by Dale Brown
“Yeah, roger that.”
“You want me to do that?”
“Yeah, jeez, come on, Kevin. Do it.”
“Two aircraft from the southeast,” announced Sergeant Rager, the airborne radar controller. “At 250 miles. MiG-29Bs. Must be out of Adampur.”
Englehardt’s heart began to pound, and suddenly his throat felt dry. He checked his position on the map, then double checked, basically stalling for time.
What was he supposed to do?
He’d been in situations like this dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times—in simulations. He’d always handled it then.
Now?
Now he was still moving a step behind. What was going on?
“Flighthawk leader to Bennett—you want me to send Hawk Two out that way?” asked Starship, downstairs in the Flighthawk bay.
“Roger that,” he said. “Check them out. Copilot—Kevin, they challenge us?”
“Negative.”
“Radar, continue to track. If they continue on course, we’ll ask their intentions. If they show hostile signs, we’ll shoot them down.”
His voice cracked as he finished the sentence. Englehardt winced, hoping no one else would notice. Then he reached for the water bottle he kept tucked in his pants leg, his throat bone dry.
Jamu
2143
JENNIFER GOT DOWN ON HER BELLY SO SHE COULD SEE THE interior of the weapon better, then pushed the electronic probes toward the two points at the far end of the circuit board. The narrow, needlelike probes felt as if they were frozen solid. Anna Klondike had assured Danny that taking the measurements would not cause the weapon to explode. But Jennifer had had too much experience with integrated circuits gone bad to feel completely at ease.
“OK,” she told Danny as the needles made contact. “Take the reading, please.”
“Zero.”
Jennifer pulled the probes back, then straightened.
“Well? What did they say?”
Danny put up his hand. He was wearing his smart helmet, visor up, listening to the experts at Dreamland.
“They say there’s about a twenty percent chance that it’s armed,” he told her. “If that’s the case, it can go off at any time.”
“No way.”
“You want to talk to them?”
“Yes.”
Danny pulled off his helmet and put it on Jennifer’s head. It felt heavy, and she had to steady it with both hands.
“This is Jennifer Gleason.”
“And this is Ray Rubeo,” said the scientist. “Why am I talking to you?”
“This bomb is armed?”
“There is a possibility.”
“If it was armed, it would have exploded by now.”
Rubeo snorted.
“Don’t you think?” Jennifer added, slightly less sure of herself.
“The fail-safe circuitry is dead,” said Rubeo. “Now is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“You have the experts there. What do they think?”
“They are divided. We have steps for you to take.”
“Is it going to blow up if I do the wrong thing?” Jennifer asked.
“It may. It may very well go off if you do the right thing.”
“I wish you had a sense of humor, Ray. Then I would think you were joking.”
Aboard Dreamland Bennett
2150
STARSHIP CORRECTED SLIGHTLY AS THE INDIAN MIG TACKED gently to the north. The MiG was still on a dead run for the Megafortress, about a hundred miles away. The two planes were closing in on each other at a rate of about seventeen miles a minute.
“Bennett, this is Flighthawk leader. I’m about two minutes from the MiGs. What’s your call?”
“Let’s find out what their intentions are,” said Englehardt. “Sullivan, see if you can contact them.”
The pilot’s voice sounded a little shaky. Starship had flown with him once or twice, not long enough to form an opinion. He seemed tentative, but then the prospect of combat could do that the first time you faced it. Starship remembered his first combat sortie—he’d emptied his stomach as soon as they landed.
“Indians don’t answer our radio calls,” said Sullivan.
“Try again,” said Englehardt.
The Indians called the MiG-29 “Baez”—Eagle. The models coming toward the Bennett were the initial version produced by the Mikoyan Opytno-Konstruktorskoye Byuro in the 1980s. A twin-engined, lightweight fighter-bomber, the MiG-29 was an extremely maneuverable aircraft, and generally came equipped with a pair of medium-range R-27 Alamos and four shorter range R-73 Archers. The MiG was considerably faster than the Flighthawk, but had one serious disadvantage—its N019 coherent-pulse Doppler radar could not see the Flighthawk until it was in extremely close range.
