“Good job, Dave,” Patrick said. “Now get to the lifeboats.”
“I’m telling you, Muck, I didn’t—”
“Contact! Here they come!” Briggs shouted. “Man, they’re damned low. I don’t know if the Stingers will be able to lock on them.” But he raised his Stinger, aimed, and fired. Seconds later, the first antiship missile, a Russian- made SS-N-2C Styx missile, exploded in a brilliant ball of fire. Patrick’s Stinger missile missed the second antiship missile, but Chris Wohl was ready with his Vulcan cannon and destroyed it seconds before it hit. This time, the starboard side of the Catherine was showered with unspent rocket fuel and fiery bits of the obliterated warhead. It was a very close call.
“Lifeboats away,” they heard Dave Luger report. “One lifeboat starboard, another on the port side, ready and waiting for you guys.”
“How many of those big missiles does that frigate carry?” Briggs asked.
“Koni-class frigates carry four SS-N-2s,” Luger responded.
“Then I’ll stay to see if they fire any more missiles,” Patrick said.
“I’m staying too,” Hal Briggs said.
“I’m not leaving,” Chris Wohl said with pure titanium in his voice. “We’ve got two Stingers and some ammo left— that should be enough for the last two SS-N-2s.”
Patrick nodded. He was happy to have such good fighters and close friends on that fantail with him. He had no way to fight off two big antiship missiles by himself, but he had been ready to order both of them to the lifeboats anyway.
“Here they come, guys,” Hal shouted. It seemed as if he barely had time to raise his Stinger missile before he fired. The antiaircraft missile missed, plunging into the sea without ever locking onto the target. Wohl’s cannon fire hit the missile, but it still continued on, skipping across the ocean like a stick of dynamite thrown across a pond before slamming into the Catherine near the bow. Patrick’s last Stinger missile shot missed as well, and the second SS-N-2 Styx missile hit just aft of the first missile’s impact point. The ship shuddered, which soon progressed with terrifying speed to an earthquake-like trembling. The deck heeled upward, slammed down hard, then heeled up again. The bow was already going under.
It took every bit of strength for the three commandos to struggle to the port-side lifeboats. Luger had already lowered a boat to the water and had its engines started, and it took only seconds for the three to climb down, unfasten their lines, and motor away from the Catherine.
Through his electronic visor, Patrick could see the big Libyan frigate on the horizon. It was already turning toward them—the rapidly sinking salvage ship could no longer screen them. The lifeboat could only putter along, barely making five or six knots—the frigate would catch up to them in no time. Moments later he saw a muzzle flash, and seconds later a huge geyser of water erupted just a few dozen yards away—the Libyan frigate was already firing on them!
Wohl was twisting and pulling the lifeboat’s tiller, trying to spoil their targeting. “Come and get us, sucker,” he muttered. “Just hope there’s nothing left of me when you catch up to me.” Another geyser of water and an earsplitting BOOM! erupted, closer this time—they were getting the range. Another couple shots and ...
Suddenly a fountain of fire appeared on the horizon. “Something hit the Libyan frigate!” Patrick shouted. “The FlightHawk! It must’ve kamikazied on the frigate! Not a moment too soon!” On the command net, he radioed, “Wendy, this is Castor. Are you in contact with the Egyptian patrol ships? They should be able to screen you against any other Libyan fighters. Are you heading toward Egypt?” No response. “Wendy, you copy?”
“This is the Hammer,” the pilot of the CV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft replied. “Are you trying to call us?”
“I was wondering if Wendy got in contact with the Egyptian navy.”
“Wendy’s not on board, Castor,” came the response.
Patrick’s mouth turned instantly dry, and his knees wobbled, even though his legs were supported by the high-tech exoskeleton. “Say again, Hammer?”
“Sir, Wendy is not on board,” the pilot acknowledged. “She told some of our passengers to lift off without her, that she was going in a lifeboat after she got a FlightHawk ready to attack.”
