The Tin Man by Dale Brown

safety and the reputation and quality of this company, the company that I founded, not
you.
I’m going to trade in and sell my stock options and start Sky Sciences Inc. again, and this time I won’t let you or anyone else tell me how to run it, no matter how much of a whiz kid they might be. Good-bye, Jon. I’ll see you in the funny papers—or in the obituaries. You’re sure to end up in either place.” And she slammed the receiver home.
    The slam reverberated through the loudspeakers around the old rocket test site like a 155-millimeter howitzer shot. A sheepish Masters looked at the faces of the stunned and amused technicians around him.
    “That crazy kid—she’s still in love with me,”he said, though his characteristic boyish grin was strained. He took a swallow of Pepsi from his squeeze bottle and tried to walk nonchalantly back to his mobile control bunker. “She’ll be back—she still loves me,” they could hear him muttering.
    He was still in a daze when he entered the bunker, so he didn’t even notice the two strangers in black battle-dress uniforms. He went to his little cubicle, put his feet up on the desk, and punched up a digitized video replay of the test, complete with telemetry readouts. But he really wasn’t watching the replay—he was thinking about Helen. The two men approached the cubicle, and the first one raised two fingers out of his belt as if drawing a pistol from a holster, aimed it at Masters, and mimicked pulling the trigger. Still no reaction. “Shee-it, Doc,” said Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Harold Briggs, “killin’ you wouldn’t even be no fun.”
    Masters whirled around. Standing behind him was a wiry, medium-tall black man wearing a wide grin on his face and a big pearl-handled 45 Colt on his hip. Beside him was a tall, powerfully built white man as dour as Briggs was cheerful, as muscular as Briggs was lean. “Hal Briggs! Gunnery Sergeant Wohl!” Masters exclaimed. “What are you guys doing here?”
    “Our two Pave Hammer aircraft are getting overhauled up at McClellan Air Force Base north of Sacramento,” Briggs explained. The MV-22 Pave Hammer was a tilt-rotor aircraft that could take off, land, and hover like a helicopter, but had the speed and load-carrying capability of a cargo plane. The Pave Hammer variant of the V-22 Osprey was specially designed for high-risk, low-level flight into enemy territory. “McClellan is the only facility that has the equipment to service them. They do all the depot-level maintenance for the F-117 Night Hawkstealth fighter-bombers here too, so once the Air Force gets done overhauling and test-flying the stealth fighters, they work on our gear. It’s all classified, by the way. Not just ISA, but the F-l 17’s too.
    “Anyway, we heard you were nearby doing some kind of demonstration, and of course when we found out what it was we hotfooted over here. Madcap Magician is very interested in BERP. Of course, everyone in ISA thinks BERP is a joke, so they sent me and Gunny;”
    Masters realized why Hal Briggs was so chatty—there was no one else in the bunker to overhear them. The ISA—the Intelligence Support Agency—was a subdivision of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations. When a CIA agent in the field gets in trouble, the directorate calls on the ISA to help extract a friend, rescue an agent, create diversions, find targets, neutralize enemy defenses, or engage many other covert actions.
    The ISA is broken down into action groups, or cells, comprised of members from military, civilian, and government specialties; the cells are so secret that one ISA cell would not recognize another. Colonel Hal Briggs was the commander of one such cell, code-named Madcap Magician. Composed mostly of former or active-duty Force Recon Marines, Madcap Magician was usually called upon for high-risk operations deep within enemy territory. Jon Masters had worked with the group on many projects. They liked using Sky Masters,