"I like them both, but I can see both of them being very competitive.

"At least James comes right out and says it. He's an excellent pilot, and he's the only one right now who can fly DreamStar.

sits there utting on an innocent and contrite act, but he's as big a show-off as James. " He rubbed his eyes. "I can't afford to lose either one of them, but . . . "

'What will happen if you transfer either one of them?"

'I -can get someone to fly Cheetah-hell, I've got enough hours, I could probably fly the thing. If I ground James, the project gets set back six months, maybe more. I told him I have people training on DreamStar. Who can be sure when or if they'll be ready? I exaggerated some to take him down a bit. Brad Elliott will hit the roof. The security leaks-or what seem like security leaks-are already turning him sour."

' 'Are you saying you'll have to transfer or reassign if they don't get along?"

"I suppose. But Ken knows he's the only guy who can fly 87.

DrearnStar. That would be like giving him a veto in almost every other matter that comes up during this project from here on. I ended up grounding both of them, until I have a chance to talk to the general."

Wendy smiled. "Eight years ago you were just a captain, responsible only for a radar scope in the belly of a B-52 bomber.

Your big worry was your next emergency procedures test.

Now, you're a lieutenant colonel in charge of a hundred men and women and two of the hottest jets there are . . . We'll put it all on hold for a few hours. I'm here to take you to lunch. You probably don't have time to take the helicopter to Nellis, do you?

General Elliott has got to have some decent restaurants built out in this desert."

McLanahan grabbed his flight cap. "We've got time to take the Dolphin into Nellis if we hurry. I'm not expected back un- til-" The desk phone rang. He looked at it, then at Wendy.

"Let's go."

She smiled, shook her head. "You'd hate me in the morning.

He picked it up@ "McLanahan..... Hi, Sergeant Clinton . . .

The data tapes are ready now?..... Yeah, we had some maneu- vers that may have overstressed the canards . . . how bad? All right, I'll be right down." He dropped the phone back on its cradle. "I knew it. My two hotshots may have bent DreamStar some. I've got to take a look and prepare a report before this afternoon's meeting. " He circled his desk, gave Wendy a hug and a kiss. "Rain check?"

"Anytime." Especially on flying days, she reminded herself, dates were always crap shoots. She watched as Patrick hurried off.

"Wendy?

She turned and found Captain Kenneth James standing behind her. His bright blue eyes sparkled, as usual. He was a head taller than Patrick, less broad-shouldered but still athletically built.

They looked at each other for a moment. Be honest, Wendy Tork, she told herself, Ken James is a charmer. Plus he has a magnetism, a sort of masculine grace, and he's not arrogant or cocky or condescending. He also had this way of making a woman feel special, as if he had been waiting all his life just to say hello to her.

She had met him eighteen months earlier when he first joined the High Tech Advanced Weapons Center at Dreamland. He 88 .

wasn't like many of the other jet jockeys in and around Nellis Air Force Base. Getting an assignment to HAWC was the top achievement for any young officer, and most new test pilots seemed not to be able to let you forget it. Not Ken James. He took the time not only to get to know senior officers but non- commissioned officers as well. He seemed just as interested in the engineering and technical parts of the job as the flying. He quickly established himself as the best pilot at HAWC . . . a scholar of flying and aerospace, not just a participant. Quite a package. And no wonder they had become good friends.

"If you're looking for the old man . ." he paused at the intentional slip, smiling winningly "I mean, the colonel, he just left."

