Piranha

by Dale Brown

“Stoner?” she said.

  Nothing.

  “Stoner?”

  Engine two—” Chris started to tell her the engine had just died, but it was unnecessary—the thump jerked her so hard she nearly let go of the stick.

  “Manage our fuel,” she told him. “Fentress—where’s Stoner?”

  “He’s here, he’s here—his radio’s out. He’s ready.”

  “Crew, we’re going out on three. I have the master eject, authorization Breanna Rap Bastian Stockard One One Rap One,” she told the computer in her level voice.

  The computer didn’t answer, as if it were hesitating , as if it didn’t want to lose its crew. Then it came back and repeated the authorization. All the seats would now be ejected when she pulled her handle; the Dreamland system would greatly increase the probability they could find each other after the chutes deployed.

  “The weather’s hell out there,” she told her men. “Let the chutes deploy automatically. Just enjoy the ride.”

  Given the intensity of the storm they were flying into, it was probably suicidal to go out now. She reached for the throttle slide, pushing for more speed, hoping to maybe get beyond the storm, or at least through the worst of it.

  “Fire in the Gat compartment,” said Chris. “We’re going to blow.”

  Breanna heard a rumble and then a pop from the rear of the plane. She reached down to the yellow handle at the side of her seat.

  “Three-two-one,” she said quickly, and the universe turned into a tornado.

  Chapter 7

  In the hands of the gods

  Philippines

  August 28, 1997, 1847

  The screen blanked.

  “Get them back,” Zen told Bison.

  “I’m not sure what’s going on,” said the sergeant sitting at the com panel.

  Zen pushed his chair back and then forward at an angle, as if realigning himself would make the picture from Quicksilver reappear.

  “Get them back,” he said again, this time his voice softer.

  “They’re off-line,” said Bison. “They were hit—they may be down.”

  Zen pushed backward and wheeled to the door. One of the two navy people in the trailer said something, but Zen didn’t hear the words and wasn’t about to stop to ask him to repeat them. he had to reach awkwardly to open the door, pushing with his other hand on the wheel; he nearly fell out of his chair and down the ramp as he burst outside, downward momentum the only thing keeping him in the seat. He mastered it, got his balance, and continued to the oversized tent where Major Alou and the rest of the flight crew were just starting to brief for their mission. The fabric sides were rolled up.

  “Merce—Quicksilver is down,” said Zen. “We need Iowa now.”

  Without waiting for Major Alou to acknowledge, he wheeled back onto the path and headed for the aircraft.

  It took nearly twenty minutes for the crew to get the Megafortress airborne. It was totally good time—the plane hadn’t been refueled, and the work on meshing the Piranha and Flighthawk systems was far from complete. Every second stretched to torturous infinity.

  In the air, the buffeting pressure of the fresh storm system held them back. Zen launched the Flighthawk and pushed ahead, scanning through the thick rain even though they were still a hundred miles from the coordinates of Quicksilver’s last voice transmission. Other resources were being scrambled from the fleet, but at the moment they were the only ones on the scene, and certainly Bree’s best chance.

  The storm was so severe, both the Chinese and Indians had landed all of their planes. The thick cloud cover made it impossible for satellites to scan the ocean, and at points Zen had a difficult time separating the waves from the much he was flying through. Ten miles from the gray splatch of sky where Quicksilver had been lost, he felt his arms and shoulders sag. Zen leaned his head forward. The fatigue nearly crushed him, pounding his temples. He saw Bree on their wedding day, the blue and pink flowered dress tight against her hips in the small chapel. Her mouth trembled ever so slightly, and when the minister had her repeat the words of the vows, she hesitated over “richer or poorer.”

  Did not, she said that night, cuddled against his arms.

  Did too, he told her.

  Didn’t, she said a thousand times later.

  Too, he replied.

  But there’d been no hesitation on sickness. Ever.

