Return to Honor (14 page)

“All in good time, Mr. President. Just remember what I said—start thinking of a good speech to make. One of those you do so well—appealing to the generosity and goodwill of all nations. It will make a good show for us.”

Kamil turned back to the door and spat a command. The noise outside Montoya’s chamber grew quiet; people were leaving the plane. Satisfied that the plane was emptied, Kamil grabbed Montoya by the arm and forced him to exit.

The plane was in shambles; the aircraft was torn apart. Montoya couldn’t tell if the ransacking was for souvenirs or for the cryptographic equipment carried on board Air Force One. At this point, all Montoya cared about was his staff and the flight crew.
What had they done with them?

The General shoved Montoya into the back seat of a staff car and locked him in. Metal mesh separated Montoya from the front. Kamil drove away, and as they were leaving, people stepped out from the darkness and started filling the plane with fuel. It was almost as if the General didn’t want anyone to know Montoya was there.

Camp Pendleton, California

“Don’t answer the phone, dear. The kids are waiting in the car.” Maureen Krandel’s shoulders sagged. She stood outside the door, holding the picnic basket in one hand and a blanket in the other.

It was mid-afternoon, and they were running late. Creases furrowed her forehead. The lines looked deeper than they actually were because of the sun’s reflection off the concrete. She pleaded with her husband once more as the phone’s shrill ring cut through the air. “Honey, you
promised—
”

Bill Krandel barely hesitated. “I’ll be right back. The battalion knows I’m signed out on leave. They wouldn’t bother me if it wasn’t important, and they’d call my cell if I didn’t answer the home phone.”

He left the door ajar as he sprinted out of sight.

Maureen’s fingers tightened around the picnic basket’s handle as the ringing stopped.
Damn
—ever since moving to California, she hadn’t had an uninterrupted day with her husband. The Pentagon was bad, but this was worse. She’d lost count of the nights he’d been pulled awake, be it an unannounced exercise or one of his men locked up, drunk, in the downtown jail. It never seemed to stop.

And the children … the kids couldn’t even say they had a father now. He’d be gone before dawn and home after they’d gone to bed. It really hadn’t struck her until Julie had asked one night over dinner why her daddy couldn’t go to her soccer games like the rest of her friends’ fathers.

And Justin needed a father more than ever now. The few times Bill had been home to throw a baseball to him, Bill would wisecrack about Justin growing up as a marine brat: living all over the world before he was eighteen, and staying in no place longer than two years.

How long would it go on? It just wasn’t meant to be this way.

She could see it if the pay was good, or even if he raked in the bennies like her friends’ husbands who weren’t in the military. She had once kept track of the hours Bill worked in a month, then divided that into his salary, but she’d been too depressed to tell him they were living below the poverty level.

He could be making more money an hour working for McDonald’s.

But he wasn’t in it for the pay. She’d known that since he was a butter bar, but things were different back then. They could have a good time on only a movie and a malt. But it was different with the kids. She didn’t want them to grow up as some fatherless pair of renegades, all because of his goals.

What goals? The last time they’d talked, he dreamed of going back to the Pentagon as a full colonel, with a chance of making general. It would only get worse.

So this command was his ticket to glory. But what kind of satisfaction could he find ignoring the kids? And her?

Her thoughts were broken as Bill stuck his head out the door; he wasn’t smiling. He wore that intense, worried look that disturbed her so much.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to go without me, hon. Something’s come up.”

“Can you meet us at the beach?”

He shook his head and seemed tense. “No, I’ve got to run.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know—I’ve got to be at battalion headquarters in ten minutes.” He set his mouth. “Go ahead. I’ll try to get back as soon as possible. And don’t mention this to anyone, hon. I wasn’t even supposed to let you know I’d be gone.”

She closed her eyes. “We’ll wait until you leave.”

He nodded, then left as abruptly as he had come. She stood in the door for several moments before the basket slipped from her fingers, dropping to the ground. She didn’t hear the bottle inside break. She turned to the car to bring the children inside. Liquid seeped out of the basket and into the sunlight, covering the concrete with dull, blood-red wine.