"I know. "'

Maraklov understood, as everybody did, the special relation- ship between Wendy Tork and the colonel. Which, of course, was the chief reason for making her his friend. And it was not exactly hard duty. Tall, good figure, brunette with hints of gray, still foxy for a woman going on forty. But be careful, he re- minded himself. And helped himself do that by remembering the research on her. A considerable dossier: Wendy Tork, Ph.D., electrical engineering. Chief of DOPY5, the cryptic office sym- bol of HAWCs Director of Penetration Aids, Project Y5-the Megafortress Plus, the super-bomber and strategic escort battle- ship. This woman had developed many of the twenty-first-century electronic jammers used on American military aircraft, includ- ing new jammers that could electronically defeat infrared- and laser-guided missiles. She had built a jammer the size of a toaster that could disrupt much of the known electromagnetic spectrum for thirty miles in every direction. Considered a sort of outsider in HAWC because of her former independent contractor status, she tended, except for the colonel, to keep to herself. Scuttlebutt said that started after the mysterious Old Dog mission that she and most of the brass at HAWC were involved with eight years before. It seemed to have affected her more than the others.

In any case, possibilities here, he had decided, for a special source of information. "How about lunch?" he said easily.

"Do you have time? Don't you have a meeting this after- noon? "

"I think they'd rather not have me at this particular meeting,"

he said, pretending embarrassment. "I'm sort of in the dog- t 89.

house. But it's my lucky day. I don't have to be back until late, and I have a pretty lady to share lunch with. If she'll give me a break.

For a moment she hesitated, then decided why not . they were, after all, friends.

If there was room on one of the shuttle helicopters that flew hourly to and from Dreamland, it was open for anyone at HAWC to hop a ride for the twenty-minute flight back to the "main- land," as people from Dreamland called Nellis Air Force Base.

But Maraklov had a different plan. When he climbed aboard the Dolphin transport helicopter he went forward and spoke briefly with the crew. Then as the helicopter touched down on the broil- ing tarmac at Nellis, Ken touched Wendy's arm as she began to unbuckle her seat belt.

"We're not there yet," was all he said.

The helicopter lifted off once again and sped northwest. Ten minutes later it touched down on another military-looking air- field. As they left the chopper Wendy noticed the helicopter landing pad had been painted with a stylized Indian thunderbird symbol.

"What's this?

"One of the best-kept secrets in the Air Force," he told her.

'Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field. This is where the Air Force Aerial Demonstration Team, the Thunderbirds, work and, practice even though the unit is based out at Nellis. You know, the Thunderbirds do a lot of demonstrations for the brass and foreign dignitaries here-not to mention that the Thunderbird pilots get the best of everything, being on the road so much- so Indian Springs is an oasis for them out in the middle of no- where. The base is open to all military personnel, but that's not widely advertised. I knew the Thunderbirds were gone so I asked the Dolphin pilot to get us permission to land."

They walked past immaculately groomed desert landscaped yards and freshly painted buildings to a Spanish-style stucco building with red tile veranda and cane-ceiling fans. They were seated at a table on the veranda.

"I've been coming to this area for eight years," Wendy said, and I've been at HAWC for three years, and I never knew about this, or only vaguely if at all. Patrick and I are both so busy 90 .

He nodded. "The Dolphin pilot enacts a toll for side trips-I think he's got a Chris Craft on Lake Mead that needs refinishing.

Guess who'll get asked to help."

"Well, it's delightful and I'm glad we came."

"You'll have to tell Patrick about it, if he doesn't know."

"Believe me, I will. I know how important his project is to him, to all of you, but I do wish he'd slow down just a little.

Actually I don't know if he'd take advantage of a place like this even if he knew about it."

"Sure he would ... but he is a busy man."

Over lunch he said, "Most people here thought you two would be married by now. You've known each other for seven years?

Eight? "

' 'Eight," Wendy said. "Ever since the Old Dog flight ...

God, has it been that long?"

"That must have been some mission," Ken said. "I've heard about it, of course, but mostly scuttlebutt. I'd like to get the whole story from you someday."

She only nodded, smiling briefly.

"Well, the colonel joined HAWC a short time after that proj- ect . . . ended. What about you? You didn't join HAWC until recently, a little before I came here."

