Delta Green - [4]

The landscape was rugged and undulating between six to eight thousand feet above sea level, and he used his radar altimeter to monitor his distance above the peaks, mesas, and valleys. Rollercoasting at five hundred feet above the earth, he maintained a speed of five hundred knots.

Highway 50 and the Blue Mesa Reservoir shot past.

“We got a target yet?” he asked.

“I don’t want to go active and give ourselves away,” Munoz told him.

A transmitting radar revealed itself to an enemy.

“You’re the one who picked up the moniker Snake Eyes,” Munoz added. “Prove it.”

McKenna had already picked out the white dot against the slate blue of the sky.

“One o’clock high,” he said.

“Jesus! I don’t believe it.”

Thirty seconds went by before Munoz found the airplane for himself. He quickly aimed the video camera in the nose with his hand controller, shunted the image to the main CRTs, and zoomed the magnification to twenty.

On McKenna’s screen, the sharp image of a Cessna Citation business jet appeared. It had United States Air Force markings.

“That’s the hummer,” Munoz said. “Let me have a couple of Wasp IIs.”

McKenna reached for his armaments panel, opened the bomb bay doors, and lowered the missile rack. He selected missiles one and two, armed them, and was rewarded with two green LEDs.

“All yours, Tiger. Happy hunting.”

Chapter Two

MERLIN AIR BASE, BORNEO

Major Frank Dimatta, tagged “Cancha” for a linguistic habit he had been trying to overcome for years, was the command pilot of Delta Green. In his mid-thirties, with short-cropped black hair and dark eyes, he was becoming more involved with mild exercise in order to alleviate the side effects of his favorite hobby, exotic food.

Dimatta took a walk at 6:15 A.M. after consuming a hearty repast of pasta swamped in a spicy tomato sauce that featured Italian sausage hot enough to warm Minneapolis in January. It wasn’t actually breakfast for Dimatta. His system was attuned to Washington, D.C.’s time zone, and his appetite thought it was 5:15 P.M. EDT.

He wouldn’t have selected pasta either, except that it was the one alternative to a traditional egg-based fare that the morning kitchen personnel at Merlin Air Base could come up with on short notice. Besides that, his eating habits irritated the hell out of his WSO, Captain George Wilson, who was as nutty as they came about nutrition, diet, and fitness. Dimatta sometimes went out of his way to irritate the redheaded “Nitro Fizz” Williams.

Merlin Air Base, called Wet Country by those assigned to it because of the humidity, didn’t offer much space for a walking tour. The complex was composed of three massive hangars, dormitories, warehouses, a two-mile-long single runway, and a launch complex. It was located on the island of Borneo, on the coast north of Sangkulirang. The government of the Indonesian Archipelago didn’t interfere with their operations, and the U.S. military personnel kept a low profile.

There was an extended finger-pier that accepted deep-draft vessels a mile away, on a shore peopled with palm trees. Around the small base itself, the rain forest had been trimmed back, but seemed to resent the intrusion. Orangutans and gibbons made threats from the protection of the jungle, and an occasional leopard made an appearance, glared at the inane activities of man for a moment or two, then loped away.

The Borneo base was one of three land bases supporting the 1st Aerospace Squadron, and it was the largest. Most of its operations were overt, though flights of the MakoShark were generally accomplished at night.

Dimatta left Williams in the electronic arcade in the recreation center, dubbed “Heaven on Earth,” which was centered among the four dormitories. Behind it was the dining hall where he had just finished his limited choice meal.

He eyed the coastal installation, gloomy through a low-hanging early morning haze, and decided against walking the whole mile down to it. He turned westward and sauntered toward the largest hangar fronting the runway. It was two stories tall, with administrative offices and storage space on the second floor. When he and Williams had parked Delta Green in it two hours before, it had contained two C-123 Providers, three business jets, two Bell JetRangers, and a single Mako — the unstealthy, unarmed version of the MakoShark.

Ignoring a curved asphalt sidewalk, Dimatta crossed uneven, weedy ground toward the flight line. He walked easily, content with his world despite the perspiration breaking out on his forehead. It was already eighty degrees, with a humidity reading to match. The armpits of his blue flight suit were beginning to darken.

Looking up at the glass-enclosed control tower that topped the hangar, he didn’t see the normal head or heads moving about. The tower was manned twenty-four hours a day, even if only by one man. Or woman.

By the time he reached the hangar, no one had appeared in the bronze-tinted windows, and Dimatta thought the absence might be worth investigating. He picked up his pace, arrived at the door in the corner of the building, and shoved it open.