by Dale Brown
“I have a cell phone cluster,” said Habib. “Several transmissions, coded. Twenty-five miles southeast of your position, Hawk One. ”
“Okay. Mark it and we’ll get down there later,” said Zen. “Jen? You see anything?”
“Nothing interesting,” said the scientist, who was monitoring the video feed from Hawk Two, which was being flown by the computer. “No buildings large enough for a radar. There were two trailers parked beneath the overpass we saw, that was it.”
“Yeah, okay, let’s check those trailers out. They used to hide Scuds under the overpasses during the war,” said Zen. He jumped into Hawk Two, which was flying approximately eight miles to the north of One. He started to descend, approaching a town of about two dozen buildings nestled in an L-shaped valley. The overpass was just south of the settlement.
“Major, we’re getting down toward bingo,” said Chris Ferris.
“Hawk leader. We have enough to get over to that area where O’Brien had the cell phones?”
“We should,” answered Ferris.
“I’m still trying to get a definite fix,” said the radio intercept operator. “Roughly thirty miles south of us. Map says there’s nothing there.”
“That makes it more interesting,” said Breanna.
“Roger that,” said Jeff, still flying Hawk Two. He dropped through two thousand feet, tipping his wing toward the overpass. The two trucks looked long and boxy, standard tractor-trailers.
Undoubtedly up to no good or they wouldn’t have been placed here, but he couldn’t just shoot them up — as Breanna would undoubtedly point out.
“Trucks look like they’re civilian types,” he said. “We can pass on the location to CentCom.”
Zen turned Hawk Two back toward Quicksilver and told the computer to take it into a standard trail position.
Then he jumped back into Hawk One, streaking ahead of the Megafortress as it angled southward toward the coordinates O’Brien had given. Breanna had pushed the throttle to accelerate, staying close to the U/MF.
“I believe you’re ten miles north of the source,” said O’Brien.
“Roger that.”
The Megafortress flight crew, meanwhile, prepared their missiles for a strike, in case Zen found something worth hitting. The large bomb bay doors in the belly of the plane opened and a JSOW missile — a standoff weapon with a two-thousand-pound warhead that guided itself to a GPS strike point downloaded from the flight deck — trundled into position.
“We’ll nail the son of a bitch if we have a positive target,” said Bree, talking to Ferris. Between the open bay doors and the uncoated nose, Quicksilver was now a fairly visible target to Iraqi radar, though at nearly thirty thousand feet and stuffed with ECMs and warning gear, she’d be tough to hit.
The pilot they’d rescued probably thought the same thing.
“Zen, do you have a target?” asked Bree.
“Negative,” he said, eyes pasted on the video feed. A series of low-lying hills gave way to an open plain crisscrossed by shallow ditches or streams. There were no buildings that he could see, not even houses.
“It’s exactly five miles dead on your nose,” said O’Brien.
“I’m still looking for the building,” said Jennifer.
Zen saw a large, whitish rectangle on his right at about three miles. He popped the magnification and began to tell Bree that they had something in sight. But he’d gotten no more than her name from his mouth before Quicksilver shuddered and moved sideways in the air. In the next moment it stuttered toward the earth, clearly out of control.
Chapter 61
High Top
1750
Mack Smith resisted the urge — barely — to kick the toolbox across the tarmac. “When is the plane going to be ready, Garcia?” he said.
“I’m working on it, sir,” said the technician, hunkered over the right engine. “You’re lucky I took this apart, Major. Big-time problem with the pump.”
“Just — get — it — back — together.”
“I shall be released.”
“And if I hear one more, just one more line that sounds like a Dylan song, that could be from a Dylan song, or that I think is from a Dylan song, I’m going to stick that wrench down your throat.”
“That’s no way to talk to anybody,” said Major Alou, walking over to see what the fuss was about.
“Yeah,” said Mack.
“Louis, I need you to look at Raven,” said Alou. “The pressure in that number three engine—”
“No way!” yelled Mack as Garcia climbed down off his ladder. “No fucking way. He’s working on my plane.”
“The Megafortresses have priority here,” said Alou.
“Garcia works for me. You’re a guest, Major. I suggest you start acting like one.”
“Yeah? A guest, huh? A guest?”
Mack booted the tool case in disgust. A screwdriver flew up and nailed him in the shin.
Chapter 62
Aboard Quicksilver, over Iraq 1750
Breanna felt herself thrown sideways against her restraints, the Megafortress plunging out from under her like a bronco machine on high speed. Pitched in her seat, she pushed her stick gently to the left, resisting the urge to jerk back and try to muscle the plane back level.
The plane didn’t respond.
She bent forward, right hand on the power bar on the console between the two pilots. The front panels looked like Christmas trees ablaze with caution and problem lights.
The engines were solid, all in the green.
Rudder pedals, stick, she thought. Stick, damn it.
“Computer, my control,” she chided.
The computer did not respond.