"I still had a civilian position in my own laboratory. Much as I wanted to, I couldn't just leave or get reassigned to Drearn- land. I started to work more closely with General Brad Elliott and his group, but my home base was still in Palmdale. I visited every chance I could, but Patrick and I were still apart. When they announced the reactivation of the Old Dog project I saw my chance and got assigned to HAWC permanently. What I didn't expect was that Patrick was going to shoot up like he did under General Elliott. Don't misunderstand. I knew Patrick was good, very good, but when I first met him he was, believe it or not , thinking about leaving the Air Force and working his fa mily's business in Sacramento. It's hard to get promoted by just being the best navigator around. And that's all I thought he wanted to be. I was wrong. In two years he went from being just another non-technical test-flight crewmember to a project director. He got promoted so fast you'd think there was a time warp. One year after becoming director of his first program he was made chief of a full-blown flight-test development program with state-of-the-art hardware. In another five or six years he'll 91.

have his first star and probably be chief of HAWC soon after."

Through most of this she'd been looking down into her napkin.

Now she looked up abruptly. "God, if I sound like I'm com- plaining, I'm not. Or I don't mean to. Just for the record, I happen to love McLanahan even more than I respect him ...

Okay, enough of me, what about you? There's an army of ladies in Vegas waiting to snag someone like you. When are you going to ta ke the fall?

He laughed. "The right woman is hard to find, even in the sun belt."

"But you're having a good time looking, right?"

"I confess ... I'm not suffering." It had gone well, very well, he thought.

The waiter reappeared with the check and a message.

"Helicopter's on its way," he said. "We should head back."

As they waited on the helicopter landing pad a few minutes later, Wendy took a deep breath of warm yucca-scented desert air and looked out at the mountains surrounding the tiny base.

"I enjoyed it, Ken. The lunch and the talk. I haven't gone on like this for a long time. Thanks."

"We'll do it again some time."

"I don't want you to spend too many weekends refinishing some chopper pilot's boat. "

"Believe me," he said, watching her, "it's worth it."

Yes, she could be another source of information . . . on the new ECM gear, for example.

t East Las Vegas, Nevada Wednesday, 10 June 1996, 2007 PDT (2307 EDT) MARAKLOV DIDN'T RETURN to his condominium in the east Las Vegas subdivision of Frenchman Mountain until late that night.

The early start and the intense flying had taken their toll, and the lectures he had received from McLanahan and Elliott dur- ing the long debriefing didn't help.

He locked his car in the carport, took his briefcase, and trudged upstairs to his second-story entranceway. He wasn't able to get on the Dolphin helicopter back to Nellis and had to bump along in the electric shuttle bus from Dreamland to Nellis. Then twenty hot, steamy minutes on the freeway just to go four exits in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Maybe a cold shower, a cold beer, a casino run.

He punched his code in the lock's keypad. The door was al- ready unlocked. He pushed it open a crack. No lights on. The lights were programmed to come on in the evening when the door was opened. Someone had overridden the programming.

Someone was inside his apartment . . .

All he had for a weapon was his briefcase. Maybe he should have gotten out of there and called the cops, but the less he had to do with them, the better. He reached through the door and flicked on the lights. He strained against the faint street noises behind him but heard no sounds from inside. He flung the door open, letting it bang on the doorstep. Still no sounds.

He slowly crossed the threshold, looked down the hallway into the living room. Stereo, TV, VCR all in place. Of course, 93.

a burglar was the last thing he was worried about-he'd almost welcome that. There were others more dangerous.

He moved to the fireplace, picked up a poker and made a fast search of the apartment. Nothing. No sign of forcible entry, nothing missing. One more place to check.

He stood up on a stool and removed six books from the top shelf of the built-in bookshelves in the living room. On the back wall of the bookshelf he pressed on a board and a section sprang open about a half inch, revealing a panel hiding the steel door to a small wall safe. He had installed the safe himself shortly after moving into the apartment-one of the precautions he had taken years earlier, along with carefully arranging things in his drawers to help detect intruders, when he got his assignment to Las Vegas.

Instead of opening the hidden panel fully, he reached behind the panel with one finger and disconnected a wire leading from the door inside to the combination safe behind the panel. The wire was connected to an incendiary device inside the safe; if the door had been opened more than a finger's width the device inside the safe would incinerate the contents. The safe obviously had not been- A faint, lingering odor. Cigarettes, or an old stale cigar. He did not smoke. He turned . . .

