Kelly looked hard into the General’s eyes. ‘Sir, I’ve had a bad enough night. Be a pal and stow it, all right?’
Young took it like the man he was. ‘Mr Clark, you sound like you’re ready.’
That isn’t what it’s about, sir. Those guys in SENDER GREEN are ready.’
‘Fair enough, tough guy.’
‘Can I leave the car here?’
‘With all these clunkers?’
Kelly paused, but the decision came quickly enough. ‘I think it’s served its purpose. Junk it with the rest of ’em.
‘Come on, the bus is down the hill a ways.’ Kelly collected his personal gear and carried them to the staff car. The same corporal was driving as he sat in the back with the Marine aviator who wouldn’t be going.
‘What do you think, Clark?’
‘Sir, I think we have a really good chance.’
‘You know, I wish just once, just one goddamned time, we could say, yeah, this one’s going to work.’
‘Was it ever that way for you?’ Kelly asked.
‘No,’ Young admitted. ‘But you don’t stop wishing.’
‘How was England, Peter?’
‘Pretty nice. It rained in Paris, though. Brussels was pretty decent, my first time there,’ Henderson said.
Their apartments were only two blocks apart, comfortable places in Georgetown built during the late thirties to accommodate the influx of bureaucrats serving a growing government. Built of solid cinder-arch construction, they were more structurally sound than more recent buildings. Hicks had a two-bedroom unit, which compensated for the smallish living-dining room.
‘So what’s happening that you wanted to tell me about?’ the Senate aide asked, still recovering from jet lag.
‘We’re invading the North again,’ the White House aide answered.
‘What? Hey, I was at the peace talks, okay? I observed some of the chitchat. Things are moving along. The other side just caved in on a big one.’
‘Well, you can kiss that goodbye for a while,’ Hicks said morosely. On the coffee table was a plastic bag of marijuana, and he started putting a smoke together.
‘You should lay off that shit, Wally.’
‘Doesn’t give me a hangover like beer does. Shit, Peter, what’s the difference?’
‘The difference is your fucking security clearance!’ Henderson said pointedly.
‘Like that matters? Peter, they don’t listen. You talk and talk and talk to them, and they just don’t listen.’ Hicks lit up and took a long pull. ‘I’m going to leave soon anyway. Dad wants me to come and join the family business. Maybe after I make a few mill’, maybe then somebody’ll listen once in a while.’ .
‘You shouldn’t let it get to you, Wally. It takes time. Everything takes time. You think we can fix things overnight?’
‘I don’t think we can fix things at all! You know what this all is? It’s like Sophocles. We have our fatal flaw, and they have their fatal flaw, and when the fucking deus comes ex the fucking ???hin?, the deus is going to be a cloud of ICBMs, and it’s all going to be over, Peter. Just like we thought a few years ago up in New Hampshire.’ It wasn’t Hicks’s first smoke of the evening, Henderson realized. Intoxication always made his friend morose.
‘Wally, tell me what the problem is.’
‘There’s supposedly this camp …’ Hicks began, his eyes down, not looking at his friend at all now as he related what he knew.
‘That is bad news.’
‘They think there’s a bunch of people there, but it’s just supposition. We only know about one. What if we’re fucking over the peace talks for one guy, Peter?’
‘Put that damned thing out,’ Henderson said, sipping his beer. He just didn’t like the smell of the stuff.
‘No.’ Wally took another big hit.
‘When is it going?’
‘Not sure. Roger didn’t say exactly.’
‘Wally, you have to stay with it. We need people like you in the system. Sometimes they will listen.’
Hicks looked up. ‘When will that be, do you think?’
‘What if this mission fails? What if it turns out that you’re right? Roger will listen to you then, and Henry listens to Roger, doesn’t he?’
‘Well, yeah, sometimes.’
What a remarkable chance this was, Henderson thought.
The chartered bus drove to Andrews Air Force Base, duplicating, Kelly saw, more than half of his drive. There was a new C-141 on the ramp, painted white on the top and gray on the bottom, its strobe lights already rotating. The Marines got out of the bus, finding Maxwell and Greer waiting for them.
‘Good luck,’ Greer said to each man.
