The Ransom of Black Stealth One Read online

  THE RANSOM OF BLACK STEALTH ONE

  DEAN ING

  ATOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK NOTE:

  If yon purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE RANSOM OF BLACK STEALTH ONE Copyright © 1989 by Dean Ing All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN: 0-812-50857-2

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-35078

  First Tor edition: April 1990

  Printed in the United States of America 0 9 8 7 6 5

  For the women in other men's lives: Elaine, Carole, Suz' and Suzanne.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Because the very nature of stealth is ambiguity, we need not be surprised that the subject is both top secret and high profile. It was not my intent to ferret out and publish information that might compromise the security of existing programs. My advisors assure me that I did not. Those now active in aerospace programs did, however, help me focus on the better sources in open literature, and critiqued my preliminary design of Black Stealth One. Retired engineers free to swap brainstorms, and to critique my own fictional stealth techniques into something like feasibility, include Everett Elerath and Joseph Vasilik. William Brubaker made his library available and has my thanks for it. A few whose employments are more sensitive must remain, in their jargon, "low observable." To them I offer generic thanks.

  ONE

  Weston, who was not a light sleeper, at first sensed only a dull impact through his bedroom floor to the mattress. It did not shake him fully awake and he was unable, later, to testify how long it took him to become aware of the door buzzer. Too long, at any rate. He did recall that the digital clock downstairs in the living room read "02:51" when, conservative as always, he slipped a raincoat over his pajamas, his old .45 service automatic heavy as a curbstone in the right-hand pocket.

  Although he had been a full-fledged member of the intelligence community for over forty years, the first thing that popped into Weston's head as he squinted through the peeper was: some damn kid's prank. He opened the door anyway. The rounded dark mass slumped against his alcove brickwork seemed about the size of those huge plastic mulch bags to a man whose sixty-three-year-old eyes were still full of sleep. The position of his alcove light and Potomac's country-lane street lamps in his face at three o'clock in the morning, for God's sake, didn't help. James Darlington Weston, a patient man, resisted the urge to kick that bag of mulch, sighed, took his right hand from the overcoat pocket and snapped the alcove light off.

  Nothing had ever startled him more in his life than when the bag of mulch mumbled, "Thank you, Halcyon."

  Dar Weston was suddenly, vibrantly, awake. He did not snap the light on again because as his awareness dilated, it included the sedan abandoned across his front walk and the fact that the car must have shaken him half awake as it slammed into the low brick pilaster flanking his carport. It included some faint familiarity with that voice, too, which had thanked him for plunging the alcove into darkness again, and used a code name he hadn't answered to since 1953. Weston had not even run agents as a case officer for many years, but nobody who'd been in that part of the business ever forgot as much of it as he would like to, and Weston's response was immediate.

  He snapped off the living room valance light, then stepped out onto chill cement and squatted, sensing that the huddled figure needed help. By the time he got the man into the guest room, carrying more than guiding him, the man's attaché case banging shins at random, Weston knew the man needed that help very, very badly. His own hands were sticky, and blood does have a special smell when there is enough of it, and civilized men do not void their bladders or bowels while fully clothed except in the greatest physical extremity.

  He swore as the reading lamp flooded the room, and lifted the man's legs onto the bed to save the carpet. The left trouser leg was already stiff with blood, which seemed to be coming from the man's lower left abdomen. The attaché case, with three feet of cable linking it to the man's wrist manacle, could wait. As Weston tugged at the man's wind-breaker and sportshirt, he traded calm gazes with the stranger who did not seem to be in much pain. The face was sixtyish, clean-shaven, with the pallor of gray milk, and like the voice it was distantly familiar. Weston, hoping to find a knife wound, said, "Forgive me, but I don't recognize you." Then he saw the hole in the man's abdomen, slowly pulsing as fresh blood pumped out, and swore again. Inside that man was a metal slug.

  "I was 'Sparrow' in the old days," the man said, sounding very tired. "You knew me well enough then." A pause, and a cough that must have hurt. "You were the only one whose address I knew tonight. Sorry."

