Case B, evade and deliver, Marena said.
Understood, Ana said. Another pause. Okay, were going to take it on, right? Anybody object?
This is getting way out of hand, I thought. Maybe I ought to object.
Nobody objected.
Right, then, remember Im the sole CO from here in, Ana said. Nobody takes order one from Marena or anyone else.
Hoo-hah, the pilots voice said.
Hwah, the WSO said. What was that? I wondered. Oh. They were saying HUA, like heard, understood, and acknowledged.
Okay, hang on, the WSO said. He opened a different radio channel. Zepp to NERV Base.
Hello, Zepp, a white-sounding voice said. It was the head air traffic guy at the Stake. This is NERV Base, go ahead.
Were switching to Case B, the pilot said. Were requesting MD4s.
Copy that, just a sec, NERV said. Looks like youre in a bit o shit.
Fuckin-A.
Our speed dropped even more until we were practically hovering. I stared through the nose-cone camera at a square of burning forest. I typed MD4? into my high-chair-bar keyboard. A silhouette of a drone cruise missile came up. It was a slender thing, only six feet long, with long nose wings. It said it was fast, and that it was armed with an air-to-air warhead. Hell. Send in the drones, I thought. Hell. Hell. Were fucked. Were going to get shot down. Well, at least it probably wont hurt
Okay, Zepp, the NERV voice said. We see your beacon and four MD4s are prepping for launch.
Thank you, NERV.
Tell them were landing, Ana said.
All right, Guzmán. We acknowledge and were going back to Puerto Barrios, the WSO lied. My map spun around as we made a sharp about-face.
No Puerto, the Guate voice said. Pop Click.
Okay, Zepp, the NERV voice said, the MD4s are up and headed your way.
Okay, thanks, NERV, the WSO said, do you have an ETA on those?
They will be alongside you in two minutes forty-five. You just bear south another twenty degrees and they wont have to turn around.
HUA.
You guys take care, you hear?
Will do and thank you, NERV, the WSO said.
Forty degrees coming up, the pilot said. He pitched left and pulled his left foot off the antitorque jet, banking us into a turn that seemed to screech in the air. We screamed south along a narrow watercourse between gorges and out over the Moxela River.
Theres the intercept, the WSO said.
[64]
I looked around but couldnt see any aircraft. I guessed she meant they were visible on the map. I clicked it up and enlarged. I was beginning to get the hang of the interface. Ahead of us the Belize border was dotted with active antiaircraft installations like a string of Christmas lights. Oh, there they are. A pair of red dots were drifting toward us at 310 degrees. I put my cursor on it and typed IFF, for identification friend or foe. A window came up and scrolled through the radar profiles of various aircraft until it found a match. 2 COMANCHE H-18 (?) AIRBORNE A+?, it said. I guess the A+? meant they looked armed, but it wasnt sure with what yet. I found INTERCEPT PROBABILITY on the menu and it drew two range circles, a green one around us and a red one around them. They looked too close for total comfort.
They dont want to pop us, the WSO said. They want to get a Hippo. Theyll try to force us down up ahead.
Lets not be too sure about that, Anas voice said.
La gran puta. Howd I get into this again? I wondered. An hour ago we were all nice and cozy up in the kings niche, taking our time, and now were risking death from the Guate air force. Why didnt Ana just let them arrest us? Warren would have bailed us out in a week. No. Two days. Our timetable cant be that important. I mean, it is and everything, but still … fuck. It just hadnt quite gotten through to me that these guys were ready to take it all to the next level. Damn. Idiot. You know, the fact is, Jeddo, you wanted to think you were just getting into bed with corporate thugs, but really, you were getting into bed with war thugs. And honestly speaking, you knew it all the time. So dont
We nosed up toward the center of the Sierra de Santa Cruz, climbing at two thousand feet per minute, and flashed past a green cliff with a narrow white chalk gorge. Theres a depression in the range that extends nearly due south, and we followed that at about 340 miles per hour, hugging the cliffs. On the map the two circles crept up on each other, about to connect.
Well, so much for the royal tombs, I thought. We wouldnt be visiting Ix Ruinas again anytime soon. Or ever, probably. The only thing we could do nowif we even got back to the Stake, which was looking less and less definitewas look for the lodestone cross. That isand I think I mentioned thiswhere Jed2 was supposed to have buried a crate with a second copy of all his notes on the Game. And now we also had to hope that it turned up far enough away from Ix that we could still sneak back in and dig it up without the Guates hassling us. That is, if Jed2 even got that far. How many ifs is that? I wondered. A lot
A new cluster of blips entered the map from the north.
Okay, thats the MD4s, the WSO said.
He slowed. The drone blips increased their speed and came in underneath us like pilot fish. I guess the idea was to keep them hidden in our radar profile.
Okay, NERV, weve got em, the WSO said.
Uh, copy, Zepp, were releasing the wire. Take over.
Thanks, the WSO said. Got it. Listen, Keelorenz wants to make sure youve got the Ducks in a row. He meant the pickup boats.
The Ducks are fine.
Okay, the WSO said.
