Delta Blue

by William H. Lovejoy

  Eisenach was not going to apologize to a subordinate for being late. “And Gerhard, you have started without me.” Schmidt smiled. “I have been at sea for twelve days. I was thirsty. I am also hungry. Are you ready for dinner?” Eisenach looked at his watch. “It is early, but yes, we can eat.”

  Schmidt nodded to Niels, and the aide left the room, closing the door behind him.

  The general took one of the castered and upholstered chairs opposite Schmidt. He fished in his pocket for a package of American Marlboros and lit one. Schmidt shoved an ashtray across the table toward him.

  “All right, Gerhard. You asked for this meeting.”

  “Right to the point?” Schmidt said. “No chattering over the sauerbraten?”

  “I must return to Berlin immediately after dinner.”

  “All right.” Schmidt sat up in his chair and leaned his elbows on the table. His eyes became more serious than normal, and they were normally serious. “I am going to request a transfer to First Fleet.”

  “You’ll end up in a staff job, Gerhard.”

  “Perhaps, but only for a while.”

  The door opened and Niels came in with another stein for Schmidt and a Scotch and water for Eisenach. Werner Niels’s memory was very good, Eisenach thought. He tasted it and guessed that it was his preferred Glenlivet.

  After the aide left again, Eisenach asked, “What brings this on, Gerhard?”

  “Nothing brings it on. My disenchantment has always been there. The navy does not work well under an air force command that cannot distinguish the pointed end of a ship from the ass-end. For God’s sakes, Felix, all we do is sail back and forth like an endless clothesline. My tactical and strategic training exercises are farces. Morale is slipping badly.”

  “I should think your men would be extremely happy,” Eisenach said. “Of your sixteen surface vessels, four are rotated into port for two weeks at a time. That is a lot of shore leave.”

  “Leisure time that deteriorates the level of readiness,” the admiral said. “I am a realistic man, Felix. I do not embellish my reports to my superiors. The Third Naval Force is not a crackerjack unit. It is falling apart, and your planning group in Berlin does not allow me to do anything about it. They think they have airplanes to boss around. The mission of standing sentinel to a bunch of oil wells is not awe-inspiring to my ship commanders or their personnel.”

  “That accounts for this morning’s incident?” Eisenach asked.

  Schmidt snickered. “The idiot in the Tornado? Yes, he caught us by surprise. And do you know why?”

  “You will tell me.”

  “That is damned correct. Your planning staff has absolutely no concept of naval operations. They keep us strung out in single file, like that clothesline I mentioned, when I should have my ships clustered in battle groups. Jesus Christ! You can’t have a cruiser like the Hamburg exposed like it was today. I should have had destroyers on the flanks.”

  Eisenach nodded, but reluctantly.

  “It would have served you right if that Tornado pilot had punched us with a Kormoran antiship missile.”

  “What do you suggest, Gerhard?”

  “I suggest I go back to the real navy.”

  Eisenach studied the navy man for a long moment before speaking. “Gerhard, you and I are not friends. Perhaps that is impossible. However, I respect you as a military man, and I do not want to lose you. If I were to remove the planning group from the chain of command — you would report directly to me — would that change your mind?”

  Schmidt leaned back in his chair, studying Eisenach’s face. He took a long drag from his stein.

  “I want to change the makeup of the force.”

  “In what way?”

  “I want the Stuttgart and another missile frigate. I’ll keep eight destroyers and release the rest. I’ll keep the subs, but I’ll put one at a time toward more fruitful training.”

  “To what end, Gerhard?”

  “I would create four three-ship surface battle groups. We will not often be in port, for my detached groups will be sent off on training sessions. I must broaden their thinking, and their horizons, Felix.”

  “And that will keep you on the job?”

  “It’s either that, General, or I tell my ship captains that they’re not really oil wells.”

  *

  With several short blasts of the nose thrusters, McKenna drifted Delta Blue backward out of its hangar and watched as the doors folded to the closed position like the petals of a tired rose.

  The red warning strobes mounted on the spokes and at four points around the hub blinked clearly at him. They were only activated during departures and arrivals.

