Delta Green - [40]

“That’s a good idea, General. Please. How long do you think?”

“Oh, this will be a national first priority. It shouldn’t take long at all.”

USSC-1

McKenna assigned Kenneth Autry to a round-trip flight to Wet Country, and Benny Shalbot and his technicians mounted one of the passenger modules in the payload bay of Mako Three.

McKenna and Avery arrived at the Mako hangar cell together. Polly Tang was tethered to the control console which, with its window, overlooked the hangar interior. The MakoShark cells had windows that could be darkened so that visiting civilians could not get a close look at the space fighters.

Avery was towing a stuffed plastic bag.

“Not much in the way of personal items accumulated over two years, is it?” Avery said.

“There’s not a hell of a lot of places to go shopping, Milt.”

“True.”

“Let me take that, sir, and I’ll stow it,” Benny Shalbot said.

Avery gave him the bag, and Shalbot arced across the hangar to the Mako, which was held in place in the center of the hangar by bungee cords. Since the craft’s velocity was matched to that of the space station, only the reaction to a technician pushing off her skin would change her attitude.

Polly Tang gave Avery a kiss on the cheek. “We’ll miss you, Milt.”

“Can I have one of those?” McKenna asked.

“You’ll get yours, for sure, McKenna,” she said. “And besides, you’re not leaving for good.”

He gave her a grin, then gripped the hatchway, tugged, and floated across to the Mako.

Autry and his backseater were already in the cockpit. McKenna gave them a thumbs-up, deflected himself off the nose, and sailed beneath the Mako.

The bay doors were wide open, and Shalbot was tending the module.

“You stock up on my favorite magazines, Benny?”

“National Geographic was the best I could do, Colonel.”

“That’s it? You wouldn’t want me to get too excited now, would you?”

“That’s the way the guys on Spoke One run this place,” Shalbot complained. “Bastards don’t want us to appreciate the finer things in life.”

McKenna grinned at him, then pulled himself up into the passenger module. Avery followed him, and Shalbot started sealing the hatch, then the bay doors.

There were four airline-type seats in the module, and a video screen was mounted on the forward end. That was the end of the amenities.

McKenna and Avery buckled into the seats, connected the communications and nitrogen/oxygen lines to the proper receptacles, then helped each other settle and lock their helmets.

Avery’s helmet was general purpose, finished in white and utilized by many passengers. McKenna’s was a personal helmet in Air Force blue, with the accessory visor used for infrared and night sight targeting, and with “Snake Eyes” painted in half-inch-high white letters on the right side.

Avery went right to the intercom. “Ken, you suppose we could see something? Anything.”

The backseater linked their video screen to the video lens, and they had a view of the inside of the hangar. Shalbot was following the last of the technicians through the hatchway, then turning to close and dog the hatch. Polly Tang stared at them through the window.

McKenna watched as Tang evacuated the atmosphere in the hangar; the gases required for the survival of humans was never wasted; it was sucked into holding tanks.

After she opened the hangar doors, Autry backed the craft out of the cell.

They had a twenty-three minute wait for a reentry window, then Autry completed the retro burn, flipped back over to forward flight, and positioned the Mako in its nose-high reentry attitude.

The view on the screen was of stars.

McKenna reached between the armrest and the seat cushion and found a magazine.

“Benny wasn’t kidding,” he said. “It really is National Geographic.”

He offered it to Avery.

“I’ve read that copy three times, Kevin.”

“How about some entertainment back here?” he asked on the intercom. “Otherwise, I’ll have to come up there and fly this thing.”

The backseater gave them Elmore Leonard’s Mr. Majestyk, with Charles Bronson handling the melons. McKenna had seen it twice before, but went ahead and lost himself in it a third time.

Autry landed the Mako at Merlin Air Base in the late afternoon.

Munoz was there to meet them when they crawled down the ladder from the passenger module.

“Damn, I’m glad to see you, Kevin,” Munoz said. “Sittin’ around this burg watching the sweat run isn’t my idea of real racing.”

“Hey, Tony, meet the new base commander.”

“No shit? Milt? Damn, you gonna be a general and everything?”

“There’s been a few hints, Tony,” Avery said.

“You think you’re still gonna talk to us working-class people?”

“Most of the time, I suppose.”

“In that case, congratulations.”

Munoz gave Avery a salute, then shook his hand.

Avery headed for the administration section, and Munoz asked, “What now, jefe.”

“Now, we go hunting again, Tiger.”

“Hot damn!”

By the time they got off the ground, Conover and Abrams were inbound from their search, ready for a rest break and a refueling of the turbojet tanks. Delta Red was already on the ground in Chad. McKenna took up the search pattern over India where Conover had abandoned it the day before. After six hours of back-and-forth searching, they had located one possible clandestine airfield.