I scrolled ahead along the flight plan until I could see the string of boats. We had our choice of four pickups, two in the Mar de las Antillas and two in the Gulf of Mexico. Were we going to have to bail out? I wondered. For some reason I shivered. No, ni modos. Theyll lower us down. And after that I suppose these two guys would land this Hippo thing in the Keys, answer a whole lot of questions, do some time, and get amply compensated.
I see em, I see em, the WSO said. I cursored over the two enemy dots. The IFF said (2) US-B/CAH#220? It meant they were two Guate Comanche helicopters. They had rockets.
We should expect a launch, the pilot said. He changed heading to forty degrees northwest, toward Punta de Manabique.
Better give me the balls, the WSO said. Now. Seriously. We passed through the opaque cloud-front, like we were wadded in cotton for a second, and then rose out of it into the blue.
Theyre hailing us, the WSO said. He clicked the air-to-air common channel.
… no me friegues, the Guate Comanche said. (Dont fuck around.) Land and surrender.
Diles que nos la mamen, Ana said. Tell them to suck it.
They cant be going by the book here, I thought. Generally you werent supposed to chat with the other side. Maybe Executive Solutions had given up that rule since theyd gone private.
Listen, Comanches, get out of the way, the WSO said on the common channel.
Pela las nalgas, one of the Guate helicopters said.
No les hables, a Guate controller cut in. Dont talk to them.
Vete, the WSO said. Back off. Youre way out of your league.
Mejor andate a la mierda! …
Weve got some heavy shit, the WSO said. Youre going down.
Chíngate, the Guate pilot said. Go fuck yourself.
I do not want to fuck you up, the WSO said. Beat it. Last chance. He clicked off and came onto the PAGE ALL channel. Okay, team, listen up, he said. Just in case w
A high-E tone, the targeting alarm.
Oh, fuck, I thought.
Oh, fuck, the pilot said.
Ave María, LAUNCH!!! the WSO said. Shitfucker! Dont worry this
is pretty routine were designed for this
Try fifty-five, the NERV voice said. Four at six point forty-two.
A rose flash bounced through the cabin as the Guate targeting laser swept across us. I choked back a glob of vomit. Were fucked, I mumbled inaudibly into my visor, I cant believe I got talked into this, I cant believe it, I cant believe it, I cant believe it. I pounded my thigh.
Roger that, the pilot said, well vector to ninety-five at the low end.
Low radius should be one eighty.
Make it one seventy. A red danger dot appeared on my screen and then didnt seem to move, the way things dont when theyre coming at you. Mierdita!!!
Got it. Okay, counting from ten.
Okay, mark. The pilot swiveled the nacelle positions and the tilt-rotor simultaneously, throwing the Hippo almost into reverse. My head felt like it was going to twist off my spinal cord. Suddenly our turbines reduced power and the rotor pitch changed again, practically stalling us in midair, and all at once the interior was weirdly silent. A gloop of that oh-shit-the-bottoms-fallen-out feeling inflated and burst as we dropped. Its okay, I yelled to myself, its cool, theres still a whole hell of a lot of air around us and its holding us up pretty good. We were under the overcast again and you could just see the red beacon of the Punta de Amatique lighthouse one mile due east. We flew northeast over the bay.
Okay, I have it still closing, the WSO said. Uh, ninety. Eighty-five.
Right, were doing a U49, the pilot said. Mark.
Our engines slowed again and, to me, they almost seemed to stop.
On our port side one of the MD4s fired its engine, mimicking our heat signature. We fell. At about two thousand feet the pilot tilted the rotors back to where they started catching some air again, but he kept us almost-falling toward the foam at the tip of the peninsula, down into denser air that would lower the ATAs hit probabilities. It felt like we were burrowing into additive-free peanut butter. On my map view the missile looked like it was just hanging out next to our permanent spot in the middle of the screen, tiptoeing a bit closer every so often and then edging away. At less than twenty feet above water level the pilot pulled us up in a sickeningly smooth parabola. I felt my testicles rise up through my inguinal canal, through my digestive tract, and into my mouth, and swallowed them back down. I swear I could really feel both of them, the left one bigger than the right one, and I had to choke back each one separately. There was a PFRROOOOSH underneath us, like a safety valve popping on a giant cappuccino machine, as the red dot went past us, following the decoy, down toward the swamp. I didnt see any impact, but the missile must have hit the point only about a hundred feet ahead of us, just a bit offshore of the lighthouse. There was a BUMP shockwave through the cabin and a POCKETA-POCKETA-POCKETA staccato from everywhere at once as the Hippos composite shell expanded in the heat. The chin-bubble window buckled inward from the pressure and popped back into shape all webbed with cracks. Pebbles clattered over our Kevlar-skinned undercarriage, there was a sickening uprise, and then it was already all back to normal. I switched to the tail camera. All I could see was scattering gulls and a blob of steam the size of a ten-story helping of instant mashed potatoes. For some reason I kept thinking about all the dead parrot fish. We leveled off again and headed straight on northwest, out into the Golfo de Honduras, rising again.
Come on, the WSO said, they still have five dicks left. Lets not fuck around.
