Piranha

by Dale Brown

  “Chris!” she screamed. “Chris! Chris!”

  Stoner used all his strength to keep her at the bottom of the raft, and still she managed to squirm away. He grabbed her by the throat and pulled her so tight she began choking for air. She he held on, certain she would jump out for her copilot if he didn’t. only when her body grew limp did he finally let go, collapsing himself over her.

  Taj building, Dreamland

  August 28, 1997, 2100 local (August 29, 1997, 1200 Philippines)

  Dog took a large gulp of the extra-strong coffee and swallowed quickly, hoping the caffeine would rush to his brain cells.

  As a fighter pilot, once or twice he had come close to resorting to greenies to stay awake at crucial points; he’d always hesitated, however, fearing they might become addictive—or worse, not work as advertised. If he had some now, he’d have swallowed them without hesitation. The few hours of sleep he’d managed had left him more groggy then refreshed, and as he walked down the hallway toward the elevator with his half-full coffee cup, he felt as if his head had been pushed down into his chest. He nodded at the security detail near the elevator, took another gulp of his coffee, then got into the car, waiting for it to trundle downward to the Command Center level.

  Even though his quarters were just on the other side of the base, he’d slept on his office couch. He’d never down that before, anywhere.

  Neither had he ever worried about losing Breanna.

  Once, on the so-called “Nerve Center” mission, he’d had to authorize a plan to shoot her down. She was a passenger on a suicide mission to destroy an American city; the decision was a no-brainer.

  This was different. She had been lost on a surveillance mission while technically under someone’s else command—was that the part that made it so hard to accept? Did he feel the mission was unworthy of her sacrifice?

  Colonel Bastian commander a combat unit as well as a development facility. In either case, death was part of the portfolio. Who was to say what justified one instance and not the other? It was all the same to you, when you were gone.

  He took another full gulp of the coffee, felt it burn is mouth. There was still a chance, slim but possible, that Bree and her people, his people, were alive.

  They were alive.

  Rubeo had just returned to the Command Center himself and was getting briefing from Greg Meades when Dog entered. Meades started over for the colonel, ignoring Rubeo’s frown.

  The storm had passed out of the area a few hours before. Though they were mounting very aggressive patrols, the Chinese and Indians hadn’t fired on each other; they seemed to be spending much of their energy recovering from the initial battle and the storm. The diplomats were busting their backs trying to get a cease-fire in place.

  Pacific Command had launched searches for the F-14 and a helicopter that had gone down in the storm. They were also looking for Indian and Chinese survivors as a goodwill gesture—a move interpreted by both sides as interference, if not spying, though they had taken no action to prevent it.

  Admiral Woods had allocated two frigates and helicopters to the Megafortress search, and was detailing a P-3 as well, but the Navy had its hands full. Besides the three aircraft that had apparently been lost, two civilian ships had floundered in the storm. The only good news was the Navy had, at last, found its unaccounted-for submarine, safe and unharmed.

  “How’s Zen?” Dog asked.

  “We’ve expanded his search area,” said Meades. “He think they were farther south when they ejected, that the plane arches back northwards before it crashed. It’s possible.”

  Dog nodded. The scientist began detailing the UMB’s performance—they were, after all, testing a new system, something that was easy to forget. The aircraft and sensor arrays were working fantastically.

  “Fantastically,” repeated Meades. He trimmed the enthusiasm in his voice. “Though, of course, that’s small consolation.”

  “It’s okay,” said Dog, going over to the communication desk. “Let me talk to Zen.”

  The South China Sea

  Date and time unknown

  The surprise and agony burned in her brain.

  Breanna had felt it before—Jeff in the hospital when he woke up.

  Bright light filled her eyes. Her forehead and hair were crusted with salt. How long had she lain in the raft? How long had her arms, back, and legs soaked in the water?

  To die like that.

  God, why have you saved me and not my crew?

  Water.

  “Captain Stockard?”

  Something blocked out the sun.

  Jeffrey.

  Stoner, it was Stoner.