“Wendy?” Patrick shouted. “Can you hear me? Where are you? Answer me!” He was breathing so hard into his helmet that he was in danger of hyperventilating. “I want a search of every lifeboat and every square inch of the Hammer! Turn this boat around! We’re going back!”
But by the time they turned around, the S.S. Catherine the Great had slipped beneath the dark burning waters of the Mediterranean Sea. They searched for several minutes until they heard patrol helicopters from the Libyan frigate heading in their direction and they were forced to withdraw. The Libyans pursued them until Egyptian navy patrol planes forced the Libyan helicopters to return to their stricken ship, but by the time Patrick, Briggs, and Wohl were picked up by an Egyptian frigate, the area where the Catherine had gone down was surrounded by Libyan coastal patrol ships. There was no way they could return, and they easily outnumbered the Egyptian patrols. Patrick interrogated Wendy’s subcutaneous microtransceiver, checking for life signs or even a position, but there was no reply.
Patrick could not bear to turn away from the spot where the Catherine had gone down. He didn’t care if the whole world heard the strange high-tech-looking commando sobbing inside his battle armor.
CHAPTER 2
BLYTHEVILLE, ARKANSAS
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING
“I can’t take a meeting today. Can’t you see this place is a madhouse?” Jon Masters shouted when his assistant, Suzanne, interrupted him for the third time in the past hour.
“Jon, the Duffields have been waiting since yesterday... ”
“I asked to reschedule the meeting.”
“They’ve already rescheduled twice,” Suzanne reminded him. “They’ve flown out all the way from Nevada each time. They’re trying to accommodate you all they can.”
“Have them try harder.” He jabbed a finger at the door, dismissing her, then recited more commands into his voice-command computer terminal.
Suzanne sighed and gave up, but as she departed Jon’s wife, Helen, who was the chairman of the board of their high-tech defense contractor aerospace company, Sky Masters Inc., walked in. Helen was several years older than her husband, but these days their age difference seemed to grow less and less noticeable. Helen was now wearing her dark hair a bit shorter, accentuating her long neck, slender face, and dark mysterious eyes; through the magic of laser surgery, she was also able to forgo the thick matronly- looking glasses she had worn since childhood. “Jon, we have that meeting with the Duffields right now. Let’s go.”
“I just got done telling Suzanne—”
“I know what you’re telling Suzanne, but I’m telling you—we can’t put this off any longer,” Helen insisted. “Just a couple hours, that’s all. A quick tour, review the prospectus, meet and greet, perhaps talk about the reorganization . ..”
“Helen,” Jon began, rubbing his temples quickly with his fingers, “give me a break, okay?” He put his head down and concentrated on his self-massage, and Helen waited patiently for him to finish. Jon Masters was only in his mid-thiities, but his short, frizzy, rather unkempt hair looked like it was already turning gray at the temples, and many speculated he rubbed his temples more and more these days to rub the gray off. He had stopped wearing ball caps and drinking from big thirty-two-ounce squeeze bottles like a preschooler; and Helen, his wife of only a few years, noticed that her younger husband was starting to feel his age as well as look it.
It was about time, she thought. Jon Masters’s entire life had been one adventure after another: his first of several hundred patents at age ten; his first million-dollar tax return by age eleven; his first Ph.D., from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at age thirteen; control of the company, the one she had slaved for years to build, before age thirty. He had comp
letely bypassed childhood and gone from infant to adult. Jon had never really known failure or pressure in his young life—he was always the one in control. Even in his clumsy, boyish, but charming courtship of her, he managed to learn how to charm and please a woman quickly enough to avoid losing her completely. He did not make her feel like just another conquest—he had learned well enough to avoid that trap.
“In case you’ve forgotten, Helen,” Jon muttered, “Paul is dead; Wendy is missing; and Patrick, Hal, and Chris are being detained in Egypt.” Sky Masters Inc. was the secret major weapons and technology supplier to former president Kevin Martindale’s commando force, the Night Stalkers. It was not a closely guarded secret: Wendy, Patrick, Hal Briggs, and Chris Wohl were all employees of Sky Masters Inc., and Paul McLanahan, although employed as an attorney in California, had worked closely with Sky Masters for years on development of the Tin Man battle armor and other weapons. “I’m a little preoccupied right now.”