  The earth looked inviting, rosily lit along a line from Leningrad westward. The dark side melted into the blackness of space, defined primarily by the stars it blotted out. The moon was an eerie white disk far down on his right.

  When the aerospace craft had cleared the space station by several hundred yards, Munoz said, “Okay, Snake Eyes, flip her ass over.”

  McKenna chuckled. “Roger, Tiger. Flipping.”

  Using the hand controller, now connected to the thrusters, McKenna gave the MakoShark a nose-down command. Spurts of nitrogen gas spiked the vacuum, and the craft slowly turned over until the tail was pointing in the direction of travel. The cockpit was head-down to the earth.

  He pulled back gently on the controller, igniting the thrusters, to stop the roll.

  “Lookin’ good, amigo. I’m gonna hook into the brain now.”

  McKenna checked the HUD. The readings looked good, though the cockpit temperature was lower than it should be. He nudged the slide switch to raise it. The velocity showed him Mach 26.2. Flat moving out, he thought, though the only sense of movement came from watching the growing gap between the MakoShark and Themis, which was now on the bottom edge of the rearview screen.

  The primary screen displayed the randomly appearing numbers that Munoz was programming into the computer. The computer did, in fact, remember typically used coordinates for returns to Peterson, Jack Andrews, or Merlin air bases, updating them automatically for the position of the earth at the time of departure.

  “Got any idea at all where you’d like to end up, Snake Eyes?”

  “I think it’d be nice if we hit a hundred thousand feet somewhere in the vicinity of the Barents Sea. Maybe even the middle of it.

  “You want to make the first run over the ice?”

  “To the west, yeah.”

  “That’s not what Amy-baby had in mind.”

  “Amy-baby’s not flying it.”

  “Good goddamned point, jefe. The Barents Sea, it is.”

  The screen flickered with more numbers as Munoz plotted the reentry path and entered the variable weight data — pilots, cargo, pylon loads. The computer insisted on knowing, within certain tolerances, the center of gravity and the total weight of the MakoShark before it finalized the numbers. Since none of the variety of components interchanged on a MakoShark had weight aboard the space station, every object placed on board had to be checked against the master weight file on the station’s computer. The mass of a cargo or munitions pod, a camera, a film pack was double-checked against the file, then fed to the MakoShark’s on-board computer.

  When his data was entered, Munoz ran the test program, which compared all of the new numbers with what the computer knew was possible. The machine accepted the new information congenially by flashing green letters: “ACCEPTED.”

  “Start up procedure.”

  “Ready, Tiger.”

  They went through the rocket start checklist, up to the point of ignition, then McKenna turned it over to computer control.

  In the upper-left corner of his CRT, new blue lettering appeared:

  REENTRY PATH ACCEPTED

  REENTRY SEQUENCE INITIATED

  TIME TO RETRO FIRE: 0.12.43

  “Shit,” McKenna said. “Twelve minutes.”

  “Hey, compadre, that ain’t bad. We’ve had to wait ove
r an hour before.”

  In calculating the duration of retro-rocket bursts, the angle of attack into the atmosphere, and the trajectory to the desired point on earth, the computer also had to determine at what time the reentry program was to begin. The MakoSharks, however, had a distinct advantage over the Space Shuttles, in that they had power available after returning to the atmosphere. It allowed them a great deal more flexibility in reentry scheduling. They had many more windows of opportunity open to them.

  McKenna punched the communications button for Themis. “Delta Blue to Alpha. We’ve got retro burn in one-two-point-four-one.”

  “Alpha copies,” General Overton said. “Have a nice night, Delta Blue.”

  “Colonel Pearson there?”

  “I’m here, Delta Blue.”

  “Get this, Amy. Twenty-four, twenty-two, twenty-one, seventeen, sixteen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-two, fifteen, twelve, ten, nine, thirteen, six, fourteen, eight, seven, two, five, three, four, eleven, one.”

  “Very good, Colonel. You memorized the order.”

  “Told you I could do it.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Pearson said, “That’s backward.”

  “Delta Blue out.”