  “Are you okay? Captain Stockard? Breanna?”

  His face was right next to hers as her eyes opened fully.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “God.”

  “We’re all right.”

  She wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. She’d held them back too long. She’d never let herself cry in Jeff’s room after his accident. She couldn’t cry now, even though she wanted to. She’d never be able to cry again.

  “The sharks moved off. I shot a couple and they started eating each other. We’re okay.”

  “Yeah,” she managed. “Peachy.”

  Aboard Iowa

  August 29, 1997, 1346 local (August 28, 1997, 2146 Dreamland)

  Watching the optical feed from the mini-KH package in the UMB’s bay was like looking at a room through a strobe light. Zen’s head and upper body pitched slightly with each image, responding to the pulse like a dance moving to a beat. He stared at the images so long and so hard he found the radar, and even the video from the plane, disorienting. The computer could take care of everything else; he had to scan the images, examine each one, dance with the darkness between them.

  “Dreamland Command to B-5. Zen, how are you doing?” asked Colonel Bastian over the Dreamland circuit.

  “We’re on course.”

  “Good.”

  Bastian’s voice betrayed no emotion; he could have been asking if the garbage pickup had been made yet. Zen wanted to curse at him. Didn’t he feel anything for his daughter?

  No one did. She was already dead as far as everyone else was concerned. He was just looking for bodies or debris.

  But Zen knew she was there. He was going to find her.

  “Keep us apprised,” said the colonel. “Dreamland Command out.”

  Yeah, out.

  Something tapped him on the shoulder. “You okay?” said Jennifer, leaning close and talking to him.

  “Not a problem,” said Zen.

  “Want something to eat? I smuggled in some cookies.”

  Talking threw off his beat, and that made it harder to concentrate.

  “No,” he said, willing his eyes back to the task. He pushed forward harder, scanning the emptiness below him.

  This is what God sees, someone had told him once. It was an orientation flight in the backseat of an SR-71. They were at eighty thousand feet, looking down at Dreamland on a clear day.

  Picture, new picture.

  Here was something in the right corner of his screen, the first thing he’d seen in fifteen minutes.

  The rail of a ship.

  The fantail of a ship.

  A trawler, the radar was telling him, or rather the computer was interpreting the radar and telling him, in its synthesized voice.

  He locked it out. He had to concentrate.

  One of the Taiwanese spy ships.

  “You’re getting the ship?” Jennifer asked over the interphone, back at her station. Even though they were physically next to each other, she couldn’t get the photo or radar feed until it was processed and recorded by C³, which took a little over five seconds. At that point, it was available to Dreamland as well.

  “One of the Taiwanese ships,” said Zen. “Maybe they’re on to something.”

  He was past them now, still pulsing over the empty sea. Picture, new picture. Picture, new picture.

/>   “PacCom checking in,” said Jennifer a few minutes later.

  Picture, new picture.

  “Anything you want to ask them? Or give them a lead or something?”

  picture, new picture.

  “Zen?”

  “No.”

  Picture, new picture. He glanced down at the lower portion of his screen, reading the instruments—the fuel consumption was nudging a little higher than anticipated, but otherwise everything was in the green. He selected the forward video—nothing there, of course, since he was coming through sixty thousand feet—then went back to the routine.

  Picture, new picture. Picture, new picture.

  “Jeff, one of the Navy planes thinks it picked up a radio signal. We’re going to change our course and see if we can get over there,” said Major Alou. “It’s going to take us toward your search area. It’s about two hundred miles from our present position. So it’ll be a bit.”

  Yes. Finally.

  “Give me coordinates,” he said.

  “I ill when we have them. we’re going very close to the Chinese fleet,” added Alou.

  “Okay.” Zen reached to the console to pull up the mapping screen—he’d need to work out a new pattern with the team back at Dreamland, but he wanted a rough idea of it first. Just as his fingers hit the key sequence, something flickered at the right side of the picture.

  “Dreamland is wondering about the performance of the number-two engine,” said Jennifer. “They’re worried about power going asymmetric.”

