The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [184]
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-I, would fly Jackson's wing today. They'd flown together when Jackson had commanded VF-4I 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