“But the Duffields don’t know any of that,” Helen said, closing Jon’s office door behind her. “We can’t tell them several of our people are involved in secret commando attacks in Libya. We have to carry on as if everything is okay. If we don’t, it’ll look like we’re just blowing them off—and we definitely don’t want to do that.”
“Helen, I thought all this shareholder and ownership and corporate-resolution stuff was your responsibility,” Jon whined. “All I want to do is be an inventor, work in the labs, design stuff. ..”
“You are also chief operating officer and the majority shareholder, so you have a say in everything that goes on,” Helen reminded him. “Of course, you can always transfer all your shares to me, and then I can relieve you of your position as COO and largest shareholder and you can be just a regular salaried employee—just like you did to me six years ago.”
“C’mon, now—you’re still not mad about that, are you?” Jon asked with a faint smile.
“A guy eight years my junior who had never even owned a car before marches into the company I mortgaged my parents’ house to start and takes over in just a couple years—what do I have to be mad about?” Helen responded. But she smiled at him and said, “Actually, I was impressed by what you did, even though I squawked and hollered every step of the way until I was purple, and I’m proud and pleased with what you’ve done with my company since then. You’re a good guy, Jon. That impish spoiled-brat personality is almost gone, and you’ve turned into a regular guy.” She paused, her smile warm and genuine. “The guy I love.”
Jon looked up and smiled back. “And I love you, Helen.” He sighed, then added, “And you can have the stock and the title. I don’t want it. It’s not worth that much these days anyway.”
“Bull, Dr. Masters,” Helen said. “If you didn’t want it, you would have given it away long ago, or put it into a trust for the child you keep promising to make with me—if you’d ever go home and spend a night in bed with me. And don’t worry about the stock value. Sure, it’s gone down in recent months with the downturn in the NASDAQ, but with the sweetheart stock option deals you finagled, you’re still a rich guy.” She stepped over behind him and gently massaged his shoulders. “Besides, giving up the stock and your position in the company wouldn’t relieve you of worrying about our friends, or mourning Paul McLanahan.”
“No. I guess it wouldn’t.” Jon sighed. “I can’t believe Paul’s gone. We were almost the same age. He was teaching me how to sail. We were buddies. I felt closer to him than I did to Patrick.”
She massaged his shoulders a bit more until he moaned with pleasure, then patted his shoulder, hard, in the direction of his office door. “Let’s go, Doctor. Let’s meet the Duffields.”
“Remind me who they are again?”
“You know who they are,” Helen said, rolling her eyes with mock exasperation. “Conan David Duffield is the retired founder of SumaTek, the largest very-high-speed integrated-circuit design company in the world and the pioneer of nanotechnology. We have used SumaTek chips in our designs for ten years. He’s in his late forties, degrees from Rutgers and Cornell, he’s into French and Napa Valley wine, humane treatment of animals, and private schools, including providing scholarships to good students who otherwise couldn?t afford a private-school education. His new acquisition company is called Sierra Vistas Partners. He’s the money guy—he buys, rehabilitates, grows, and sells distressed high-tech companies.”
“Hey, this company is not ‘distressed.’ ”
“I’m not saying it is, Jon,” Helen said quickly. But they both knew better—the combination of a downtuming stock market, a glut of fairly modem Russian and Chinese weapons on the global arms market, and vastly lower defense spending had depressed stock values and affected thousands of defense-related companies all over the world, including Sky Masters Inc.
“His wife is Dr. Kelsey D. Duffield, Ph.D.,” Helen went on. “I don’t have that much info on her—she keeps more to herself. I hear she’s much younger than he is. She’s the front person: she investigates and evaluates companies, then reports to him.”
“What’s her degree in?”
“Which one? She has six or seven of them, including two Ph.D.s—electrical engineering, math, physics, computer-language design, chemistry, and a couple others. Speaks seven languages, plays concert-quality piano, writes music, and is an expert-level downhill skier and chess player. They have one child—I don’t know her name.”