  “Commencing visual search.” Zen tightened his grip on the U/MF’s control and pushed the plane through a reef of wind and rain. Clouds came at him in a tumble of fists; the small plane knifed back and forth as it fell toward the dark ocean. Finally, he broke through the worst of it, though this was only a matter of degree; at three thousand feet he found a solid sheet of rain. Leveling off, Zen gingerly nudged off his power. Not exactly optimized for slow flight in the best weather, the U/MF had trouble staying stable under two hundred knots in the shifting winds. Zen had his hands and head full, constantly adjusting to stay on the flight path. But he needed to go as slow as possible, since it increased the video’s resolution and, more importantly, the computer’s ability to scan the fleeting images for signs of the survivors.

  At least concentrating on flying meant he couldn’t think about anything else.

  “Coming to the end of our search track,” said the copilot above.

  “Roger that. Turning,” said Zen.

  Zen selected IR view. The rain was too thick for it to fight through, and finally he decided to flip back to the optical view. Two long circuits took them slightly to the north. Iowa’s look-down radar fought through the storm to scan the roiling waves, but the conditions were severe. Zen punched over the waves at just under a thousand feet, convinced the U/MF’s video cams—and his eyes—were the best tools they had, at least for now.

  A distress call came over the UHF circuit as one of the Sukhois ran out of fuel before he could complete a landing on his storm-shrouded carrier.

  “Poor shit,” said somebody over the interphone circuit without thinking.

  Yeah, thought Zen to himself. Poor shit. Then he pushed the Flighthawk lower to the ocean.

  Los Angeles International Airport

  August 27, 1997, 0600 local (August 28, 2100 Philippines)

  Flying as a passenger on a civilian airliner was bad enough, but Colonel Bastian had the bad luck to draw an overly talkative seventy-year-old as a seatmate. The woman spent roughly an hour detailing the cruise she had just been on; when that topic was exhausted, she moved on to the wallpaper she was putting in her bathroom, and finally the oranges she had ordered for her daughter’s upcoming birthday. Dog was too polite to tell her to shut up. By the time he got off the plane, his ear had a permanent buzz; he knew if he checked in a mirror it would be red.

  He hadn’t decided how to get over to Edwards; thinking he might rent a car and drive, he headed in the direction of the Hertz booth. On the way, his eye caught the fleeting text on a TV screen set to deliver headline news.

  “Fighting breaks out between China and India,” said the words.

  Dog stopped so abruptly, a short man walking behind him bumped into him with his suitcase. Instead of accepting the man’s apology, he asked where the phones were.

  “Major Ascenzio has a jet en route,” said Ax when Dog dialed into Dreamland. “I’ll transfer you down to him for the details.”

  “Thanks, Ax.”

  “Colonel, one thing—Breanna was aboard the plane.”

  “What plane?” Dog asked.

  For the first time since he’d known him, Chief Master Sergeant Terrence “Ax” Gibbs was lost for words.

  “What plane?” Dog demanded when he didn’t answer.

  “Quicksilver is down, sir.”

  Aboard Iowa, over the South China Sea

  2308

  Twice Zen thought he found something, but the brief flickers from the computer proved to be anomalies. Jennifer Gleason worked the freeze-frames back and forth silently, sometimes calling up the radar and IR scans on her own. But none of th
e sensors picked up anything substantial in the swirling torrent.

  They refueled the small plane three times. Knocking off the refueling probe and diving through the thick storms, Zen felt as if he had plunged back into the underworld, battling the winds of hell. He funneled his eyes into the viewscreen, scanning with the computer, looking, looking, looking. The copilot kept track of the search tracks; his announcements of the approaching turns marked the time like a grandfather clock clanging on the quarter hour.

  Zen saw nothing. The radar found nothing. Still he flew, back and forth across the angry ocean, repeating the tracks.

  In sickness and in health, she’d said. and she’d meant it.

  “Jeff, we’re about three ounces from bingo.” Major Alou’s voice sounded as if he were speaking from the other end of a wide pipe.

  “Where’s our tanker?”

  “There are no tankers,” said Alou. “The storm’s too much and we’re too far. There’s no choice—we have to get down. I’ve already stretched it out.”