  Asymmetric. Stinking scientists.

  The map came up. Zen’s fingers fumbled—he wasn’t used to working these controls, couldn’t find the right sequence.

  Picture, new picture.

  “What should I tell them?” said Jennifer.

  “We have a good location on that signal,” broke in Alou. “I’m going to turn you over—”

  “Wait!” said Zen. He pushed up the visor and looked at the keyboard, finding the keys to bring the picture back up. “Everybody just give me a minute.”

  South China Sea

  Date and time unknown

  As he leaned down toward her, something caught his attention. Stoner looked toward the horizon. There was something there—or he thought there was.

  “Water,” she said.

  He reached for the small metal bottle, gave it to her. She took half a gulp.

  She was so beautiful.

  “It’s almost empty,” she told him.

  He nodded, took his own small sip, put it in his pants leg. “We have another,” he said.

  “Where?”

  Where? He didn’t see it.

  She lifted up, looking.

  It was gone. They must have lost it when the sharks attacked.

  The radio was gone too. They had an empty water bottle and an empty gun.

  “It’s all right,” he told her. “It’s okay—look.”

  “What?”

  He put his arms around her, then pointed toward the horizon.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Look,” he said. Stoner put his head on her shoulder, pointing with his arm. His cheek brushed hers. “There,” he said.

  Aboard Iowa

  1353

  The resolution of the optics in the UMB’s belly were rated good enough to focus on a one-meter object at an altitude of 22,300 miles, roughly the height necessary for a geosynchronous orbit. A number or variables affected that focus, however, and the designers at Dreamland had found it more expedient and meaningful in presentations to say that, at any altitude above twenty thousand feet, the camera array could see what a person with 20/10 vision could see across a good-sized room. The metaphor was both memorable and accurate, and often illustrated with the added example that a person with that vision could read the letters on a bracelet as she reached to embrace and kiss her lover.

  Zen saw it as clearly as that.

  The edge of a raft. A foot. A leg.

  Then bodies entwined.

  Their cheeks were together—had they just kissed?

  “I have them,” he said, mouth dry. “Here are the coordinates.”

  South China Sea

  Date and time unknown

  “Don’t,” said Breanna, in a soft, hoarse voice.

  “No?”

  She could feel his heart beating next to hers. Desire began to well inside her, pushing her toward him. She needed him, needed to feel his arms wrapping around her, feel his skin on her skin. She needed to feel him push against her, wrap her legs around his.

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s there,” Stoner told her. She couldn’t tell whether he meant the ship he’d seen, or his feelings for her, or his lips. Suddenly she had an urge to throw herself into the water, just dive in. she started to move upward. Perhaps sensing her thoughts, he grabbed her; she slid into his arms and then said “no” again, the pointed.

  Now she saw it too, a ship.

  “The flare gun,” she said.

  “We don’t have it,” said Stoner. The words emptied his eyes.

  She’d seen the same blankness in Zen’s face when he told her she’d known for weeks, that he couldn’t feel his legs and would never feel them again.

  Jeffrey. Her desire raged and she reached toward him. A wave pushed her to his chest, but then pulled the boat back; she struggled to push up, to throw herself around him, but Stoner was steadying himself in a crouch at the edge of the raft, trying to stand, or at least squat, waving.

  “Balance me,” he told her without looking, his voice a whisper. “On the other end.”

  She went to do so.

  “No, they’re not going to see us. Paddle, we’ll have to paddle,” he said.

  “The sharks,” she said, her words barely a whisper in her own ears. Before she could repeat them louder, he had slipped into the water/

  “Wave,” he said. “Shout.”

  “The sharks.”

  “Wave, jump, anything. Get their attention.”

  Airborne over the South China Sea

  1355

  The idea came to Zen only after it was too late:

  Block the transmission, kill the feed. No one will know.