‘Good hunting,’ was what Dutch Maxwell told them.
Built to hold more than double their number, the Lockheed Starlifter was outfitted for litter patients, with a total of eighty beds bolted to the side of the aircraft and room for twenty or so attendants. That gave every Marine a place to lie down and sleep, plus room for all the prisoners they expected to rescue. The time of night made it easy for everyone, and the Starlifter started turning engines as soon as the cargo hatch was shut.
‘Jesus, I hope this works,’ Maxwell said, watching the aircraft taxi into the darkness.
‘You’ve trained them well, Admiral,’ Bob Ritter observed. ‘When do we go out?’
‘Three days. Bob,’ James Greer answered. ‘Got your calendar clear?’
‘For this? You bet.’
CHAPTER 26
Transit
A new aircraft, the Starlifter was also a disappointingly slow one. Its cruising speed was a mere 478 miles per hour, and their first stop was Elmendorf Air Force base in Alaska, 3,350 miles and eight hours away. It never ceased to amaze Kelly that the shortest distance to any place on Earth was a curve, but that was because he was used to flat maps, and the world was a sphere. The great-circle route from Washington to Danang would actually have taken them over Siberia, and that, the navigator said, just wouldn’t do. By the time of their arrival at Elmendorf, the Marines were up and rested. They departed the aircraft to look at snow on not-so-distant mountains, having only a few hours before left a place where heat and humidity were in a daily race for 100. But here in Alaska they found mosquitoes sufficiently large that a few might have carried one of their number off. Most took the opportunity to jog a couple of miles, to the amusement of the Air Force personnel, who typically had little contact with Marines. Servicing the C-141 took a programmed time of two and a quarter hours. After refueling and one minor instrument replacement, the Marines were just as happy to reboard the aircraft for the second leg of the journey, for Yakoda, in Japan. Three hours after that, Kelly walked onto the flight deck, growing bored with the noise and confinement.
‘What’s that over there?’ he asked. In the distant haze was a brown-green line that denoted somebody’s coast.
‘Russia. They have us on radar right now.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ Kelly observed.
‘It’s a small world, sir, and they own a big hunk of it.’
‘You talk to them – air-traffic control, like?’
‘No.’ The navigator laughed. ‘They’re not real neighborly. We talk on HF to Tokyo for this leg, and after Yakoda, we’re controlled through Manila. Is the ride smooth enough?’
‘No beefs so far. Gets long, though.’
‘It does that,’ die navigator acknowledged, turning back to his instruments.
Kelly walked back into the cargo area. The C-141 was noisy, a constant high-frequency whine from the engines and the air through which they were passing. The Air Force didn’t waste any money, as airlines did, on sound insulation. Every Marine was wearing earplugs, which made conversation difficult, and after a time didn’t really block the noise anyway. The worst part of air travel was the boredom, Kelly thought, made worse by the sound-induced isolation. You could only sleep so much. Some of the men were honing knives which they would never really use, but it gave you something to do, and a warrior had to have a knife for some reason. Others were doing push-ups on the metal cargo deck of the aircraft. The Air Force crewmen watched impassively, not wanting to laugh, wondering what this obviously select group of Marines was up to, but unable to ask. It was for them just one more mystery as their aircraft slid down the Siberian coast. They were used to it, but to a man they wished the Marines well on whatever their job was.
The problem was the first thing on his mind when his eyes opened. What do I do about this? Henderson asked himself crossly.
It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but what he would be able to do. He’d delivered information before. At first unknowingly, through contacts in the peace movement, he’d – well, not so much given over information as had joined in rambling discussions which over time had become more and more pointed until finally one of his friends had asked something just a little too directed to be a random inquiry. A friendly question she’d asked, and at a very friendly moment, but the look in her eyes was a little too interested in the reply and not enough interested in him, a situation which had immediately reversed when he’d answered the question. A spoonful of sugar, he’d told himself later, rather vexed with himself that he’d fallen prey to such an obvious and old-fashioned – well, not an error, really. He liked her, believed as she did in the way the world should be, and if anything he was annoyed that she’d felt it necessary to manipulate his body in order to get something that reason and intellect would have elicited quite readily from his mind … well, probably.