‘What happens?’ Kelly asked thirty minutes and five miles later. Solomons was already a tan-green line on the northwestern horizon.
‘The treatment regime is pretty simple, really. We support her with barbiturates and ease her off.’
‘You give her drugs to get her off drugs?’
‘Yep.’ Rosen nodded. ‘That’s how it’s done. It takes time for the body to flush out all the residual material in her tissues. The body becomes dependent on the stuff, and if you try to wean them off too rapidly, you can get some adverse effects, convulsions, that sort of thing. Occasionally people die from it.’
‘What?’ said Kelly, alarmed. ‘I don’t know anything about this, Sam.’
‘Why should you? That’s our job, Kelly. Sarah doesn’t think that’s a problem in this case. Relax, John. You give’ – Rosen took the list from his pocket – ‘yeah, I thought so, phenobarb, you give that to attenuate the withdrawal symptoms. Look, you know how to drive a boat, right?’
‘Yep,’ Kelly said, turning, knowing what came next.
‘Let us do our job. Okay?’
The man didn’t feel much like sleep, the coastguardsmen saw, much to their own displeasure. Before they’d had the chance to recover from the previous day’s adventures, he was up again, drinking coffee in the operations room, looking over the charts yet again, using his hand to make circles, which he compared with the memorized course track of the forty-one-boat.
‘How fast is a sailboat?’ he asked an annoyed and irritable Quartermaster First Class Manuel Oreza.
‘That one? Not very, with a fair breeze and calm seas, maybe five knots, a little more if the skipper is smart and experienced. Rule of thumb is, one point three times the square root waterline length is your hull speed, so for that one, five or six knots.’ And he hoped the civilian was duly impressed with that bit of nautical trivia.
‘It was windy last night,’ the official noted crossly.
‘A small boat doesn’t go faster on choppy seas, it goes slower. That’s because it spends a lot of time going up and down instead of forward.’
‘So how did he get away from you?’
‘He didn’t get away from me, okay?’ Oreza wasn’t clear on who this guy was or how senior a position he actually held, but he wouldn’t have taken this sort of abuse from a real officer – but a real officer would not have harassed him this way; a real officer would have listened and understood. The petty officer took a deep breath, wishing for once that there was an officer here to explain things. Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians. ‘Look, sir, you told me to lay back, didn’t you? I told you that we’d lose him in the clutter from the storm, and we did. Those old radars we use aren’t worth a damn in bad weather, least not for a dinky little target like a day-sailer.’
‘You already said that.’
And I’ll keep saying it until you figure it out, Oreza managed not to say, catching a warning look from Mr English. Portagee took a deep breath and looked down at the chart.
‘So where do you think he is?’
‘Hell, the Bay ain’t that wide, so’s you have two coastlines to worry about. Most houses have their own little docks, you have all these creeks. If it was me, I’d head up a creek. Better place to hide than a dock, right?’
‘You’re telling me he’s gone,’ the civilian observed darkly.
‘Sure as hell,’ Oreza agreed.
‘Three months of work went into that!’
? can’t help that, sir.’ The coastguardsman paused. ‘Look, he probably went east rather than west, okay? Better to run before the wind than tack into it. That’s the good news. Problem is, a little boat like that, you can haul it out, put it on a trailer. Hell, it could be in Massachusetts by now.’
He looked up from the chart. ‘Oh, that’s just what I wanted to hear!’
‘Sir, you want me to lie to you?’
‘Three months!’
He just couldn’t let go, Oreza and English thought at the same time. You had to learn how to do that. Sometimes the sea took something, and you did your best looking and searching, and mostly you found it, but not always, and when you failed, the time came when you had to let the sea claim the prize. Neither man had ever grown to like it, but that was the way things were.
‘Maybe you can whistle up some helicopter support. The Navy has a bunch of stuff at Pax River,’ Warrant Officer English pointed out. It would also get the guy out of his station, an objective worthy of considerable effort for all the disruption he was causing to English and his men.
‘Trying to get rid of me?’ the man asked with an odd smile.
‘Excuse me, sir?’ English responded innocently. A pity, the warrant officer thought, that the man wasn’t a total fool.
Kelly tied back up at his quay after seven. He let Sam take the medications ashore while he snapped various covers over his instrument panels and settled his boat down for the night. It had been a quiet return trip from Solomons. Sam Rosen was a good man at explaining things, and Kelly a good questioner. What he’d needed to learn he’d picked up on the way out, and for most of the return trip he’d been alone with his thoughts, wondering what he would do, how he should act. Those were questions without easy answers, and attending to ship’s business didn’t help, much as he’d hoped that it would. He took even more time than was necessary checking the mooring lines, doing the same for the surgeon’s boat as well before heading inside.
The Lockheed DC-130E Hercules cruised well above the low cloud deck, riding smoothly and solidly as it had done for 2,354 hours of logged flight time since leaving the Lockheed plant at Marietta, Georgia, several years earlier. Everything had the appearance of a pleasant flying day. In the roomy front office, the flight crew of four watched the clear air and various instruments, as their duties required. The four turboprop engines hummed along with their accustomed reliability, giving the aircraft a steady high-pitched vibration that transmitted itself through the comfortable highbacked seats and created standing circular ripples in their Styrofoam coffee cups. All in all, the atmosphere was one of total normality. But anyone seeing the exterior of the aircraft could tell different. This aircraft belonged to the 99th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron.
Beyond the outer engines on each wing of the Hercules hung additional aircraft. Each of these was a Model-147SC drone. Originally designed to be high-speed targets with the designation Firebee-II, now they bore the informal name ‘Buffalo Hunter.’ In the rear cargo area of the DC-130E was a second crew which was now powering up both of the miniature aircraft, having already programmed them for a mission sufficiently secret that none of them actually knew what it was all about. They didn’t have to. It was merely a matter of telling the drones what to do and when to do it. The chief technician, a thirty-year-old sergeant, was working a bird code-named Cody-193. His crew station allowed him to turn and look out a small porthole to inspect his bird visually, which he did even though there was no real reason to do so. The sergeant loved the things as a child will love a particularly entertaining toy. He’d worked with the drone program for ten years, and this particular one he had flown sixty-one times. That was a record for the area.
Cody-193 had a distinguished ancestry. Its manufacturers, Teledyne-Ryan of San Diego, California, had built Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis, but the company had never quite managed to cash in on that bit of aviation history. Struggling from one small contract to another, it had finally achieved financial stability by making targets. Fighter aircraft had to practice shooting at something. The Firebee drone had begun life as just that, a miniature jet aircraft whose mission was to die gloriously at the hands of a fighter pilot – except that the sergeant had never quite seen things that way. He was a drone controller, and his job, he thought, was to teach those strutting eagles a lesson by flying ‘his’ bird in such a way as to make their missiles hit nothing more substantial than air. In fact, fighter pilots had learned to curse his name, though Air Force etiquette also required them to buy him a bottle of booze for every miss. Then a few years earlier someone had noted that if a Firebee drone was hard for our people to hit, the same might be true of others who fired at aircraft for more serious purposes than the annual William Tell competition. It was also a hell of a lot easier on the crews of low-level reconnaissance aircraft.