Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 (8 page)

 
          
He
tried to clear his head, looked for the two agents who had come with him.

 
          
They
were gone. So was the body of Kenneth James. He went to the door, opened it,
looked outside. Nothing.

 
          
And
then he heard: “What a
great
hotel.”
A female voice. “Free peep shows.” He turned and saw three college-age women
clustered around the elevator. Only then did he realize he was standing in the
hallway wearing only a pair of briefs.

 
          
“Prastiti
. . . uh, sorry ...”

 
          
“Don’t
be, sugar,” one of them said, straining for a better look as Maraklov ducked
back into his room. “It looks to me like you got nothin’ to be sorry for.”

 
          
He
must get hold of himself. After all the training, the conditioning, the first
word he uttered as Kenneth Francis James to the first Americans he saw was a
Russian
word. He could only hope they
hadn’t noticed. Probably not, but it was a warning to him . . .

 
          
He
collapsed onto the bed. On the bedspread were some pieces of gold jewelry, a
large, heavy Rolex watch, a wallet, some bills in a silver money clip, the
hotel key and assorted papers and receipts. The two agents had taken James’
clothing, but an open suitcase sitting on a clothes valet in a corner had
plenty more.

 
          
A
drink. He needed one. The room’s tiny refrigerator was empty except for an
icetray with half a dozen cubes. He thought about calling for room service but
didn’t want anyone inside the room until he had triple-checked it for any
evidence of a struggle. The drink wouldn’t wait.

 
          
He
selected a pair of slacks and a red polyester pullover shirt from the suitcase,
slipped on a pair of Nikes—they fit perfectly—slipped on the Rolex and gold
chains, pocketed the room key, money and wallet, brushed his hair. He studied
himself in the mirror. The shirt was a bit tight across his chest, and his
thighs strained some against the pants legs. He could detect the faintest
evidence of plastic surgery scars. Never mind. He had to get out of this room
where Ken James had died . . . and been reborn?

 
          
He
made his way downstairs to the hotel’s Polynesian bar and seated himself in an
area where he could watch all the exits and windows, just as he had been taught
at the
Connecticut
Academy
.

 
          
“Good
evening, Mr. James.”

 
          
Maraklov
willed himself not to show what he felt. A waitress in a tight sarong slit up
each side nearly to her waist had come up behind him and put down a cocktail
napkin. “Hi, there, Mr. James. Your usual?”

 
          
Maraklov
nodded.

 
          
“I
need to see your I.D. again. Sorry.”

 
          
Identification!
Slowly he withdrew the wallet, opened it and held it up for the waitress.

 
          
“Not
that one, silly.” She reached in behind the driver’s license in the front and
pulled out an identical-looking laminated card. “Thank
you,
Mr. James. Back in a flash.”

 
          
After
she left Maraklov took a close look at the hidden card. The birthdate had been
cleverly changed. A fake I.D. Apparently the hotel staff knew the routine—even
better than the “new” Ken James. A few moments later the waitress returned,
placing a huge frosted champagne glass on the napkin.

 
          
Maraklov
looked at her. “This is my usual?” Immediately he regretted the words. A giveaway
. . .

 
          
“Not
tonight, lover,” the waitress said. She nodded over toward the bar. “Champagne
cocktails, compliments of those ladies over there.” He turned and saw the three
women that had seen him in the hallway at the elevator. They raised their glasses
toward him, smiling.

 
          
“Well,
Romeo,” the waitress said. “What are you waiting for?”

 
          
Slowly,
carefully, Maraklov rose to his feet. To his surprise, he found his legs and
knees quite strong. Without thinking, he reached into his wallet, extracted the
first bill he touched and handed it to the waitress as he picked up his
cocktail. It was a twenty dollar bill.

 
          
“Thank
you,
Mr. James,” she said. “A real
gentleman, as always.” She lowered her voice, moved toward him. “If those
waihilis don’t do it all for you, Mr. James, why, you just leave a message for
me at the front desk. Mariana knows what you want.”

 
          
Still
feeling shaky inside, he made his way toward the bar, smiling. Andrei
Ivanschichin Maraklov was about to experience his first night as an American
named Kenneth James. Now
he
was the
real Ken James. The only one.

McConnell Air Force Base,
Kansas

August 1994

 
          
“Required
SATCOM reports are as follows,” Air Force Captain Ken James said. He motioned
to a hand-lettered, expertly rendered chart beside him but kept his eyes on his
“audience” and did not refer to it. “As soon as possible after launch we
transmit a sortie airborne report. If we launched on an execution message we
transmit a strike-message confirmation report.” He pointed to a large map on
another easel. That depicted the strike routing of his B-iB Excalibur bomber as
it proceeded on its nuclear-attack mission.

