through a lot together.
“Hey, skipper!” called one of his squadron commanders.
Commander Bud Sanchez was shorter than Jackson. His olive skin and Bismarck mustache accentuated bright eyes and a grin right out of a toothpaste commercial. Sanchez, Commanding Officer of VF-1, would fly Jackson's wing today. They'd flown together when Jackson had commanded VF-41 off the John F. Kennedy. “Your bird is all dialed in. Ready to kick a little ass?”
“Who’s the opposition today?”
“Some jarheads out of Cherry Point in -18-Deltas. We got a Hummer already orbiting a hundred miles out, and the exercise is BARCAP against low-level intruders.” BARCAP meant Barrier Combat Air Patrol. The mission was to prevent attacking aircraft from crossing a line that they were not supposed to cross. “Up to some heavy ACM? Those Marines sounded a little cocky over the phone.”
The Marine I can't take ain't been born yet,' Robby said, as he pulled his helmet off the rack. It bore his call sign, Spade.
“Hey, you RIOs,” Sanchez called, ”quit holdin’ hands and let's get it on!'
“On the way, Bud.” Michael “Lobo” Alexander came from around the lockers, followed by Jackson's radar- intercept officer, Henry “Shredder” Walters. Both were under thirty, both lieutenants. In the locker room, people talked by call sign rather than rank. Robby loved the fellowship of squadron life as much as he loved his country.
Outside, the plane captains — petty officers — who were responsible for maintaining the aircraft walked the officers to their respective birds and helped them aboard. (On the dangerous area of a carrier flight deck, pilots are led virtually by the hand by enlisted men, lest they get lost or hurt.) Jackson's bird had a double-zero ID number on the nose. Under the cockpit was painted “CAPT. R. J. Jackson ‘SPADE’” to make sure that everyone knew that this was the CAG’s bird. Under that was a flag representing a MiG-29 fighter aircraft that an Iraqi had mistakenly flown too close to Jackson's Tomcat not so long before. There hadn't been much to it — the other pilot had forgotten, once, to check his “six” and paid the price — but a kill was a kill, and kills were what fighter pilots lived for.
Five minutes later, all four men were strapped in, and engines were turning.
“How are you this morning, Shredder?” Jackson asked over his intercom.
“Ready to waste some Marines, skipper. Lookin’ good back here. Is this thing gonna fly today?”
“Guess it's time to find out.” Jackson switched to radio. “Bud, this is Spade, ready here.”
“Roger, Spade, you have the lead.” Both pilots looked around, got an all-clear from their plane captains, and looked around again.
“Spade has the lead.” Jackson tripped his brakes. “Rolling now.”
'Hello, mein Schatz,” Manfred Fromm said to his wife.
Traudl rushed forward to embrace him. “Where have you been?”
“That I cannot say,” Fromm replied, with a knowing twinkle in his eye. He hummed a few bars from Lloyd Webber's ”Don't Cry for Me, Argentina.'
'I knew you would see,” Traudl beamed at him.
“You must not talk of this.” To confirm her suspicion, he handed her a wad of banknotes, five packets of ten thousand D-Marks each. That should keep the mercenary bitch quiet and happy, Manfred Fromm told himself. “And I will only be here overnight. I had some business to do, and of course—”
“Of course, Manfred.” She hugged him again, the money in her hands. “If only you had called!”
Arrangements had been absurdly easy to make. A ship outbound for Latakia, Syria, was sailing from Rotterdam in seventy hours. He and Bock had arranged for a commercial trucking company to load the machine tools into a small cargo container which would be loaded on the ship and unloaded onto a Syrian dock in six more days. It would have been faster to send the tools by air, or even by rail to a Greek or Italian port for faster transshipment by sea, but Rotterdam was the world's busiest port, with overworked customs officials whose main task was searching for drug shipments. Sniffer dogs could go over that particular container to their hearts’ content.
Fromm let his wife go into the kitchen to make coffee. It would take a few minutes, and that was all he needed. He walked down into his basement. In the corner, as far from the water-heater as was possible was an orderly pile of lumber, on top of which were four black metal boxes. Each weighed about twelve kilograms, about twenty-five pounds. Fromm carried one at a time — on the second trip, he got a pair of gloves from his bureau drawer to protect his hands — and placed them in the trunk of his rented BMW. By the time the coffee was ready, his task was complete.
“You have a fine tan,” Traudl observed, carrying the tray out from the kitchen. In her mind, she'd already spent about a quarter of the money her husband had given her. So, Manfred had seen the light. She'd known he would, sooner or later. Better that it should be sooner. She'd be especially nice to him tonight.
“Gunther?”
Bock didn't like leaving Fromm to his own devices, but he also had a task to perform. This was a far greater risk. It was, he told himself, a high-risk operational concept, even if the real dangers were in the planning stage, which was both an oddity and a relief.
Erwin Keitel lived on a pension, and not an especially comfortable one at that. Its necessity came from two facts. First, he was a former Lieutenant-Colonel in the East German Stasi, the intelligence and counter-intelligence arm of the defunct German Democratic Republic; second, he had liked his work of thirty-two years. Whereas most of his former colleagues had acknowledged the changes in their country and for the most part put their German identity ahead of whatever ideology they'd once held — and told literally everything they knew to the Bundesnachrichtendienst — Keitel had decided that he was not going to work for capitalists. That made him one of the “politically unemployed” citizens of the united Germany. His pension was a matter of convenience. The new German government honored, after a fashion, pre-existing government obligations. It was at the least politically expedient, and what Germany now was, was a matter of daily struggling with facts that were not and could not be reconciled. It was easier to give Keitel a pension than to leave him on the official dole, which was deemed more demeaning than a pension. By the government, that is. Keitel didn't see things quite that way. If the world made any sense at all, he thought, he would have been executed or exiled — exactly where he might have been exiled to, Keitel didn't know. He'd begun to consider going over to the Russians — he'd had good contacts in the KGB — but that thought had died a quick death. The Soviets had washed their hands of everything to do with the DDR, fearing treachery from people whose allegiance to world socialism — or whatever the hell the Russians stood for now, Keitel had no idea — was somewhat less than their allegiance to their new country. Keitel took his seat beside Bock's in the corner booth of a quiet Gasthaus in what had formerly been East Berlin.
“This is very dangerous, my friend.”
“I am aware of that, Erwin.” Bock waved for two liter glasses of beer. Service was quicker than it had been a few years before, but both men ignored that.
“I cannot tell you how I feel about what they did to Petra,” Keitel said, after the girl left them.
“Do you know exactly what happened?” Bock asked, in a level and emotionless voice.
'The detective who ran the case visited her in prison — he did so quite often — not for interrogation. They made a conscious effort to push her over the edge. You must understand, Gunther, courage in a man or a woman is a finite quality. It was not weakness on her part. Anyone can break. It is simply a matter of time. They watched her die,” the retired colonel said.
“Oh?” Bock's face didn't change, but his knuckles went white on the stein handle.
“There was a television camera hidden in her cell. They have her suicide on videotape. They watched her do it, and did nothing to stop her.”
Bock didn't say anything, and the room was too dim to see how pale his face went. It was as though a hot blast from a furnace swept over him, followed by one from the North Pole He closed his eyes for a brief second to get control of himself Petra would not have wished him to be governed by emotion at a time like this He opened his eyes to look at his friend.
“Is that a fact?”
'I know the name of the detective. I know his address. I still have friends,” Keitel assured Bock.
“Yes, Erwin, I am sure you do. I need your help to do something ”
“Anything ”
“You know, of course, what brought us to this.”
