Nerve Center d-2

by Dale Brown

  The sergeant slipped the helmet back and yelled into the helicopter. “Yo!”

  “Hello,” yelled Brautman. “Leg’s broke,” he added, his voice almost cheerful. “Otherwise, I’m cool except for whatever the hell is holding me down.”

  It looked like a good hunk of the helicopter wall.

  “You say the F word yet?” asked the flight engineer as Powder tried to push his way toward him.

  “No way,” answered Powder. “You owe me ten.”

  “Mission’s not done yet.”

  “Need a pneumatic jack to get him out.” said Liu from somewhere outside the helicopter.

  “Screw that.” Powder straightened in a small spot between the forward area and what was left of the rear compartment. He had enough clearance to sit upright, but still couldn’t see Brautman’s head. “I said ‘screw,’ not the F word,” he yelled back to the trapped crewman.

  “I heard ya. You will.”

  Powder backed out, gingerly climbing atop the wrecked helicopter. Liu stood on the ground near the door — the chopper body had been squeezed so tight it barely came to his shoulders. Moving forward on his knees, Powder looked for something to use to help lever the rear door off its rail. When he couldn’t see anything, he set himself at a forty-five-degree angle and managed to jerk the metal out in two loud rips, producing a two-foot-wide opening.

  “I ate my Wheaties this morning,” he told Liu as he leaned back to rest. His arm felt like he’d pulled it out of its socket.

  The helicopter creaked as he spoke. He straightened, then realized they were moving — not far, not fast, but definitely moving.

  “We may slide down the slope,” said Liu.

  “Shit,” answered Powder.

  “Get the pilots out one at a time, ASAP.”

  As Liu said that, he was already clambering back to the cockpit. He leaned in, trying to release the pilot from his restraints.

  The helicopter slid some more, then stopped. Powder thought of trying to find something to prop it in place, but quickly dismissed the idea. He swung down and took the pilot’s body from Liu.

  The pilot was heavier than he thought, and Talcom’s legs buckled as he carried the man toward the rocks they had pointed out before. The rocks didn’t offer much shelter, but they were easy to find in the swirling snow and sat on the other side of a large crack, which might — might — mean they were safe from the slide. Powder laid the pilot as flat as possible, then lifted the crash shield on his helmet to make sure he was still breathing. When the man opened his eyes, Powder nudged his cheek with his thick thumb, then closed the shield. He took off the CIV and smart helmet, placing them next to the pilot, and ran back to the Pave Low. Liu was just lifting the copilot out.

  “You’re strong for a little guy, Liu.”

  “He’s conscious,” said Liu, holding the man in front of him as if he were displaying a piece of meat.

  Powder clambered up onto the helicopter. The aircraft slid a lot this time. “Damn,” he said, grabbing the copilot.

  “I’m okay,” grumbled the man. “I can walk myself.”

  “Yeah, okay,” said Powder, ignoring him. He turned to get off the helicopter, then noticed something peculiar — though the Pave Low had moved several times, it hadn’t pushed up any snow in front of it as it slid.

  “That’s because the whole sheet of ice is moving,” explained Liu before ducking back inside the craft.

  “Damn,” said Powder. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  He helped the copilot back to the rock, then ran to Liu. The wind rattled the helicopter propeller back and forth. Powder heard a low rumble, as if a train were approaching from the distance.

  “Liu! What the hell are you doing in there?”

  “If we use this spar as a lever,” Liu answered from inside the cockpit, “maybe we can move the wall away.”

  “The whole thing is moving,” said Powder. “Feel it?”

  “Quickly then.”

  “Shit.” Talcom squeezed around Liu to push his legs into the small opening to the rear of the helo. There was a loud groan from outside as he did.

  “Hope that was the Abominable Snowman,” he said.

  “Ice is giving way,” said Brautman.

  Powder wedged his foot against the metal side of the helicopter and tried levering the piece of spar in the opposite direction. As he did, Liu dropped the flashlight.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Brautman told them. “Go.”

