Delta Green - [46]

“And the equipment?”

“The boxes have been constructed exactly to your specifications. I have been assured of that.”

“That is all that I require,” Maslov said. “Will that be all, General?”

“Of course. Be on your way.”

Druzhinin backed away, then turned and walked to the side of the runway.

Nine minutes later, with the turbojet engines screaming, and yet issuing very little flame from their exhausts, Maslov saluted him from the cockpit.

Druzhinin returned the salute.

Maslov released the brakes, and the MakoShark shot down the runway. The steel planks bounced and rattled.

Then the craft rotated, climbing steeply away to the northeast, and the roar of the engines receded. Only two pinpricks of light identified her against the morning sky, and they were soon gone.

Druzhinin was still in awe of the MakoShark. One of them was enough to make the rest of his air force obsolete. As soon as they had a spare hour, he would have Maslov take him for a test ride.

“You see something, Snake Eyes?”

“Maybe, Tiger. Probably a meteorite”

“We’re supposed to look like meteorites.”

“Let’s go look,” McKenna said.

They were cruising eastward at sixty thousand feet over the border between Thailand and Kampuchea, following new orders issued by Brackman’s office to concentrate on the area. Conover was flying a pattern over Vietnam, and Haggar was down at Wet Country for a breather.

“Time?” he asked.

“Ten-five-eight local, jefe.”

“Run the checklist,” he ordered as he pulled into a left turn and started to climb. They weren’t powered and the speed started to bleed off right away, down to Mach 1.2. “Running. What’d you see, Snake Eyes?”

“A momentary burn, could have been any thing.”

“Direction?” Munoz asked.

“Call it zero-four-five, maybe twenty degrees above my horizon. I don’t have a clue as to distance.”

“Going active.”

McKenna followed the checklist scrolling up his small CRT, checking switches and readouts, then ignited the rocket motors. He keyed in a ninety percent thrust and two minutes of time in the keyboard, and let the computer balance the throttles during the acceleration. Manual control of the twin rocket throttles during high percentage burns tended to skid the craft around the skies.

By the time the rocket motors shut down at Mach 4.4, Munoz had completed a radar search of most of their forward quadrants, at various altitudes and at ranges of thirty, one hundred, and 220 miles. The 220-mile range wasn’t absolutely reliable at their altitude.

“Nothing, compadre.”

“Absolutely positive?”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s her, then.”

“Yeah, I think so, too. I trust your eyes.”

“But where do we go from here, Tiger?”

“I think we go back to Wet Country and wait for the news reports. We’re not gonna see anythin’ else before we hear about it.”

“Too damned true,” McKenna said, rolling into a right turn. Damn, he hated being on the other side of the fence, with the hostiles flying stealth craft. It made him appreciate how the German pilots he had faced must have felt.

“See if you can find Borneo.”

“How big is it?” Munoz asked.

Chapter Nine

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA

Iztak Milstein had once carried the name of Vladimir Systenko, but he had lost it many years before when, as a young member of the GRU he had been approached by General Anatoly Shelepin himself.

Milstein had been tutored for many long months before he entered the stream of Jewish dissidents allowed to relocate to Israel. He worked on a farm for several months, and then, with money sent to him, bought a taxicab and learned the streets of Tel Aviv.

He had, in fact, begun to enjoy his life immensely, chasing after the beautiful girls with many shekels in his pocket, when he received the only telephone call that could disrupt it. Again, it was General Shelepin himself, and he used the correct codeword. Shortly thereafter, a courier approached Milstein in his taxi and provided him with more money and the travel documents required.

And now he rode in the passenger seat of an Atlas single axle moving van, directing the driver along the narrow street. Like himself and the two men back in the van body, the driver remained nameless.

Though he had been here before, the lengthening shadows made him hesitant. He looked at the map to be certain of himself, then said, “The next street, a right turn.”

The light was green, and without responding, the driver turned at the corner, shifted down a gear, and picked up speed again.

It was still light, but the shadows were stretching across the street. Many of the warehouses and industrial plants had their interior lights on. Shift changes had already occurred where they were going to occur, and traffic on the four-lane street was light. The nearby airport had a steady stream of airplanes landing and taking off.

A mile later, Milstein pointed toward the small sign: NRC Industries.

“That is it,” he said. He had reconnoitered the site many times in the last two weeks.

The plant took up almost two square blocks, surrounded by acres of parking lots. It was, however, a ghost of its former self. With the downturn in military procurement, the employee force had been trimmed drastically, and one shift of workers now met the demand in place of three shifts.