  Pearson called several times in the next five minutes, then gave up.

  Overton called, too. “Alpha to Delta Blue.”

  “Go Alpha.”

  “You’ve changed the op?”

  “Fuel savings,” McKenna professed.

  “Roger, confirm fuel conservation.”

  On the intercom, Munoz said, “Snake Eyes, we ain’t savin’ shit.”

  “I know, Tiger, but it irritates the IO.”

  “That ain’t the way to get into her jumpsuit, gringo.”

  “I don’t want to get into her jumpsuit,” McKenna lied. Actually, he had decided to fly the ice first for a particular reason. Despite her stealth characteristics, the MakoShark was vulnerable to the naked eye when seen against a light background, like blue sky or white ice. A storm had passed through the target area around noon, but conditions were now clear, and in the summer, the northern regions did not become fully dark. If, by some chance, a German patrol plane was up by the time Delta Blue made its low-level run, there was a possibility of detection. McKenna wanted the higher-risk portion of the flight out of the way, first.

  At thirty seconds to burn, McKenna tightened his straps and double-checked the oxy/nitro fittings. He snuggled his helmet down and rotated his shoulders against the gray-blue environmental suit. The suits they wore were considerably advanced over the EVA suit in which Armstrong sauntered on the moon’s surface. The fabric was a combination of Kevlar, silicon, and plastic, very tear-resistant and very flexible. When inflated, there was less than an inch of space between the fabric and the skin in most places. It depended for some people on the amount of food intake. Frank Dimatta had been refitted for new environmental suits twice, and McKenna had warned him to watch his weight. In the pressurized cockpits, the suits were not inflated, but they would automatically fill if the cockpit seals failed. The helmet-to-suit fitting was comprised of a pair of collars with a series of meshed grooves, allowing almost full freedom in head rotation.

  “Four, three, two, one,” Munoz intoned.

  The CRT countdown readout went to zero.

  McKenna knew the rocket motors were firing from the vibration in the craft’s frame and from the thrust indicators on the HUD. The thrust on each motor climbed rapidly to 100 percent.

  Themis slid off the rearview screen as white fire encroached from each side of the screen.

  The Mach numbers started to dribble off.

  The burn lasted for two-and-a-quarter minutes.

  At Mach 20, the computer flipped the MakoShark over once again so they were facing forward, but the angle of attack into the atmosphere would not be nose down. Like the Space Shuttle Orbiters, the MakoSharks pancaked into the heavier soup of the atmosphere. The HUD reported the correct angle of attack, 40 degrees.

  The leading edges of the wings, the nose, the pylons when they were mounted, and the nose cones of exterior ordnance or pods were composed of a second skin combining reinforced carbon-carbon, Nomex felt, and a ceramic alloy that resisted temperatures that rose to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit on the leading edges of the wings. Additionally, the nose cone and the wing leading edges contained an arterial network of cooling tubes through which supercooled fluids were pumped. The system had had very few failures, and none of those fatal, and McKenna thought it considerably superior to the Space Shuttled individual tiles.

  Half an hour later, at ninety miles of altitude, McKenna felt the first dragging fingers of atmosphere pulling at the MakoShark. Two red lights in the lower-left corner of the HUD indicated that the computer had begun pumping coolant through the heat shields, as well as initiating cockpit air conditioning.

  He watched as the exterior temperature sensors began reporting the effects of aerodynamic heating. The skin temperature on the top side climbed to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Leading edges were already near 700 degrees.

  Munoz transmitted the message to Themis. “Alpha, Delta Blue. We’re goin’ black.”

  “Copy, Delta Blue.”

  When the heat-shield temperatures exceeded 2300 degrees, the surrounding atmosphere was ionized, resulting in a blackout of communications.

  In the cockpit, McKenna felt the heat, but it wasn’t entirely uncomfortable. Kind of like hanging around the pool on a summer day in Aspen. More disconcerting was the red-orange film that enveloped the cockpit canopy. He lost all visual contact with his black world.

