Delta Green - страница 4

“Maybe we could do Palm Springs tonight, jefe? Or Vegas? We haven’t been to Vegas in a long time.”

“If we don’t pull off this attack, Tiger, the CO will fire us, and then we can’t afford Palm Springs.”

“Good damned point, Snake Eyes. I’ll make sure my computer is counting right. You happen to see Needles, go to three-oh.”

McKenna saw Lake Havasu first, retarded his throttles, and began a slow descent. The speed came down to Mach 1.8.

He dialed in a Denver radio station on the Nav/Com radio and used it to verify the position reported by the inertial navigation system, which obtained its information from the NavStart Global Positioning Satellite system. Using triangulating information from at least three of the eighteen satellites in the GPS system, the computer usually knew within a few feet their exact position on the globe.

As usual, the MakoShark’s brain was correct. The coordinates were printed at the lower edge of the HUD, to the right of the readout for the craft’s heading.

078 34° 55’ 14” 114° 49’ 55”

At the top of the HUD, the crucial data of speed and altitude were dominant figures. By the time the Grand Canyon crossed beneath them, he had reached Mach 1.5 and thirty thousand feet of altitude.

“Take a big, lazy S-turn, Snake Eyes, and bleed off another tenth of a Mach, then go to heading zero-seven-four. We’re ahead of schedule.”

“Always hated being late for a date,” McKenna said.

The sun was behind them at 3:15 P.M. when they crossed the Colorado border west of Durango. As soon as he passed over the 14,000-foot Mount Wilson, McKenna eased the throttles back. The velocity rolled back until the Mach numbers on the readout changed to knots. He didn’t want to leave a sonic footprint.

Easing the side-mount stick, which was computer-adjusted for the tensions McKenna favored forward, he put the MakoShark into a shallow dive.

“Unless you want C. W. McCall to see us, Kev, you’d better grab a couple points to the right.”

The man who had given the world “Convoy” and “Wolf Creek Pass” was the mayor of Ouray, Colorado.

McKenna banked to the right to give Ouray plenty of room and lined up to the right of Uncompahgre Peak. The MakoSharks were only infrequently brought into populated areas during daylight hours since, despite all of their stealthy characteristics, they were still visible to the naked eye, and they were still mostly classified.

The Uncompahgre National Forest came up quickly on the left, a thick blue-green blanket of Ponderosa Pine and Blue Spruce peppered with the pristine white of the year’s first snowfall a week before.

When the peak lined up with the craft’s left wingtip, which was actually the slanted-up rudder, Munoz said, “Target four-five miles, beadin’ zero-zero-five. Put her on the deck, jefe.”

McKenna could have used the terrain-following radar on his invasion of the mostly deserted Gunnison National Forest, but that might have taken the fun out of it. He rolled hard to the left, pumped in some rudder, and dove toward the earth, pulling out on a northerly heading.

The landscape was rugged and undulating between six to eight thousand feet above sea level, and he used his radar altimeter to monitor his distance above the peaks, mesas, and valleys. Rollercoasting at five hundred feet above the earth, he maintained a speed of five hundred knots.

Highway 50 and the Blue Mesa Reservoir shot past.

“We got a target yet?” he asked.

“I don’t want to go active and give ourselves away,” Munoz told him.

A transmitting radar revealed itself to an enemy.

“You’re the one who picked up the moniker Snake Eyes,” Munoz added. “Prove it.”

McKenna had already picked out the white dot against the slate blue of the sky.

“One o’clock high,” he said.

“Jesus! I don’t believe it.”

Thirty seconds went by before Munoz found the airplane for himself. He quickly aimed the video camera in the nose with his hand controller, shunted the image to the main CRTs, and zoomed the magnification to twenty.

On McKenna’s screen, the sharp image of a Cessna Citation business jet appeared. It had United States Air Force markings.