Delta Green - [49]

He remembered to brush the sand from the soles of his flight boots before stepping into the cockpit.

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Amy Pearson was strapped into her bed. Later, she would remember that she had been dreaming of hot, lathery showers, practically the one thing she loved that she couldn’t get aboard Themis.

Though she had secured the communications board for the night, to avoid unwanted intercom calls, the emergency channel was always alive, and it blared her out of her dream, “Colonel Pearson!”

It blared twice before she was alert enough to reach out and depress the talk button. “Pearson.”

“This is Sergeant Curtis, ma’am. You have an urgent call right now.”

“Put it through, please.”

“Go Four,” he said.

She activated the panel, then pressed the keypad for Four. “Colonel Pearson.”

“Amy, this is Marvin Brackman.”

That woke her up finally.

“Yes sir? Sir, there’s something I wanted to—”

“Amy, we’ve had another hijacking.”

“What!”

“NRC Industries,” he said.

“They manufacture the Wasp II for us.”

“Right. They lost sixty of them.”

“Oh, my God! How…”

“I don’t have much detail yet, just that the warehouse was broken into and that a gate guard was killed. Thorpe is on the way to the coast, and the FBI is already on the scene.”

“But we know who got them, don’t we, sir?”

“I would think so. Of course, anyone could adapt them for use in their atmospheric mode, but this is too much of a coincidence.”

“The Phoenix missiles?” she asked.

“We’ve contacted the Hughes people, and they’re doubling the guard on the modified Phoenix IIs.”

The Phoenix II, adaptable to either space or atmospheric firing, had an effective targeting range of 125 miles. The semi-active homing head of the Phoenix switched to active homing in the last ten miles of an interception track, so that the launching aircraft could forget it. The Phoenix was large, thirteen feet in length with a three-foot span with fins deployed. It weighed 975 pounds, with 132 pounds of that devoted to a high explosive warhead. The destructive potential was greater than that of the Wasp.

The Wasp II, designed especially for the MakoShark, had proven itself versatile. Its range was only seventy-five miles, but it accelerated quickly to Mach 2.5, guided by either an independent radar-seeker, by infrared homing, or by visual control through a video lens in the missile’s head. A twenty-one-pound high-explosive warhead was sheathed in machined metal containing depleted uranium. That allowed the warhead to pierce armor plate before detonating. The Wasp was much easier to store and handle than the Phoenix since it was only nine feet long and five inches in diameter and weighed 155 pounds.

“Stealing Phoenix missiles would require heavy equipment,” Pearson said. “I don’t think they will do that.”

“Let’s hope not, Amy. In the meantime, they’ve got enough firepower to scare the hell out of me. I keep thinking about 747s going down.”

Pearson hadn’t considered a terrorist role for the stolen MakoShark at all. She was shocked by that blank spot in her thinking.

“Give me your best, off-the-cuff thoughts, Amy.”

“Do we have any idea how they were taken, General?”

“There’s some witness who said something about a moving van, but that hasn’t been confirmed.”

“I don’t think,” Pearson said, “that they’d take them somewhere and hide them until they could get them out of the country.”

“Why not?” Brackman demanded.

“Did they leave missiles behind?”

“Yes, they did. There were another 112 in the warehouse.”

“Sixty of them total ninety-three hundred pounds, General Brackman. That’s just under the cargo capacity for the Mako.”

“So you think they brought Delta Green into the country? Pretty damned audacious.”

“There isn’t a better smuggling vehicle available, sir. What time did the theft occur?”

“They’re putting it around six o’clock Pacific Standard Time, just after the work shift departed for the day.”

Pearson checked the chronometer on the panel and did some rough calculations in her head.

“I’d bet the missiles are already airborne, General”

“Headed for?” he asked.

“I’m sticking by my educated hunch. It’s somewhere on the Pacific Rim or in Southeast Asia.”

After a short pause, Brackman said, “We have a chance to intercept.”

“Just a chance, sir.”

“I’ll let you get McKenna out of bed,” the commanding general told her.

She wondered if he suspected something.

MERLIN AIR BASE

McKenna wasn’t in bed. It was 1:30 P.M. in Borneo, and though he had rested in one of the guest rooms for a few hours, he had trouble keeping his eyes closed when the sun was shining.

He was in the control tower, monitoring Lynn Haggar’s flight, when Pearson was patched through to him.

“Hi, Amy!”

“How can you be so exuberant in the middle of the night?” she asked.

“Thinking about you.”

“McKenna.”

She could get so icy at times. So he shut up and listened while she repeated the details of Brackman’s call.

“So you’d put them airborne when?” he asked.

“I think they’d use one of the alkali flats or dry lakes in Nevada for the rendezvous with the truck. That’s going to be a drive of three hours out of Sacramento, minimum, maybe longer; I’d give it another hour. That’s ten o’clock from the time of the break-in. I don’t know how long it would take to load sixty missiles, but let’s say they took off around 11:30 P.M. or midnight, California time.”