CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
7th Fighter Squadron Langley Air Force Base, Virginia
T ara Doyle leaned against a flat, diesel-powered aircraft tug and watched the weapons being loaded onto her aircraft. She toyed with a crescent wrench while she sipped a can of Pepsi. It was against hangar protocol to drink soda this close to the aircraft, but the two airmen loading ordinance were more interested in stealing glances at her chest than anything she might be doing to bend the rules.
It was still hours before her flight, but she’d already donned her olive drab Nomex flight suit. Normally loose, it was known as a bag by those in the business. Tara had found one a size too small that showed off the round swell of her buttocks. A full-length zipper ran from the crotch to the neck. She unzipped it down to her belly button and tied the long sleeves around her slender waist to keep it up like a pair of pants. Her metal dog tags dangled on a chain over the chest of her skintight T-shirt, drawing attention to the fact that she’d worn no bra. She wanted the airmen’s focus anywhere but their job.
Tracy, a chubby kid with a mop of dark hair that pushed Air Force regulations, drove the weapons lift. He sat idling next to the aircraft, a load of bombs partially under the plane. The F-22 had to be loaded from the opposite side in order to clear the open bay door. Arlow stood beside his partner, scratching his buzz cut and pursing baby- face cheeks as he looked over the paperwork.
Doyle dropped the wrench on the deck of the tug and walked over to sidle up next to him. Men reacted in one of two ways to such direct attention. Arlow didn’t disappoint her. He gulped, looking her direction, trying-and failing-to keep his eyes off her breasts.
She threw her head back to drain the last of her Pepsi. It exposed the delicate lines of her neck and tightened the shirt against her body. She let her left arm drape over the top of her head, exposing the small tuft of dark hair under her armpit. Her real mother had never thought to shave there and Tara vowed not to bow to the vain American custom. It had made her the object of derision during gym class growing up. Air Force flight surgeons raised surprised eyebrows every year during her physical, but never actually asked anything. She was happy to be an outcast. It made her remember what the Americans had done to her father and brother… and the way they’d defiled her mother before they’d cut her throat.
Whether or not the young airmen found an unshaven woman attractive, they were certain to find it exotic-and in her experience, that was all a man needed to become hooked like a fish. Tara gritted her teeth behind a tight smile. Her chest shuddered with a mix of excitement and revulsion.
“Something wrong, Airman?”
“Nope.” Arlow shook his head, blinking as if to clear something out of his eyes. “I… I mean… you’re goin’ out hot tonight… By that I mean your airplane, ma’am… I don’t mean you personally…”
“Calm down, Airman. I know I’m the queen of West Texas bitches-but I don’t bite…” Her smile turned coy, perking up on one side. It made her physically ill, but she knew how to play a man. It had even worked on Dr. Badeeb, many times.
Arlow swallowed hard and looked over his sparse mustache to consult the clipboard in his hand. “I got you down here for a full complement of four-eighty cannon rounds. I get that.” The M61A2 machine gun fired at a rate of a hundred rounds per second, giving her roughly five one-second shots.
Airman Arlow continued. “You got two Slammers and two Sidewinders. I get that too.” He called the AIM 120 and the AIM 9M/X missiles by their nicknames. “What I don’t get is the GBUs. I’ve never loaded out live bombs for an over-watch run on home soil.”
Tara pitched the empty soda can toward a fifty-five-gallon oil drum used as a trash barrel. She purposely missed and it clattered to the gleaming white hangar floor.
“I know,” she said, bending over slowly to pick up the can. She felt like her suit was about to split. She could feel his eyes on her.
“Weird, huh?” she said. “They got Speedo running air-to-air tonight during the big soiree. I’m working air-to- air and air-to-ground. I suppose the big heads that think all this up are worried about waterborne attacks on the island-especially with all the talk of moles and traitors on the news.”
Arlow shrugged, his eyes locked on Tara’s white T-shirt. “Makes sense, I guess.” He was from a little town outside Houston and though he blanched every time she got near him, she knew he considered his fellow Texan an ally. “Anyway, we’re loadin’ the stuff written on the orders. It’s just odd, that’s all. He tossed the clipboard on the seat of the aircraft tug. “Eight GBU 39s coming your way, ma’am…”
He pulled on a pair of gloves and went to help his chubby partner finish the load-out.
The GBU 39 SDB or Guided Bomb Unit/Small Diameter Bomb weighed just two hundred and fifty pounds. Its lethality radius was roughly the size of a tractor trailer-not particularly large considering the awesome firepower of the F-22. Doyle had already programed the guidance systems to home on four specially designed transmitters- strategically placed. They were accurate enough to fall within fifteen meters of their intended destinations-and for human targets that would be close enough.
Tara arched her back against the tug, closing her eyes to prepare herself for the next move.
Flying “slick,” in stealth mode, the Raptor was literally wrapped around its weapons system. All four missiles and eight bombs were tucked in the aircraft’s belly, out of sight behind the bomb doors. Speedo would check his own bird, but leave Tara to check her ordnance. The captain who had forged her orders was one of them. That left Airmen Arlow and Tracy as the only loose ends that might show up in the short term.
“So,” she called out, looking at her watch as they finished affixing the last load of four bombs to the mounting carriage on the starboard side of her aircraft. The late shift would be arriving in less than an hour. “I need to go over some inventory with you boys back in the storeroom…”
The storeroom, with row after row of head-high shelving units stocked with aircraft parts and fluids, was a favorite place for squadron members to hold clandestine meetings. People went in looking intense and emerged flushed and pensive. Tara had never met anyone back there herself, but knew well enough what was going on.
She threw her head in a saucy tease and began to walk toward the gray double doors beyond the tool racks. She’d let her flight suit slip, showing a thin line of pale belly skin below the hem of her T-shirt. When she glanced over her shoulder, both Arlow and Tracy followed as though they had ropes through their noses. She patted the slender fillet knife inside the thigh of her suit and gave a long quiet sigh, smiling. It was all too easy.
First she would kill these witless men. Then, very soon, she would rain down death on the very heads of those who believed they were the most powerful people on earth.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Governors Island, New York
There was a good deal of grubby work yet to be done and Nancy Hughes hadn’t yet changed into the navy- blue dress she’d wear to watch her only daughter tie the knot. She’d had her hair done that morning, but wore a pair of faded jeans that were comfortably big in the hips and a red Texas Tech Red Raiders sweatshirt. She looked up from where she stood behind the small mahogany table at the threshold of the three-story brick home known as the Admiral’s Mansion.
The weather had turned out on the chilly side but clear-perfect for a wedding-and she’d left the front door open in an attempt to air the mustiness out of the old manor house.
She situated the white taffeta guest book between two Montblanc fountain pens held upright in marble stones shaped like eggs. With all the politicians in attendance, the expensive pens were sure to “run off,” as her mother would say, before the night was over. Still, Jolene wasn’t going to get married again anytime in the near future. No detail was too minor.
Nancy had eloped to keep her daddy from killing young Bobby Hughes. That was long before anyone thought the skinny boy from across the tracks would amount to anything at all, let alone the vice president of the United