  “Now who’s using bad words?” said Powder. The helicopter or the ice it was on slid downward, and he felt an empty impotence in his stomach.

  “Screw this horseshit!” Talcom yelled, jamming his boots against the metal.

  It snapped away, springing back as the door released from its latch. Snow and sleet and ice and rain fell through, twinkling artistically in the dim flare-light. None of them stopped to admire it — Brautman pulled himself upward through the hole, helped by Liu, who was outside. The flight engineer’s leg trailed behind him at an odd angle, and Powder felt a twinge in his stomach, thinking of how the damn thing must feel.

  The twinge was replaced by full-scale nausea as the helicopter jerked hard to his left, starting to ride down the incline. It had finally slipped on the ice — which also shifted in its own direction.

  “Get the hell out of here! Go!” Powder shouted. He’d started to push himself upward when he saw something moving beneath the twisted metal where the snow was falling.

  Dalton, still strapped to the stretcher.

  Chapter 52

  Aboard Raven

  19 February, 2010

  Hawk Three knifed through the turbulence, accelerating toward the jagged, snow-laden peaks where the Pave Low had disappeared. While the flight computer could cope with the strong vortices of wind easily enough, there was little it could do about the ice trying to freeze on the wings. The lower and slower Zen went — and to do the search properly, he had to go low and slow — the more precipitation clung to the control surfaces. While not enough to keep the plane from flying, it added considerably to the difficulty factor in the swirling winds near the crags.

  “Sector Alpha-Baker-1 is clear,” said Jennifer Gleason, who’d volunteered to come along and help monitor the scans. Major Cheshire had bumped Bree’s copilot and was at the stick; Bree had slid over to the second officer’s seat and was also studying the feeds.

  “Alpha-Baker-2 is also clear,” snapped Breanna. Both women were examining the IR video from Hawk Four, which was being flown entirely by the computer through a ravine at the very northern edge of the search area. The weather there was not as severe and the terrain not as twisted as the area Zen was working himself further southwest.

  Hawk Three hit a patch of clear air and shot forward as if her engine had ingested pure oxygen. Zen steadied his left joystick, glancing at the vital signs projected at the lower edge of the visor. Everything was in the green.

  His attention back on the main screen, he saw a dull shadow at the edge of the approaching valley, below a triple-dagger peak. It wasn’t warm enough to be a body, but since it was the first non-rock he’d seen, he switched from the IR to the optical feed.

  “Computer, zoom in the dark object at the bottom of Hawk Three’s visual feed,” Zen directed.

  The computer formed a box around the image, which seemed to burst into the middle of his view screen.

  Ejection seat.

  “Mark location,” said Jeff.

  “What do you have?” Jennifer asked over the interphone. “Jeff?” said Bree.

  “Excuse me. Are you manning your scans?” he snapped. “Affirmative, Hawk Leader,” answered Bree testily. Jennifer said nothing.

  “Raven, I have a piece of the seat, I think, from the Boeing,” Jeff said, technically speaking to Cheshire though they could all hear him. “I’ve marked it. I’ll continue to sweep the sector. Hawk Four is going to stay in the pattern we planned.”

  “Raven Leader acknowledges,” said the pilot. Although Jeff
was actually sitting a few feet below Cheshire on Raven’s lower deck, they had found it easier to communicate as if flying separate planes — which, of course, they were.

  Zen pushed Hawk Three to the south, dropping her lower to scan close to a W-shaped ravine at the edge of a shallow mountain plateau. The severe storm shortened the IR’s range considerably, though from a technical viewpoint the fact that he was even receiving an image was impressive. Even light rain played havoc with conventional FUR systems.

  As he neared the end of the ravine, a small shadow flickered into the upper right-hand corner of the view screen. He was by it before he could ask for a magnification; he pulled back on the Flighthawk’s joystick, then felt the plane fluttering in the heavy wind.

  “Disconnect in zero-three,” warned the computer. The storm and jagged terrain degraded the link between the Hawk and its mother.

  “Raven, I need you closer to Three,” snapped Jeff. He started to pull up, but saw something in the IR screen at the right-hand corner. He pushed toward it, despite the disconnect warning that flashed in the screen.

