Alpha Kat

by William H. Lovejoy

  “Let’s keep working on that maneuver then,” Kimball said. “Back to Jay.”

  “I know,” Halek said, removing his cigar and rolling it between his thumb and fingers. “I took him head-on with an AMRAAM on attack data link and shouldn’t have. He didn’t present enough of a target for the missile, and I likely had a miss. With his closing rate on Hawkeye, I should have used active radar.”

  The Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, designated the AMRAAM-II for the model they were utilizing, was targeted in either of two modes. The Kappa Kat could illuminate the target and transfer the target information by data link to the missile aboard the Alpha Kat. When the fighter pilot heard the lock-on in his earphones, he released the missile, which would also home on the target’s emitting radar. In the other mode, which might make the Alpha Kat a radar-visible target, the pilot initiated the missile’s own radar and then fired it when the missile had contact. The AMRAAM’s radar guided it to the target, whether or not the target radar was emitting.

  “Correct,” Conrad Billingsly said. “I shut down our radars to protect Hawkeye at the same time the Falcon radar went passive, and the missile had data that was out of date.”

  “Let’s not be so eager to get into action, Jay, that we forget to think,” Kimball said.

  Halek stuck his cigar back in his teeth and clamped it tight.

  “And Ito, we scratched your hit because you released weapons without permission.”

  Makura nodded. “I know. I am sorry, Bryce.”

  “When we get where we’re going, there’s a chance for a lot of traffic. If somebody fires without a positive ID or weapons permission from Hawkeye, we could down, say, an Air India 747. Anybody want to live with that?” The silence was answer enough.

  “Okay, I’ve got a final training schedule, and I’ve named the controllers. A.J. and Connie will be the lead controllers, backed up by Phillipe and Dave.”

  Except for Phillipe Contrarez and Dave Metger, the others appeared happy enough with that decision.

  “Phillipe and Dave, you’ll be on the Alpha Kat training schedule, also.”

  That revived half-smiles.

  “We’re going around the clock. Four fighters at a time, with two undergoing maintenance according to Tex’s schedule. If anyone asks you about the intense schedule, we’re preparing for our demonstration tour.

  “During the day, the routine is the same one we’ll actually use for demos. Night flights are different.”

  “You find a bombing range?” McEntire asked.

  “We contributed ten thousand bucks to the Papago Indian Reservation Educational Fund, and they’re letting us use some empty desert.”

  “You did that?” Sam Eddy asked.

  “Susan worked it out. We rented a recreational vehicle, and Tex is sending two men south to camp out and set up ground targets for us.”

  “I could do that,” McEntire volunteered.

  “It’s not a big RV, Sam Eddy. It won’t carry a lot of beer.”

  “Maybe I won’t, in that case.”

  “The schedule has your flight times and your sleep times listed. I want you to get used to sleeping during the day,” Kimball told them.

  “Alone?” Sam Eddy asked.

  “There wasn’t room on the schedule for recreation, Sam Eddy.”

  The group broke up, more somber than when they had assembled at nine o’clock. They were learning that, anywhere from three to four years out of military training, they weren’t quite the hotshot pilots they remembered themselves as being.

  Kimball was well aware of his own deficiencies. He had placed himself prominently in the training schedule.

  Susan McEntire and Andrea Deacon returned as the last of the pilots filtered out. Andrea, a petite and pert blonde just out of her teens, with a refreshing dose of naivete, was in jeans and a boat-necked blue blouse that intrigued most of the men in the building. She was good on the phone, worming her way past receptionists, secretaries, and minor bureaucrats. Susan was wearing her customary short white skirt and a blouse that featured Indian motifs.

  “Mornin’, Susie,” Sam Eddy said.

  “Good morning,” she replied formally.

  “You want coffee later?”

  “No. Goodbye, Sam Eddy.”

  McEntire looked across the room at Kimball, shrugged, and went out.

  Kimball settled onto the sofa while the women reclaimed their desks.

  “You’re going to have to build a conference room, Kim,” Andrea told him, “if you’re going to have all these meetings that keep us away from work.”