  Zen didn’t answer.

  “There’s a Navy P-3 out of Japan due in twenty minutes,” he told him. “They’re going to continue the search. As soon as the carrier can launch more planes, they’ll have another search package out. The F-14’s will stay over the area in the meantime. They’ll hear a transmission.”

  Who the hell would manage to use a radio in this?

  “Jeff, we’ll find her. They will, or we will. But we have to go. We’ll be out of the storm at least, so we can refuel and take off right away. It may be far east. Okay?”

  “Yeah, Roger that.”

  Dreamland

  0936 local

  The flight from LAX to Dreamland was quick—Ax had sent an F-15E, and the pilot, Major Mack Smith, had probably broken the speed barrier twenty feet off the tarmac. Ax met Dog in a Jimmy SUV as the airplane taxied toward the hangar; the truck whipped over to Taj so fast Dog never got his seat belt buckled. Even the notoriously slow elevator seemed to understand this was a real emergency; it started downward three seconds after Dog touched the button for the subbasement level where the command center was located.

  Major Ascenzio, Ray Rubeo, and about a half-dozen mission specialist were waiting for hi,

  Rubeo stepped up and started to talk, telling the colonel they shared his concern for his daughter and the rest of the crew. The scientist was not only sincere, but actually seemed on the brink of becoming emotional—a development so out of character Dog felt worse than before.

  “Thanks, Dog. Thanks, everybody. Let’s get to work. Who’s searching, what have we heard?”

  “Iowa’s just knocking off for fuel,” said Gat. Major Ascenzio reached down to his desk and hit a key; a diagram of the search area appeared on the main screen at the front of the room. They had used data from Quicksilver’s transmission to plot its probably flight path after it was hit. Because of the clouds and Quicksilver’s altitude and position, there was no usable information from the Crystal asset—a KH-12 satellite—covering the area, but there was some possibility a satellite used to monitor missiles launches might have picked up explosions aboard the plane; they had a query in to the Natioanal Reconaissance Office to see. That information might help them tweak their search area, though Gat felt they had a decent handle on it.

  One thing the major didn’t mention: Like much of the rest of the Air Force, Dreamland’s standard survival equipment included the PRC-90 survival radio. While the radio was a time-tested veteran, it had a limited range and was hardly state-of-the-art equipment. Newer versions utilizing satellite communications were hard to come by—a ridiculous budget constraint that might have proved fatal for Captain Scott O’Grady in Bosnia two years before. O’Grady’s heroism and resourcefulness notwithstanding, a more powerful radio with a locator would have shortened his ordeal considerably.

  “We’ll find them,” said Gat. “A P-3 from the Pacific Fleet in en route.”

  “That’s it?” said Dog.

  “The weather is fierce,” said Gat. “Hurricane winds, hail, the works. Half the Pacific is covered by it. The carriers can’t launch aircraft.”

  Dog folded his arms. The storm had even more serious implications for the people who had parachuted—if they parachuted—from the plane. Even if they somehow got into the water without injury, climbing into a life raft in mountainous seas could be an almost impossible task. And once you were in it—hell, you might as well go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

  “PacCom has lost at least one plane as well,” said Gat. “The storm is that bad. They feel they’ll be in a better position by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon? Fuck that. Fuck that!”

  The words flew from his mouth like meteors, spitting down on everyone in the room.

  “We need to organize the search,” said Dog, not apologizing. “We have three planes—two planes.” He caught himself. His breath was racing but he couldn’t corral it. “We’ll run eight-hour missions out of the Philippines.”

  “Raven’s not ours,” Gat said. “And besides, the storm there is incredible. Kitty Hawk had to curtail operations, I had Major Alou divert all the way over to Japan.”

  “Why didn’t he just refuel in the air and continue the search?”

  “We didn’t have a tanker available.”

  “Punch me through to Woods.”

  “Yes, sir.” Gat grimaced. “It’ll be voice-only.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Dog wasn’t mad at Gat—he wasn’t even mad at Woods, but he nonetheless barked at the Navy lieutenant who came on the line.

