by Ryder Stacy
“Rock—the power, the power,” Sheransky stuttered out.
“I’m letting her drop,” Rockson barked back. “It’s our only chance. The electrical discharges were shorting her out. She just wasn’t responding.” He didn’t add that he hoped he could get the engine turned back on again before they were mashed into steel sandwich spread on the hard earth below. But at least it pulled them out of the center of the raging storm. Even as lightning streaked wildly around them, as if trying to track them down and let them have it with a good 50,000,000-volt jolt that would incinerate the craft, they dropped right out of the clouds and down into the quiet dark air below that Rockson had hoped for. Even there though, the sky was filled with sheets of rain and hail.
Rock watched the altimeter and the ground too. He knew he had to time it all perfectly. There wouldn’t be a second chance one way or another. The sheer speed and drop angle made it hard for the delta-wing aircraft to grab hold of the air. Still, they tried. Even within the steel frame of the jet, they could all hear the howling, angry winds outside like a million ghosts all knock-knock-knocking on their flexing door.
The ground was clearly coming up too fast. They could see trees and a road here and there. Could see them all too clearly. Rockson saw the warning light of imminent impact blinking faster and faster as the altimeter read out 3,000, 2,000, 1,000— There was no more time.
He slammed the POWER ON switches, waited two seconds, and when the engine whinnied into life, poured on everything the jet had. They could literally hear the craft creaking and making all kinds of awful bending sounds as its very molecular components were tested to their limits. A roar of fire poured out of the thruster of the MIG, and suddenly the g’s were back in full force. The jet’s nose swung up, straightening out as Rock pulled back as far as he could on the controls. He swore a pine tree’s top just below them was going to take them out, but the jet just skimmed its needles, sending the top branches of the pine tree exploding off in flames. Then they were moving horizontally again. And they were alive, for the moment.
Rockson eased back on the controls, and the X7 climbed a few thousand feet until they were safely above the looming mountain passes. The storm was still roaring out its anger above, but the worst of the blow was much higher up, above ten thousand feet. Down here they only had to contend with driving sheets of rain that would have drowned the Ark.
“Good flying, Rock,” Chen muttered from behind Rockson.
“Arrccchhheeer llooovvve Rrroooccckksssoonnnn,” Archer croaked out from his seat. Which made them all laugh, breaking the incredible tension of the last several minutes.
To Rockson’s amazement, a tail wind from the storm aided their progress for a thousand miles, saving precious fuel. The mass-ratio computer reported that they would indeed make it to Africa, if they followed its “suggested” flight path.
They reached the long, curving shoreline of the Atlantic in just another twenty minutes without anything coming out to intercept them. Then the MIG left the land mass of America and they were out over the water. All eyes turned back to get a final glimpse of their home. All of them couldn’t help but wonder if they’d ever see it again. They tried to shut up the dark voice inside that said “no.”
Rock continued flying low, just yards above the ocean, creating a foaming furrow in the black liquid behind them. Fish, porpoises, whales floating near the surface looked up in fear, wondering if the sky was falling as the flaming thunder-thing passed overhead.
Twelve
They flew across the great oceanic divide separating America from the other continents. Flew and flew, and flew some more. It was hard to believe there was this much water on earth, let alone in just one part of it. Sheransky got a game of cards going with Chen and Archer in the backseat, straining around in his co-pilot’s chair to do so. Rock kept a firm eye on the console readouts and the curved violet-tinted windshield which almost matched the off-color of the smooth sea. Archer, tiring of the card game, fell asleep quickly, snoring loudly with his head back against the steel wall. Chen, who claimed he had never played Old Maid before, beat Sheransky game after game, until he’d lost every Century City dollar that he ever had or would have.
Rockson just let his mind sort of go into an all-systems-on, relaxed-but-ready kind of trance. He kept his hands firmly on the controls. He wouldn’t even think of throwing her on automatic pilot and getting some shut-eye. Not for an instant. He just didn’t trust machines when it came right down to it. Not more than himself and his mutant’s sixth sense. No way, Jose. He’d stay awake all the way to Africa, then probably collapse as soon as he touched down. It was an eight-hour journey even in the high-speed MIG.