Edwards Air Force Base, California

The atomic bomb detonated just above his bed, flashing white, brilliant light with a sound that overloaded his senses. Gould shot up from the cot in a panic.

When he woke the klaxon was shrieking above his head, and his heart still yammered from the scare. He realized he hadn’t been atom-bombed, and it took another second to realize the klaxon was actually
warning
him that the alert was on.

“Holy cow!” He’d slept in his flight suit; his boots were on and halfway laced by the time he hit the door running. Delores burst from a door down the hall. She was running upright and passed him as he bent over to tie his boots.

“What’s going on?”

“How should I know?” Delores’ voice came from outside the alert shack door, as she was already outdoors. “They haven’t announced it’s a drill, so it must be real world.”

This couldn’t be happening, he thought. SAC crews used to do this all the time during the Cold War. But the call always comes through: “THIS IS SKYBIRD, I SAY AGAIN, THIS IS SKYBIRD.…THIS IS ONLY AN ALERT.” And once they knew it was an alert, they could relax.

Oh, the SAC weenies still did their jobs—you’d better believe it! ’Cause if they were ever found goofing around, that was it, bucko. Out the door with a boot in the fanny. So they practiced like it was the real thing all the time.

So what the heck is this? The Cold War was over, and no one ever thought they’d be called on alert for real. The thoughts pounded through Gould’s mind as he finished lacing his boots.

He was out the door at a run. The desert sunlight hit him like a sledgehammer. Going from the cool air-conditioned alert shack to the dry outdoor heat slowed him minutely, but he put down his head and sprinted for the second TAV.

The 747 crew was ahead of him. They must have been out the door as the klaxon first sounded, for they had already reached the 747 and were scrambling up the ladder to the cockpit.

He’d been assigned the second TAV because he could outrun Delores in the one-hundred-yard sprint, about the distance from the alert shack to the TAV—theory was they’d reach their TAVs at the same time. But Delores was already climbing onto the lifting unit, which hoisted her high above the 747 mother craft, directly to the TAVs hatch.

Gould increased his pace; he reached his own lift seconds later.

Once inside the TAV Gould strapped in and secured his helmet. He slapped on the touch-sensitive terminal and punched up the checklist. The terminal screen raced through preflight check, changing with each screen configuration, and displaying each subsystem it queried. The TAV flight units flashed across the screen in multicolored animation.

Gould scanned the results as he settled in. “GPS, comm-up, slave terminals … looks good.” He reached overhead and threw what few “hard” switches he had—nearly everything was routed through his touch-sensitive terminals, doing away with unnecessary toggles that could snap or worse, stick. Gould still viewed it with a jaundiced eye.
Anything
could go wrong with computers, he believed, and personally he’d rather have a switch he could click than mess with a computer that went belly-up.

The craft started a slow vibration as the 747’s engines ran up. Gould established a link with the 747 mother ship below him. He said, “You guys know what’s going on?”

“Later, hitchhiker. We’re busy down here. Talk to CP if you’ve got any questions. Now, don’t bother us unless you’re going to blow us up.”

Gould got the idea and switched over to
GUARD.
The terminal flashed an
“ALL SYSTEMS GO”
in huge green letters. “Command Post, this is tail number—”

“Unidentified plane, all airways are closed. Acceptance on S for Sam only.”

Great. They’re only taking messages over the secure—the Sam—link. Whatever it is, they’ve got to be serious about it.

The secure link was bounced off the geosynchronous satellites—DoD’s AEHFs—that were overhead at all times. Three thousand extremely high-frequency bands were used, and in addition to voice scrambling, the channels randomly jumped from one frequency to another within the band every thousandth of a second. Even if the bad guys stumbled onto the frequency Gould started communicating on, the frequency switched too fast for them to follow his conversation.

And if the communication link popped out of synch, the whole procedure had to be restarted, initializing on keys distributed by quantum key distribution, that were changed every day to prevent compromise.

Gould touched an icon on the terminal to switch him over to the secure link. As he reached out, the TAV jerked as the 747 lurched under him. They were moving …

A red square flashed on the terminal. An icon of a tiny figure, the hat pulled low over its eyes, filled one corner of the square with the words
“SECURE LINK ESTABLISHED”
plastered underneath. “TAV niner one, this is Command Post. Do you copy?”

