Delta Green - страница 19

McKenna took one look at the crewmen, then told his squadron members, “Wait here.”

He crossed the hangar and caught up with Cartwright near the exit door.

“General.”

Cartwright stopped and turned toward him. “Colonel?”

“Have you spoken to General Brackman yet?”

“No, Colonel. I have nothing to report to him as yet.”

Despite how he often felt about petty officiousness in the military, McKenna did not often go around superior officers. He had asked Cartwright to talk to Brackman, rather than going directly to the Space Command boss himself.

Pappas smiled at him.

McKenna suppressed the urge to turn the major’s smile inside out. His patience was wearing thin enough to produce some verbal heat when Munoz came up beside him.

Tony Munoz was only five-nine, but the Tucson-born Arizonian was a tight bundle of sinew. Hard-ridged muscles lined his arms, legs, chest, and stomach. He had dark brown hair that matched his eyes and a smooth, almost round face that many people had misjudged as complacent. He didn’t worry about much, but when his fires were stoked, the cold fury appeared in his eyes.

It was there now.

Munoz spoke to the general’s aide, “Mikos, lets, you and me take a little walk.”

“What? I don’t think…”

“I know you don’t. But the colonel and the general want a few moments together.”

Munoz put his arm around Pappas’s shoulders and led him away.

“What the hell’s going on, McKenna?” Cartwright asked.

McKenna saw the flush creeping up the base commander’s throat.

“Whatever your problems are, General, they’re yours. I have my own. Right now, you’re going to tell those men over there to get these birds in the air.”

“The hell I am!”

“If you don’t, sir, then I will.”

“Bullshit!”

“And do you want to take a wild-assed guess about which one of us they’re going to respond to, General? What I’m doing here, I’m giving you a chance to save face before you lose it.”

Judging by the changing shades in Cartwright’s face and the flickering in his eyes, the decision was having a tough time surfacing.

But it finally did.

Cartwright called to a master sergeant, “Bristol, let’s get those craft ready to roll.”

“Thank you, sir,” McKenna said.

Lieutenant Polly Tang, Brad Mitchell’s number two, waved through the glass port that overlooked the hangar. Over the radio, she said, “All clear, Delta Red. Good luck.”

Lynn Haggar clicked her transmit button. “Until next time, Beta.”

Over the intercom, Olsen reported, “All systems on line, Country.”

When she and Olsen had been formally adopted by the squadron, she had been given the nickname of Country Girl, but Olsen tended to shorten it.

She fired the nose thrusters, and spurts of nitrogen gas nudged Delta Red slowly backwards out of the bay. The motion was relative, of course, since the MakoShark was hurtling through space at the same 18,000 miles per hour as the space station, which orbited the earth at a mean altitude of 220 miles. The orbital period was 3.6 hours.

The craft reversed slowly from the hangar cell, and as soon as it was clear, she added two more bursts from the nose thrusters, then said, “All right, that’s enough. Close them up, Swede.”

Olsen punched the pad that sealed the carbon-carbon/Nomex/ceramic alloy panels over the nose thrusters. Without the protective doors in place, the nozzles would not survive the intense heat of reentry.

“Nose thrusters passive, panels closed,” he reported.

The gap between the satellite and the MakoShark increased steadily. The hangar doors closed with deliberate slowness, like flower petals folding, and the hangar’s interior lights winked out. And Lynn Haggar was left with the sight that brought her to the brink of awe every time.

When the doors of all twenty-eight cells were closed, twenty-foot-high black letters identified the station as:

The hub of the station was a cylinder three hundred feet in diameter and two hundred feet in width. One half of it (this side) was constructed like a honeycomb, made up of eight hangar cells large enough to accept a Mako or MakoShark behind closed doors. Resupply rockets, fuel, and other stores could be ported in the smaller cells. Additionally, the module on Spoke Twelve was utilized for HoneyBee maintenance as well as for refurbishing satellites which were already in space. One of the tasks of the Mako vehicles was to collect faltering communications or surveillance satellites and bring them to