was simply Raymond Harris's personal war against a rival on behalf of a smuggler.
Harris spoke at length on the Firehawk program in Malaysia. Troy didn't hear the words. His mind wandered, first back to Jenna and to Hal, finally coming to rest on the words of the CIA men.
Harris really was emerging as a demagogue, his appetite only whetted by the raw-meat taste of the power that came from the omnipotent ability to declare your own wars and to fight them with the most high-tech of weapons.
Troy looked at Jenna in the audience as he accepted his award. She had been looking at him, but she glanced away when their eyes met.
Afterward, there were handshakes and pats on the back, and several people wanted their picture taken with Troy. When this tapered off, he looked around for Jenna, hoping to resume their conversation and guide it toward a more positive resolution. She was nowhere to be seen.
When he had arrived, he had parked his rental car one row back from her Porsche. When he left the building, it was gone.
Back at the hotel, he ordered a hamburger at the bar and had a couple of beers. A news-talk show came on the television, and Troy was surprised to see Raymond Harris on with a congressman from Missouri. Harris was on his familiar jag about PMCs being the future of warfare, and the congressman was gushing about how much money the government was saving.
'PMCs have proven to be excellent partners in respect to efficiency, skills, low prices, and reliability,' the congressman said in his soft Midwestern drawl, looking at the talking-head moderator. 'They've been able to fulfill most of the missions normally handled by regular armies, without risking political fallout.'
'Initially they were just consultants,' the talking head said to his guests. 'But each year, they come closer to serving as fully operational armies. For many client countries, it seems that PMCs have become essential.'
'Any time you have customers that come to rely on you as an essential part of the program, that's when you know that you're doing your job.' Harris smiled confidently.
Troy still thought the CIA guys were wrong about Harris, but he could certainly see how they'd jumped to that conclusion.
Chapter 33
Troy was shown into Raymond Harris's large top-floor office, the office that didn't remind you that he was a retired general so much as it hit you over the head with that fact. Harris was behind his big desk, next to his flagpole.
He was on the phone but waved for Troy to take a seat. As Harris finished his call, Troy's eyes roamed the room, looking at the framed photos of Harris with famous people and his collection of 1/22-scale mahogany aircraft models. As his eyes came to rest on an F-16, he thought about Hal and the cruelties of war.
When the call was finished, the two men exchanged pleasantries and Harris got down to business.
'I wanted you to be among the first to know that I'm stepping aside as Director of Air Ops here at Firehawk.' Harris smiled.
'That's sort of a bombshell,' Troy said. He was bowled over. Harris was synonymous with air operations at Firehawk. He had run the Air Ops Division since its inception and had watched it grow into one of the top ten air forces in the world. 'This is really astounding…. what next for you?'
'That's the good part.' Harris grinned. 'I'm staying with Firehawk. I'm just moving to a new division.' 'Which division?'
'One you've never heard of, and one I can't tell you about… unless of course you accept my invitation to come over and work with me there.'
'Sounds like a desk job,' Troy said. 'I don't think that's right for me. I like what I'm doing and I'm real anxious to get back overseas and start doing it some more,' Troy said
'Well, I will tell you that this job does involve flying,' Harris said.
'How much flying?'
'There'll be an opportunity for you to get into the cockpits of some pretty extreme stuff.'
'Hmmm,' Troy said thoughtfully. 'What does it pay?'
'As you recall the last time I offered you a job, we sat in this room and I asked you what you were making, and I doubled it. This time, I know what you're making, and I'm offering to double it.'
'Well, then I guess you have your guy,' Troy said. A change of pace was always good, especially after all the anguish he'd been wrestling with since Hal died.
A doubled salary didn't hurt, either.
Troy was a little startled that Harris had already prepared the papers and nondisclosure agreements for him to sign, but only just a little. As soon as these details were attended to, he began his explanation.
'Back at the end of World War Two, when the Germans were way ahead of us on certain kinds of technology, the Army and the Army Air Forces went in to scoop up the German scientists and the stuff they were working on. You've heard of Operation Paperclip, right?'
'Of course,' Troy said. 'That was when the Americans got hold of Wernher von Braun, who invented the V2 ballistic missile… and brought him to the United States to build a whole succession of bigger and bigger rockets that led to ICBMs and to the Saturn V that took astronauts to the moon.'
'Right.' Harris nodded. 'But Paperclip was only one of several programs of that sort. Another one run by the U. S. Air Force was called Project FALCO, for Foreign Aircraft and Logistics Capture Operations. Paperclip's bailiwick was big rockets, while FALCO's was veryhigh-altitude fighters. You've heard of the YF-12 and the SR-71, which came along in the sixties and flew at altitudes up to a hundred thousand feet… well, there were others you never heard of.'
'Why not? That was a half century ago.'
'Certain things just stay secret. In this case, HAW, the High Altitude Warfare program, was parallel to other things like the SR-71 that were merely top secret. HAW remained classified beyond all access partly because it was classified beyond all access. They had done such a good job of keeping it a secret that the biggest secret was simply that they had kept it that way.'
'How does this affect Firehawk?' Troy asked. The history lesson was nice, but he was anxious for Harris to cut to the chase.
'Because the program still exists,' Harris said, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, as though to underscore the secrecy. 'For several decades after its heyday in the sixties, the program was underfunded and didn't really do very much, but in the last couple of years, they've really cranked it up again. It's now called HAWX for High Altitude Warfare, Experimental, because of the emphasis on really advanced systems.'
'That doesn't explain how this affects us.'
'It affects us because the U. S. Air Force has decided to privatize it and hand it off to a PMC,' Harris said excitedly. 'They're so pleased with the efficiencies of working with PMCs that they decided to let us run with it. On top of that, it's growing so big so fast that they want to keep it another step away from congressional oversight. They're afraid this increases the chance of information getting leaked.'
'Where is the program located?' Troy asked.
'It's been all over. It was at Wright-Pat, then Langley, and now it's out on the Nellis Air Force Base range about a hundred miles north of Las Vegas, out by Groom Lake. Officially, it's known as the 24th Test and Evaluation Squadron.'
'Mmmm,' Troy purred conspiratorially. 'Out by Area 51?'
'About fifty miles to the northeast,' Harris replied straight-faced.
'What would I be doing exactly?'
'There are three primary missions of the 24th TES. First, just like the squadron designation says, there's testing and evaluation of experimental and secret aircraft and hardware, with an emphasis on high-altitude systems. Second, the 24th has been called on to fly live high-altitude combat or recon missions. All of these will be strictly on the 'black ops' side. You'll get to continue doing what you're doing now, it's just that nothing that you do
