The Alpha Deception (2 page)

“Well, girl,” he said softly, “looks like we got company.”

“Red leader to base. Red leader to base.”

“This is base,” returned Guillermo Paz.

“We have the enemy in our sights. Repeat, the enemy is in our sights. Should we engage?”

“Negative, Red leader. I will have Green, Blue, and Yellow units rendezvous in your sector immediately. Stay on his tail. Repeat, stay on his tail.”

Paz gave the appropriate instructions to the rest of his units and breathed easier. Imagine losing a Hind. … His career would be ruined. He had resisted the initial temptation to stalk the stolen Hind with more of her sisters, opting instead for four units of three standard helicopter gunships each. Certainly they would be sufficient to get the job done in this case. After all, where did the thief plan to fly the stolen Hind? There was no possible way he could get out of the country, none at all. Paz reminded himself that he must remain calm. If need be, he could still order his gunships to destroy the Hind and then fabricate a story to cover the truth. Accidents did happen.

Paz stroked his mustache and dialed up a fresh frequency. “Acoyapa base to Falcon One,” he said to the man piloting the Hind. “Surrender or die.”

McCracken did not acknowledge the warning. The three choppers were holding their positions behind him as he expected they would, waiting for others to mass from different directions to box him into a forced landing. He had no chance of reaching his destination. Unless… .

Blaine turned his eyes to the targeting controls, range finders, and dual joystick handles. Thankfully, the weapons systems’ positioning remained just as he had studied it. He switched on the AUTO switch and practiced rotating his head. Beneath the wings the air cannons turned with him. His 128 unguided missiles were laser-aimed and made for air-to-air combat. Comfortable with the control panel, Blaine took a deep breath and brought the big agile bird around.

“Red leader to base! Falcon One has turned and is coming at us in an attack run. Repeat, attack run!”

Paz slammed his callused hand down on the desktop. This thief was surely insane. What could he possibly hope to gain from such a display? Reenforcements would be closing by now. The thief would know that. An act of desperation obviously. Well, Paz would just have to stop him here.

“Destroy him, Red Unit,” Paz ordered. “Repeat, destroy Falcon One.”

“Roger, base.”

The three choppers had moved into an attack spread when Blaine locked the middle one into the firing grid sketched over his face mask. Blaine fired a burst from his wing-mounted air cannons; the chopper exploded into a jet of orange flames as the remaining two converged on him from opposing angles, guns clacking. It would take a perfect shot, however, to disable the heavily armored Hind. Blaine could feel the bullets banging off the ship’s steel hull, but he knew they were merely distractions to allow the smaller ships to draw close enough to achieve sure hits with their missiles.

The strategy was wise. Each carried two missiles and only one of the four would have to impact to force the Hind-D into an unscheduled landing or worse.

The choppers whirled closer.

Blaine could take one out easily, but in the impossibly short period of time for a man unfamiliar with the controls, two seemed a long shot. But there was a chance.

McCracken dipped evasively to buy the time he needed, swinging round to the north once more. The choppers corrected their attack angle and started in again.

Blaine went into his swing. It was not something an intelligent pilot would have done, but then Blaine was hardly a pilot at all. Gnashing his teeth from the G-forces, he somehow kept both thumbs poised on the firing buttons of his twin cannons, sending a non-stop barrage that scarred the sky as Blaine circled around behind his targets.

Blaine could only hope he had figured the remaining choppers’ positions properly. An explosion pounded his eardrums and shook him forward against the safety straps. He felt the Hind whirling out of control, and when the second explosion came it was all he could do to keep his hands on the navigational stick. His trembling hands held on to it desperately as the Hind swooned lower, treetops directly beneath him now, a vast green blanket into which he seemed sure to be wrapped.

Guillermo Paz sat anxiously by the radio. Over one minute had passed since Red Unit’s last report, an eternity in battle. Already he was dreading the call he would have to make to Managua if the impossible happened and the bastard somehow got away. More than his career was at stake.

Crackle, crackle, crackle… .

“Base, do you read?” came a garbled voice through the static.

“This is Base,” Paz returned, squeezing the microphone’s base.

“He’s down, Base. We got him. Down ourselves but… .”

Crackle… .

“Where? Request coordinates.”

Crackle…

“North of … north …”
crackle
… “of Santo Domingo… .”

