Tom Clancy's op-centre_ mirror image - Tom Clancy [97]
The phone beeped. Hood looked at the digital code on the LED band at the bottom. It was Stephen Viens at NRO.
Hood picked up the receiver. "What's doing, Stephen?"
"Paul? I thought you were on vacation."
"I'm back," Hood said. "What kind of intelligence organization are you running, anyway?"
"Funny," Viens said. "Bob wanted us to watch that Trans-Siberian train, and there's been a change."
"What kind?"
Viens said, "Not a good one. Have a look at your monitor. I'll send the image over."
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Tuesday, 9:13 A.M., Seoul
The windows of the hangar at the base outside of Seoul were bulletproof and painted black. The doors were locked, sentries were posted at each of them, and no one other than members of the Air Force's M-Team were allowed near the structure. The Mosquito unit was under the command of General Donald Robertson, a sixty-four-yearold dynamo who had discovered bungee jumping when he was sixty and did it once a day before breakfast.
Inside, the twenty-soldier team had run this drill dozens of times with a plastic and wood prototype. Now that the emergency and the cargo were real, they moved with even greater speed and precision, exhilarated by necessity, handling the surprisingly light, matte-black components confidently, silently. They had rehearsed loading it onto various aircraft, from the Sikorsky S-64 helicopter for missions under 250 miles to cargo planes ranging from the StarLifter to the RAF's old Short Belfast for runs of 5,000 miles or more. For the 750-mile trip to Hokkaido, General Milton A. Warden had okayed the use of a Lockheed C-130E. It had the largest cargo bay of any aircraft presently in South Korea, and the rear access to the main cargo hold, with its hydraulically operated ramp, made the process of getting in and out relatively easy. As Mike Rodgers had told Warden, speed would be desperately important once the Hercules landed in Japan.
While the M-Tearn loaded the cargo, the pilot, copilot, and navigator were reviewing the flight plan, checking the four Allison T-56-A-1A turboprop engines, and obtaining clearances from the tower at the secret U.S. air base midway between Otaru, on the coast, and the prefecture capital of Sapporo. The base had been established early in the Cold War as a staging area for missions into eastern Russia, and had been the home of between ten and fifteen U.S. spy planes until satellites rendered them relatively obsolete in the early 1980s. Now the troops stationed there called themselves "bird-watchers," keeping a radar eye and radio ear on Russian comings and goings.
But with two heavy transports on the way and the need for precise weather and geographical information, the bird-watchers were getting back into the flight game. And as the Hercules was rolled from the hangar in Seoul, the troops in Hokkaido were making preparations to help target, launch, and guide a vehicle that would leave the Russians wondering what had hit them.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Tuesday, 4:05 A.M., the Gulf of Finland
The smell inside the midget submarine was terrible. The forced air was dry and stale. But for Peggy James, that wasn't the worst of it. She hated the total sense of disorientation. The submarine was constantly caught in currents, rocking from side to side or bobbing to and fro. The helmsman used the ship's rudders to adjust their course, which, for a moment, made the gentle hobbyhorse become a bucking bronco.
She was also having trouble seeing and hearing. To begin with, they were whispering. And the thickness of the hull and the surrounding water muted the sounds even more. Apart from the faint radiance given off by the control panel, the only light came from the small, hooded flashlight they were allowed to use. Its dull yellow light-- not to mention the long hours she'd been awake, and the sleep-inducing warmth of the cabin-- made it difficult to keep her eyes open. After just two hours underwater, she was keenly anticipating surfacing at the halfway point some four