"Sloppy of you, Captain James. " The voice came from be- hind him. He braced along the wall. A quick leap, a hard push and- He heard the metallic click, and another voice: "Come down from there, Maraklov, before you hurt yourself, or worse."

Slowly he replaced the trip wire on the safe's hidden panel, closed it and stepped off the stool. Turning, he saw two men, one standing directly behind him holding a weapon, the other man seated on his sofa. He noted the weapon-not a pistol but a taser, a gun that shot small electrified darts. The darts, con- nected to the taser gun by a thin wire, were charged with twenty thousand volts at low amperage with the press of a trigger, caus- ing instant paralysis. The dart only buried itself a fraction of an inch into the skin, but with a strong electric current from the taser short-circuiting the victim's nervous system, he was pow- erless to pull or shake it free. A potent weapon-quiet, effective but non-lethal. That last encouraged Maraklov. They wanted him, but they didn't want him dead.

94 .

He turned to the man on the couch. Henry Kramer was fif- tyish, short, bulky but not fat, thin dark hair and beady eyes.

He was dressed in a dark ill-fitting suit with a thin dark tie, looking too much a caricature of what he was-a conniving So- viet KGB agent, far more serious and dangerous than he looked.

"What are you doing here, Kramer? " Maraklov tried to control his anger as he also looked at the younger man with the taser. "Put that away. Look, you people are crazy to come here-"

Moffitt, the younger agent, lowered the taser but did not put it down. "We were worried about you, Captain James. And you should have locked our door before searching your apartment.

We not only were able to get behind you, but found out where your safe is. You seem to be getting complacent . . . "

Maraklov forced himself to answer. He locked the front door closed the blinds and began replacing books on the shelf. -No@ what are you really doing here?"

"Captain," Kramer said, "people are displeased. The infor- mation stream you have been supplying has become a trickle."

"I told you why in my last report. Perhaps you've not had time to read it. They're cracking down on security at HAWC like never before. Major Briggs has been given the widest leeway to stop security leaks, and they've been promised full cooperation from the federal judges in Las Vegas. That means not only searches of military property at Dreamland and Nellis but legal searches of private non-military residences too. They could even get, probably have gotten, authority for wiretapping, no-knock searches and arrests at any time. I thought it was Briggs in here already. "

"We have connections at the federal courthouse," Kramer said. "If there has been cooperation between the military and the federal courts I'm sure' an anonymous tip to the Las Vegas papers will stir things up. A report about widespread military authority to search private residences? They go crazy over such things here. Especially the press. Our perestroika caught some of it." Kramer studied Maraklov. "Are you saying tightened security is your reason for not supplying one photograph of the XF-34A fighter plane or its components in over three weeks?"

"They haven't let me be alone with the plane or its technical data since then. I was able to be alone with a set of the aircrafts technical layouts a week ago but discovered an unusual change 95.

in the schematics that I didn't understand ... a dogtooth mod- ification to the wings-"

"A what?"

"A special wing design that creates two differently perfon-n- ing wing structures on one surface. On a mission-adaptive wing like DreamStar's, the dogtooth might increase its capabilities twenty percent."

"A significant development indeed," Moffitt said. "Why didn't you report this? If they left you alone with the specifica- tions why did you not photograph them?"

James turned to him. "Because I think it's a fake. Or it could be. A plant. A trick. They may want me to see the dogtooth wing-and then they want to see if the dogtooth shows up on a satellite photograph of a Russian fighter at Ramenskoye or in a supposedly secure telephone message to Moscow. The dogtooth looks like a notch in the wings and is visible on satellite pho- tography. It's not just me. I'm sure they showed something dif- ferent to each of the key players-a tail modification drawing to Powell, a nozzle mod to Butler . . . Major Briggs probably cooked up dozens of these tests for security leaks. Mine was the dogtooth . . . "