The attack pattern Starship mapped out took advantage of that; it was unlikely that the MiG driver would know he was there until the first bullets began smashing through his fuselage.
Assuming Starship got the go-ahead to fire. While the MiGs had not answered the calls from the Bennett to identify themselves, they hadn’t made any overtly aggressive moves, either.
Hawk Two was now a minute away.
“Bennett, how are we proceeding here?” Starship asked.
“Just hang on a minute, Flighthawk leader,” said Englehardt.
“Roger that,” said Starship, throttling back.
ENGLEHARDT COULDN’T BELIEVE THIS WAS HAPPENING TO him. He just couldn’t think.
A voice inside his head seemed to be screaming at him: Don’t blow it!
I won’t.
Don’t!
“Still nothing,” said Sullivan in the copilot’s seat. “They obviously know we’re here.”
“Their attack radars on?”
“Negative.”
Not answering their hails was provocative, Englehardt thought, but not threatening. His orders of engagement were pretty clear that he was to fire only if threatened.
On the other hand, if he let these planes get much closer and they did turn on their attack radars, it might be too late to get away.
“Bennett, this is Flighthawk leader. What do you want me to do?” asked Starship.
A good, legitimate question, Englehardt thought. And his good, legitimate answer was—he didn’t know.
“I don’t see these planes as a threat to us at the moment,” he told Starship.
“What if they’re carrying dumb bombs and are going to use them on the recovery team?” asked Sullivan.
He wants us to take them down, Englehardt thought. Maybe he’s right. Better safe than sorry.
“I have a suggestion, Bennett,” said Starship.
“Make it,” said Englehardt.
“Let’s move our orbit away from the ground team. See if they follow. I’ll keep Hawk Two near them, ready for an intercept.”
Good, Starship, good.
Englehardt wondered why he hadn’t thought of it—it was a simple, obvious move.
“Good. Let’s do that,” he said. “Sully, we’re going east.”
“Hey, I got something on the ground, on the highway that runs to the valley,” said Sergeant Daly, working the ground radar. “Four trucks, Humvee-sized. Moving through the passes. Real hard to get these suckers on radar with these mountains and vegetation. Yeah, all right—they’re about ten miles from the recovery area. Four of them.”
“Tell Captain Freah,” said Englehardt, the screech creeping back into his voice.
Jamu
2153
“NOTHING,” SAID DANNY FREAH. “ZERO. NO CURRENT.”
“Very good, Captain,” said Klondike. “Now we’re going to try the oscilloscope readings.”
Danny passed the information on to Jennifer, who sighed and sat back from the warhead, fluttering her fingers as if trying to get rid of a cramp.
“Can we take a short break?” Danny asked.
“As long as you need.”
Before Danny could acknowledge, there was a buzz on the line,
indicating that someone else on the Dreamland network wanted to talk to him. He switched over to channel two, where Kevin Sullivan, the copilot of the Bennett, warned him about the ground units.
“They’re about ten miles south of you,” Sullivan warned. “Coming up that road that cuts back and forth through the valley. They’re hard to track because of the terrain and trees.”
“Copy that.”
Danny yelled to the Marine sergeant in charge of the detail, telling him to pass the word about the trucks. Then he switched back to Dreamland Command.
“How much longer before the warhead is safe to move?” he asked.
“Three more steps,” said Klondike.
“How long will it take?”
“Five minutes, maybe. But first we have a series of tests. If we get the wrong result—”
“We have ground troops moving in our direction,” Danny told her. “If I can get the hell out of here before they arrive, I’d be a very happy man.”
“Stand by.”
Danny flipped back to the Bennett. “How fast is that ground unit moving?”
“Not very fast,” replied Sullivan. “Maybe fifteen miles an hour. That road takes a lot of turns and switchbacks.”