* * *
Zen’s head split between the Flighthawks and their plummeting mothership. Hawk Two had snapped out of trail, aware that the EB-52’s actions were not normal. Zen pulled Hawk One back toward the stricken plane, setting its course on a gradual intercept. Then he jumped into Hawk Two, tucking it down to get a visual on whatever damage had been done to Quicksilver. In the meantime, he checked the radar, scanning to see if they were followed or if other missiles were in the air. The threat bar was clean; somehow, that didn’t seem reassuring.
Quicksilver was still descending rapidly, her right wing tilting heavily toward the earth. Two streaks of red flared near the front fuselage.
They were on fire.
Hawk Two passed through five thousand feet; Quicksilver was about a thousand feet ahead. If they were going to bail, they were going to have to go real soon.
“Quicksilver? Bree?” he said.
There was no response.
* * *
Until now it had felt like a session in the Megafortress simulator in the test bunker. Breanna sniffed something — the metallic tang of an electrical fire — then decided the computer had either gone off line or malfunctioned. She hit the hard-wired cutoff, initiating the backup hydraulic system. The backup control gear had been installed thanks to a malfunction she dealt with some months before. Something clunked beneath her, as if she were driving a very large truck that had been switched on the fly into four-wheel drive. The stick jerked against her hand so hard she nearly lost her grip.
“My control. We’re on hydraulics,” she told Ferris.
She wrestled the plane for a few seconds, momentum and gravity working against her. The EB-52 began to shudder — the plane was approaching the speed of sound.
The rocks below grew exponentially.
Breanna felt herself relax as the pedals jerked against her feet. She ignored the panel of instruments, ignored the warning lights, ignored everything but the immense aircraft. It became part of her body; her face was squashed by gravity, her sides compressed by the buffeting wind. She brought herself to heel, leveling off at a bare two thousand feet, clearing a mountaintop by thirteen feet.
It was only when she came level that she realized they were on fire.
“Chris?” she said calmly. “Chris?”
When he didn’t respond, she turned and saw him slumped forward against his restraints. Bree looked over her shoulder — O’Brien was fighting off his restraints.
Long, thin ribbons of smoke filtered from one of the panels at the rear of the flight deck.
“Stay where you are,” she told O’Brien over the interphone circuit.
Either the circuit wasn’t working or he didn’t understand. Breanna waved at him emphatically; he saw her finally and settled back down.
The Megafortress was equipped with two fire suppression systems. One injected high-pressure foam into non-crew areas of the aircraft; this worked automatically. The other, a carbon-dioxide system designed to deprive a fire of oxygen, required a positive command from the flight deck, since anyone not on oxygen would be smothered along with the flames. Breanna could see that everyone was okay on the flight deck, but she had no way of checking downstairs. Zen would certainly have on his gear, but the techies who flew with him almost never did. Which meant that fighting the fire might very well kill Jennifer Gleason.
Her father’s girlfriend.
“Jen — get on oxygen,” she said. “Everyone — now! We have a fire.”
There was no acknowledgment. The plane’s com system was dead.
Breanna pressed the manual warning switch. The cockpit was supposed to flash red but it didn’t.
Smoke was now pouring into the cockpit. She had to put it out.
“Fire suppression!” she shouted as she reached over and thumbed the guard away from the button.
* * *
Jeff heard the metallic hush of the carbon-dioxide fire suppression system, then felt his teeth sting — the sound was remarkably similar to the sound of a dentist’s suction tool, amplified about a hundred times. The sudden change in the pressure as the gas whipped in made the cabin feel like a wind tunnel.
There’d been no warning light or tone.
Jennifer — she never wore the gear. She’d be breathing pure carbon dioxide.
“Trail Two,” he told the Flighthawk computer. He pushed up his visor and turned toward her station.
She wasn’t there.
Something cold hit him on his right shoulder. He turned and saw her standing there, shaking her head vig-orously up and down, a mask on her face.
* * *
Breanna restabilized the pressure in the cabin, restored the normal airflow, then began dealing with the caution lights on her panel, assessing the damage. Fuel tanks were intact. Environmental controls — the AC system — was on backup. Oil pressure in the number four engine was now high, but just barely in the yellow. The flight computer was off line, as were the interphone and the radios. All of her backup instruments were operating.
The flight controls felt a bit kludgy on hydraulic backup, but otherwise were fine. The interface with the Flighthawks, which forwarded data from the robots’ sensors, was out.
Small bits of shrapnel had burst through the cockpit; one had apparently hit Ferris in the helmet, knocking him unconscious. There was some blood on his arm, but judging from his breathing, he was okay. Habib and O’Brien both gave her thumbs up.
When Breanna pulled off her mask to talk to her two crewmen, her nose tingled with the metallic smell that lingered from the CO2 system. Power to the radar tracking station had been cut completely; Habib’s eavesdrop-ping gear had been knocked off line, but some circuits still had power. Breanna told O’Brien to go downstairs and see about the others while Habib worked to see if he could get something from the radio.
“God, let Jeff be okay,” she found herself saying as she ran a quick self-check on the INS. “Don’t let him die. Not after everything else.”
* * *
Jennifer held her mask to the side to tell Jeff what she’d found at the circuit locker at the rear of the Flighthawk deck. The breaker on the lines regulating the com link between the Megafortress and the Flighthawks had blown out and wouldn’t reset, but otherwise they had full power. Whatever had hit the Megafortress seemed to have taken out the right underfuselage quadrant of the Flighthawk’s wide-band antennas, but his backups should be sufficient.
