Free The Circle War by Mack Maloney Page A

brewing?" Frost asked.
    Again, Hunter was silent for a few seconds. He had given it a lot of thought in the past few hours, though he had to admit, some of the answers literally popped into his head from nowhere. He now had theories on most of the recent mysteries, both on the west coast and on the east —all except one.
    "Okay, let's look at these one at a time," he began. "First, we have a patrol boat who reports something strange and sends out an SOS. By the time we get there, they're gone. Now, whatever it was, it had to be a ship that attacked them. Yet the Wreckers didn't see anything else floating around out there."
    "True," one of the F-4 pilots confirmed.
    "Okay," Hunter continued. "Maybe it was a submarine. Maybe it was a bunch of submarines. By the way the patrol boat captain was talking, he might have sailed right into a school of them."
    "Or a wolf pack," Dozer interjected.
    "Exactly," Hunter said. "They can't blast the patrol boat out of the water because they know we could probably find it and figure it was hit by a torpedo, or a Harpoon-type ship-to-ship missile, or even a deck gun.
    "So what do they do? They jam the boat's radio transmission, then they board her and either kidnap ' the crew or throw them overboard."
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    "We never saw any bodies," a Wrecker said.
    "Right, too messy," Hunter agreed. "So maybe those guys were taken alive."
    He paused for a moment, then continued. "Now, how about what went down in Vegas? What the hell exploded out there and why would anyone want to blow a mile wide crater in the middle of the desert?
    "Well, how about this: We assumed it was done on purpose. Suppose it wasn't.
    Suppose it was an accident?"
    "Accident?" Twomey asked.
    "Sure," Hunter answered. "Why not? Someone moving a whole lot of ammunition.
    Something goes wrong. Boom! Everyone is blown into smithereens and the place looks like an A-bomb went off."
    The rest of the officers around the table nodded in agreement. It was possible.
    "How about what Fitzie's guys have been seeing, Hawk?" Twomey asked. "Lights floating over the Great Lakes?"
    "Not floating, really," Hunter said. "More like soaring."
    "You mean . . . like gliding?" Dozer asked.
    "I mean exactly that," Hunter said. "They could have been gliders, released somewhere outside the Canadian radar net. Shit, if you launched a glider high enough, with the winds over the Lakes, it could fly for hundreds of miles.
    Granted, it would have to be pressurized and winterized and whatever else."
    "But it's not impossible," Frost said.
    "But what's in these gliders?" Wa wanted to know.
    "Could be anything," Hunter continued. "But my 81
    guess is troops. At the very least, officers and advisors. Sure, a few years ago we know the Soviets could disguise one of their big planes as being 'East European,' load it up with troops and fly right into the Aerodrome. But they knew then, and they know now, that with our intelligence network, we'd be on those airplanes as soon as they touched down and we'd stay with them the whole way.
    "But how do you do it when you don't want anyone to see or hear you? Sneaking in fighters is one thing. And maybe there are weapons and ammo on the subs. A sub you can dock in any number of places around the continent without a soul seeing you. But bringing in troops —raw manpower—on the QT, well, that takes some doing."
    "Jesus Christ!" Dozer said, putting the pieces together. "Are you saying they're sneaking a whole Goddamned army into the country!"
    Hunter nodded gravely. "They're not doing this just to harass us. They've been doing that kind of Mickey Mouse stuff ever since the armistice. This is big time. Serious stuff."
    He paused. "I think what we've feared most is underway and has been underway for some time.
    "The Russians are invading America."
    "But, wait a minute," Toomey said. "What happened at Way Out, or the guardsmen's post?"
    "You mean, 'Horses,' " Hunter asked. "I'm still working on that one. But we do know this much. Two men