We rose into the clouds and up through them. This is such bullshit, I thought. If Id wanted to play with GI Joe toys I would have intentionally fucked up my SAT scores, joined the marines, faked the physical, and gotten vaporized in Iraq. I called up com channel 4.
Marena? I asked. Are you okay? I couldnt really see her with my helmet cam, or rather she was just another floating label.
Im fine, her voice said after a few seconds. Ive got Max on the line, Ill call you back. Click.
I noticed a strong smell of vomit, with a top note of urine and maybe even some feces in there. Somebodyd gotten scared enough to let it all go. Probably Michael, I thought. What a wuss.
Back off, the WSO said over the radio. Im gonna fuck you up. Im gonna fuck you up.
Muerancen huecos, the Guate pilot said. Die, faggots. Our targeting alarm beeped again. Shit. I got another surge of panic and snuggled myself into the entirely deceptive security of my ergo-foam seating equipment.
Ana, give him the balls right fucking now, the pilot said.
Okay, Ana said. Fuck em. Target and engage.
On my readout a discreet box came up that said the nearer Apache was a target for the number two MD4. Like it had said on their specs table, the MD4s were multiuse UAVs. They could divert rockets, like the last one had, but they could also act as missiles. They were slower than ATA rockets, like Sidewinders or whatever, but they could still come around behind an aircraft, creep up on it, and detonate. I watched the number two MD4 edge away from us and drift toward the Comanches.
Youre dead, shitter, the WSO said on the radio.
Metetela, hueco, the Guate pilot answered.
Meanwhile, the second ATA was coming up on our rear end. Im going to drop foil on this one, the WSO said on PAGE ALL. I enlarged our tail camera view. Strings of what seemed like thousands of sparkles bloomed behind us, like we were birthing a population of chrome jellyfish. Each sparkle was actually a small self-inflating Mylar balloon, trailing a long fringe of streamers and a single burning flare. On the radar layer of my map a big smear of interference appeared between us and the missile. On the infrared layer it looked more like a thousand points of heat. Either way, the things primitive onboard brain found it confusing, and it drifted off course. At the same time the pilot banked us into an S-curve evasion move. There was a high rising and then descending whine as another rocket went under us. Somewhere it must have detonated, because we didnt try to evade it again. Instead we leveled out and got on another steady northeast course. There was a pause, as though we werent fighting, just joyriding. On the map, though, the two Comanches were slowly getting ahead of us to the east, between us and the low sun. I guess the idea was that if they got much closer theyd launch two rockets at once, and thered be no way we could deflect or evade both of them.
The lull in the action stretched out and out. Mommy really, really loves you, Marena said to Max. Youre the best boy in the world. I watched the two orange enemy dots closing in. I watched the readouts of water depths flow under us. I watched the green dot that represented our MD4 drift closer and closer to the nearer Comanche. On my nose cam window the cloud shelf below us was like a field of corrugated pack ice. A single huge clump of cumulus clouds reared above the plain far away to the east like Arabian Nights domes, marking the Cuba Reef underneath. I still couldnt see any aircraft. Finally the dot that represented the nearer Comanche veered sharply to the southeast. Hed realized what was going on. The drone crept up behind him. He dove into a tight downward parabola, trying to reflect the heat from his jets off the water, but it was too late. On the video window you could just see a tiny yellow flash as the MD4 detonated, and then a tangerine streak of burning fuel that stretched out into a horizontal helix.
Dio perro, the pilot said. Incompetent fucks.
Hey, guess what happened in lacrosse, Max said. Now we were close enough to see the helicopter skim slowly across the water in a ball of steam, spurting little glowing chunks. One of the ejector rigs materialized out of the smoke and steam like a stamen out of a lily blooming in ten-minutes-per-second time lapse video. It shot up pretty high but then the chute didnt open all the way, and the Guate pilots body spiraled down like a warped shuttlecock, strapped to the big seat and trailing pink specks of flaming plastic.
Dios mio, the WSO said. I could tell from his voice he was crossing himself.
Did the o
ther one eject at all? Ana asked.
I dont think so. Those things are pure shit anyway, the WSO said, they never work.
Fuck. My responsibility, she said.
We came up over the debris. The water was bubbling. Now you could see the second Comanche on video. I thought it was going to fire, but instead it seemed to be hanging back. Either he was scared now or his COs had told him not to engage.
We banked north again and headed out at twenty-five degrees into the Golfo de Honduras. We passed the closest point to the second Comanche. Nothing happened. We kept going.
En todos modos, I thought. Maybe everythings going to work out. No problem.
Nobody was saying anything on the main channel, so I hit MONITOR ALL. Nobody was talking there either. Youd think that everybody would be whooping and cheering and congratulating each other, but they just werent. I didnt think it was because folks were disturbed about the casualties, though. It was more that this had suddenly gone from an international incident to a really serious international incident. Suddenly, we were all eligible for a whole lot of jail time. Not that anybodyd probably get their act together on that, but still. And we werent home yet either. I noticed our speed was back up to 600 kph. I tuned into the WSOs helmet. He was sweeping the communications bands. There were dozens of outraged people squawking in Spanish and at least a few in English. I caught the phrase Scramble all available, which didnt sound good.
Brian D'Amato Page 75