“Sheesh, is this the definition of a dysfunctional family, or what?” Jon quipped. Helen scowled at him. “I’m only kidding. Sounds like a perfectly wonderful, albeit super- overachieving family unit. Wonder what the little girl’s going to grow up like?” Helen looked at him with a knowing smile—she was looking at him. “Don’t answer that.”
“Can we go now?”
“All right, all right, let’s meet the whiz family. But after this, no more meetings until our guys are safe.”
“Deal.”
“And we are not selling them the company,” Jon added. Helen said nothing. The answer to that question, at least for the time being, was not up to them. “Let’s go.”
They walked out of Jon’s office, and Suzanne escorted them to the conference room. The folks waiting for them stood politely when they entered. Kelsey Duffield was a pretty woman in her mid-thirties, her reddish-blond hair tied back behind her neck. She wore a simple silk business suit and carried a thin briefcase, and she had a good, strong handshake and a confident, pleasing smile.
“Very pleased to meet you, Dr. Duffield,” Jon said as he stepped quickly into the room, extending a hand and shaking hers enthusiastically. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
The woman’s eyebrows furrowed. “I’m not a doctor, Dr. Masters. Just a lowly CPA.” Jon glanced at Helen, a bit confused and surprised by her misinformation—Helen usually didn’t get the details wrong. Duffield turned and nodded to the man standing beside her. “This is my associate and chief financial officer, Neil Hudson. Neil, this is Dr. Jon Masters, COO, and Dr. Helen Kaddiri Masters, chairman of the board.”
As they shook hands, they heard a clatter. “Oh, dear, please be careful. Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter. She seems to have a case of the dropsies today.” Duffield rushed over to a sideboard, where a cute little brunette girl of nine or ten had just spilled a cup of orange juice on her dress. The little girl studied Jon for a long moment while her mother cleaned her up. Jon smiled at her, and she smiled back. He found it cute that she had spilled juice on a copy of a technical journal that she had in her lap. Her mother put the engineering journal aside and put a well-worn copy of a children’s book of airplanes on her daughter’s lap.
Jon noticed that the girl was still staring at him, the smile gone, as Duffield returned to the group. Jon winked at her, but she did not respond. Well, Jon never did click well with little kids—probably why he was hesitating having some of his own.
“Would your daughter be more comfortable in the daycare center, with some other children her ag
e?” Helen asked. “It’s just across the courtyard.”
“Or I’d be happy to take her to the park,” Suzanne offered.
Both the elder and younger Duffields looked a bit confused. “No, she’s fine here,” the elder Duffield said coolly.
The numbers guy, Hudson, looked a little aghast for a moment; then, after Duffield glanced at him, he appeared as if he was suppressing a chuckle. “Shall we get started?”
“Of course,” Helen replied. They all took seats around one end of the conference table. “On behalf of everyone here at Sky Masters Inc., welcome to Blytheville and the Arkansas International Jetport. We have a tour of the facilities planned, then lunch, then a briefing on our current projects and plans for future growth. Suzanne?” Suzanne handed her two folders. “Here is our current audited financials and company statements, including the latest Department of Defense and Congressional Budget Office audits and financial condition statements. I’m sure you’ll find that Sky Masters Inc. is well positioned to ride out the shortterm economic slowdown and market situation and get ready to take advantage of new opportunities.”
“So, if you’ll excuse me,” Jon said, rising quickly to his feet. “I’ve got to head back to the labs. But I’ll see you for lunch at twelve-thirty, and then I will make myself available for questions afterward. I hope you have a nice—”
“We’ve already taken the tour, Dr. Masters,” Duffield said. “We arrived yesterday, remember? You set that up for us then.”
“And we’ve already downloaded a copy of your financials from your website and from the Defense Department’s audit department,” Hudson said. “Your staff should be commended, Doctors. Your own marketing information parallels the government data exactly, neither overstating nor understating your situation.”
“Situation?” Jon asked defensively. He remained standing. “There’s no ‘situation.’ ”
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