  “Disconnect in zero-three, two—”

  Zen managed to nudge the U/MF upward at the last second, retaining the data flow. But the storm whipped hard against the small plane’s wings. It pushed up and then down, yawing like a gum wrapper tossed from a car. Even with the assistance of the computer and the vectoring nozzles, Zen couldn’t get it where he wanted.

  “Raven, lower,” he demanded.

  “You want me to park on Mount Whitney?” snapped Cheshire.

  “That’s too high.” He just missed a ravine wall as he tried to slide Hawk Three back toward the ridge where he’d seen the image. Hawk Three hugged the hillside, her altimeter nudging six thousand feet — half the altitude Raven needed to clear the surrounding peaks. This was too damn low for comfort, and even C3 began doing a Bitchin’ Betty routine, warning that he was going too low and too slow. Still, the only way to get a good view was to practically crawl across the terrain. Hawk Three’s forward airspeed nudged below ninety knots.

  Stall warning. But something hot, real hot, filled the screen. Above — up. Jeff throttled and pushed the stick, climbing the side of the ridge.

  “Disconnect in zero-three.”

  “Nancy! Closer!”

  “We’re trying, Zen!”

  A red bar appeared at the bottom of his view screen as the computer continued counting down the disconnect.

  But there was a man there. Definitely a man — two men, huddled.

  As Zen went to push the GPS marker, the screen blanked into gray fuzz. The default sequence knocked the view screen back to the optical view from Hawk Four, which had just begun knifing east.

  A magenta disc filled the screen; Jeff felt suddenly weightless, sliding backward. The right side of his head imploded, pain shooting everywhere — he closed his eyes as he spun back, caught by some trick of fatigue or exertion or merely disorientation. He couldn’t see, couldn’t think. Streaks of rain and lightning flashed by him, close enough to feel but not see. The world split beneath him, the fault line running through his spine.

  Then he felt his toes. He could actually feel his toes.

  The sun turned mercury red, then steamed off, evaporating in a hiss that filled his helmet.

  An ANTARES flashback because he’d been thinking of Kevin?

  Or because he’d taken the first dose of drugs as soon as Bastian gave the okay to rejoin the program?

  That was less than two hours ago. The screen was back to normal — it had to have been a weird anomaly caused by the lightning.

  And fatigue. He was getting damn tired.

  “Sorry, shit, I’m sorry. The storm is too fierce here,” said Cheshire somewhere outside of his helmet. She apologized for the wicked, disorienting turbulence shaking the plane.

  Raven shuddered, trying desperately to fight off a wind shear that dropped her nearly two hundred feet in the blink of an eye. The plane pitched onto her side, just barely staying airborne.

  “Zen, I can’t get any lower than this.”

  “Hawk Leader acknowledges,” he snapped. “C3, reestablish contact with Hawk Three.”

  “Attempting,” answered the voice module.

  “Try harder,” he said, even though he realized the voice command would merely confuse the computer. He altered Hawk Four’s course to close on the area Three had been surveying, and was within ten miles when the computer finally managed to restore full bandwidth with the U/MF.

  Fail-safe mode during disconnect had caused the robot to fly upward out of the mountains. Because of that, Four was actually closer to the slope where he’d seen what he thought were men — or at least he thought it was closer, since he hadn’t marked it. Zen let the computer put Three into a safe orbit at fifteen thousand feet over Raven, and brought Four into the treacherous peaks. He flew south, then circled back, pushing downward as he came.

  A fire burned at the left-hand side of his screen. Above to the right loomed a large object.

  The Pave Low. Men nearby.

  Jeff quickly marked the location.

  “I have them,” he told Nancy. “Get me the SAR commander.”

  “Coast Guard asset Colgate is already en route to our position, Hawk Commander,” answered Breanna from the copilot’s station, where she was handling communications. “ETA is ten minutes. They’re requesting you guide them in.”

