“Didn’t they file a flight plan?”
“Yeah, but they’ve already deviated from it. Besides, according to the plan they’re coming back here.”
“Well, stop them,” the suit snapped. The supervisor just looked at him until he realized now stupid that was and reddened.
It’s easier dealing with the DEA, the supervisor thought.
“I mean, can you alert the airports within range and have them report when it lands?” the suit asked in a lame attempt to cover himself.
“If they land at an airport. From the looks of that plane it can set down on any strip of flat desert from here to Idaho.”
The suit clearly didn’t like that. The police captain, on the other hand, seemed less concerned. Clearly he was just glad to get the problem out of his jurisdiction.
“Well,” said the civilian, obviously trying to control his temper, “can you follow them on radar?”
“For a while. But they’re descending rapidly. If they get right down on the deck we’ll lose them in the clutter.”
“How fast can you get a plane after them?” one of the lesser suits asked.
The supervisor shrugged. “Ask the police, or maybe the DEA. Or you may have to rent something.”
The suit turned to look at the police captain.
“We’ve got an air unit that can follow them for a while,” the cop said.
“Don’t worry about following them too far,” the supervisor told the visitors. “They’re headed into restricted airspace. If they don’t change course pretty soon the Air Force will take care of them.”
“What will they do?” the suit asked.
“If they don’t break off? Then they’re going to overfly Area Fifty-One. The Air Force is real touchy about uninvited visitors there.”
The suit looked apprehensive. “But what will they do about it?”
“Intercept them. Try to get them to land.” The supervisor shrugged. “In the worst case they’ll blow them out of the sky.”
“We are getting close,” Kuznetsov yelled in Mick Gilligan’s ear.
Mick didn’t recognize the terrain, but he didn’t need the Russian to tell him where they were. They’d crossed the highway some time back, pulling up so they didn’t collide with any cars or trucks and scaring the heck out of a couple of tourists. By now they had to be inside the restricted airspace that surrounded the base and soon they’d be over the line on the base itself.
The Russian leaned over Mick’s shoulder and pointed at a nondescript building on top of a nearby mountain.
“Radar station,” Kuznetzov shouted over the noise of the engine. “Normally would have been eliminated by speznatzü, but no speznatzü, so…” He shrugged.
Gilligan turned in his seat to look at him closely. “What in the hell are you?” he yelled.
“I told you,” Kuznetsov shouted back, “I am a businessman.”
“Yeah, but what did you used to be?”
“Used to be businessmen were parasites and enemies of people. So I was good Communist like everybody else.”
“Heads up!” Charlie called. “Here comes company.”
It only took Mick an instant to pick up the two dots headed toward them. They quickly grew and resolved into the gray shark shapes of a pair of F-16s.
This is a nightmare, Mick thought I’m going to wake up soon and find out this whole thing is just a nightmare. But the F-16s kept coming.
I should have gotten out back in 1978 when I was still a captain, Major General Paul Manley thought as he stared at the radar plot. Outwardly everyone in the command center was cool and professional, but you could feel the tension rising. Right now the tensest place in the room was the pit of General Manley’s stomach. Unusually for the Air Force, General Manley was not an experienced combat pilot. Even his tour in Vietnam had been spent pulling pilots out of the jungle with Air Rescue rather than dropping bombs. For the first time in his career as an Air Force officer he was probably going to have to kill someone.
“Break off, you damn fools,” he muttered at the dot on the scope. But the point of green light kept coming straight for the smear of the mountain range and the base beyond.