They were at about the two-thirds point according to the instrumentation panel when Rockson saw a warning that there were numerous large objects at sea level. He decided to go higher a few feet for safety, aiming the high-resolution video camera beneath one wing down at the water.
It was amazing—fish of all sizes and shapes floating on the surface all over the place. Many were quite large, twenty, even thirty feet long. They glowed, and it appeared that many, if not most, of them weren’t moving. They were dead—and glowed as if floating in a radioactive sludge.
He scanned them, miles of them as the jet pushed on. Other immense sea beasts were snapping away at the glowing pink and green carcasses. And these feeders were equally ugly. Many really were more like oceanic reptiles than the fish he had seen in his time. A mix of shark and Plesiosaurs would about describe them. He thanked the Good Lord they weren’t down there in a boat.
He cruised up to a few thousand feet, and stayed there for a good half hour watching the Sargasso Sea of Glowing Death, overwhelmed by the size of it. A whole portion of the ocean must have gotten poisoned as well as the land masses, Rock speculated. Somehow he’d thought that the atomic missiles would have hit only land. But of course a lot of them had probably misfired, or their guidance systems had gone haywire and they’d gone right into the oceans. Perhaps dozens of nukes had landed around here and killed everything. And over the century the radiation had created the hideous sea creatures below.
Maybe it had even been done on purpose. Some madman on one side or another had decided in the final moments, “Yeah, we must poison the oceans as well so the enemy won’t be able to fish from them.” Well, they were right about that. Rockson wasn’t doing any fishing around there.
He lifted the X7 higher, having had enough of the mutations, and leveled off at 25,000. There couldn’t be any Red radar screens out here! Sheransky had fallen asleep as well, and his high-pitched snore contrasted nicely with Archer’s animal slobbering sounds. Rock glanced around to Chen, who stared with almond-shaped eyes like clear black rocks in a stream straight back at him. A small grin moved across his face just for a second, acknowledging that he too had seen the feeding sea monsters.
At last as they rode out of the night and into the morning Rock got a reading that they were nearing land. They were over the Mediterranean Sea. He woke up Sheransky to help him with the whole series of instructions in Russian that were flashing on the jet’s computer screen.
“It says, ‘Approaching selected target area. Do you wish to arm nukes?’ ” Sheransky read sleepily, rubbing his eyes and dry mouth.
“Bombs? We have atomic weapons on board?” Rock asked with disbelief. It hadn’t occurred to them that they were carrying anything more than a few conventional air-to-air rockets. If he had known, he would have dumped them to save fuel.
Ahead the sun was starting to rise, a burning ball floating up out of the perfect curves of the blue water, which ended abruptly, to reveal the great land mass of Africa showing up out of the haze.
“We still have about a half hour,” the Russian technician explained to Rockson. “But it wants to know if it should load our firing chambers with two small-yield nuclear-tipped missiles and begin implementing launching procedure?”
“How do you tell it no?” Rock gulped nervously. “Tell it to take a
ll the nuke stuff out of gear and put it to sleep. Keep the other armaments, though. We may need them.”
“Will do, Rock,” Sheransky croaked as he hit the computer keys, one finger on each hand tapping out instructions fast like a woodpecker’s beak. “There—done like you asked for.” He smiled broadly, the wide ruddy face looking at Rockson with pride.
“I didn’t know you knew about all this jet armament stuff, Sheransky. You really are handy,” Rock said, somewhat amazed.
“Always try to pick up a few things here and there, you know. Hang out in the computer room at Century City a lot too. In Russia you better know something good when you come out of the army—or boom—off to the Gulags to pick frozen cabbages. So—” He shrugged his shoulders and looked at Rockson with a smirk. “I became expert-expert!”
“Listen, pal,” Rock said, his eyes squinting as the north coast of Africa came fully into view. He could match it up against the image of the map on the monitor to his left. “Next time you know about something—tell me, man, you hear? I need every bit of information I can get my fingers on.”