  Four minutes later, as the windscreen began to clear, working down through the colors from burnt orange to amber to yellow, Munoz called Themis. “Alpha, Delta Blue. Altitude two-four-zero thousand feet, velocity Mach twelve-point-six, fourteen minutes to objective.”

  “Copy, Delta Blue.”

  McKenna had lost track of the number of times he had made the reentry — well over 350 times — but passing through the blackout still made the blood pump and the adrenaline flow. It took several moments to come down from the high.

  Coming out of the blackout, the computer put the nose down a trifle, to 32 degrees.

  When the speed was down to Mach 6 and the altitude to125,000 feet, McKenna said, “I’m going to take it back, Tiger.”

  “You damned barnstormers are all alike. Seat-of-the-pants bullshit.”

  That was true to a great extent. McKenna started flying because he liked to fly. Though he had come to trust the computers most of the time, going along for the ride still wasn’t the same.

  He said a silent thank-you to the computer, then canceled its control.

  Dropping the nose to maintain his speed and glide, McKenna began a wide, wide turn from his heading of 84 degrees to due north.

  “That’s Moscow off the port wing,” Munoz said.

  “Good night, Moscow.”

  The march of night had crossed the British Isles and most of Greenland now, and the lights of Moscow were orderly at eleven-thirty. McKenna could pick out the ring roads. He kept the city off the left wing as he made his turn.

  Far ahead, he saw a smudge of light that would be Archangel, on a bay of the White Sea, and just over a hundred miles short of the Arctic Circle.

  Beyond the city, the horizon was still bathed in vague light. There wasn’t much darkness in northern latitudes at this time of year. In fact, to the residents of Sweden, Norway, and Greenland, the sun did not go up and down. It descended sideways, barely touching the horizon before beginning a slanted ascent. The MakoShark’s stealthy traits were negated to some degree by the geography of the objective.

  Munoz busied himself with system checks of the two pods they were carrying, to make certain that the heat of passage into the atmosphere had not damaged either the infrared and standard cameras or the film cartridges.

  “How do they look?” McKenna asked.

  “Green lights all the way, Snake Eyes. I’m ready if you are.”


  Over the northern end of the Barents Sea, McKenna started his turbojets and dropped to a thousand feet of altitude before turning westward.

  Munoz brought up Pearson’s map of the area on the screen, with the well sites noted by yellow dots. On the map, McKenna’s north was almost exactly 270 degrees. Svalbard Island was a mass of green on the left side of the screen.

  “No shippin’ this side of the island,” Munoz said. “Radar’s tellin’ me there’s a dozen ships on the other side.”

  “Let’s see them, Tiger.”

  On his panel screen, eleven red dots appeared. They moved slowly, and most of them cruised around the perimeter of the offshore well cluster. Two seemed to be patrolling the south edge of the ice pack.

  “I don’t see any aircraft, Tiger.”

  “Nor do I, jefe.”

  “All right. I’m going right down the top of the string on the ice. We’ll coast it at four hundred knots and a thousand feet of altitude. On the last two, numbers twenty and twenty-three, I’ll put it on the deck.”

  “Go, babe.”

  McKenna climbed a few hundred feet to pass over the small island of Northeast Land, then settled back to a level flight at 1000 feet. He lined up with the first well, number twenty-four, using the map on the screen, then looked up through the windshield.

  The ice appeared very rugged. Pressure ridges and chasms pocked the surface, but gave him some landmarks. The light was perhaps equivalent to a sixty-watt bulb burning in a very large room, and the surface was a jigsaw puzzle of light and dark patches.

  One minute later, McKenna saw a red strobe light. No one had said the domes were identified by beacons. He’d rib Pearson about that.

  The dome came up fast. It was geodesic in construction, large triangles fastened together, so that it was a series of flat planes, rather than a true globe. It was larger than he expected, maybe a couple hundred feet in diameter. That would make it twenty stories tall.

  “Bingo,” Munoz said. “Got it.”

  The next six wells passed quickly under them, McKenna counting them off, checking the map for a heading on the next one. At one point, he glanced out the left side of his canopy and thought he might have seen the running lights of a ship, some ten miles away.