It was enough to go on, plenty. Somewhere north of the town of Santo Domingo. The rest of Paz’s fleet was already in the area. He might be able to salvage this mess after all.

The Green Unit leader saw the white wing protruding from the ground brush and radioed in.

“We’ve got him, sir. Down in the brush, two miles north of Santo Domingo.”

“Land and report.”

Six of the nine choppers landed in an open field eighty yards from the brush that concealed the stolen Hind’s carcass. The soldiers grouped together and approached, warily, with leveled guns.

The Hind’s wing sharpened as they drew closer, poking up from the thick brush where the rest of its corpse must have been scattered in the crash. Strange there was no smoke, the leader reckoned, nor any evidence of explosion or smell of fuel. It was not until he came upon the wing that he realized why.

“Por Dios,”
he muttered, touching it. “It’s made of wood!”

It had been nearly an hour since Blaine had passed over the Ditch Point after issuing the report of his own demise. The static had been the touch that clinched the authenticity of his words, he figured, managed through a means no more elaborate than crumpling sections of navigational maps one after the other. Johnny Wareagle had planted the fake wing at the Ditch Point, the idea being that in case of an emergency, the wing would distract pursuers long enough to allow Blaine to reach the border. Things hadn’t gone exactly as planned, but they had gone well enough.

McCracken didn’t need any of his crumpled maps to tell him he was coming up on Honduras and the landing site just west of Bocay where the rest of his team had established a small camp and had a Hercules transport waiting. He landed the Hind next to the Hercules without further incident and waited for Johnny, who would be making his way here by jeep from the Ditch Point.

Two hours later, a huge figure appeared in the opening of the small tent where Blaine was resting. He gazed up into the eyes of the giant Indian.

“Musta drove pretty damn fast, Indian.”

“Speed is relative, Blainey. For some a mile is the same as a step. For others …”

Blaine nodded his understanding, still gazing up. Wareagle admitted to seven feet and might have easily exceeded that by an inch or two. His hair was tied in a ponytail, and his flesh was baked bronze by years of living in the outdoors following four tours of duty in Nam in Captain Blaine McCracken’s commando unit. For the first time since those years, Wareagle was garbed in a set of camouflage fatigues.

“The uniform suits you, Johnny.”

“A reminder of the hellfire. In the jungle today it tried to come back to me until the spirits chased it away.”

“I figure those same spirits moved the Honduras border a bit to make life easy for me in the end.”

“It would not be beyond them.”

McCracken nodded at that. He had seen Johnny’s mystical powers at work too often to challenge them, first in Nam and then much later on a snow-swept night in Maine when the fate of the country had hung in the balance.

“What next, Blainey?” the big Indian wondered.

“First off, I’m going to make sure that Hind-D gets delivered safely to Ben Metcalf in Colorado Springs. I didn’t spend two months of my life preparing for this to see it get fucked up somehow. I like seeing things through to the end.”

Wareagle nodded knowingly. “Sometimes the ends are not ours to control, Blainey. Man is a creature of constant beginnings. Your constant obsession with finishing leads you on an empty journey that can never end. We are nothing more than creatures of our destinies unless the spirits guide us.”

“You sound like a travel agent for the soul.”

“The spirits are the agents. I am just the interpreter.”

“They furnish your words concerning me this time?”

“They furnish all.” Wareagle hesitated. “I worry for you still, Blainey. So restless is your manitou. So driven are you to pursue that which you cannot identify.”

“But we
have
identified it, Indian; it’s what lured you out of your retirement villa up in Maine and got me away from sorting paper clips in France: the world’s gone nuts. Innocent people are dropping dead all the time. The madmen are taking over and there are only a few of us left to keep the balance straight.”

“You did not throw it off by yourself, Blainey,” Wareagle told him. “And yet that is how you seek to restore it. Ever since the hellfire …”

“The real hellfire was the five years I was out, Indian. Now I’m back but I’m doing things my way, on my terms. Ben wanted a Hind. I owed him. Straight and simple.” He paused. “Hope I didn’t forget to tell you how great it is working with you again. No one else could have pulled off that trick with the fake wing.”

“Men see what they expect to. The trick is to give it to them.”

“The trick is to stay alive, Indian. Where you off to from here, back to the wilds of Maine?”

