Cover of Darkness Read online

The interior of the communications van was painted the color of tinned peas. One end was laid out as a Ready Room, with a teletype and a scrambler terminal. The near wall was a bank of monitoring and recording devices, hooded screens, computer readouts, and calibrating equipment, manned by U.S. Air Force personnel.

  The opposite wall was given over to an eight-foot-square display map of northern Europe and the Baltic, sandwiched in plexiglass and backlit. There was a radar grid laid over the map to a radius of two hundred nautical miles out from Berlin, at the center. The plexiglass was criss-crossed with dotted lines in colored grease pencil, red, yellow, blue, and green, aircraft headings marked with numbers and times. The colors were fluorescent. McElroy understood that the map board showed the course of the Air Defense exercise up to the time the Russians had lost their plane. The route of that aircraft was indicated in black, with an X in the river.

  Major Jacobson led them to the far end of the operations area where a small work station had been set up.

  “Aircraft carry electronic systems with specific signatures,” the major said. “An onboard radar, for example, sends out signals of a certain frequency, and we can analyze those characteristics to identify it. Before the crash we were able to record some signals from the aircraft, but they don’t indicate anything we recognize. That plane is equipped with a new radar, perhaps being tested for the first time.”

  “Which might explain why it crashed,” BRINE said.

  Jacobson smiled. “It just might,” he said. He took a diagram out of his folder. It was a three-view schematic perspective of an aircraft---side, top, and full-face views---with dimensions to scale and a block of text elucidating technical data running along the margins. “This is a Yakovlev prototype Soviet fighter-bomber,” the major told them. “The airframe has been adapted to long-range, all-weather interceptor capacity and given the interim NATO designation FIREFLY. We believe this is the aircraft that crashed, but we don’t have an accurate profile. We know next to nothing about this plane, and it appears the Russians have dropped one right in our laps.”

  Adrian switched on a high-intensity drafting light and positioned it over a large graph.

  “This is a chart of a four mile stretch of the river Havel,” he said. “Point of impact, here. The width of the river is from five to six hundred meters shore to shore, but fifteen hundred or so meters downstream it narrows to a bottleneck with an attendant Bernoulli effect. The current picks up rapidly. Russian troops are stationed on both banks of the river some five hundred yards north and south of the crash site. Our present position is a little over a thousand meters upstream.”

  McElroy pursed his lips and let out a deep breath. “You want us to thread the needle,” he said.

  “Support personnel?” BRINE asked Kim Adrian.

  “We’ve brought in an underwater demolition team from Malta,” Adrian told him. “You’re to brief them only with regard to the job at hand, not its significance.”

  BRINE consulted his watch. “Best get to it,” he said.

  McElroy shrugged.

  The two men went outside and crunched across the frosted ground in the eddying snow to the canteen, marked with the broad A of the British army. An infantry corporal drew them strong, scalding tea from a spigot into paper-thin tin cups. The metal conducted the heat and scorched their palms, and both of them passed their cups back and forth from hand to hand, blowing off the rising steam.

  “What do you make of it?” BRINE asked him.

  “Could be worse,” McElroy said.

  “Tricky stretch of water, that,” BRINE remarked.

  McElroy nodded, sipping his tea thoughtfully.

  “You want to throw for who goes first?” BRINE asked.

  McElroy smiled. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’m wondering now what kind of fish we’ve got on the line.”

  “Mind you’re not the bait,” the Welshman said.