“Can you give me a visual from Hawk One?”
“Affirmative. Stand by.”
“No, I’m going to have to get back to you,” said Danny. “I’ll talk directly to Starship.”
He ducked down to Jennifer and pulled off the helmet. “We have troops coming up the road in our direction. Find out the quickest way to get this thing ready to move. Then give me the helmet back, OK?”
She bit her lip, then nodded and took the helmet.
Aboard DreamlandBennett
2155
STARSHIP TURNED HAWK TWO AWAY FROM THE MIGS, THEN took over Hawk One. Slipping down toward the unit the ground radar had spotted, he cut between a pair of 3,000 foot cliffs and shot into an open valley.
The jagged road twisted and turned across what looked like a dry streambed. A dozen men were riding on the backs or tops of the four vehicles, which had their lights out.
“Starship, you with me?” asked Danny Freah.
“Yeah, here we go, Captain. This is a live feed.” He banked, and took another run up the road, this time from the rear of the column. “Four trucks, a dozen guys or so hanging on them. They’re moving pretty slow. About forty minutes away from you, maybe a little more.”
“Yeah, listen, take a run all the way up that road for me again, OK?”
“On it.”
Starship tucked the Flighthawk through a nearby canyon, then back up and over the low mountain before falling into the valley the road ran through. One of the passes was so narrow that the computer gave him a proximity warning as he shot through. Starship ignored it, tucking the Flighthawk to the right to stay with the trail.
He took a quick look at Hawk Two. The MiGs were about thirty seconds from overtaking it. So far they hadn’t changed course or acknowledged the Bennett’s repeated attempts to contact them. He notched up the Flighthawk’s speed, then jumped back into Hawk One.
“You see that ledge on my side of that tight pass?” Danny asked as Starship climbed over the recovery site.
“I think I know which one you mean.”
“Any chance you could get some rocks into it?”
“You mean start an avalanche?”
“That’s it.”
“Let me take another look.”
Starship brought the airplane around and swooped toward what looked like a sheer, solid cliff. He wasn’t sure the relatively small missiles the Flighthawk held would do much.
Now that he had the idea planted in his head, however, he started hunting for a place where it might work.
“There’s a spot about two miles south of you where a bunch of boulders are piled against the side of the road,” he told Danny. “There are some small trees holding them back, but I think if I put the missiles there we’d get something on the road. Downside is, if it doesn’t work, I won’t have any missiles to use against the trucks.”
“Give it a shot,” Danny told him.
“Roger that.”
“INDIAN FIGHTERS ARE PASSING THE FLIGHTHAWK, STILL coming for us,” said Daly at the radar.
“Let’s move farther north,” said Englehardt. “Let’s see how far we can bring them.”
“Should we target these guys or what?” asked Sullivan. “They’re just about in range to fire at us.”
Englehardt started to say no, then reconsidered. If he let them fire first, could he avoid their missiles and fire the Anacondas?
He started to reach for the radio to ask for instructions, then stopped. His rules of engagement covered the situation—avoid firing except to protect the mission, and himself. He didn’t need authorization from anyone, or advice.
If he called Dreamland Control, he’d look weak, wouldn’t he? That’s what he was really worried about.
So what was he going to do? Was there a threat or not?
Colonel Bastian had been right to bump him the other day. He couldn’t make a decision.
Screw it.
Just make a decision. Either way. Do it.
He took a breath.
“Hold off on the Anacondas,” he said. “If they get hostile, we have a bunch of things we can do.”
“Roger that,” said Sullivan, not sounding particularly convinced.
THE COMPUTER HELPING STARSHIP FLY THE FLIGHTHAWK beeped at him when he boxed the rocks at the side of the cliff on the weapons screen, asking if he was sure he knew what he was doing.
“Confirm target,” said Starship.
The computer replied by turning the small aiming reticule red. Starship pressed the trigger button at the top of his stick and began dumping lead into the pile of rocks. They disappeared in a cloud of dust.
