tracked.'
'With what? All our air-defense fighters are on the Canadian border. Calling them down wouldn't work, they'd never catch up.'
'How about an AWACS?' Foley asked.
'They belong to Air Combat Command at Langley ours, not yours-and well, maybe one's up for counterdrug surveillance or maybe training. I can check.'
'Do that,' Ed Foley said. 'I'll hold.'
The two-star in blue went one better than that, calling the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain, which had radar coverage over the entire country, and ordering them to identify the four Gs. That took less than a minute, and a computer command was sent to the Federal Aviation Administration to check the flight plans that had to be filed for international flights. NORAD also told the general that there were two E-3B AWACS aircraft aloft at the moment, one 300 miles south of New Orleans doing counter-drug operations, and the other just south of Eglin Air Force Base, conducting routine training with some fighters based there in an exercise against a Navy flight out of Pensacola Naval Air Station. With that information, he called Langley Air Force Base in the Virginia Tidewater, got Operations, and told them about the DCI's request.
'What's this for, sir?' the general asked Foley, once the phone lines were properly lashed up.
'I can't tell you that, but it's important as hell.'
The general relayed that to Langley Operations, but did not relay the snarled response back to CIA. This one had to be kicked to the four-star who ran Air Combat Command, who, conveniently, was in his office rather than the F-16 that came with the job. The four-star grunted approval, figuring CIA wouldn't ask without good reason.
'You can have it if you need it. How far will it be going
'I don't know. How far can one of those Gulfstream jets go?'
'Hell, sir, the new one, the G -V, can fly all the way to friggin' Japan. I may have to set up some tanker support.'
'Okay, please do what you have to do. Who do I call to keep track of the shadowing operation?'
'NORAD.' He gave the DCI the number to call.
'Okay, thank you, General. The Agency owes you one.'
'I will remember that, Director Foley,' the USAF major general promised.
'We're in luck,' Clark heard. 'The Air Force is chopping an AWACS to us. We can follow them all the way to where they're going,' Ed Foley said, exaggerating somewhat, since he didn't understand the AWACS would have to refuel on the way.
The aircraft in question, a ten-year-old E-3B Sentry, got the word fifteen minutes later. The pilot relayed the information to the senior control officer aboard, a major, who in turn called NORAD for further information and got it ten minutes after the leading G departed U.S. airspace. The steer from Cheyenne Mountain made the tracking exercise about as difficult as the drive to the local 7Eleven. A tanker would meet them over the Caribbean, after lifting off from Panama, and what had been an interesting air-defense exercise reverted to total boredom.The E-3B Sentry, based on the venerable Boeing 707320B, flew at the identical speed as the business jets made in Savannah, and kept station from fifty miles behind. Only the aerial tanking would interfere with matters, and that not very much. The radar aircraft's call-sign was Eagle TwoNiner, and it had satellite radio capability to relay everything, including its radar picture, to NORAD in Colorado. Most of Eagle Two-Niner's crewmen rested in their comfortable seats, many of them dozing off while three controllers worked the four Gulfstreams they were supposed to track. It was soon evident that they were heading somewhere pretty straight, five minutes or about forty-one miles apart, attempting no deception at all, not even wavetop flying. But that, they knew, would only abuse the airframes and use up gas unnecessarily. It didn't matter to the surveillance aircraft, which could spot a trash bag floating in the water-something they regularly did in counter-drug operations, since that was one of the methods used by smugglers to transfer their cocaine-or even enforce the speed limit on interstate highways, since anything going faster than eighty miles per hour was automatically tracked by the radar-computer system, until the operator told the computer to ignore it. But now all they had to look at were commercial airliners going and coming in routine daily traffic, plus the four Gulfstreams, who were traveling so normal, straight, and dumb that, as one controller observed, even a Marine could have taken them out without much in the way of guidance.
By this time, Clark was on a shuttle flight to Reagan National Airport across the river from Washington. It landed on time, and Clark was met by a CIA employee whose 'company' car was parked outside for the twenty- minute ride to Langley and the seventh floor of the Old Headquarters Building. Dmitriy Popov had never expected to be inside this particular edifice, even wearing a VISITOR - ESCORT REQUIRED badge. John handled the introductions.
'Welcome,' Foley said in his best Russian. 'I imagine you've never been here before.'
'As you have never been to Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square.'
'Ah, but I have,' Clark responded. 'Right into Sergey Nikolay'ch's office, in fact.'
'Amazing,' Popov responded, sitting down as guided.
'Okay, Ed, where the hell are they now?'
'Over northern Venezuela, heading south, probably for central Brazil. The FAA tells us that they filed a flight plan-it's required by law-for Manaus. Rubber-tree country, I think. A couple of rivers come together there.'
'They told me that there is a facility there, like the one in Kansas, but smaller,' Popov informed his hosts.
'Task a satellite to it?' Clark asked the DCI.
'Once we know where it is, sure. The AWACS lost a little ground when it refueled, but it's only a hundred fifty miles back now, and that's not a problem. They say the four business jets are just flying normally, cruising right along.'
'Once we know where they're going… then what?'
'Not sure,' Foley admitted. 'I haven't thought it through that far.'
'There might not be a good criminal case on this one, Ed.'
'Oh?'
'Yeah,' Clark confirmed with a nod. 'If they're smart, and we have to assume they are, they can destroy all the physical evidence of the crime pretty easily. That leaves witnesses, but who, you suppose, is aboard those four Gs heading into Brazil?'
'All the people who know what's been happening. You'd want to keep that number low for security reasons. wouldn't you-so, you think they're going down there for choir practice
'What?' Popov asked.
'They need to find and learn a single story to tell the FBI when the interrogations begin,' Foley explained. 'So, they all need to learn the same hymn, and learn to sing it the same way every time.'
'What would you do in their place, Ed?' Rainbow Six asked reasonably.
Foley nodded. 'Yeah, that's about it. Okay, what should we do?'
Clark looked the DCI straight in the eye. 'Pay them a little visit, maybe?'
'Who authorizes that?' the Director of Central Intelligence asked.
'I still draw my paychecks from this agency. I report to you, Ed, remember?'
'Christ, John.'
'Do I have your permission to get my people together at a suitable staging point?'
'Where?'
'Fort Bragg, I suppose,' Clark proposed. Foley had to yield to the logic of the moment.
'Permission granted.' And with that Clark walked down the narrow office to a table with a secure phone to call Hereford.
Alistair Stanley had bounced back well from his wounds, enough so that he could just about manage a full day in his office without collapsing with exhaustion. Clark's trip to the States had left him in charge of a crippled Rainbow force, and he was facing problems now that Clark had not yet addressed, like replacements for the two dead troopers. Morale was brittle at the moment. There were still two missing people with whom the survivors had worked intimately, and that was never an easy thing for men to bear, though every morning they were out on the athletic field doing their daily routine, and every afternoon they fired their weapons to stay current and ready for a possible callup. This was regarded as unlikely, but, then, none of the missions that Rainbow had carried out had been, in retrospect, very likely. His secure phone started chirping, and Stanley reached to answer it.'Yes, this is