“We have full power on the monitoring suite, but the interphone system is off line,” she told him. “I think they’re on backup.”
“The fire,” he yelled, still facing forward and controlling the U/MFs.
“I think it’s out.”
“It is if you can breathe.” Zen pulled his mask off and looked up at her. “What the hell hit us?”
“No idea. Should I go up and see if they’re okay on the flightdeck?”
“Yeah,” he told her. “Tell them I’ll survey the outside and pipe it up. Something hit the fuselage on the right side — I saw the fire. Jen—” He grabbed her arm as she started for the ladder. “It may be pretty brutal.”
“No shit.” She pulled free, then bolted for the ladder.
Someone was coming down. “Hey!” Jennifer yelled, stepping aside.
“Hey, yourself,” said O’Brien. “You guys okay?”
“Yeah — what’s going on up there?”
“My gear’s out. Captain Stockard’s okay. Captain Ferris got hit by something, knocked cold.”
“Radio?”
He shook his head.
“Where was the fire?” Jennifer asked.
“Not sure.”
“Come on, we have to check the gear in the rear bay.”
“I’ll go,” said O’Brien, spinning around and charging up the ladder to the rear area.
Jennifer clambered after him, reaching the top in time to hear him scream in agony.
“My hand! My hand!” he yelled, rolling on the metal grate of the floor and cursing in agony.
One of the equipment panels was open; Jennifer guessed that a short had juiced the panel. She reached into the small passage between the bay and the flight deck, grabbing the first aid kit off the wall. O’Brien writhed in pain so badly the first thing she did was stab him with the morphine syringe. She rammed it into his leg, right through his uniform. Then she dug into the box for the burn spray — a high-pressure can of antiseptic solution that was so cold as she sprayed, her own hands turned to ice. By the time she had gauze on his hands, O’Brien had calmed down. She helped him back onto the flight deck and got him strapped into his seat as his eyes closed.
“What happened?” asked Breanna.
“One of the panels is hot — there’s a short. Maybe if I had a schematic — can you access the on-line manual?”
“Negative — everything associated with the computer is out.”
“If you have control of the plane, we shouldn’t mess with it,” said Jennifer. “I don’t want to screw up something else.”
“Agreed,” said Breanna. “How’s Jeff?”
“He’s fine,” said Jennifer. “He should be giving you a visual.”
“I have no feed from him,” said Breanna. “The computer’s out.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, he’s fine. He was worried about you,”
she added. Jennifer thought of Breanna’s father, worried about him for a moment, even though he wasn’t the one in danger. “I’ll find out what it looks like and come back.”
“Good luck,” said Breanna. “We’re about ten minutes out of High Top. If the damage is too bad, we’ll have to go on to Incirlik. I don’t want to mess with a short-field landing.”
* * *
It looked like a giant had stuck his thumb onto Quicksilver’s fuselage just before the wing on the right side. The center of the thumbprint was dark black; streaks of silver extended in an oblong starburst toward the rear where bits of the radar-evading hull had been burned away. There were one or two long lines extending toward the back of the plane, along with a small burn mark on the panel where the rear landing gear carriage folded up.
There were some other pockmarks, including a large dent on the cover to the chute they needed to deploy to land on the short field.
“The thing looks bad, but it looks intact,” Jeff told Jennifer. �
��I don’t know about the chute, though.”
“Okay.”
“Tell Bree I think I should land the Flighthawks at High Top and we should go on to Incirlik. I should be able to talk to the AWACS through Hawk One in about thirty seconds. I’ll have the controller about a minute after that. You’ll have to play messenger.”
“Not a problem,” she said, starting back.
He checked his instruments. The U/MFs themselves were in good shape.
The only thing that could have done this sort of damage was a laser. Maybe they’d believe Brad Elliott now.
Chapter 63
High Top
1830
Captain Fentress didn’t know what was going on until he saw Major Alou hustling toward his plane, followed a good ten yards back by the rest of his crew. He ran after them, shouting for information. Kevin Marg, the copilot, explained that Quicksilver had been hit by a SAM.
Zen and Bree and the others — oh God.
Zen.
“The Flighthawks — they’ll be in a fail-safe orbit if the control unit was blown out,” Fentress told them. “They can help us find them if they go down. Let me come with you?”
Alou yelled something that he took to be a yes. But as he ducked under the plane he heard the soft whine of a Flighthawk in the distance. Fentress trotted back out in time to see the robot tilt her nose up above the far end of the runway, skimming in like a graceful eagle hooking its prey. The second plane came in two seconds later, just as smoothly.
Would he ever be able to land like that?
He had fifty times — on the simulator.
“Hey, Quicksilver’s heading over to Incirlik,” yelled the copilot from the ladder. “We’re going to fly shotgun — Major Alou wants to know if you’re coming aboard or not.”
“I better look after the Flighthawks,” said Fentress.
“You got it, Curly.”
“I’m not Curly,” he shouted, starting to trot toward the robot planes.
Chapter 64