 
          
“After
each air refueling we transmit an offload report, advising SAC of our aircraft
status and capability to fulfill the mission. On receipt of a valid execution
message, if we weren’t launched with one, we would acknowledge that message as
well as any messages that terminated our sortie. After each weapons release, if
possible, we transmit a strike report that gives SAC our best estimate of our
success in destroying each assigned target. The message also updates SAC on our
progress and advises them of any difficulties in proceeding with the mission.
Of course, staying on time, on course and alert has priority over all SATCOM or
HF message traffic. All strike messages can wait until we climb out of the
low-level portion of the route and are on the way to our post-strike base.
These messages can also be delivered to other SAC personnel heading stateside,
to
U.S.
foreign offices, or to overseas military bases capable of secure
transmissions to SAC headquarters.”

 
          
He
pointed further along the route. “Other messages will include launch reports
from the post-strike and each recovery base: NUDET—nuclear detonation—position
reports,
GLASS EYE
combat damage
reports, severe weather reports, continental-defense-zone entry reports and
sortie recovery and regeneration reports.”

 
          
James
lowered his pointer and stepped away from the charts. “SIOP communications are
extremely important, and the SAC aircraft involved with the execution of our
Single Integrated Operations Plan are a front-line asset in keeping the
Strategic Air Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Command
Authority advised of the progress worldwide of any conflict. We feel we have
the world’s most up-to- date and survivable communications networks, but of
course it’s no good unless each aircrewman uses it effectively.” He looked
around the empty briefing room. “That concludes my annual Mission Certification
briefing, Colonel Adams. Any questions, sir?”

 
          
“Not
bad, not bad—for a pilot,” came a voice from the back of the room. Kenneth
frowned at the man who came in now and began to pack up the briefing charts and
diagrams.

 
          
“Kiss
my ass, Murphy,” Ken said. “It was a perfect briefing-even for a navigator.”

 
          
Captain
Brian Murphy, James’ offensive-systems officer on his B-i crew, had to admit
it. “Yeah, it was, Ken. No doubt about it. But why are you spending so much
time on that stuff? On an Emergency War Order certification, briefing is done
by the radar nav or the defensive-systems operator. Not by the pilots.”

 
          
“I
heard
Adams
likes to hit his mission-ready crews with
little surprises,” Ken said. “His favorite is mixing up the usual briefing
routines to make sure each guy on the crew is familiar with the other guy’s
responsibilities. He likes to hit navs with pilot questions, too—how well do
you
know your abort-decision matrices?”

 
          
Murphy
shrugged. “I’ll bone up on that stuff before the briefing tomorrow. These
briefings are bull anyway... Coming to the Club with us for lunch?”

 
          
“In
a while, it’s only eleven-thirty. I’ll meet you there at
noon
.”

 
          
“Man,
you are so dedicated.”

 
          
“Knock
it off.”

 
          
“No,
really, I mean it,” James’ crew navigator said. “You’re always studying. You
know your stuff backwards and forwards, and you know everyone else’s too. If
it’s not EWO communications procedures it’s security or avionics or computers
or target study. You got your hands in everything.”

 
          
“That’s
my job, Murph.”

 
          
“Well,
at least you’re getting some reward for it. Making commander of a B-i Excalibur
in less than two years was moon- talk until you came along. They’re saying you
might make flight commander in a few weeks. You’re really burning up the
program.”

 
          
James
slapped his pencil down on the table, smiled. “You’re buttering me up, man.
Okay, okay, I’ll buy lunch. Just let me finish.”

 
          
“Hey,
hotshot, can’t you take a compliment? I know attaboys are rare around here, but
I think you can still recognize one.” James raised his hands in surrender.
“Okay, okay. Thanks, Murph, but I’m not doing anything special here. I do this
stuff because it’s my job and because it really interests me, and because my
ass will be grass if I don’t learn this communications stuff by tomorrow morning.”

 
          
“Message
received. I’m outta here.” Murphy stood and headed for the door, then stopped.
“You’re an Academy grad, aren’t you?”

 
          
“Right.”

 
          
“Top
of your class, from what I heard.”

 
          
James
looked at Murphy. “Get to the point, Murph.”

 
          
“I
thought so, I just want to know why you chose B-is. You could have had your
pick of any hot jet in the inventory, but you picked B-is.”

 
          
“I
liked them. I always did. They’re big and sexy—just like your wife ...”

 
          
“Asshole.”

 
          
“.
. . and I still have a stick and afterburners and Mach-one speed like a
fighter. I hated it when Carter canceled them. I think they should build
another hundred of them. At least. Answer your question?”

 
          
Murphy
nodded. “But you seem a little, I don’t know, out of place.”

 
          
“Out
of place?” His stomach tightened as he looked closely at his radar nav.

 
          
“Yeah.
Like B-is are just a jumping-off place for you. I mean, you’re not advertising
it or anything, but somehow, old buddy, I get the feeling you’re on your way
somewhere. Care to tell?” Ken James forced himself to smile. This big Irishman
was hitting too close. “Just between you and me and the fencepost?”

