It was that simple. Lock, launch, and get the hell out of the airspace, as the MIG jumped apart in a nasty popcorn of flash and ash.
"Bogie splashed," Ayres said, his voice thin.
"Roger. Stay out there."
"Any others?"
"Negative on other bogies."
"Roger," said Captain William "Trusty" Ayres, who had now tasted combat and wondered why the taste was so metallic.
Chapter 4
Dr. Harold W. Smith controlled the most powerful computer network on the face of the earth.
Not the most advanced. There were supercomputers far more advanced than Smith's. Nor the largest. Smith had only a quartet of mainframes at his disposal. Oddly enough, they were secreted behind a concrete wall in the basement of his place of work.
Nor were Harold Smith's computers the fastest. Nor the newest. Modern technology had long outstripped their microprocessors and old-style integrated circuits.
But they were powerful. In this case, knowledge was power. Thirty years of maintaining the system-which had been upgraded often in the early years, but seldom these days for security reasons-had filled its vast memory banks with highly specialized data of specific value to Smith and his work. Long years of toiling behind his shabby oak desk under the shaky fluorescent lights in his Spartan office that overlooked Long Island Sound had enabled Harold Smith to crack virtually every computer net he might have to access in the performance of his duties.
The combined computers of the FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, NASA, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS, on down to the lowliest police department terminal in the most rural corner of the nation, were like open books, waiting to have their electronic pages turned by the unseen fingers of the anonymous Harold W. Smith.
Corporate computers, among the most rigidly controlled and protected, had surrendered their passwords to him long ago.
Government systems, despite continual upgrading and password updating, inevitably fell under the brute-force assaults of his keen analytical mind.
If it could be accessed by telephone line, Harold Smith could enter it.
None of it was, strictly speaking, legal. Smith could, in theory, be sent to prison for penetrating government files and siphoning off their secrets.
But all of it was sanctioned.
For Harold W. Smith was a unique man with a unique responsibility.
Back in the grimmest days of the Cold War, when America was beset with foreign enemies and being systematically corroded from within by domestic troubles, a soon-to-be-martyred President had summoned Smith-then a middle-aged CIA bureaucrat-to the White House to offer him a post that Smith had never heard of.
Officially the post did not exist. It was Director of CURE, a supersecret agency that didn't exist either. In any official sense.
Smith had been chosen because of the unique combination of qualities that had made him uniquely Harold Smith. His unswerving loyalty to his country. His inflexible sense of responsibility. Perhaps most of all, his lack of imagination. For what a worried President was contemplating was giving a faceless bureaucrat the power to unseat him-if he had the imagination and ruthless ambition to pursue that goal.
Smith had no such ambition. His imagination was virtually nonexistent.
And so it was that he sat behind his shabby desk thirty years later, his patrician nose almost touching the computer terminal that fed off his hidden mainframes, trying to imagine where his enforcement arm and his trainer could be.
He could not. It baffled him. He had clearly instructed Chiun to go to Miami with Remo. To await orders in the Biltmore Hotel.
They were not registered at the Biltmore. Not under any of their usual aliases.
"Are you certain you do not have anyone registered with the first name Remo?" an exasperated Smith had asked the Biltmore desk clerk.
The desk clerk, after patiently deflecting Smith's question, snapped, "We are not a telephone directory." And hung up.
Smith had hung up too. Then he had dialed into the hotel's own computer records. It was part of a chain and its system was connected to the other hotels in the chain, and thus accessible by modem.
Smith paged through the registration file.
There were no Remos. There was no guest whose name suggested an Asian flavor. Remo always retained his first name, owing to his general difficulty with technical details. And Chiun invariably chose a Korean-sounding cover name-when he bothered with a cover name at all.
This odd development had baffled Smith. He wondered if there had been a plane crash. He logged over to the wire services. There had been none. Neither were any of the flights from New York-Remo and Chiun's most recent address-to Miami hung up by delays, according to the airport traffic-control computers he checked.
Smith next accessed Remo's credit card files. Remo had thirty of them under thirty different cover names, all first-named Remo.
None of those nonexistent Remos had used his card to book a flight that morning, Smith determined.
Smith logged off the last of the credit card companies, absently adjusting his rimless glasses.
He was a gray man. Gray was the hue of his dry skin, and gray was the color of his eyes. His hair was more white than gray, but it was still grayish. He wore a gray three-piece suit enlivened only by a green Dartmouth tie.
Even his worn old wedding ring looked somehow colorless.
As he leaned back, his face pale, Harold W. Smith found himself facing a complete dead end. He could not account for the whereabouts of his enforcement arm.
And all hell was breaking loose.
The first call had come from the President of the United States that morning. Smith had picked up the red handset of the dial-less red telephone sitting on his desk in the middle of the first strident ring.
"Smith. We have a problem."
The President was respectful. He was the seventh president Smith had been privileged to serve. They had all been respectful. Not because they feared Smith and his organization, but because they understood how it functioned.
CURE was set up to operate outside of constitutional restrictions. It was answerable to no one. Not even the Executive Branch. The President was the only person outside the organization who knew it existed. To admit there was a CURE would have been tantamount to admitting the Constitution didn't work and the great modern experiment in democracy was a broken, flailing mechanism.
The President was prohibited from ordering Smith to undertake operations. Chief Executives could only suggest missions. That way, there could be no opportunity for a ruthless officeholder to abuse CURE.
Presidential control was limited to one simple instruction: Shut down.
Smith's instructions were clear in that event. The computer files would be erased, the enforcement arm disposed of, and when those details had been attended to Smith was to ingest the poison pill he kept in the watch pocket of his gray vest. It would leave no trace-other than a gray corpse.
And he would execute this order without hesitation. Because he was Harold Smith. Every President for the last thirty years had known this, and so none had given the order to shut down.
And so this latest President was saying in a reserved tone of respect, "I have something you might want to look into."
"Go ahead, Mr. President," said Smith with equal respect.
"Someone has just tried to invade Cuba."