  “I have a flare on the ground. Two figures near a rock, three figures. Something else in the helicopter,” said Zen, nudging Hawk Four to get as close as possible in the storm. “Looks like the helicopter’s moving, sliding or something.”

  “Opening Colgate channel. I think I’m getting something on Guard as well.”

  The helicopter seemed to hop in the screen.

  “Colgate better get a move on,” said Zen. “And Bree, if you can get the crew on Guard, tell them to get the hell off that ice. The whole side of that hill is heading for the ravine.”

  Chapter 53

  Sierra Nevada Mountains

  19 February, 2018

  Powder shouldered against the helicopter spar, then felt something shove down behind him. Metal crunched and crackled — he pushed around what had been a flight engineer’s seat, kneeling and then crawling into the cabin opening. Dalton lay beneath some blankets just a few feet away, his legs exposed.

  They were moving. The earth rumbled beneath them.

  “Yo, Captain, I’m gonna cut you outta this,” said Powder, feeling along the stretcher for the restraints. “I sure hope your back ain’t messed up, ‘cause we gotta go.”

  Dalton groaned, or at least Powder thought he groaned. Powder pulled his combat knife against the belts, slashing and hacking as the back end of the helo slid around. His hand Hew free as he reached the last strap. He lost the knife but grabbed Dalton, pulling him backward as he pushed upward to get out of the fuselage. Dalton dragged behind, still attached somehow.

  “Come on!” shouted Powder, pulling. Whatever held the pilot down snapped free. Powder got his elbow on the metal side below the open doorway and pushed upward like a swimmer trying to rise from the bottom of a swimming pool. He managed to get out of the fuselage, dragging the pilot with him as they tumbled into the snow and ice and rocks. Powder got to his feet, clawing in the direction of the others as the mountain rumbled beneath him. Something hard hit him in the chest, but he kept moving, churning his legs and struggling to keep Dalton in the grip of his icy fingers. After about five or six yards he fell sideways into a fissure of earth, then lost his balance backward.

  Something grabbed his scalp, yanking at it but losing its grip; nonetheless, it helped him regain his momentum, and he threw himself and the injured pilot forward, scrambling as a pair of arms caught his side and hauled him upward.

  “Shit fuck,” he said, landing on the ground across the fissure near the rock, helped there by Liu and the copilot.

  “You owe me ten bucks,” growled Brautman on the ground.

  �
��Fuck yourself,” Powder said to him, easing Dalton to the ground.

  “Want to try double or nothing?”

  Despite the storm, they all started laughing.

  Chapter 54

  Aboard Raven

  19 February, 2024

  Raven had been outfitted as an electronics warfare and electronics intelligence or Elint test bed, and her sleek underbody included several long aerodynamic bulges containing high-tech antennae. Though not trained to squeeze the last ounce of reception out of the equipment, Bree knew enough to pinpoint the strongest areas of the PRC-90 transmission beacon as it bounced out of the rocks. The enhanced gear in Raven gathered different parts of the broadcast, in effect cobbling the full transmission from a series of broken shadows. The problem was making the PRC-90 hear them; the radios were strictly line-of-sight and the surrounding ridges gave only a narrow reception cone.

  “I think they’re laughing,” Breanna told the others on the interphone.

  “Laughing?” said Cheshire.

  “Hang on.” She clicked back into the Guard frequency. “Charlie 7, this is Raven. Can you hear me?”

  “Charlie 7. Got you Raven, honey.”

  The crewman was definitely giggling.

  “Honey?”

  “Kind of wet down here,” responded whoever was handling the radio. “Send some umbrellas if you’re not picking us up.” Major Cheshire tapped Breanna’s shoulder.

  “What’s up?”

  “I think they’re suffering from oxygen depletion or something,” said Breanna, shrugging before giving the Coast Guard rescue helicopter a vector to the crash.

  “Colgate acknowledges. Bitchin’ weather, but — we see them, we see them!” said the Coast Guard pilot, his voice suddenly jumping an octave. “We can get them as long as they stay in the clear there. We can get them!”

  “Raven acknowledges. We’ll stand by.”