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"No one expects miracles."
Pitt said, "Well?"
"Well what?"
"We fall from the sky and play hide-and-seek with Suma's robots while the three pros sneak in through a sixty-kilometer tunnel?" Any hint of irritation, incredulity, and despair was contained with great force of will by Pitt. "That's the plan? That's all there is?"
"Yes," Penner said, self-consciously avoiding Pitt's blazing stare.
"Your pals in Washington must have drawn that brilliant piece of creativity out of a fortune cookie."
In his mind, Pitt never doubted his decision. If there was the slightest chance Loren was held prisoner on the island, he would go.
"Why can't you simply cut off their power source on the mainland?" asked Giordino.
"Because the control center is entirely self-sustaining," replied Penner. "It has its own generating station."
Pitt looked at Giordino. "What do you say, big Al?"
"That resort have geishas?"
"Suma has a reputation for hiring only beautiful women," Penner answered with a faint smile.
Pitt asked, "How do we fly in without being blown out of the sky?"
Penner smiled a smile that seemed to portend something good for a change. "Now that part of the plan has an A-number-one gilt-edge rating for success."
"It had better," said Pitt with ice in his opaline eyes. "Or somebody's going to get hurt real bad."
As Penner had suggested, being shot down in flames was not a likely prospect. The ultralight power gliders that Pitt and Giordino were to fly off the landing pad of the U.S. Navy detection and tracking ship Ralph R. Bennett looked like pint-sized Stealth bombers. They were painted a dark gray and sported the same weird Buck Rogers shape that made them impossible to see on radar.
They sat like alien bugs under the shadow of the ship's giant box-shaped phased-array radar. The six-story-high system was composed of 18,000 antenna elements that collected a wide range of intelligence data on Soviet missile tests with an incredible degree of accuracy. The Ralph R. Bennett had been pulled away from its mission near the Kamchatka Peninsula by presidential order to launch the power gliders and monitor activity in and around Soseki Island.
Lieutenant Commander Raymond Simpson, a man on the young side of thirty with sun-bleached blond hair, stood next to the men from NUMA on the open deck. There was an air of capable toughness about him as he kept a tight eye on his maintenance crew, who swarmed around the tiny aircraft fueling tanks and examining instruments and controls.
"Think we can manage without a check flight?" Pitt asked.
"A piece of cake for old Air Force pilots like yourselves," answered Simpson lightly. "Once you get the hang of flying while lying on your stomach, you'll wish you could take one home and keep it for your personal use."
Pitt had never laid eyes on one of the odd ultralight craft until he and Giordino landed on the ship by an Osprey tilt-motor aircraft an hour before. Now after only forty minutes of class instruction, they were supposed to fly them over a hundred kilometers of open sea and make an injury-free landing on the dangerously rugged surface of Soseki Island.
"How long have these birds been around?" Giordino queried.
"The Ibis X-Twenty," Simpson corrected him, "is fresh off the drawing boards."
"Oh, God," groaned Giordino. "They're still experimental."
"Quite so. They haven't completed their testing program. Sorry I couldn't have given you something more proven, but your people in Washington were in an awful rush, insisting we deliver them halfway across the world in eighteen hours and all."
Pitt said consideringly, "They do fly, naturally?"
"Oh, naturally," Simpson said enthusiastically. "I've got ten hours' flying time in them myself. Super aircraft. Designed for one-man reconnaissance flights. Powered by the very latest in compact turbine engines that provide a three-hundred-kilometer-per-hour cruising speed with a range of a hundred twenty kilometers. The Ibis is the most advanced power glider in the world."
"Maybe when you get discharged you can open up a dealership," Giordino said dryly.
"Don't I wish," said Simpson without feeling the barb.
