Delta Green - [15]

“My second assumption, then, is that Delta Green was not taken into orbit. At least, not yet. We will be searching to the west of Borneo, and we will be looking for landing strips of concrete or asphalt, which are at least two miles long. They will not be in populated areas, of course, and they will have available some form of cover: hangars, jungle canopy, camouflage netting.

“I have designated three search areas.” Pearson nodded to Curtis, and he pressed a button sending the maps to receivers at Wet Country.

“Coming up on the printer now,” McKenna said.

“Zone One is Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Zone Two is the Indian Subcontinent. Zone Three is, I’m afraid, the entire continent of Africa.”

“What are we going to do for the rest of the day, enamorada?” Munoz asked.

Pearson cleared her throat. “The crosshatched portions of the maps are areas you can eliminate for population, political, or other reasons. The yellow areas are probably iffy for geographical or topographical reasons. The blue-shaded areas are the most suspicious. Those are where a MakoShark could be landed and hidden.”

“Nice job, Colonel,” McKenna said without being condescending, a tone she sometimes searched for in his voice.

“On short notice, it’s the best I could come up with in order to initiate a physical search.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Country Girl, you’ve got Zone Three. Con Man, you’re on Two, and we’ll take One. We’re going to have daylight for much of this, so we’ll keep the altitude high. Stay around five-zero-thousand and use your video cameras on magnification.”

“Do we want to mount recon camera pods?” Abrams asked.

“I don’t think so,” McKenna said. “We’re not trying to document anything just yet. If we run into something, the video tape will be sufficient. Also, let’s avoid air traffic, people. We don’t want anyone spotting us and alerting some trigger-happy air defense force. Questions?”

There were none and McKenna told them to take off.

Haggar and Olsen pushed their way out of the radio shack, eager to be on the way and doing something.

Pearson followed them out of the compartment, aiming herself toward her office cubicle.

Now that she had the squadron started on one segment of the search, she was impatient to get her own intelligence investigation under way.

Her search, she was certain, would be more fruitful than shooting around in the skies, looking for a tiny MakoNeedle in an earthen haystack.

MERLIN AIR BASE

McKenna, Munoz, and the Delta Yellow crew were already dressed in their environmental suits, and they left the ready room and turned into the hallway leading to the hangar proper.

Emerging into the brightly lit aircraft area, McKenna saw that the ground crews were lolling around the workbenches at the back, sitting on the floor or the benches themselves. Both of the MakoSharks had their canopies closed and appeared to be all buttoned up.

General Cartwright and the aide he had brought with him from his last assignment, Major Mikos Pappas, stepped from the elevator to the upper floor and control tower.

McKenna took one look at the crewmen, then told his squadron members, “Wait here.”

He crossed the hangar and caught up with Cartwright near the exit door.

“General.”

Cartwright stopped and turned toward him. “Colonel?”

“Have you spoken to General Brackman yet?”

“No, Colonel. I have nothing to report to him as yet.”

Despite how he often felt about petty officiousness in the military, McKenna did not often go around superior officers. He had asked Cartwright to talk to Brackman, rather than going directly to the Space Command boss himself.

Pappas smiled at him.

McKenna suppressed the urge to turn the major’s smile inside out. His patience was wearing thin enough to produce some verbal heat when Munoz came up beside him.

Tony Munoz was only five-nine, but the Tucson-born Arizonian was a tight bundle of sinew. Hard-ridged muscles lined his arms, legs, chest, and stomach. He had dark brown hair that matched his eyes and a smooth, almost round face that many people had misjudged as complacent. He didn’t worry about much, but when his fires were stoked, the cold fury appeared in his eyes.

It was there now.

Munoz spoke to the general’s aide, “Mikos, lets, you and me take a little walk.”

“What? I don’t think…”

“I know you don’t. But the colonel and the general want a few moments together.”

Munoz put his arm around Pappas’s shoulders and led him away.

“What the hell’s going on, McKenna?” Cartwright asked.

McKenna saw the flush creeping up the base commander’s throat.

“Whatever your problems are, General, they’re yours. I have my own. Right now, you’re going to tell those men over there to get these birds in the air.”

“The hell I am!”

“If you don’t, sir, then I will.”

“Bullshit!”

“And do you want to take a wild-assed guess about which one of us they’re going to respond to, General? What I’m doing here, I’m giving you a chance to save face before you lose it.”

Judging by the changing shades in Cartwright’s face and the flickering in his eyes, the decision was having a tough time surfacing.