Delta Green - [20]

Though he knew they were there, he could not see a single one of the aircraft. Revetments had been hacked out of the jungle on the east side. Several of the reinforced parking spaces had been given camouflaged roofs, and the rest had roofs now under construction.

There were four Mikoyan MiG-27 ground attack planes, one MiG-25 interceptor currently in reconnaissance configuration, and six Sukhoi Su-24 attack fighters hidden in the jungle, along with three assorted civilian aircraft. Perhaps the greatest achievement had been their ability to hide the monstrously large Antonov An-72 belonging to Shelepin. Maslov had been in favor of abandoning the huge transport, crashing it into the sea, but had been outvoted. Or out-ordered. And on reflection, Shelepin and Druzhinin had been correct. The transport had been necessary for ferrying in their supplies. There had been millions of kilograms of material carted in from all over southeast Asia. Maslov did not know the details, but he supposed that much of it had been purchased and that much of it had also been surreptitiously acquired from old Soviet caches around the southeast region of the Asian continent.

On the west side of the airstrip, two more revetments were under construction, one of them housing the Tupolev Tu-124 that had been converted to a tanker. Several dozen trips with the tanker had been required to fill the underground fuel tanks located a half-kilometer out in the jungle. The tanker made at least three trips a week to a shifting schedule of destinations to take on fuel and transport it back here.

At the far north end of the runway, off to the west side, they had excavated large bunkers in which to store the ordnance. There were ground-and air-launched missiles of Soviet, Chinese, French, and American manufacture. Iron bombs and guided “smart” bombs were stacked in one bunker. Another held ammunition of various calibers, ranging from that for 9-millimeter personal weapons to 7.62-millimeter rounds for automatic weapons.

When he reached the command center, Maslov skirted the building to the left and entered through a side door. The value of the four ceiling-mounted air conditioners was immediately apparent. The perspiration on his forehead dried quickly. He felt chilled.

No-air operations were planned for the day — their necessary training flights for the pilots took place at night — and the chairs in front of the radar and communications consoles were vacant. He crossed the control room and entered the narrow corridor leading to the back of the building.

At the rear were offices for the base commander and his assistants, as well as a large space for pilot briefings. Along the corridor were smaller cubicles set aside for storage, hygiene, and dedicated tasks. Maslov turned into the one identified as “Global Communications.”

General Oleg Druzhinin, the base commander, was seated in one of the two chairs available in the small room. He was not an imposing man. With moderate stature, bland facial features, and mousy brown hair, he was the kind who disappeared in the crowds of nearly any city in the world. His mind was sharp, however, and his reflexes, while slowed somewhat as he approached sixty years of age, were still capable of commanding MiG-25s and MiG-29s.

With the general was Sergeant Nikita Kasartskin, a lumbering bear of a man whose massive hands were extremely adroit with computer keyboards. Kasartskin was their top communications and computer specialist. He was seated before the massive global communications console which, with its super secret encryption devices, had accompanied Anatoly Shelepin on his flight from Moscow. The antenna complex required for the machine, along with the antennas for the radars, was located two kilometers to the south, at the top of a hill in the jungle. The antennas were finished in matte camouflage paint and would never be seen by the human eye. Only search radars might detect them at a time when they were radiating energy.

“Good afternoon, Comrade General,” Maslov said. “Sergeant Kasartskin.”

“Come in, Colonel Maslov,” the general said. “We were about to review the morning’s tapes.”

“I wonder if they will be informative?” Maslov asked.

“Who knows? I doubt it. Proceed, Sergeant”

Against one wall was a bank of forty tape recording drives. The technician could assign them to monitoring forty of the thousands of frequencies in the Commonwealth satellite system. That they could still tap into the old Soviet satellite communications was a wonder, but not an awesome wonder. The breakup of the state, with various republics assuming control of bits and pieces of the Soviet military, communications, and intelligence apparatus, had resulted not only in confusion, but also in trust. The new commanders in the Commonwealth assumed that the security of the system was still intact. Kasartskin, too, was circumspect in his use of the system.

Normally, he only drew information from it. Only rarely was it used for transmission of data or voice communications, and then on unused channels. The likelihood of the Commonwealth members discovering the usage was not high, and the system provided them with, as the sign outside the door said, a global communication and listening ability that was worth billions of rubles.