“Sorry, I didn’t want to show you up or anything,” Sheransky apologized. “In Russia, if you show you know more than the idiot above you—boom—you’re licking ration stamps in Ikkutsk. I thought—”
“This ain’t Russia, for Christ’s sake,” Rock said, exasperated. “I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. We work as a team. Every man contributes what he knows, whatever the hell it is. If you can tell me anything, tell me before—not after.”
“Sure, Rock,” Sheransky said sheepishly, turning and looking out the window at the coastline. Waves washed up on the shore in a foam of white that stretched hundreds of miles.
Whistling merrily, Rockson checked the fuel. One minute’s worth left! Luckily they were very near their destination. His whistle stopped when he checked out the status of the landing gear. It was kaput. The right wheel had been damaged somewhere along the line. The readouts indicated it was leaking oil, its hydraulic system completely AWOL. He couldn’t land on one wheel.
“All right, everyone, get your Soviet chutes on. We’re going to have to jump. Sorry, but the party’s over. Hey—are those nukes completely defused?” Rock asked Sheransky nervously.
“Da! The computer told me that the warheads are pulled away from the firing mechanisms on both missiles. It may cause some radiation leakage where it falls—but it won’t go up and burn our tails, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Well, I guess we’re going to pollute an already polluted ocean a little more,” Rock noted darkly. He dropped the X7 down, and slowed it, until the jet’s computer indicated it was at optimum height for jumping.
“Everybody ready?” Rock asked, turning around in his cockpit seat.
Archer was still struggling with his chute, which Chen was helping him with after rigging it up with extra belt-webbing so it would fit around his broad shoulders. It would hold. But it looked pretty strange.
“Yeah, Rock,” Chen shouted back as the sun came from behind a cloud, streaming through the window, making them all wince even through the tinted glass.
“Your chutes will open automatically—or so they say. But the cord on your right hand side opens it as well, so—” Rock pressed a lever, and the canopy jumped off from the fuselage and flew away.
“How do we jump?” Sheransky asked as he looked from side to side. The jet’s engine went silent.
“Oh, we don’t jump.” Rock grinned devilishly. “If I remember my manual—these are ejection seats.” He slammed the INSTANT EJECT button. In a fraction of a second, with such speed that they swore they were all shot from a cannon, they were all rudely ejected out into the cold sky. None of them knew where the hell they were for a few seconds. They just tumbled end over end like clothes spinning around in a dryer. Chen came into a straight glide after about four seconds of freefall. Rockson an instant later. The other two Freefighters continued to flail about madly like birds with one wing for a few more seconds. Then all the chutes suddenly snapped open, timed to go after exactly eight seconds.
Then they were just drifting down, twisting around in the clear sky, marveling at the land below them and the sea just to their backs. And then marvel turned to fear as onshore breezes suddenly began sweeping them out toward the ocean again. Rock had ejected them when the console had said that the X7 was three miles inland, very near their rendezvous site. But quickly they were being carried out over the craggy shoreline, and then out over the water.
They all tried to steer their air-filled chutes. But although they held well enough, they were the old fully domed ones—not the cutaway steerable ones. Rock saw the plane fly on by, and slam into the water two miles off, where he had aimed it. It slid smoothly into the ocean with scarcely a ripple, and must have gone straight to the bottom, for he saw no explosions.
Suddenly the dark water was coming up fast and Rock tried to steady himself for the splashdown. Landing a chute in water could be the last thing you’d ever try. He imprinted on his mind that his large knife was in his boot at his side, to know where it was once he hit, in case he had to cut ropes. And then he didn’t have time to do any more planning. He came down feet first, and seemed to go down a good ten yards into the cold ocean before he felt himself being pulled back up again. Above he could see the chute, soaking wet, starting to drift down over him. If he got tangled in it—he was a dead man. Rock reached for the knife and cut the chute cords a few feet from the surface. He came up alongside it and threw his head up out of the water, gasping for breath.
