William Lovejoy - Delta Green

He toed the brakes, reducing the ground speed to a crawl, then linked the ground steering to the hand controller.

He turned off the runway toward the hanger and a blue tow tractor moving toward them. Fumbling with the catch on his helmet, he pushed his helmet visor up, automatically closing off the oxygen/nitrogen supply feed.

After depressurizing the cockpit, McKenna raised the canopy. The humid air floated in and slapped him in the face. The moan of a hydraulic line told him that Munoz had raised his own canopy.

It took four minutes to shut down the engines and electronics systems, then McKenna turned his helmet one-eighth turn in the track of the environmental suit’s collar to free it, lifted it off, and placed it on the instrument panel shroud. He stood up in the cockpit and stretched his muscles.

A ground crewman fitted the ladder to the side of the MakoShark, and he slid over the cockpit coaming, found the ladder with his feet, and worked his way out over the wide chine, then down to the ground.

Dimatta, Williams, Conover, Abrams, and the new base commander, a brigadier named Del win Cartwright, were waiting on the tarmac for him.

“What the hell happened to your security, General?” McKenna demanded.

“Ease off, Colonel. You don’t question my security.”

“I’ll damned well find someone who will,” McKenna told him, then turned his back on the man and headed for the ready room.

The members of the 1st Aerospace Squadron followed him, curiously quiet for that bunch.

Colonel Kevin McKenna took up a station near the Mercator projection world map on one wall of the ready room. Even in the environmental suit which disguised the finer points of form, he appeared hard and fit. He was six feet tall, and Conover judged that his weight hadn’t varied five or six ounces from 175 pounds in all the time he had known the commander. His skeletal structure was composed of heavy bones, and his cheekbones were prominent in a lean and tanned face. Conover supposed — hell, he knew — that women found the gray/green eyes and slightly long and rumpled black hair enticing. The only change Conover had noted in almost three years was a minor deepening of the lines between the outer edges of McKenna’s nostrils and the ends of his mouth, and Conover attributed that to the weight of command. He smiled just as frequently, though. Perhaps there were a few more wrinkles in the pilot’s squint at the corners of his eyes. He thought, though, that McKenna’s eyes were as sharp as ever. And Snake Eyes was still willing to take a gamble, another reason for his nickname.

McKenna had never talked much about his history, but Conover knew that he had flown with the Thunderbirds demonstration team, had done some liaison work with the Saudis and Israelis in F-15s and F-16s, and had been assigned to Edwards as a test pilot before Brackman selected him to head the 1st Aerospace Squadron.

McKenna had the demeanor and the credentials to demand loyalty and trust, and he got both from the people in his squadron.

He also didn’t pussyfoot around.

“Do-Wop, close the door.”

Jack Abrams closed the door, then took a seat in one of the armed desk chairs.

“Frank, run it down for everyone.”

Dimatta took four minutes to brief them on what he knew of the disappearance of Delta Green and the murders of four people. “Hell, Kevin, I assumed we still had the same old security plan in effect. Bad assumption on my part.”

“We’re not going to sweat the security problems,” McKenna said. “That’s history, and you can be damned sure the arrangements will change. Have you talked to Pearson?”

“I briefed her right after I talked to Brackman. She’s putting together some kind of plan.”

“All right, we’ll adapt our mission as her information comes in. First things first. I’ve ordered the radio encryption boxes removed from all MakoSharks, and the Mark IV boxes installed. We don’t want whoever’s got Delta Green to be listening in on our scrambled radio communications. Space Command will be making the same change. Next, we’re short a MakoShark. As soon as we’re done here, Frank, you and George grab one of the Lears and head for Hot Country. Delta Orange is about ready for flight testing, and we’ll boost the schedule on her. I’ll talk to Brackman and get an approval on that”

George “Nitro Fizz” Williams, Dimatta’s backseater, frowned. He wouldn’t like giving up the Delta Green designation. It was a superstitious trait — even McKenna had renamed his new craft Delta Blue after the original Delta Blue had been shot down.

“George?” McKenna asked.

“Whatever you say, Colonel”

Williams wouldn’t normally call McKenna “Colonel,” except in a public setting. He was pretty much reality-based, though he went overboard on the nutrition thing. He was thirty-three, tall at six-two, and the startlingly red hair and deep green eyes had come from some Irish ancestry, though he denied it to Conover, who was Irish. When he wasn’t messing around with all of his electronic gadgetry in the backseat of a MakoShark, he was messing around with the electronic gadgetry he built as a hobby. His cubicle aboard Themis and his apartment landside were stuffed with stereos, television sets, computers, bar code readers, VCRs, radar detectors, and even radars he had designed and built himself.

“Spit it out, George,” McKenna ordered.

“Well, damn. We ought to rename the new bird Green.”

“No,” McKenna said. “As far as we know, Delta Green is still operational. She’ll stay Green until we know one way or the other.”

Williams shrugged.

“Next. Will, what’s your status?”

Conover sat up in his hard wooden seat and said, “We’re topped up and ready to go.”

“Weapons?”

“We’ve got practice Wasp IIs aboard, Kevin. We were just starting our training series in the desert when Overton diverted us here.”

“Change them out for live missiles, just in case, and install a Chain Gun pod.”

“We’ve got permission?” Conover asked.

“Not yet, but we will have by the end of the day.”

Jack “Do-Wop” Abrams, Conover’s WSO, broke in. “We’re going to shoot her down, Kevin?”

Dimatta groaned.

“That’ll be up to the brass, Jack. My immediate priority is to locate her. Based on the assumption that it’s not wise to let anyone — whoever it is — have a spacecraft that is equal to our own and can be used against us, I recommended to Brackman that we destroy it.”

Williams groaned.

“The general, however, read me a minor riot act which included items such as cost-per-bird, public relations, and congressional thumbs which might be turned down on our whole act.”

“So Brackman’s kicking it upstairs for a decision?” Abrams asked.

Abrams’s bushy mustache had grown even longer, now covering his upper lip, and just then, it seemed to quiver. The mustache was compensation for the hair which had disappeared before he reached the age of forty. His pate was smooth, but his face was lined with the worry he devoted to almost any issue. He was chronic about worrying, and it was reflected in his sharp hazel eyes. Originally a New Yorker, Abrams had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley prior to entering the Air Force. Conover thought that Berkeley had been the root of his worrying. The only thing that took his mind off his imagined troubles was outdated music, the source of his nickname, “Do-Wop.”

“Let’s just say, Jack, that my recommendation, along with General Brackman’s observations, will be considered by the appropriate commands.”

“He kicked it upstairs,” Abrams concluded. “We can figure on somebody making a political decision”