Nerve Center d-2

by Dale Brown

  He’d dropped out of Theta.

  The twinge of panic swirled into a full-blown typhoon. The entire Air Force would be after him, all of the military. He’d been screwed before — Army generals and personnel bastards and Pentagon phonies had screwed him out of his advanced-weapons project at Los Alamos, yanked his clearances. They’d claimed he needed a rest, but he’d known they were out to screw him because of what he’d done in Iraq. He’d shown them up, nailing those tanks with his men. Bastards.

  Madrone forced himself to sit back in the seat. He was losing it, giving in to paranoia.

  The headache started to return. He pushed air into the bottom of his lungs, loosened the muscles at the top of his shoulders.

  He hadn’t wanted to run away. But here he was. The pilot and copilot had ejected; he was in control of the ship.

  They’d call it mutiny. Put him in jail for life, and he’d never see his daughter.

  She was already dead.

  Kevin ran his fingers across his forehead. He couldn’t think straight. The universe was breaking apart.

  He had to get back into Theta. Now.

  Chapter 45

  Pej, Brazil

  19 February, 1510 local

  Minerva Lanzas folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the back of the bulldozer. The hazy sun cast a brown light over the dusty mountain airstrip, tinting the colors like a faded postcard. If she’d been in a better mood, she might have almost thought it romantic.

  But if she’d been in a better mood she would not be here in Pej, caught between the Amazon and the mountains of Serra Curupira, in exile — Dante’s third ring of hell.

  Three months before, Colonel Lanzas had been one of the most important officers of the Força Aérea Brasileira, the Brazilian Air Force. She had obtained her position through the usual means — family connections, politics, sex, even skill as a pilot and commander. As commanding officer of an elite group of FAB interceptors attached to the Third Air Force south of Rio de Janeiro, she’d had power, prestige, and the potential for great wealth. She had managed to shed her third husband — a once-useful if pedestrian diplomat and military attaché — and begun to amass a personal following that extended to the Army as well as the Air Force. At thirty-one, she’d looked forward to a bright future not just in the military, but in Brazilian politics as well.

  But then she had overplayed her hand, misjudging the ever-shifting currents of the country’s politics. The result had been a disastrous showdown with the Navy — and then this.

  Two decades before, the Brazilian Navy had attempted to expand its power by clandestinely adding aircraft to its fleet forces. Then, the Air Force generals had carefully parlayed news of this into a magnificent power play that assured them of dominance in the government for many years. So it seemed likely that when the admirals once again tried something by secretly purchasing Russian destroyers and sending out feelers for MiGs, the evidence would propel the Air Force to even greater heights. General Emil Herule hoped to become Defense Minister, a short step to President. Lanzas and the white-haired Air Force leader had done good business in the past, with an occasional foray into matters of pleasure; her decision to lead a flight to gather intelligence seemed a logical and profitable gesture.

  Colonel Lanzas personally commanded a four-ship element of F-5E Tigers over the screening force around Minas Gerias, the Brazilian Navy’s aircraft carrier. The film in her plane confirmed Air Force suspicions about the two new destroyers. Her camera also discovered that the carrier’s catapults had been modified to launch Mirages — a fact confirmed by the takeoff of the planes.

  The two Mirages attempted to intercept the Tigers. At some point, one of the Navy planes used its radar to lock on her group. There was only one possible response. Both Mirages were destroyed in the subsequent battle.

  Minerva had splashed one of the planes herself. Like all of her engagements, it was short, quick, and deadly. But it did not bring the desired result.

  Brazil in the 1990’s was very different than the 1960’s. The President and his Cabinet backed the Navy in the inter-service imbroglio, even though the admirals had clearly violated the law. General Herule was reassigned to a minor desk job in Brasilia. Most of the generals and colonels who had backed him were jailed. Lanzas, after some negotiation, got off with mere banishment. Her family had helped finance the President’s election, after all. Negotiations had been complicated by several factors, not the least of which was the destruction of the Mirages. A sizable payment from the colonel’s personal fortune had finally settled the matter.

