Marta just stared at her—cherubic cheeks and straight blond Dutch hair hanging in bangs that ended just above the eyes. “I need to borrow Henry for a moment, my dear.”
“Oh . . . Okay, I—”
Clarke nodded, stuffing one more piece of steak into his mouth. “Back in a sec.”
Marta led Clarke toward a private room in the back of the busy restaurant. Her eyes swept the place. “I’m shocked to find you in a place like this. An overpriced strip mall.”
“What can I say? She chose it.”
“Ah, I see. Was it near her school?”
“Ha, ha. You know, it’s very uncool to just keep showing up with little or no warning.”
Marta brought them into the private room as two suited gentlemen in her security detail closed the doors behind them. The room was empty. “The schedule has changed. There’s word of some rogue element loose out there that could corrupt the message. Before that happens, we need to be ready.”
“When, ready?”
“Like whenever I say. Tomorrow. The day after. Whenever means whenever. Can your people deliver?”
Clarke sighed deeply. “Christ, I thought you told me ‘have patience.’ What happened to patience?”
“We don’t have time for patience. The situation has changed, Henry. Serious people are on the move. So say good-night to your little friend and get your ass to the office. Be prepared to man a crisis center for the next few days.”
Clarke nodded. “Okay. All right, I’ll gather the troops.” He paused as something occurred to him. “This ‘rogue element’—they don’t think we’re actually behind the . . . ‘troubles,’ I hope?”
“Even if they did think so, it will shortly be moot. Let the serious people deal with that. Ours is a struggle for messaging supremacy, and we need to win.”
“About them thinking we’re behind this . . . was that a yes or a no?”
CHAPTER 17
Safari-One-Six
Linda McKinney had never ridden in the cargo bay of a C-130, and now that she had, it wasn’t something she looked forward to repeating. The cavernous space reeked of jet fuel and the hydraulic fluid and oil from past vehicular cargo. Then there was the roar of aircraft engines. But at least on that last point, the team used wireless Etymotic headphones to reduce the noise and permit conversation. The headphones were also tapped into the pilot’s address system, not that much info had been forthcoming from the flight deck. “Prepare for takeoff” had been about it.
After a while McKinney switched the headphones off, enjoying the unearthly silence. Looking around in the red-light semidarkness she could see the team sitting in jump seats to either side of the cargo bay, or moving about, checking on equipment. Foxy and Tin Man were cleaning assault weapons. She could see Foxy’s African kora sitting atop a pile of gear—at least he’d managed to salvage that from the abandoned SubTropolis facility.
Farther forward Hoov was clicking away at a laptop. The aircraft’s loadmaster was double-checking static lines and conferring with the flight engineer—who was busy moving about on other inscrutable duties. There was also some sort of signals workstation set up against the forward bulkhead, with twin flat screens showing radar and other sensor data. Two airmen in headsets sat there, monitoring and talking on radios.
McKinney sat by herself on one of the uncomfortable DayGlo nylon webbing jump seats. Like everyone else she wore an insulated gray aircrew jumpsuit to help keep back the cold, and cold it was. McKinney occasionally exhaled just to see how much vapor she could create. The cargo hold was pressurized, and she knew they had heaters, so she was unclear why they were keeping the temperature so low.
She’d spent the past hour trying to figure out their cargo. It looked like a gray fumigation tent folded and strapped onto a double-wide pallet that stood near the middle of the hold. Steel cables snaked from it into neatly rolled and bound coils on the floor, and then stretched to another, half-height pallet of solid concrete. This was apparently some sort of deadweight. McKinney guessed it was a parachute linked to a concrete weight, although the precise purpose of it escaped her. There were high-tension cables locking the concrete slab into place, along with some sort of quick-release lever. There were also a couple of pallets of equipment and supplies cocooned in plastic wrap farther forward that obviously weren’t meant to be deployed in midair, since they didn’t have static lines attached.
They’d been airborne for nearly an hour when McKinney noticed Odin emerge from the narrow door at the front left of the cargo hold with two paper cups of coffee. He approached and extended one to her.