  “I wouldn’t think you’d complain about that. But it won’t be for long, Andy. How are the reservations going?”

  She picked up a legal tablet. “You gave me confirmed dates for Riyadh and New Delhi, and I’ve got tentative reservations for hotels in both cities. Landing fees, fuel, and aircraft parking are set. Until you set up the other stops, I can’t do much more. And if you have to skip some country, I’ll have to redo the whole thing.”

  “Got the message, Andy. I’ll get on the phone.”

  Susan motioned toward the doorway with a shake of her head, and left the room.

  Puzzled, Kimball followed and found her standing in the hallway.

  “Something wrong, Susan?”

  “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I think somebody’s following me.”

  “What!”

  “You go out in the parking lot and look for a white Oldsmobile. There’s a man sitting in it.”

  “He followed you from home?”

  “I don’t know. I just saw him as I came to work, and he drove into the lot after I did.”

  Kimball studied her face. Susan McEntire didn’t often get upset, but there was some fright showing in her big green eyes and a twitch at the corner of her mouth. “I’ll go take a look.”

  “Be careful, Kim.”

  “Give me a cigarette.”

  “You don’t smoke,” she reminded him.

  “It’s cover.”

  She frowned, but went back into the office and came back with her purse. She rummaged around in it and found him a cigarette and butane lighter.

  Kimball took them, went down the corridor, and let himself out the front door.

  He stood beside the door, on the narrow strip of grass someone had high hopes for, between the hangar and the parking lot sidewalk, and lit up.

  Guy taking a break, right?

  The sun beat on him, raising globules of perspiration on his forehead. The air was dry, and the reflections off chrome and glass in the lot hurt his eyes. He stood there, smoking and looking around.

  He found the Oldsmobile five spaces back in the second row, but there was no one in it.

  Susan was probably being a little paranoid.

  Turning toward the east, he sauntered down the grass strip, passing the corner of his hangar. The space between it and the next hangar was blocked by an eight-foot-high chain link fence. He stared down the opening, but there was nothing between the two hangars except dirt and a few weeds the defoliant hadn’t been able to conquer.

  The next hangar was vacant, the owners waiting out the period until his option expired before attempting to rent it. Kimball had about two months before he lost his option money. He almost reversed course then and headed back to his office, trying to come up with a gentle way to tell Susan she was hallucinating.

  Something prodded him to take a look, and he kept sauntering until he reached the first door into the next hangar. He tried the door handle, and it turned.

  It shouldn’t have.

  Shoving the heavy door inward, Kimball stepped inside.

  The cavernous structure was empty, dimly lit by the sunlight forcing itself through the rows of grimy windows high overhead. The concrete floor had been swept, but was mottled with old oil, grease, and fuel stains. The far sidewall had several small office and storage spaces abutted to it.

  The Oldsmobile man was at the far, runway end of the hangar, standi
ng on an upturned wooden crate, snapping photographs rapidly through one window in the sliding hangar door.

  The clicking of his camera shutter echoed across the concrete. Kimball could hear the tiny whir of the film advance motor after each click.

  The man was so intent on his photography that he didn’t hear the padded footfalls until Kimball was ten feet away.

  Startled, he whirled around.

  His face was wide, made wider by large ears, and there was a thin, white scar running across the right side of his forehead, disappearing into thick umber hair. The face was less grainy than the faxed photo Kimball had seen.

  “Doctor Nash, I presume?”

  He came off the crate in a rush, his camera swinging at the far end of its neck strap.

  Kimball hadn’t expected an attack.

  He threw up his left arm.

  His forearm blocked the strap, but the camera whipped around his arm and slapped him in the forehead.

  Stunned, Kimball went to his knees, his arm reflexively jerking back against his shoulder, trapping the camera’s strap and ripping it out of Nash’s hand.

  Nash didn’t wait around.

  He kept on running, heading for the door.

  Kimball knelt on the concrete, shaking his head until the little black dots in his vision went away.