           
“Sure, man.”

 
          
“I
did get an assignment, I think. When I filled out my last dream sheet I was
sort of... well, daydreaming. Appropriate, huh? Anyway, I put down that I was
interested in the
High
Technology
Advanced
Weapons
Center
—”

 
          
“HAWC!
You got an assignment to Dreamland? I don’t believe it! Do they actually
give
assignments there?”

 
          
“I
didn’t think they did, either. Like I said, it was a long shot. And I don’t
have any assignment yet. But I did get a letter back from the deputy commander,
a Brigadier General Ormack. He sounded interested. It was sort of a
don’t-call-me-Tll-call- you letter, but at least I got an answer back.”

 
          
“I
don’t believe it,” Murphy said. “Dreamland. You realize that all of the world’s
hottest jets and weapons in the past thirty years went through there? Those
guys fly planes and test weapons out there that are years ahead of anything
that exists in the real world. And
you're
going to be assigned there—”

 
          
“I
said I don’t have an assignment, Murph. So keep this under your hat, okay?
Besides, how do you know so much about Dreamland?”

 
          
“I
don’t know much of anything, except that anybody who even accidentally
overflies Dreamland gets sent to our version of the old Gulag Archipelago.
Every now and then you hear about an ex-
Los Angeles
Center
air-traffic controller telling stories
about Mach-six fighters or planes that fly vertically to fifty thousand feet
over Dreamland. It’s got to be the assignment of a lifetime.”

 
          
“Well,
like I said, keep all this under your hat,” James said. “Now take off. I want
to polish my briefing before we do our dry runs this afternoon.”

 
          
After
Murphy left, James got up from his seat, went to the door, locked it, put a
chair in front of it. He returned to the small pile of red-covered books and
manuals on the desk in the front of the conference room and selected one
marked:
“COMBAT CREW EMERGENCY WAR ORDER
COMMUNICATIONS PROCEDURES—TOP secret/noforn/siop/wivns.”
It was the master
document used by all of the American strategic combat forces all over the
world—aircraft, submarines, intercontinental missile sites, and command
posts—outlining every one of their communication sources and methods, procedures,
frequencies, timing and locations of the nation’s domestic and overseas
communications facilities. The hieroglyphics after the title warned that the
document was top secret, not releasable to foreign nationals, part of the
Single Integrated Operations Plan—the master plan on how the United States and
its allies would conduct “the next world war.” This particular volume was dated
1 October 1994
,
some two months from now, because it belonged to the new SIOP revision
scheduled to take place at that time. The procedures in that manual would be
used by all strategic forces for the next twelve months afterward.

 
          
It
made it convenient for him and the KGB, Ken thought, to have to do these
once-a-year briefings for the wing commander. The annual Mission Certification
briefings were required by law. The wing commander of each SAC base with
nuclear missions had to certify to the Commander-in-Chief of SAC, and he in
turn to the President of the United States, that each crewman knew precisely
what his duties were in case the SIOP was “implemented”—a euphemism for the
so-called unthinkable, the declaration of World War Three. Normally the
certification briefings were given once, when a crewman became mission-ready.
But the SIOP was revised each year, reflecting new rules, new tactics, and so
every year each crewman had to dig out the changed books, study them, then
brief the wing commander on the revised mission. The top-secret books were
trotted out for the certification, studied for a week, then locked away, usually
never to be seen again except for base-wide exercises or inspections. The
opportunities were rare to have such free access to these manuals, and Ken had
to work fast.

 
          
He
opened the manual to section four, “ELF, LF, HF and SATCOM SIOP Frequencies and
Broadcast Schedules,” and propped the pages open with a couple of books. This
section detailed all of the frequencies used by aircraft and submarines to
broadcast and receive coded messages from SAC and the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
along with what time of the day these broadcasts would be made. Anyone knowing
these frequencies and times could jam or disrupt them, specific broadcasts
could be intercepted and decoded. The crew charts had stickers that had only
one frequency, but this book had all the frequencies for the nuclear strike
force of the
United States
.

 
          
James
unzipped a leg pocket of his flight suit and took out what looked like a
thick-barreled marking pen. Moving his chair so his body would cast no shadows
across the pages, he twisted and pulled the cap, held the device a couple of
feet over the pages, and pressed the pocket clip to activate the shutter.

 
          
Murphy
was close, James thought as he worked. He would have liked to get assigned to
F-15S or F-i6s, or the new F-117 Stealth fighter unit, but he went where
Moscow
told him to go, and that was where he could
learn as much as possible about the new B-i’s nuclear-strike mission. Dreamland
was the most secret base in the country. B-i Excalibur bombers were fine, but
he would give anything to get his hands on the
United States
newest fighters.