  “Where’s our search team?”

  “Excuse me, sir, this is lieutenant Santiago. The admiral is tied up.”

  “I understand that,” said Dog. He pushed his arms tighter to his chest, as if by holding himself he could calm down. “I need help searching for my people.”

  “We have a plane en route. I’m in charge of—”

  “Get Admiral Woods for me,” said Dog.

  “Uh—”

  “Just do it.”

  The line went dead for a moment.

  The others in the room were trying to be discreet, but he knew they were watching him. He had to fight for his people—even if it wasn’t his daughter who’d gone down, he had to do everything he could to get them back.

  “We have our hands full here, Colonel,” said Woods, his voice snapping though the speakers. “I understand the difficult position you are in, but I’ve lost another plane as well, and one of our destroyers was fired on inadvertently—at least we think inadvertently—by the Indians. One of our submarines has missed two scheduled transmissions, and at least one helicopter in an hour overdue. In the meantime, the Chinese ships up near Taiwan are in a frenzy. We are looking for your people, Tecumseh. They’re one of our priorities, just not the only one. The storm is complicating everything.”

  “My plane on the Philippines can get around the storm,” said Dog.

  “Those are my planes,” said Woods. “Now I’m not going to press the point, but Major Alou and his crew took off without orders and without authorization. Granted, it was an emergency, and I certainly would have approved—but that will not happen again. Those are my assets. I need to be able to control what’s going on, and that requires—”

  Dog cut the connection. It was either that or punch something.

  Rubeo broke the silence. “I have a suggestion,” said the scientist.

  “And?”

  “The UMB is due for a flight in six hours. We can use it to conduct the search. The mini-KH photo package is already scheduled for telemetry tests—completely unnecessary, I might add, given that we’ve already proven it works without flaws.”

  “It won’t see through the storm,” said Dog.

  “The imaging radar will. By coincidence, it happens to have been loaded into the plane just prior to your arrival. Merely to see if the double load would fit. The aircraft ad to go up anyway. We are merely speaking here of an inconsequential change in the flight
plan.”

  Dog considered the situation. The mini-KH gear not only could identify an object .3 meters in size—roughly a foot—but placed in the B-5, it could train its sensors wherever they wanted, without having to worry about the complications of earth orbit and maneuvering in space. Launching the plane and flying it over the Pacific was completely within his purview as Dreamland commander. There was only one problem—the UMB’s pilot went down in Quicksilver.

  “The computer can fly it,” said Rubeo, anticipating Dog’s objection.

  “We need a pilot,” said Dog. “Maybe Mack Smith—”

  “Piffle.” Rubeo’s face contorted. “Smith would have it rolling into the ocean within minutes. Colonel, the computer can fly it. That’s what it’s designed to do.”

  “I want someone at the controls.”

  “Naturally. I’ll be at the controls, with Fichera as backup,” said Rubeo. “Along with the rest of the team. Precisely as designed. This is what the system was created for.”

  “Where’s Zen?”

  “Why Zen?”

  “He’s flown the B-5.”

  “He merely guided the computer by voice as far as that goes, he’s no more competent than I. Freddy, Colonel, I not only have considerably more experience flying the aircraft, but—”

  “No offence, Doc, but I want a combat pilot at the controls.” Dog turned to the lieutenant handling the communications panel. “Get Major Stockard.”

  “Colonel—”

  “We’ve been over this, Ray. I appreciate your getting it ready—that was damn sharp of you. But I want an experienced pilot making the call when the shit hits the fan. The scramjets—they’re still a problem?”

  “They function within parameters.”

  “Plan the flight without using them.”

  “That’s overly cautious,” said Rubeo. “The problem was in sensors. They’re due to be tested on the flight.”

  “Then set it up so that they’re used on the back end of the flight—on the return to Dreamland.”

  “There’s no reason not to use them in-flight,” insisted Rubeo.

  “If they fail we’ll have to return home.”

  Rubeo’s face paled ever so slightly. “As you wish,” he said.