  *

  Henry Loh put the C-123 Provider into a gentle left bank and circled the airfield at a thousand feet of altitude.

  The Provider had probably once belonged to the U.S. military, before it was left behind in their hurried flight from Vietnam. It had had a half-dozen owners since, but after a thorough overhaul of the twin 2500 horsepower Pratt and Whitney radial engines, the fuselage had been stenciled for Air Jungle Ltd., chartered as a cargo and occasional passenger hauler. Air Jungle owned one C-123, two old Douglas DC-3s, and a DC-6 that had once been an American Airways passenger liner.

  Henry Loh was a match for the beat-up transport. He had been born and educated in Taiwan, but gotten his world reality drummed in as a mercenary, a Nung Guard, working for the Americans in Vietnam. Since his personal pullout from the war-torn nation in 1972, he had learned to fly practically anything with wings, and he too had had a half-dozen owners.

  He was big for a Chinese. Weighing 170 pounds, he stood five feet, eleven inches tall. He had massive shoulders and a strong upper body and arms. His chest and face were laced with scars resulting from run-ins with shrapnel, broken beer bottles in bar brawls, and one long, long session at the hands of an avid Khmer Rouge torturer. His dark hair was lanky and long, and he had the habit of whipping his head to fling the hair away from his eyes.

  His copilot was a Frenchman going by the current name of Jean Franc. He had a mean, red mouth and narrow yellowed eyes. Both physical traits were probably the legacy of many battles with malaria, dysentery, and other diseases common to Westerners stuck in Asian jungles.

  Henry Loh saw nothing unusual taking place in the immediate vicinity of the airstrip. It was located sixty klicks south of the village of Keng Hkam on the Salween River, and was comprised of the short dirt runway, one tin-roofed shack, one canvas-roofed warehouse, and one stack of fifty-five-gallon drums.

  “Do you see anything you do not like, Jean?”

  “No. Still, we should prepare.”

  “Yes. Do that.”

  Franc crawled out of his seat, edged back to the hatchway, and lowered himself down the ladder to the cargo deck. He and the three Thai cargo handlers would arm themselves with Kalashnikov AK-47s and be ready for anything that appeared once the ramp was lowered.

  The airstrip disappeared into the jungle canopy as Loh leveled his wings and headed east. He flew five miles, then turned back to recross the river. It was shallow and muddy in the broad curve it made through the jungle.

  To the north and west, the high plateau country was spotted with jungle, hills rising above it. It was not a welcome landscape, but Henry Loh had never known a landscape that thrilled him particularly.

  As the river passed under, he retarded his throttles, then reached down for the lever controlling the flaps and deployed them.

  The Provider bounced upward with its new lift, and Loh eased the control column forward to counter it.

  The airstrip appeared again, revealed as he approached the lip of the jungle clearing.

  Loh lowered the landing gear, then idled the engines. The medium transport settled downward slowly, and the big tires grabbed the ground and bounced once. As soon as it settled the second time, he ran the engines into reverse thrust and felt himself shoved forward against his seat harness as the airplane slowed itself.

  The two simple structures were at the far end of the runway. Loh taxied toward them, noting the ramp warning light come on. Franc had lowered it partially.

  When he reached the end of the runway, he used the left brake and ran up the right engine. The plane turned quickly, almost 270 degrees, so that the ramp was aimed at the warehouse.

  Speaking into his cantilevered microphone, he asked, “Jean?”

  “Looks okay, Henry,” Franc told him over the intercom.

  Loh locked the brakes down, idled the engines, and unstrapped from his seat. Working his way back to the hatch, he watched the cargo handlers labor, shoving three goats down the ramp, untying crates marked Carnation Foods, General Mills, and Hong Kong Enterprises. Others were labeled in Chinese, Thai, Russian, and Laotian letters and phrases.

  The men pushed and shoved the crates and cardboard boxes toward the rear of the plane, setting them down on the rollers of the ramp, letting them slide on out the back.