A fine mist of dirt still covered the area when he swung back, and even the Flighthawk’s radar couldn’t see whether the road had been blocked or not. Starship continued past, moving down the road toward the Indian column a few miles away. Apparently they’d heard the commotion; the trucks had stopped and the men were crouched around them and in the nearby rocks.
As Starship turned to come back north, the computer warned him that the MiGs were past Hawk Two.
“Bennett, what are we doing with those MiGs?” he asked.
“We’re going to lead them away from the ground party,” replied Englehardt.
“Well, yeah, roger that, but they’re inside fifty miles.”
“I know where they are, Flighthawk leader.”
Starship changed course, angling in the direction the Bennett was taking. The MiGs had slowed down but were still about three miles ahead, out of range of sure cannon shot for the robot aircraft.
He went back to Hawk One, bringing it up the road. The cloud of dust had cleared. The road was blocked—but only partially.
“You seeing this, Danny?” he asked Captain Freah.
“Roger that,” said Danny.
“Good enough?”
“It’ll have to do.”
Jamu
2200
JENNIFER JERKED BACK AS THE LEDS ON THE LARGER OF the two circuit cards in front of her began to flash.
“Danny, I need the helmet right now!” she yelled, still staring at the lights.
Danny plopped the helmet down on her head, catching her ear in the process.
“Ray, I have blinking lights here,” she said, trying to make her voice sound calm. “What does this mean?”
“Move the helmet a bit so we can see,” said Rubeo.
He sounded real calm, she thought. But of course, why wouldn’t he?
“Jennifer, locate the green wire with the white striping at the left, and snip it.”
“Snip it? You told me five minutes ago we weren’t cutting anything.”
“The thinking has changed.”
“Why?”
“Ms. Gleason, there comes a time when you have to let the pil
ot fly the plane. Just cut the wire.”
Jennifer leaned over, took the narrow-headed wire cutters from the blanket where she had laid it out, and moved her hand carefully beneath the circuit board. Gingerly working her fingers against the strands, she separated the wire from the bunch. Her hand shook slightly; she steadied the cutters against their target with the forefinger of her other hand and snipped.
Then began promptly cursing, because she had caught her finger as well.
“Jennifer?” asked Rubeo.
“The lights are out,” she said, looking at the tiny balls of blood that seemed to percolate up from the red line on her finger where she’d caught it. “The LEDs are out.”
“Very good. One more step and the warhead can be moved.”
“How good an electrical conductor do you think blood is?” she said as the small spheres turned to a large drop and oozed off her finger.
“Surprisingly good,” replied Rubeo. “I wouldn’t test it.”
THE TERRAIN WAS SO RUGGED TO THE SOUTH THAT THE Marines manning the observation point there couldn’t even see the landslide. Sergeant Norm Ganson, in charge of the landing team security, didn’t trust the eye-in-the-sky assessment and sent two men down to assess the damage.
“Four vehicles, a dozen guys—we can hold them off, no sweat,” the Marine sergeant told Danny.
“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Danny replied. He trotted back to Jennifer, whom he found squatting next to the bomb, her left forefinger in her mouth.
“Jen?”
“We can move the warhead now,” she said, rising.
“What happened to your hand? It’s bleeding.”
“It got in the way. Can you spare anybody to attach those straps, or should I do it myself?”
An atoll off the Indian coast
Time and date unknown
IT WAS THEIR WEDDING, BUT NOT THEIR WEDDING. BREANNA danced in her long white dress, sailing across the altar of the church, into the churchyard, the walls and roof of the building vaporized by Zen’s dream. She floated on the air and he followed, alone in a white and brown world, stumbling on the rocks. The band played in a large, empty fountain, arrayed around a cement statue of a forgotten saint, his face chipped away by centuries of neglect. Every time he held his hand out to his wife, she danced farther away, moving through the air as easily as if she were walking. She lay herself down on a bench, holding her arms out to him, but when he arrived, she floated off, just out of reach.