Tom Clancy - Clear and Present Danger

"Thank you, Sergeant," Jackson said with a smile. "I needed that."

"I told Ozkanian that he ought to concentrate a little more on leadin' his squad instead of trying to be Sergeant Rock. I think this time he'll listen. He's a pretty good kid, really. Just needs a little seasoning." Mitchell stood. "See you at PT tomorrow, sir. Good night."

"Right. 'Night, Sergeant." Tim Jackson decided that sleep made more sense than paperwork and headed off to his car. On the drive to the BOQ, he was still pondering the call he'd gotten from Colonel O'Mara, whoever the hell he was. Lieutenants didn't interact with bird-colonels very much – he'd made his (required) New Year's Day appearance at the brigade commander's home, but that was it. New lieutenants were supposed to maintain a low profile. On the other hand, one of the many lessons remembered from West Point was that he was responsible for his men. The fact that Chavez hadn't arrived at Fort Benning, that his departure from Ord had been so… irregular, and that his natural and responsible inquiry into his man's situation had earned him nothing more than a chewing only made the young officer all the more curious. He'd let Mitchell make his calls, but he'd stay out of it for the moment, not wanting to draw additional attention to himself until he knew what the hell he was doing. In this Tim Jackson was fortunate. He had a big brother on Pentagon duty who knew how things were supposed to work and was pushing hard for O-6 – captain's or colonel's – rank, even if he was a squid. Robby could give him some good advice, and advice was what he needed.

It was a nice, smooth flight in the COD. Even so, Robby Jackson didn't like it much. He didn't like sitting in an aft-facing seat, but mainly he didn't like being in an airplane unless he had the stick. A fighter pilot, test pilot, and most recently commander of one of the Navy's elite Tomcat squadrons, he knew that he was about the best flyer in the world, and didn't like trusting his life to the lesser skills of another aviator. Besides, on Navy aircraft the stewardesses weren't worth a damn. In this case it was a pimply-faced kid from New York, judging by his accent, who'd managed to spill coffee on the guy next to him.

"I hate these things," the man said.

"Yeah, well, it ain't Delta, is it?" Jackson noted as he tucked the folder back in his bag. He had the new tactical scheme committed to memory. As well he might. It was mainly his idea.

The man wore khaki uniform clothing, with a "U.S." insignia on his collar. That made him a tech-rep, a civilian who was doing something or other for the Navy. There were always some aboard a carrier-electronics specialists or various sorts of engineers who either provided special service to a new piece of gear or helped train the Navy personnel who did. They were given the simulated rank of warrant officer, but treated more or less as commissioned officers, eating in the officers' mess and quartered in relative luxury – a very relative term on a U.S. Navy ship unless you were a captain or an admiral, and tech-reps did not rate that sort of treatment.

"What are you going out for?" Robby asked.

"Checking out performance on a new piece of ordnance. I'm afraid I can't say any more than that."

"One of them, eh?"

" 'Fraid so," the man said, examining the coffee stain on his knee.

"Do this a lot?"

"First time," the man said. "You?"

"I fly off boats for a living, but I'm serving time in the Pentagon now. OP-05's office, fighter-tactics desk."

"Never made a carrier landing," the man added nervously.

"Not so bad," Robby assured him. "Except at night."

"Oh?" The man wasn't too scared to know that it was dark outside.

"Yeah, well, carrier landings aren't all that bad in daylight. Flying into a regular airfield, you look ahead and pick the spot you're gonna touch on. Same thing on a carrier, just the runway's smaller. But at night you can't really see where you're gonna touch. So that makes it a little twitchy. Don't sweat it. The gal we got driving–"

"A girl?"

"Yeah, a lot of the COD drivers are girls. The one up front is pretty good, instructor pilot, they tell me." It always made people safer to think that the pilot was an instructor, except: "She's breaking in a new ensign tonight," Jackson added maliciously. He loved to needle people who didn't like flying. It was always something he bothered his friend Jack Ryan about.

"New ensign?"

"You know, a kid out of P-cola. Guess he wasn't good enough for fighters or attack bombers, so he flies the delivery truck. They gotta learn, right? Everybody makes a first night carrier landing. I did. No big deal," Jackson said comfortably. Then he checked to make sure his safety belts were nice and tight. Over the years he'd found that one sure way of alleviating fear was to hand it over to someone else.

"Thanks."

"You part of the Shoot-Ex?"

"Huh?"

"The exercise we're running. We get to shoot some real missiles at target drones. 'Shoot-Ex.' Missile-Firing Exercise."

"I don't think so."

"Oh, I was hoping you were a guy from Hughes. We want to see if the fix on the Phoenix guidance package really works or not."

"Oh, sorry – no. I work with something else."

"Okay." Robby pulled a paperback from his pocket and started reading. Now that he was sure there was somebody on the COD more uncomfortable than he was, he could concentrate on the book. He wasn't really frightened, of course. He just hoped that the new nugget sitting in the copilot's right seat wouldn't splatter the COD and its passengers all over the ramp. But there wasn't much that he could do about that.

The squad was tired when they got back to the RON site. They took their positions while the captain made his radio call. One of each pair immediately stripped his weapon down for cleaning, even those few who hadn't gotten a shot off.

"Well, Oso and his SAW got on the scoreboard tonight," Vega observed as he pulled a patch through the twenty-one-inch barrel. "Nice work, Ding," he added.

"They weren't very good."

"Hey, ' mano , we do our thing right, they don't have the chance to be very good."

"It's been awful easy so far, man. Might change."

Vega looked up for a moment. "Yeah. That's right."

At geosynchronous height over Brazil, a weather satellite of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had its low-resolution camera pointed forever downward at the planet it had left eleven months before and to which it would never return. It seemed to hover almost in a fixed position, twenty-two thousand six hundred miles over the emerald-green jungles of the Amazon valley, but in fact it was moving at a Speed of about seven thousand miles per hour, its easterly orbital path exactly matching the rotation speed of the earth below. The satellite had other instruments, of course, but this particular color-TV camera had the simplest of jobs. It watched clouds that floated in the air like distant balls of cotton. That so prosaic a function could be important was so obvious as to be hard to recognize. This satellite and its antecedents had saved thousands of lives and were arguably the most useful and efficient segment of America's space program. The lives saved were those of sailors for the most part, sailors whose ships might otherwise stray into the path of an undetected storm. From its perch, the satellite could see from the great Southern Ocean girdling Antarctica to beyond the North Cape of Norway, and no storm escaped its notice.

Almost directly below the satellite, conditions still not fully understood gave birth to cyclonic storms in the broad, warm Atlantic waters off the West Coast of Africa, from which they were carried westward toward the New World, where they were known by the West Indian name, hurricane. Data from the satellite was downlinked to NOAA's National Hurricane Center at Coral Gables, Florida, where meteorologists and computer scientists were working as part of a multiyear project to determine how the storms began and why they moved as they did. The busy season for these scientists was just beginning. Fully a hundred people, some with their doctor's degrees years behind them, others summer interns from a score of universities, examined the photographs for the first storm of the season. Some hoped for many, that they might study and learn from them. The more experienced scientists knew that feeling, but also knew that those massive oceanic storms were the most destructive and deadly force of nature, and regularly killed thousands who lived too close to the sea. They also knew that the storms would come in their own good time, for no one had a provable model for explaining exactly why they formed. All man could do was see them, track them, measure their intensity, and warn those in their path. The scientists also named them. The names were chosen years in advance, always starting at the top of the alphabet and proceeding downward. The first name on the list for the current year was Adele .