  There had been rumors before the showdown that Lanzas possessed two atomic weapons. The admirals fortunately did not believe the rumors, or the negotiations might have been considerably more difficult. They considered that the woman colonel was like all women, a contemptible temptress ready to use her tongue in any way possible — something several of them could personally verify. Brazil did not have its own nuclear program, and even her wealth could not purchase a bomb from another country. Besides, who would be so unpatriotic as to bomb their own country?

  But in actual fact Minerva Lanzas did possess two devices, though in some ways they were as impotent as the admirals’ personal equipment.

  Designed during a joint-service project with a renegade Canadian weapons engineer several years before, the warheads were to have been fired by a massive artillery device. The gun, had the design worked, would have propelled them roughly twenty miles. About as long as a desk, with the diameter of a bloated wastepaper basket, they had small payloads that were only a third as powerful as the primitive weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The design was relatively primitive — a focused detonation of high explosives propelled a seed nugget of fission material into a small bowl shaped of plutonium at a speed and temperature just high enough to start a chain reaction.

  The project itself was an utter failure. The artillery piece proved much more likely to shatter than launch even a dummy shell. The computer simulations of the warhead showed its yield would be very “dirty,” with the long-lasting radiation likely to spread precariously close to the firing position. And finally, Brazil had never been able to obtain the plutonium the weapon’s final design called for.

  Lanzas had been assigned as a monitor for the project; her reports lambasted it. But when the government abandoned the initiative, she acquired several of the early shells with their high-tech explosives and trigger mechanisms through blackmail, bribery, and in one case, murder.

  Her wealth was not so great that she could obtain weapons-grade plutonium. But she could find uranium, which not so coincidentally had been the subject of one of the earlier designs. Shaping the radioactive metal was expensive and dangerous, but in the end the only thing that shocked her was how small the radioactive pellets were.

  The Navy adventure had interrupted her efforts to adapt the warheads for practical use as missiles. And while she had arranged for two top weapons engineers to follow her here within the next few days, she now faced an even greater problem — even if she managed to scrounge material for a missile chassis, she lacked a suitable plane to launch the missiles from.

  Minerva tucked her hands into her leather jacket and surveyed the packed dirt strip. Ten bulldozers—”borrowed” from a rancher nearly fifty miles away — had carved an additional three hundred meters out of the rocky soil, making the strip just long enough to comfortably land her Hawker Siddeley HS 748, an ancient twin turboprop known to the Brazilian Air Force as a C-91. The sturdy but far from glamorous transport was now the centerpiece of her command. In fact, it was her only plane.

  Despair curled around her like a snake, squeezing the breath from her lungs. Her money was nearly gone; she had no influence beyond this small strip. When she had arrived, she had hoped for revenge, but as the days dragged on it became increasingly clear that there would be no opportunity for it. When the strip was finished, she might — might — be lucky to host a visiting KC-130H and a
n occasional squadron of F-5’s, or Tucanos, as they rotated north to patrol the Venezuelan-Colombia frontier every third or fourth month. Even that would only happen if catastrophe struck Boa Vista, several hundred miles away.

  She told herself not to despair. Fate would deliver her an opportunity, just as it had in the past. She would shape her bombs into something useful; she would find a way to use her charms and the last of her money. Fortune would send her a chance, and she would make the most of it.

  At worst, she would have revenge.

  Chapter 46

  Aboard Hawkmother

  Over Pacific Ocean

  19 February, 1302 local

  Madrone pushed his back gently against the seat, his head rising with the flow of air into his lungs. Slow, slow — he pushed everything into the breath, resisting the temptation to concentrate on the tickling sensation at the corner of his temples. He could hear the rain in the distance. Thick trunks of trees appeared before him, materializing from the fog. His lungs rose to the top of his chest, pushing him against the restraint straps. He had to hold his back perfectly erect, his boots flat on the floor.

  In.

