, having risen from young staff sergeant 11-Bravo light-infantryman,.S. Army, to a respected field intelligence officer in CIA, with a master’s degree from George Mason University. . . and now he occasionally mused about going another two years for his Ph.D. Maybe from Oxford, Ding had speculated earlier in the week, if he could arrange the off-time to make it possible. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass – an East L.A. Chicano with a hood from Oxford University! He might end up DCI someday, and then he would really be intolerable. John chuckled, sipped his Guinness, and returned his attention to the television.