Chen was already up, and then Archer too bobbed up like a big raft, his bearded face looking around frantically. Chen went back under, and came up a few seconds later with Sheransky, who spat out half the ocean as the martial-arts master helped him cut his chute free. Rock tore his eyes to the shore. They were about a half mile out. Not too bad considering.
“I think we can swim for it, all right. The tide’s going in.” Rock addressed the three of them as they bobbed around. God, wasn’t this water cold for Africa, Rock thought. Too cold to linger in! “Chen, you keep an eye on our Russian friend here. I’ll take the lead.”
Rockson started ahead with strong firm strokes. Archer paddled right behind him. The big man could swim pretty good. He was splashing a little, like a moose in a tub—still, he moved. They had gotten perhaps a quarter-mile, nearly halfway to shore, when Rock saw a motion in the water ahead, a sudden rippling coming straight at them from about a hundred yards off.
“Unknown something coming in at nine o’clock,” Rock shouted to the others as he ripped out his thankfully fully waterproof shotpistol and kicked sideways away from the moving shadow.
“Holy shit,” Sheransky stuttered, stopping his strokes, a few feet from Chen, who had been giving him an extra push every few yards. The shape came straight toward him.
“Move, out of the way it’s—” Rock’s voice stopped in mid-sentence as his tongue became instantly frozen by the sight of the huge head that broke the surface. It was like the rad-monsters he’d seen from the air. Only this sea creature was much uglier up close, and it was coming at them, opening its immense jaws. It looked like some spawn of Moby Dick which had mutated over many generations, and bore no resemblance to the more “wholesome-looking” fish of the past.
This one had spikes and bumps and rows of poisonous teeth all over its face. Its jaws poked ahead in crocodilian fashion a good thirteen feet long. It must have been sixty, even seventy feet from snout to tip of tail. Rockson knew such things had existed in prehistoric times. Shecter had told him many times about his theories of de-evolution. This ugly bastard had de-evolved his way back to the nastiest of the sea dwellers, back to before life even had time to get as pretty as the dinosaurs.
“Move, move.” Rock suddenly found his voice as he saw the green eyes the size of truck tires zeroing in on the still-frozen Sheransky. “Move your ass, or it’s going to be Russian stew for that monster.” Rock raised his shotpisto
l as the huge head tore by about ten yards away. He knew it was a puny weapon, but pulled the trigger. Then pulled again and again. The shots slammed into the side of the thing, and Rock could see little spurts of blood here and there. But it didn’t hurt it—and it sure as hell didn’t stop it.
Just as the creature came down with closing jaws, Sheransky kicked and splashed suddenly, coming to hysterical life as he tried to get out of the way. The thing went by him, taking off part of his jacket as a dagger-sized tooth sliced right down his shoulder and arm. The creature swam past them, chomping hard with its teeth all gnashing and grinding together like an oversized garbage-disposal unit. It took it about three seconds to realize that it wasn’t eating anything but air, and it screeched on the brakes, turning around. The great flippers came splashing up out of the water, and then it was guiding itself back again, the thousand-toothed jaw opening wide.
Sheransky tried to kick his way out of the path again, but even as Rock swam toward him, he could see that the Russian was almost out cold already. And that he wasn’t going to get to him in time. Suddenly Chen came out of nowhere, swimming right into the path of the creature. The huge head snapped around as the black-suited figure tore by it. The sea killer seemed annoyed that anything would dare swim into its view, and tore off after the new game. Chen paddled like he was on fire, and moved at high speed through the water with a kind of stroke Rockson had never seen. Still, the toothed face was gaining. There was no way even the martial-arts master could outswim something like this.
Suddenly he stopped in the water and spun around screaming out Chinese curses at the monster. Crazy, yet it worked, for the ocean mutant opened the big jaws again, ready to take the splashing fool down into hell. Which was just what Chen had been waiting for. His hands flew inside his wet ninja suit and he ripped out two shurikens in each hand. Instantly all four were sailing out, whistling like tea kettles as they spun through the harsh morning light. They sailed right into the gaping jaws that were dripping seawood, saliva, and flesh from a previous meal. They went inside the creature.