Gould clicked his radio. “I copy, Command Post; this is niner one.”

“Stand by for message, niner one.” In the background he heard a voice say, “I’ve got him, sir.”

A moment passed, then: “Niner one, this is Colonel Mathin. Your mother ship is cleared for takeoff, and I’ll brief you over the secure link while they’re getting you to Pendleton. We’ll hack on my time: in seven seconds I’ll have 1002 hours.…ready, ready, hack.” Gould punched at his terminal; the numbers agreed with the hack. Mathin continued: “We’ve got an ETA into Pendleton at 1055 local. I want you in the air and ready to rocket no later than 1130.”

“Sir, can I—”

“Niner one, we don’t have much time, and this is important. If it were up to me, I’d have Beckman on niner two flying this mission—she’d follow orders better than you without giving me any crap—but you’re the best we’ve got, so are you going to shut up and listen, or do I turn the mission over to niner two?”

“Copy that, sir, please continue.” Gould held his breath; he’d taken things one step too far, but he had a feeling that if he was
really
lucky, he was in for one doozy of a mission.

“Very well, niner one.” Mathin sounded relieved. “Once your 747 lands at Pendleton, you’ll load up with a full contingent of RDF personnel. Your destination is being downloaded directly into your onboard computer. When you rocket, your new call sign will be
Ojo-1.”

“That’s a rog, tower: Ojo-1. Care to let me know what this mission’s about?”

A long silence preceded Colonel Mathin’s coming back. “That’s a negative, Major. We’ll have to wait until you rocket.”

Need-to-know, fumed Gould. But at least he finally had a live one, and the whole mission probably depended on his steady hand to get them there. He also thought how typical it was that he didn’t have the proper clearance to know where they were going until he was on his way.

He wondered where the flare-up might be. No telling, but as long as they had the C-17 transports to pull them out of there, he didn’t really care. In fact, he might even be able to hit the club for dinner tonight if he was lucky.…

The TAV jumped as the 747 lumbered off the runway, throwing Gould back against his seat. The jolt was more unexpected than harmful, but Gould switched on the comm to the mother ship below. As he did, the secure link automatically disconnected.

“When are you guys sending up the cocktail service? First class hasn’t been served yet.”

“Just sit back and enjoy the ride, hotshot. You’ll get yours.”

Another voice broke in over the commline. “Hey, while you’ve got our hitchhiker on the line, tell Gould I’m going back to hit the restroom and then lie down on a cot for a while. Ask him if he can do that in that excuse for an airplane he flies.”

“You guys are jealous, ya bunch of apes. Just don’t run into any commercial liners while you’re goofing off down there.”

The intercom shut off, leaving him in silence. He tried to relax by reviewing the TAV procedures for a fully loaded craft. If they were going to Pendleton, he’d probably be flying with the marines’ whole dog-and-pony show.

It still didn’t make much sense to house the marines down at Pendleton if they were supposed to be part of the RDF, but politics dictated it would save money. The RDF wouldn’t lose more than forty-five minutes flight time if the TAVs were kept at Edwards and the marines at Pendleton. Otherwise, the additional cost of buildings, supplies, and even schools for the marines’ kids would have to be taken care of at Edwards. Gould had to admit, as much as he despised the President’s politics, it had saved money.

His terminal silently flashed down the minutes and seconds that were left before landing at Pendleton. The emergency procedures bored him to tears. He had plenty of time to rack it back and catch some sleep. It was an old habit he had picked up as a cadet at the Air Force Academy during classes.

Within seconds he was conked out.

Camp Pendleton, California

“Are the men ready?”

“Not yet, sir. They’re still rounding up Delta squad out at the mockup. They should be arriving within five minutes.”

“Good.” General Vandervoos lit his cigar for the fifth time and paced across the room. He didn’t puff on the stogie, so his perpetual habit of lighting and relighting the cigar kept his hands busy.

Reaching the window, he turned and looked Krandel up and down. “Bill, I can’t let you go. Weston’s got the experience, the men know him.…and most importantly, he’s been tested under fire.”