Parallax View by Allan Leverone Read Free Book Online Page B

couch
while watching a soccer match on the apartment’s black and white television,
and now worried she may have missed her flight.
    Ten-ten. Shit. She’d have to hurry, but would probably make it. If she timed it right, she might
even manage coffee. Dinner she could take or leave, but the thought of
departing Ramstein for a long flight to the States without an invigorating jolt
of caffeine was unacceptable.
    She threw her
clothing into a small canvas bag—traveling light was second nature to Tracie
Tanner after seven years of CIA service—and slid Mikhail Gorbachev’s letter
carefully into the interior breast pocket of her light jacket. Then she rushed
out of the apartment, jumped into her car, and drove onto the base.
    She dumped the CIA
car outside a small commissary adjacent to the airfield, hid the keys under the
front seat, and hustled inside. She passed a pair of young airmen who made no
attempt to hide their admiration of her running figure. She ignored them. They
didn’t have coffee. Besides, she had long since gotten used to men staring at
her. Also ogling her, leering at her and propositioning her.
    Tracie checked her
watch. Twenty-five minutes until her flight’s scheduled departure. She choked
down her coffee. It was scalding hot and almost undrinkably strong, just the
way she liked it. Then she grabbed her bag, checked for her precious cargo—the
letter was still there—and then double-timed to the airfield. Someone would
retrieve the car later.
    Tracie had been
instructed to check in at Hangar Three, and now she slowed her pace about a
hundred feet from the door, walking onto the tarmac at precisely 10:55 p.m.
Outside the hangar, a gigantic green U.S. Air Force B-52 towered above her, the
eight-engine high-wing jet appearing almost impossibly large. It had to be
close to two hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip, and the fuselage soared high
above like some kind of fabricated metal dinosaur. The notion of the huge hunk
of metal ever getting airborne, much less staying that way and flying all the
way to the United States seemed outlandish, some kind of magic trick or optical
illusion.
    Tracie had logged
endless hours aboard dozens of different aircraft, from medevac helicopters to
Boeing 747’s, during her tenure as a CIA covert ops specialist, but had never
been aboard a B-52. The sheer enormity of the aircraft was staggering. From
where she stood, it looked like every other aircraft she had ever flown aboard
could fit inside this behemoth. The wings thrusting outward from the top of the
aircraft’s fuselage seemed to go on forever, swept back and hanging down slightly,
as if the weight of the eight jet engines hanging in clusters of two was simply
more than they could bear. The fuselage itself stretched off into the distance;
to Tracie’s eye it appeared nearly as long as the wing span was wide.
    She froze in
place, marveling at the engineering miracle perched atop its tiny-looking
wheels. She could feel her jaw hanging open and closed it, embarrassed. She
felt like a country bumpkin on her first visit to the big city.
    Standing directly
in front of—and far below—the nose of the huge aircraft was an officer,
probably late-thirties, handsome in a grizzled, seen-it-all way. He had
obviously been awaiting her arrival, and he smiled at her reaction to the B-52.
“May I see your ID, ma’am?” he asked.
    Tracie handed it
over, shaking her head in mute admiration of the aircraft.
    The officer said,
“We get that a lot from people who have never been up close to a BUFF before.
It’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?”
    “That’s an
understatement,” Tracie answered.
    The officer handed
Tracie’s ID back and said, “I’m Major Stan Wilczynski, and I’ll be Pilot in
Command for today’s flight. I’ll introduce you to the rest of the crew
shortly.”
    She returned the
Major’s smile. “I’ll bite,” she said. “What’s ‘BUFF’?” Other than you, she
wanted to add, wondering how long it