without igniting. The forks at the back could be lowered to pick up a standard NATO pallet holding up to a ton. Guntracks could be linked so that if the engine on one went, the second could pull the first under power.
Shanley and Maury watched with fascination. The sheer logic of the thinking was impressive. The Guntrack had been designed by people who knew the reality of combat.
Maury could still see a problem. 'Artillery will make mincemeat of you,' he said. 'Potentially, there is a terrifying amount of unfriendly metal on today's battlefield, and much of it will cut right through your plastic box.'
'The Guntrack is not the ultimate weapon,' said Fitzduane. 'It is no more than one more useful tool. It is designed for a shoot-and-scoot approach to survival. It is primarily a better way, we think, to get around when you are on the ground on some special operations missions. The underlying idea is not to be detected at all, but if you are detected, to have enough firepower to make the enemy back off while you hightail it out of the area. It beats the hell out of dying.'
Shanley had been thinking it through. 'How do you use Guntrack tactically?' he said.
'We've found that the minimum practical deployment is two vehicles,' said Fitzduane. 'Then fire and movement. One covers the other like a fighter pilot and his wingman.'
Kilmara turned to face Shanley and Maury. 'Well, gentlemen,' he said. 'Now you know what we are working on. The next question is what you can suggest. Any ideas?'
'More than a few,' said Shanley. His mind was racing. What he had seen, if properly developed, was not just interesting. It was tactically significant.
'This idea of a small, inexpensive fast attack vehicle taking on tanks reminds me of something that happened in Africa. The Libyans tried to grab their neighbor to the south and assembled an invading army of hundreds of tanks. They were beaten by Chadians driving only Toyota pickup trucks equipped with Milan missiles. The pickups maneuvered faster than the Russian tanks could move their turrets. Also, they were so small they were hard to hit.'
Kilmara, who had been in Chad advising the Chadians at the time, did not say anything but looked at Shanley with renewed respect. This was a man who did his homework.
'You should look at Dilger's Baby,' said Maury cryptically.
Fitzduane and Kilmara looked at each other blankly.
'How does a baby fit into all this, Maury?' said Kilmara carefully. Maybe Maury had finally flipped.
Maury beamed. 'You'll see,' he said.
When the meeting broke up, Fitzduane checked the switchboard to see if Kathleen had checked in. If she went on an expedition, she normally called during the day to say roughly when she would be back.
There was no message. It was not significant, but Fitzduane could not help feeling vaguely uneasy. He looked at his watch. It was heading toward 5:00 P.M. The exhibition would close at 6:00, and soon after was a barbecue and some entertainment planned by the exhibition organizers for 7:30. The posters announced that there would also be some entertainment and dancing afterward.
Fitzduane had never seen country-and-western line dancers and was mildly curious. Certainly Kathleen, who loved dancing, would like it. As to the parachuting, there was always something morbidly fascinating about watching fellow humans jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Would the parachutes open? Where and how would they land?
It promised to be a pleasant enough evening.
The North Carolina State Police duty officer contemplated the message slip. A citizen had reported seeing a woman being manhandled into a helicopter that had been parked in a remote clearing in the wooded land that bordered the freeway. The woman had been struggling and then she had gone limp, the witness thought. The helicopter had taken off immediately. Direction? Unknown.
Color of hair? Unknown. She had a bag or something over her head, he thought. Color of skin? The citizen did not know.
Descriptions of the assailants? There had been two – or maybe three. They had been casually dressed.
He could not really tell much else. How close had he been? He had been hiking in the woods and had seen all this as he was walking back. He was fifty to seventy-five yards from the clearing. Something like that. He wasn't real good at estimating distances.
The duty officer called in the dispatcher. 'This is pretty thin. What did he sound like? Citizen or crank?'
The dispatcher shrugged. 'Elderly, a little vague, but he definitely believes he saw something.'
'Why was he hiking in the woods?'
'He said he is a birdwatcher. He was looking for the red cockaded woodpecker. He's sure about that.'
'So he saw all this through binoculars?' said the duty officer, somewhat encouraged. He had been wondering how much an elderly man could see at fifty yards when peering through the gloom of a forest. Or was it seventy-five yards? It could be a hundred. It could be thirty.
Could you really tell the difference between a woman being helped aboard and pushed aboard? A bag over the head sounded more like a head scarf to retain some semblance of a hairstyle under the assault of a rotor wash. Not a clear picture.
'Apparently not,' said the dispatcher. 'They were hanging around his neck, but he just forgot. He said he was too surprised, but he insists that he saw what he described. Adamant would convey the degree of emphasis. This guy was all fired up.'
The lieutenant smiled and checked the report again. The incident had happened – if anything had happened – forty minutes ago. His nearest patrol car was a good fifteen minutes away. And he was short two men.
'What kind of chopper?'
The dispatcher was getting a little irritated. 'I asked him. He's into birds, not aircraft. Single rotor. Civilian paint job, something pale. That's all he knows.'
'Did you ask him why he didn't report his earlier?' said the lieutenant. 'I don't know what he expects us to do after forty minutes. The helicopter could be sixty miles away by now.'
'He had to get to a phone,' said the dispatcher. 'And then he said he found he hadn't a dime.'
The lieutenant shook his head. Where did they find them. He was tempted to log the call as requiring no further action, and then a thought occurred to him. He checked the map again. He knew that clearing. He'd patrolled that area. Hunted around there, too.
'If this is about a kidnapped woman, what would a helicopter be doing in that clearing? It's only about a hundred feet across.' He looked at the map again and racked his brains. 'There's a shitload of other places in the area you could land in more safely.'
'Unless you didn't want to be seen,' said the dispatcher. She waited a beat before adding, 'sir.'
The lieutenant looked at her. He was good at looks. This one connected. Whatever the witness had said, given FortBragg's proximity, it was most likely a military chopper on some damn fool exercise. Still, maybe not. The red cockaded woodpecker was a protected species. The military, much to their chagrin, had been instructed to give the bird a wide berth. The word was they were even printing maps with little woodpeckers printed all over them. Hell of a note.
'Who is the closest?' said the lieutenant. 'Richardson?'
The dispatcher nodded. 'Sergeant Richardson,' she confirmed.
'Tell him to go to the clearing and have a look around. He's got a good eye, and who knows… maybe the Russians are invading.'
The dispatcher grinned and shook her head. 'North Carolina in all this heat and humidity. No chance.'
State trooper Sergeant Andy Richardson had a reputation for thoroughness. He was not academically bright,