  Weston studied the gray face, seeing the strong, chiseled tawny face of the young hellion beneath thirty-six more years of disenchantment, and nodded. It was Sparrow, he was certain. Goddamn an agency that sends old men to do boys' work! Weston snatched at the telephone he had knocked askew near the lamp table, and began to dial with brisk, furious strokes. "I'm calling Company paramedics. You're filling up with blood, Sparrow."

  The manacled wrist levitated as if by some outside power. "You will know who gets this," Sparrow said softly, his eyes closed now. "I was intercepted in Bethesda. Not your man's fault." He waited for Weston's rapid-fire telephoned instructions to cease, then added, "First combination: three one five. Second combination: seven four zero. Make certain—" A long pause, long enough for Weston to begin probing the free wrist for a pulse. Then, "—that you don't press the stud with any other combination."

  The pulse was thready. Dar Weston had seen good men die before, and in the silence of his lonely house he felt that sense of loss again. "Hang on. We'll get you fixed up," he said, and squatted, frowning, his face near Sparrow's. "Is absolutely everybody else in your section on fucking vacation?" That famous note of command, which had stiffened the postures of two generations of intelligence people, seemed to wake Sparrow from light sleep.

  "I asked for this courier job, Mr.—Weston. This"—again the jerk of that right wrist—"is from the Israelis. Open it."

  "I didn't know of anything incoming from there," said Weston. "That means I haven't the need to know, yet. It can wait."

  Struggling up, eyes blinking wide, Sparrow fell back to the coverlet with a sigh of mortal exhaustion. "You will have. It's the Red Book."

  "My God," Weston said, glancing at the attaché case. The poor bastard was bleeding out on him right before his eyes, and Langley was a full twenty-five-minute drive from Potomac, and that damned Company paramedic van was probably still ten minutes away, even with an expert driving like Mark Donohue two laps down. But—the Red Book? Well, even that could wait. He and Sparrow had been close, once upon a time.

  "Yes, the new Soviet shopping list." Sparrow was watching him now, licking gray lips with a gray tongue. "Take it. Let me see you take it," he begged. "Three one five. Seven four zero. Be careful."

  Shaking his head, Weston said the numbers aloud, setting the two combinations on the metal case. A sudden wild thought struck him that all this was window dressing, that some bright Sov case officer was waiting for him to press that stud and blow himself through the roof. Paranoia. Which doesn't mean they ar
en't out to get you, he finished the old gibe silently, and pressed the stud.

  There must have been over a thousand pages in that stack, cunningly bound between the covers of a Sears catalog by some Flaps and Seals man—or more likely, woman. The Company had got its hands on an old one, back in 'eighty-five. The list of what the Soviet Union wanted its agents to steal had been a wonderful treatise on what they didn't yet have. Letting the pages fan beneath his thumb, Weston saw that this was a photocopy of a new list, which the other side might not know had been compromised. "Sparrow: do the Sovs know you have this?"

  He had to lean nearer to hear Sparrow say, "... five. Seven four zero. Careful, Halcyon."

  "I have it," Weston said gently, patting the bloody forearm, holding up the most valuable Sears catalog in existence. "See?"

  Sparrow did not see, though his eyes were open. Sparrow was fading from 1989 back into the world of 1952 when all good things seemed possible, when Sparrow could drink to the future, when a man loosely connected to the U.S. State Department was buying every other round and answering to the name of Halcyon. Good days; days to remember as Sparrow lay dying.

  TWO

  As the little LearJet whistled softly past them on its landing rollout, Ben Ullmer and his assistant, Marie Duchaine, stood outside the Snake Pit and swiveled their heads in unison. "Oughta be a Model Thirty-Six, with all the heavy brass she's haulin'." Marie's expression said she didn't get it, though an aircraft freak would. Ben Ullmer knew airplanes the way some men knew batting averages, down to the third digit.