“A national convention of Sioux in Oklahoma, Blainey. The time has come to accept my heritage once more, to accept myself as
Wanblee-Isnala.”

“Wan
what
?”

“My Sioux name as christened by Chief Silver Cloud.”

“And what’s
his
Sioux name?”

“Unah Tah Seh Deh Koni-Sehgehwagin.”

“Give him my best.”

Chapter 2

PRESIDENT LYMAN SCOTT
didn’t stop to remove his overcoat upon reaching the White House. Instead he made straight for the elevator, located ten yards from his private entrance, that would whisk him down to the secret conference room, deep underground. Scott was a big, raw-boned, athletic man, and even his exceptionally fit Secret Service guards had to struggle to keep up with him.

Especially today.

A man with thick glasses and thinning hair was waiting for him at the elevator.

“Are they all here, Ben?” the President asked.

“Yes, Mr. President.”

The aide waited until the three Secret Service men had entered the compartment after the President before pressing the down arrow. The elevator had only two stops, one underground and another at ground level where they had just entered.

Lyman Scott stripped off his overcoat and scarf. He had been president for just over two years and for a portion of that period seemed well in control of his duties. He had run on a platform of sanity and sense, especially when dealing with the Soviets. Upon taking office he initiated a series of summits with a progressive Soviet leader who felt, as he did, that a constant dialogue was the most efficient way of ensuring future peace. The country rallied behind him, a long-sought-after goal at last to be achieved. But there were costs. As a show of good faith, Scott kept his campaign pledge to drastically cut back on defense spending and reorganize the military community. There was grumbling and resistance, but the process nonetheless was underway.

Then came firm evidence of an active Soviet presence in Central America, Syria, and Iran. While claiming to bargain in good faith, the Soviets had been building up foreign divisions throughout the entire duration of the peace talks. Russian leaders insisted they were even then pulling back, but the damage had already been done. When Scott refused to respond strongly, even militarily, the polls came up squarely against him. The country believed its President had been played for a fool, and men Scott should have been able to trust failed him at every turn, feeling betrayed themselves by his earlier policies. He was labeled weak. A cartoon picturing a chicken cowering from a bullying bear made the op-ed pages of several major newspapers. For the past two months, Scott had weathered a storm which showed no signs of letting up.

The elevator doors slid open. The President left his aide and guards out in the corridor and passed through a high-security door into the Tomb.

The four men already present immediately stood.

“Forget the formality, gentlemen,” Scott said by way of greeting. He tossed his overcoat and scarf onto a couch and moved to his customary seat at the head of the conference table. It was built to accommodate up to twenty, but today only five chairs were taken, the occupants of the other ones having disappeared one at a time over the past few weeks with the evaporation of the President’s trust in his own advisers. It had been paranoia, in fact, that had led him to convene this meeting here in the Tomb instead of in the usual briefing room. The isolation was devastatingly apparent; each word spoken seemed to echo through the narrow emptiness of the chamber. The Tomb was barren but for the maps that hung on the walls and for the single red phone perched on the conference table within the President’s reach. The light came harsh and bright from the recessed ceiling; for some unknown reason there was no dimmer switch.

Scott sighed deeply and met, in turn, the gazes of each of the four men before him. To his left was William Wyler Stamp, a career intelligence officer who had revitalized a CIA that had come under fire during the last administration. Stamp was urbane and dapper, with a quiet demeanor more befitting a professor than a spymaster.

Sitting opposite each other, and just as ideologically divergent, were Secretary of Defense George Kappel and Secretary of State Edmund Mercheson. Kappel was a lifelong friend of the President, which kept him in the administration despite his perpetual hawkishness and seemingly congenital distrust of the Soviets. On the other hand, Lyman Scott had known Mercheson for only one year longer than he’d been president. A former senator from Michigan, Mercheson’s pointed nose and slight German accent doomed him to be forever likened to the legendary Henry Kissinger. The press often labeled him “Merchinger” or “Kisseson.” He was Scott’s chief supporter when it came to Soviet relations and the architect of a controversial disarmament treaty the President had been on the verge of signing before the rug had been pulled out from under his administration. Past sixty now and generally thought to be past his prime, Mercheson nonetheless enjoyed a comfortable grasp of the issues and the unusual ability to pass on his opinions in clear, concise terms.