  The storm drenched him with wet, sticky water. A torrent ran down the back of his hair to his neck to his shoulders, sizzling along the metal of his spine.

  They were on the course he had plotted, running toward Mexico.

  He needed to find a quiet airfield, a place big enough so he could land Hawkmother, but not quite so big that they would ask a lot of questions.

  They would always ask questions. They were after him. They hated him.

  Madrone forced himself back to the cockpit of the Boeing. He could land — he saw the procedure on his right, felt the way it would feel in his brain.

  Find an airport now. The computer held a list.

  They would use the identifier beacon to track him. He could turn it off by cutting its power.

  Where was it, though? Beneath his left arm somewhere. The 777 suddenly lurched to the left. Madrone realized he had done that with his inattention. He imagined himself in flight again, felt his brain floating with Hawkmother. The plane leveled out, pushing its wings level.

  The rods of the interface that helped him work the controls spread around him, an infinite series of handles connected to clockwork. He stood inside a massive church tower. Bells sat above, worked by the rods. A large row of gears sat in a long rectangular box to his left. The mechanical gears of four massive clocks filled the walls. The tower smelled of stone dust and camphor. There were open windows beneath the clock faces. He could see through them to the outside. The tower sat in the middle of the rain forest. A storm raged all around.

  He looked upward. He could see through the roof, though the rain did not fall here.

  What was this metaphor? It had risen entirely unbidden.

  The testing tower at Glass Mountain, where he’d been assigned when Christina was born. The place where they’d poisoned him.

  Lightning crashed in the distance. Madrone turned his gaze slightly right, remembered his idea of the brain as separate rooms. He closed this one, put himself into the Flighthawks.

  Less than an hour’s worth of fuel.

  He turned his gaze left, then stepped back into the Boeing’s cockpit.

  Two hours more fuel.

  Refuel the Flighthawks. Then land, fuel the Boeing, take off feed the robots.

  Yes.

  Pain shot from one side of his head to the other. His skull snapped upward, shoved up by a tremendous force at the base. Breathe, he reminded himself.

  He couldn’t. A panel with his vital signs appeared before his eyes. The green line of an electrocardiogram waved in front of him, flashed into a snake.

  Pain enveloped him. The Boeing lurched toward the waves. Warnings sounded — they were very close to the water.

  A hundred feet. Fifty.

  Kevin. Kevin, I’m here. I believe in you.

  The dark woman emerged from the forest. Her eyes were dark brown, the same color as her hair, pulled back from her face and flowing over her shoulders. Her bronze breasts swayed slightly as she walked toward him, naked in the light, misty rain.

  I am in control, he told himself. He visualized himself sitting in Hawkmother’s cockpit. He pulled back on the yoke, pushing the plane away from the ocean. The plane responded easily, pushing her nose up in the rapid climb he set.

  Climb to twenty thousand feet and refuel. Then find a civilian flight path. Have the computer keep the Flighthawks close to the 777, where they would be invisible.

  Find a civilian flight to impersonate. Refuel.

  The first thing he tried was tapping into the Mexican civilian control network. He thought there would be a database of flights, and that the Boeing’s flight computer could somehow access it. But if that was possible, he couldn’t find the right hook; his mind clogged and the best he could do was use the radio, talking directly to the tower at Hermosilla — a comical exchange of ¿Qué? after ¿Qué?

  Then he got a better idea. He monitored transmissions from flights taking off from the airport, listening for call signs and then asking C3 to identify the plane types. He wanted something similar to the 777 flying southward.

  After several minutes, he found a 707 bound for Mexico City — AirTeknocali 713. It was a cargo plane, and its course took it over the Sierra Madres. Adjusting the Boeing’s flight path to trail it was accomplished with a nudge.

  Refueling the Flighthawks was equally easy. The Boeing extended the tail boom. The first buffet of turbulence off the big plane’s airfoil pushed the nose of Hawk One down, but Madrone found that the eddy helped hold the small plane in place; if he backed the engine of the U/MF off quickly as he approached, the nose of the plane moved to the nozzle like iron shavings to a magnet.