  It was absurd and murderous, and once it occurred to him he couldn’t forget it: anger, jealousy, and shame surging together. But it was too late, fortunately too late—Dreamland had the feed, the radar had a good lock, the GPS data was now being fed not just to Iowa’s flight deck but to the Whiplash Osprey.

  Too late, thank God.

  Zen took the UMB from the computer, altering the course and going over each move carefully with Dreamland. There was a minor problem in one of the engines.

  The scientists wanted him to give back control, send the plane back to Dreamland.

  Not yet. Not until the mission was complete.

  He used the rocket, engine five, took the massive robot to 140,000 feet, setting up a ten-mile orbit. The computer cut the flight path into a perfect circle.

  The Taiwanese trawler spotted earlier was headed in their general direction. Danny and his Osprey were about a half hour away. If it changed its course a little, the spy ship could reach them in fifteen minutes, maybe a little less.

  “Dreamland Command, what do you think of giving the position to the trawler, see if they can pick them up?” said Zen.

  “Zen, this is Bastian.

  “Colonel.”

  “Danny’s en route. The Chinese are tracking the trawler. We’re in contact with the Kitty Hawk on the eastern side of the Chinese fleet; one of the Hawkeyes is tracking the Chinese CAP. They think two planes from the carrier are vectoring toward that area. They’re a bit far away at the moment—”

  “Hold on.” Zen went to the UMB’s native radar, bringing up the search-and-scan panel. Look-down mode was limited; the unit had been optimized for flight requirements and, at this altitude and distance, the Chinese planes didn’t show up.

  “I’m going to have to take your word, because they’re not on my scr
een,” Zen told him. “Is it the CAP patrol?”

  “Negative. They’re going out to that spy ship at a good clip, and very low,” said the colonel. “They may be armed with antiship missiles. Wait a second.”

  The line went dead a second.

  “Jeff, at their present course and speed they’re going to be on the Osprey as well. They should find her in about sixty seconds. Kitty Hawk is sending some Tomcats out there. They’re a good distance off, though.”

  “Yeah, okay, thanks for the heads-up.”

  Why had she kissed him? Why?

  The South China Sea

  Date and time unknown

  The ship was bigger. Breanna thought her shouts were bringing it closer, but it was impossible to tell.

  Stoner was starting to tire. He punctuated his kicks with rests on the side of the raft the grew longer and longer.

  The sharks must be nearby still. They’d hear the splashes, come for him.

  She couldn’t see that again.

  “Help!” she shouted with her hoarse voice. “Hey! Hey!”

  There was an airplane in the distance, a jet—two or three maybe.

  A pair of gray hawks broke over the horizon, thundering between them and the ship.

  F-14’s? Or Sukhois?

  The two planes rode up, then banked toward the south.

  “Hey!” she shouted again, though her voice was so hoarse it was barely louder than a whisper. “Here! Hey! Hey!”

  Aboard Dreamland Osprey

  1505

  “We’re being challenged,” the pilot told Danny. “Pretty bad English.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “That we’re in protected airspace,” said the pilot.

  “We’re being targeted,” said the copilot. “Trying to spike us, the bastards.”

  “Shit,” said Danny.

  “They’re just trying to scare us,” said the pilot.

  “They’re doing a decent job,” said the copilot.

  “Tell them we’re going to pick up survivors and split,” Danny said.

  “I have twice,” said the pilot. “Here they come. Everybody hold on, it’s going to be close.”

  Aboard Iowa

  1509

  As soon as Zen heard Danny tell Dog what was going on over the Dreamland circuit, he tucked his wing and plunged toward the sea. It was a mistake, a serious mistake—he wasn’t flying a Flighthawk, and the B-5 flipped awkwardly through a roll and then headed straight downward, speed increasing quickly. An alert sounded and Fichera back at Dreamland said something in his ear about letting the computer’s emergency protocol take over. Zen ignored the scientist and the computer; he held the stick gently, letting the plane’s aerodynamics assert themselves. the nose began to lift, and not the trick was to control it, not muscling it down, or shoving it around the way he would push the small Flighthawk, but gracefully, the way you rode an overemotional show horse.