  Nine people, all small men belonging to some tribe he did not care about, had appeared from nowhere, but probably from the shack. No one said anything, just began to pick up the crates and haul them toward the warehouse.

  Franc stepped off the ramp to the ground, carrying his assault rifle at port arms, and walked off toward the warehouse. He came back five minutes later, climbed the ramp, and worked his way around the cargo to reach Loh.

  Loh raised an eyebrow.

  “Syrup. Fifteen drums of it.”

  “Let’s get it aboard and get the hell out of here.”

  *

  Derek Crider had been a Green Beret major during the last years of the Vietnam circus. Closing on forty-eight years of age now, he did not show it. People would guess him for, maybe, his late thirties because of his wedge-shaped figure, shoulders that stretched to both sides of a doorway, and musculature that gave him a neck like that of Dick Butkus. He could have been bald, his fair hair was shorn so close to his skull. His skin was tanned the color of deer hide that had been stretched in the sun for three weeks. The gray eyes probing from deep-set eye sockets rendered the more meek speechless for a few seconds.

  Two months after the fall of Saigon, in June, Crider had resigned his commission in disgust with the politicians and dedicated himself to helping people who really cared, like Angolans, Salvadorans, and Contra rebels. For a price, of course. Crider liked to take vacations in nice places.

  He met Emilio Lujan in the lounge of the Airport Holiday Inn in Miami. It was gloomy in the lounge, and Lujan disappeared into the gloom. He was a short man with long, curly black hair and dark brown eyes. His complexion blended in with the brown Naugahyde covering the benches of the booth, and only the quick, nervous movement of his hands caught the light from the candle.

  “Want a beer, Emilio?”

  “Sure, man, why not?”

  Crider signalled the waitress, who was not all that busy in mid-afternoon, anyway, and they soon had Carta Blancas on the faked walnut Formica in front of them.

  “Hey, man, I ain’t heard from you in three years. What’s up?”

  Crider took a long pull at his beer, then asked, “Where you been working, Emilio?”

  “Around. Here. There.”

  “Been flying out of Colombia?”

  “No way, man. You can get locked in tight.”

  “No drugs at all?”

&nb
sp; “Maybe a run or two. Panama, Mexico. Small-time dealers, you know?”

  “I need a plane and a pilot,” Crider said.

  “Where, and how long?” Lujan asked, his eyes held steady on Crider’s, though his hands continued to fondle nervously his icy bottle.

  “Africa and maybe the subcontinent. Not over a month.”

  “Shit. I ain’t flown that area in ten years.”

  Crider sipped and considered. Finally, he said, “You get 150 grand, flat, for you and the airplane. I want a business jet of some kind.”

  “United’s cheaper.”

  “United’s got a schedule to follow. I need mobility.”

  “What’s the op?” the Mexican asked.

  “Need to know basis only. You wouldn’t be directly involved.”

  “For 150 big ones?”

  “Something might come up. Call it contingency pay.”

  “You ain’t calling it hostile fire pay?”

  “Not right now.”

  “You going to be alone?”

  “There’ll be a few others, maybe six of us all together. The plane has to handle that.”

  “Heavy luggage?”

  “Nothing that won’t slide through customs like it was greased,” Crider told him.

  “My picture’s been around, man.”

  “Part of the deal, you get a new passport.”

  “I need two, three days to find the plane.”

  “Call me when you’ve got it,” Crider said and finished the last drops in his bottle.

  *

  Kimball had a lump the size of a walnut high on his left temple, but he owned a new Nikon 35-millimeter camera with automatic film advance. He had dropped the film off at Fotomat for developing on his way home.

  He had come home early in the afternoon to dust and vacuum and take care of some chores that had fallen by the wayside during the month he and McEntire had been touring the Pitts Specials. Then he had showered, changed clothes to a light gray suit with a striped tie, and taken Cathy Colby over to Scottsdale for dinner.

  They were back in his condo by eight o’clock. Kimball tossed his suitcoat on a chair in the living room, poured her a cognac, and fixed himself a soda water with a wedge of lime in it.

  “You aren’t drinking?” she asked.