William Lovejoy - Delta Green

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.”

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.

He entered the darkened hangar, feeling for a light switch, and stepped on something soft.

Found the switch and cut in one bank of the overhead fluorescent lights.

Looked down to see that his right foot was resting on the thigh of an airman second who was sprawled on his back in a pool of blood. A ravine had been gouged deeply into his forehead.

Dimatta dove to his right, slamming his back into the standing door, rolled twice, and came to rest behind a roll-away tool chest.

He looked up to see what else, or who else, was in there with him.

And what wasn’t .

Delta Green.

The passenger cabin of the Cessna Citation (assigned to the Commander, United States Air Force, Space Command) contained the commander, General Marvin Brackman; his intelligence deputy, Brigadier General David Thorpe; Senator Alvin Worth of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee; Representative Marian Anderson of the House Armed Services Committee; and a Marine major manning a jury-rigged radar console.

Both Worth and Anderson were staunch foes of what they called Department of Defense spending sprees. In a world of loosening tensions and warming relationships, they were especially disenchanted with purchasing additional MakoSharks at a cost of three-quarters of a billion dollars per copy. Twice, since leaving Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, scathing comments had been made in regard to some hotdog pilot named McKenna losing the original Delta Blue in the Greenland Sea during the German fracas.

Brackman’s 1st Aerospace Squadron still had seven Makos and five MakoSharks — Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, and a backup craft being completed at Jack Andrews Air Base in Chad, but the general thought it important to maintain his long-term acquisition plan.

That plan was on Worth and Anderson’s cutting block, and the two of them were gaining converts on their own committees, as well as on the appropriations committees.

There were those within Brackman’s command who thought it might be better to cut Worth and Anderson. The world would be a far better place, the philosophy went, and Brackman wasn’t certain just how serious some of those people were.

McKenna, for instance .

Thorpe and the two congressional representatives were standing in the narrow aisle, bent over the shoulders of the major at the radar console, and Thorpe was trying to explain to them how to read the screen.

The airplane hit some turbulence and bounced a little. Marian Anderson grabbed Thorpe’s arm to steady herself. Her face was a trifle pale.