  The Mexican plane, meanwhile, lumbered ahead, rising to 28,000 feet but barely pushing three hundred knots.

  Madrone couldn’t make it to Mexico City, but that was just as well. There’d be too many questions there, and people expecting AirTeknocali. He found a smaller airfield nearer the coast, Tepic.

  He looked to the right, examining the Boeing’s controls. He pushed the throttle bar gently, then edged the control yoke to the left, getting onto the exact path of the Mexican plane, though he was about five thousand feet lower.

  He looked left, climbing into the Flighthawks. He punched them out of the 777’s shadow, felt the rush as their engines began to accelerate. The planes’ relatively small power plants couldn’t take them much beyond Mach 1.2, but they were considerably faster than AirTeknocali 713 and infinitely more maneuverable.

  The Mexican plane grew in Hawk One’s visual display. C3 began giving him readings on its bearing and speed, then realized what he was doing.

  “Intercept in eighty-five seconds,” the computer told him.

  He pushed the two Flighthawks into a spread, their wings separated 131 feet, exactly an inch outside the Boeing’s.

  Until the last moment, Madrone intended only to scare the pilot of AirTeknocali 713 into changing course. He had a vague notion of forcing the pilot far inland, spooking him long enough so there was no possibility of him interfering. Concentrating on flying had calmed Kevin somehow, removed the pain to a faraway place, focused his thoughts. But rage seized him as he rode the Flighthawks toward the wings of the cargo jet. A claw grabbed for the back of his head; he heard a jaguar or another big cat growling behind him. The anger at losing his daughter, the anger at being betrayed by the Army, by the people at Dreamland, by everyone, boiled into its scream.

  Madrone flashed inches from the windshield of the Mexican jet with Hawk One, then took Hawk Two so close the wing scraped the cockpit glass, breaking it. The Mexican plane bolted upward, then nosed hard toward the ground, its pilot jerking hard on the stick as his windshield exploded and the force of the escaping air sucked at his clothes. Madrone rolled the Flighthawks downward, his mind between the two cockpits, flying them as one plane, flying them as if they were his ha
nds. He was a giant, a vengeful god seeking revenge against all who had tried to hurt him.

  The 707 — their 707 — flailed helplessly, trying to escape his grasp. As the pilot or copilot radioed a Mayday, Madrone shot Hawk One back across their path. The visual input from the robot plane caught the cockpit. The pilot’s seat was empty. The other man cried, eyes bulging as the jowls of his cheeks distorted with the violent gravity and atmospheric pressures.

  The plane yawed into a spin.

  Madrone pulled the Flighthawks back, rage spent. He told C3 to take the planes back to Hawkmother, then rushed away from them and their inputs, not wanting to know what happened to AirTeknocali 713, not daring to see the copilot’s tears as the plane crashed into the mountain.

  From Hawkmother’s cockpit, he radioed Tepic and told him he had a fuel emergency.

  He used English, but the response came in Spanish. He was cleared in to land.

  As he approached. someone on the ground radioed him frantically. Was he AirTeknocali 713?

  Yes, he said.

  But the radar showed he was something else.

  He’d turned the identifier off, at least.

  He had no time to figure out if there was a way to spoof the radar or to puzzle out a proper response. Madrone was committed now. The fear and excitement of landing, the danger — it all calmed him, helping him concentrate. He didn’t worry about red tinges reappearing at the edge of his brain, or fear the bizarre dreams and startling metaphors ANTARES imposed on his thoughts. He simply flew.

  The flight computer walked him into the airport. The strip was short — they’d have to go right into reverse thrust.

  Doable. A good wind had kicked up to hit him in the nose. No problem here.

  He jumped back to the Flighthawks. Madrone put them in a very low and slow orbit over the waves. They would be just barely within control range when he landed, but there was no one nearby to spot them.

  What would they do if there was trouble? They had no shells in their cannons.