Sea of Fire by Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Jeff Rovin Read Free Book Online Page B

removed a small point-to-point radio from his belt. Lady was pleasant, efficient, and uninformative. Unacceptably so. Coffey refused to follow the young man into the hangar.
    “Petty Officer Lady, before I board the aircraft, I would appreciate some information,” Coffey said. “Specifically, I’d like to know why I’m going with you.” He had to speak loudly to be heard over the forklifts that were moving barrels and containers.
    “I’m sorry, sir,” the young man replied. “I can’t tell you that.”
    “Then I can’t go with you,” Coffey insisted.
    “No, sir. I mean I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” Lady said. “What I can do, sir, is put you in touch with my CO if you’d like. But I can assure you that he doesn’t know anything more than I do. This is a Level Alpha operation. Information is on a need-to-know basis.”
    “Well, I need to know, and so do my superiors,” Coffey said. He held up his cell phone and wiggled it back and forth. “What do I tell them?”
    “Sir, I wish I could help you. But that information is at the other end of a two-hour flight,” Lady said. He held up his own radio. “What shall I tell the pilot, sir? He is waiting to take off.”
    If the kid had wiggled the radio, the attorney would have turned around and left. But he did not. He was respectful. And he had effectively called Coffey’s bluff.
    The American turned to Penny.
    “It looks like I’ll be taking a two-hour flight,” he said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have some idea what’s going on.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Penny said.
    “I do,” Coffey said. “I just hope this isn’t an elaborate Ellsworth plot to keep me from giving a speech.”
    “He’s a duck-shover,” she said, “but if that turns out to be the case, just E-mail me the speech. I’ll read it for you.”
    Coffey thanked her and indicated for Petty Officer Lady to lead him to the plane.
    “Duck-shover?” he said, turning back to Penny.
    “My dad drove a taxi,” the woman shouted ahead. “That’s what they used to call drivers who cut other taxis off or muscled them out of the way.”
    “I love it!” Coffey called back, waving as he headed toward the back of the hangar and the door that led to the field.
    The Lockheed P-3C was a big, gray, cigar-shaped four-engine prop plane. It was 116 feet in length with a wing-span of nearly 100 feet. Coffey had only been in a prop plane once before, when he traveled with the regional Op-Center mobile office to the Middle East. He had not liked the noise and vibration then. He did not think he would like it now.
    Because this was a transport mission, not travel to a combat zone, the P-3C had gone out without a tactical coordinator. The TACCO’s station was located in the rear of the aircraft. After Petty Officer Lady turned Coffey over to the crew, the captain gave him the coordinator’s seat. According to the pilot, it was the warmest, most comfortable place in the plane. The plane was taxiing before Coffey had even buckled himself in to the threadbare red seat.
    The attorney faced the port side as the aircraft rumbled its way into the air. He was sitting in a cubicle shaped like half a pentagon. The sun-faded blue metal walls were covered with displays, buttons, and old-fashioned switches and dials. Coffey sat with his back to the open window as the sun burned across his neck and the equipment. An hour ago, if Coffey had to guess all the places he could conceivably have found himself this morning, the rear end of a Royal Australian Navy patrol craft would have been nowhere on the list.
    The strangeness of it all was outweighed by Coffey’s curiosity as to what he would find on the other end. The attorney was thrilled by the fact that he was in the right place to do something about whatever this was. He relished the opportunity and the challenge. It reinforced one of his strongest convictions: that an individual did not have to be in the big, bulging belly of politics