  He knew top brass, too; the arrival of National Security Agency and Central Intelligence directors on the same flight was absolutely unprecedented. Those two might smile at each other across the table from the President, but each year their cooperation looked more like competition. Ullmer had heard of Dar Weston, CIA's top man for science and technology, which added up to two CIA nabobs too many nosing around NSA's Snake Pit.

  And a couple of other links in the daisy chain of command were tagging along too. That meant Ben Ullmer would have to make nice to the wing-tip oxford brigade. Now, as he often did in moments of stress or deep reflection, Ullmer chewed one of the cigars he never lit, standing near the aircraft fuel pumps and glowering into a bright spring afternoon. Ullmer glanced through the tangle of curly hair on his forearm at his old windup Breitling, the only kind of decoration he would allow his people in the secluded hangars and workshops near Elmira, New York, which NSA people called the Snake Pit. "On time, more's the pity." He readjusted the yellow baseball cap with the caterpillar legend to cover his balding head. The cap was a joke: the Snake Pit's specialty was precisely the opposite of heavy equipment.

  With years of Ben Ullmer's peeves behind her, Marie Duchaine knew that growl well enough to discount half of it. With her glasses pushed into her graying blond hair, Marie could not have read the schedule on the clipboard she carried. With Marie's memory, she did not need to. "Shall I send the Black Hangar crew home early, Ben?"

  "Yeah, clear 'em out—all but Medina." He watched her, appreciating the fine hips and purposeful stride that could fool a man into thinking Marie was a long jump shy of fifty. Then, "Hold on! It'll look better if they're in the library. Won't kill that bunch to bone up on aircraft specs for an hour."

  "Good idea," she said without breaking stride, smiling to herself because she knew how Ben hated to waste a single man-hour. He even made his vacations coincide with the annual Oshkosh fly-in, studying the experimental aircraft of amateurs because good ideas lurked in the damnedest places, and Ben's wife Lorraine had quit trying to change him before their kids left the nest. It was Marie Duchaine, not Ben Ullmer, who accompanied Ben's wife on her vacations. Small wonder that Marie was almost as much family as she was assistant by now.

  Ullmer grunted in satisfaction to see the Lear taxiing toward him because, on the uneven taxi-way at highway speed, it bobbed like a toy. Shake 'em up a little; do 'em good. "Damn stupid, is what it is," he said as he stumped out to the aircraft, talking to no one but his feet, the short arms swinging wide as a weight lifter's as he walked. Ben's crews liked to say Ben was built like a garbage can, but nobody had ever found a way to put a lid on him. "CIA thinks we're leaky, we know fuckin' well they are, but we let 'em in here. Call in the National Enquirer while they're at it..."

  The first man out of the Lear was the DIRNSA, Director of the National Security Agency, Charles Foy. NSA folk called their director "Dernza," this one bending almost double to exit the Lear because of his immense height. Ullmer shook his hand, the hand that could fund or eliminate any project in the Snake Pit by a simple jiggle of a pen, and then offered his blunt paw to the others.

  Abraham Randolph was DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, with the demeanor of old money and the face of an aging matinee idol, but Ullmer thought his handshake perfunctory. It was James Darlington Weston, CIA deputy for science and technology, who had the handshake of a C-clamp though he was at least Ullmer's age. Weston's brown tweeds and sober tie betrayed membership in the Old Boy network, but Dar Weston's face had the lines of a man who could laugh when it suited him.

  Ullmer waved them toward the office, a two-story brick affair squeezed between windowless metal hangars, and responded to small talk as always—badly. He already knew Foy's deputy, Bill Sheppard, the country's top crypto man. A skinny little specimen who walked with quick, precise steps, Sheppard had a reputation for backing the right ideas. He had backed Ullmer's stealth programs to the hilt, and Ben figured the man must have a backbone of beta titanium.

  Ben's direct superior, Malcolm Aldrich, walked beside him as if to cement a closeness that did not really exist. Aldrich smiled a lot, but behind his Rotarian cheer lay a festering resentment that his subordinate, Ben Ullmer, lay beyond his control. Well, the Snake Pit work and the autonomy it required were Bill Sheppard's doing, goddammit; let Mal Aldrich piss and moan to Sheppard. Ben had no ambition to rise above Aldrich, but try and convince him of that. Ambition, hell: no talent for it, either! Georgia Tech had pumped out a helluvan engineer in Ben Ullmer, but no politician. Ben proved it, standing in the hallway: "Mr. Foy, you flew these folks in over my Cyclone fence so I guess they have the need to know. Which tour do you want?"

  It was Sheppard who said, softly, "Black Hangar, Ben. You know why we're here. You can start your briefing."

  "It's your—" He knew Aldrich feared he would say, "funeral." He almost did. "—birds, Dr. Sheppard." Ben led them to the elevator, talking as they filed in, and inserted his ID card in a slot that seemed only a poor fit of the panelwork. "Okay: NSA's used CIA aircraft for over thirty years to gather data. U-2, SR-71, Quietstar, stuff from Lockheed's Skunk Works. I worked there awhile. Good bunch." The elevator door whispered shut. "A few years back, I was asked to develop some, uh, different delivery systems for NSA. They wanted something that could deliver and retrieve a man— or a suitcase nuke, or a sensor package—across continental distances without detection or landing strips." His glance toward Aldrich was bland, and Aldrich returned it the same way. Mal Aldrich had fought this project at its inception, and he had lost.

  The elevator lurched, an addition to the sinking feeling these CIA people must have felt when they first realized NSA could build its own stealthy birds. When NSA no longer needed CIA aircraft, the locus of power would inevitably shift. Ullmer was unperturbed. "I was ex-Lockheed, and two of my crew in delivery system design were just plain nuts about aircraft: Medina and Corbett."

  From Randolph: "Kyle Corbett?"

  Ullmer: "That was the man. He and Medina fought like two cats in a sack but, dear God, how they could cobble up an airchine!"

  "Friend of yours, wasn't he?" Randolph glanced at Weston, who only nodded with a faraway look.

  "Hard to make friends with a guy like Corbett. Damn shame, to die at the peak of his abilities," Ullmer said.

  "At least it must've been quick," Weston said. "And I gather he finished the job."

  Ullmer shrugged. "The part that dealt wit
h flying an airchine, yeah. First we built a series of stealth studies, flyin' breadboards, so to speak. The Blue Sky project." He saw Dar Weston's quizzical glance. "You know, invisible airplanes; nothin' but blue skies do I see." Ullmer sang it, evidently in the key of "Z," and saw pained smiles of recognition.

  The elevator hunted a bit, and the door slid aside. The overhead fluorescents revealed an expanse twice the size of a basketball gym but with a flat ceiling thirty feet high, the floor of another hangar directly overhead. "This is Black Hangar," said Ullmer, leading the way with a gesture that was unnecessary because everyone was already staring. "We cannibalized Blue Sky One, so I can't show her to you, but there's Two and Three."

  Murmurs of appreciation. Two slender shapes loomed silently against the wall, one suspended above the other by slender metal beams cantilevered from the wall. Those spidery supports suggested that the aircraft was feather-light, though it had sturdy wheels folded flush into the wing. Both craft sported canopies that bulged above the wings, and twin tails mounted on extension tubes that seemed slender as pencils. The wing of the lower craft was covered with fabric, painted blue below, mottled brown above. The two shapes were subtly different, but they looked more like sailplanes than powered craft.

  "The lower one's Blue Sky Two, powered by a pair of little French turbo units." Ben strolled with his visitors, whose heads kept swinging to scan the sweep of those wings as they approached. "Wingspan's a tad over forty feet, crew of one. Engines buried in the fuselage, so the locals never paid much attention to her. Helluva lot of high-performance sailplanes around Elmira, you know."

  Although the upward slope of the wing put its tip eight feet above concrete, Charles Foy reached it with ease, tapping gently with a finger. "Plastic?"

  "And carbon fiber," Ullmer nodded with the squint of a critic. "The crew got experience with superstrength materials when we formed those tips. They're a little wonky," he added, "but we've done better since. A lot better. These were just practice for the materials and processes of the final bird."