by Dale Brown
“Boss, are you telling me to terminate the pilot?” asked Jed, finally understanding what she had told him.
The National Security Advisor didn’t answer.
“Ms. O’Day?”
“Jed, a trial now will prolong a crisis that you know must be ended quickly.”
“I_„
“Why do you think you’re there, Cascade?” she said.
Before he could say anything else, the line snapped clear.
DANNY FREAH AND THE REST OF THE WHIPLASH assault team practically whooped as they cleared the coast and headed out over the Mediterranean.
The ex-hostages didn’t seem too disappointed either.
“Yo, hold it down,” yelled the pilot. “We got a situation. I’m trying to hear what the hell Raven’s doing.”
Danny got up from the rack seat and made his way forward to the flight deck area. He leaned across the small bulkhead to speak to the pilot.
“We’re still available for SAR,” he told the lieutenant. It was a command, not a question.
“Raven and Hawk One are tracking a seaplane,” said the pilot. “They think Major Smith is aboard.”
“Shit,” said Freah. “Get us there.”
“Captain, hang on.” The pilot pressed his hand against his earphones. “Task force is directing us to an assault ship. It’s about ten minutes away, dead north.”
“Where’s the seaplane?”
“That way,” said the pilot, pointing back toward the coast. “Captain, seriously.”
“Seriously, get us there,” insisted Danny.
“HEY, COUSIN,” SAID CASCADE, SNAPPING ONTO THE line.
The scrambled line gave voices a synthetic, machine-like sound. Even so, Jeff heard a tremor in his cousin’s voice.
“Hawk here, Cascade,” he said.
“Jeff, I got bad news. That seaplane. It has to be stopped.”
“We’re working on it. Can you verify there are Egyptian fighters en route? Raven has them now maybe thirteen, fourteen minutes away on their present course.”
“Yeah, we got that. They’re not on our side. They are, but not in the way we need them to be.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“We need the seaplane stopped. At all costs.”
“All costs how?”
“All costs.”
“Jed—you’re telling me to waste Mack Smith?”
“I’m telling you. I’m telling you there are four F-14 Tomcats en route with orders to shoot it down. I gave them the orders myself.”
“Shit. You gave orders?”
“Cuz, you have your orders.”
“Fuck. Jed what the hell is going on?”
There was no answer. Cascade had broken the circuit.
MACK TRIED TO WILL HIS HEART TO SLOW DOWN, AFRAID the thumping would tip off his captor.
Zen’s voice had sounded so foreign, so wild, it had seemed like a hallucination, a last dream before dying. But it was definitely real.
Fate? Allah?
Holy shit. Talk about luck.
Maybe. Could go the other way too. The Imam still had his aura. And his pistol.
Mack worked the controls calmly, frowning in the general direction of the fuel gauge. He’d build a pretense to land. Get down in the water, wait for the Navy to arrive. Or whoever was coming behind Stockard.
“What is the problem?” demanded the Imam.
“The engine, the right engine seems a little flaky,” Knife told him. “And I’m starting to run out of gas.”
The Iranian slid his neck back against the seat. “Both engines are fine. You have plenty of fuel. Continue on your course.”
“Good thing you’re a pilot,” said Mack. “You can take over if I have a heart attack.”
“You will not die of a heart attack today. That I guarantee,” said the Imam, moving the pistol out so there was no doubt that it was aimed at Mack’s head.
“Didn’t think so,” said Smith. “I try to watch what I eat.”
BY THE TIME THE OSPREY HAD THE ITALIAN SEAPLANE in view, they were barely ten minutes from Egyptian airspace.
“The Egyptians are scrambling planes,” Breanna told Danny. “They may try and shoot you down.”
“That’s the least of our problems,” said Zen, who was plugged into the same line.
“Easy for you to say,” Danny shot back.
“We have to take them down before the Egyptians get there,” said Zen. “And if we don’t, four Tomcats from the Nimitz will. You’re the only chance we have to get Mack out alive. I’ll make them ditch, you pick him up.”
“It’s a long shot, Major,” Danny told him. “They go down in the water, maybe we fish him out, maybe we don’t. Better to have them surrender and follow us into Greece.”
“Not going to happen,” said Jeff.
“You sure you don’t want us to fly over them and jump on the plane?” said Freah. The pilot glanced at him as if he were being serious.
Danny wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t.
“If you think you can make it, sure,” said Zen. “No fucking way,” said the Osprey pilot.
“I think I can take out their engines without completely destroying the plane,” said Stockard. “You guys jump in once they’re in the water.”
“What do you think his guards are going to think of that?”
“Hopefully we catch them by surprise. Maybe we offer to let them go. I don’t know. I do know that the plane has to be stopped, one way or another.”
“One way or another.”
“I can take out the engines. I guarantee it.”
“How many soldiers does he have in there with him, Jeff?” asked Freah.
“Hold on and I’ll find out.”
Danny turned back to his men. “Liu, get the snipe gear.”
“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant. He jumped up and went to grab the kit.
“I don’t know if I can hold us still enough for a sharpshooter,” said the Osprey pilot.
Danny nodded. “Yeah, I don’t think so either.”
JEFF PUSHED THE THROTTLE TO MAX, WHIPPING THE Flighthawk downward in a screaming beeline at the Piaggio’s bow. He pulled hard, cutting a near-ten-g turn almost on top of the seaplane’s windshield.
The airplane stuttered downward. Mack’s voice, obviously shaking, screamed a string of obscenities over the radio.
Jeff didn’t answer. It was pretty stupid of Mack to transmit. In fact, he should have used the diversion to knock out his captors—or jump from the plane.
Right.
Did he want to die?
“Two people, both in the front,” said Jennifer, reviewing the video at ultra-slow motion. “One on the right has got some clerical-type clothes.”
“Hopefully Mack hasn’t converted,” said Jeff, relaying the information to Danny.
THE GUN WAS AGAINST HIS NECK.
“Honest to God, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” repeated Mack. “They must have fired a missile at us. I just barely got the hell out of the way.”
“If anything else attacks us, if you divert from the course I have set for you, you will die,” said the Imam. “The border is ahead. When the Egyptian planes challenge you, fall in behind them.”
ONE TARGET. WITH ANY OTHER WEAPON, IT’D BE impossible.
But gray-haired of Anna Klondike’s magic gun? Child’s play, no? She’d said it could shoot through glass.
Too bad she wasn’t here to take the shot herself.
Danny took the gun in his hand. Powder was the best shot, but he took forever to aim. On a quick see-’em, nail-’em, Liu was the man to go to.
Or Danny.
Had to be Danny. He couldn’t let one of the other guys live with missing.
Because he was going to miss. They’d be moving, his target would be moving. They would be no closer than three hundred feet. He’d have an instant to aim and react.
Ha.
Danny pulled on the visor, clicked the edge to get it active. Then he edged toward
the Osprey’s rear door.
“All right, lower it,” he said after strapping a belt around one of the toggle restraints.
“Let me take the shot, Captain,” said Powder. “I can make it.”
“Piece of cake with this gear,” Danny told him.
“We’re going to have maybe a half second when Major Stockard blows out the engines and we pass in front of them,” said Powder. “No offense, Cap, but you know I’m a better shot.”
The Osprey began bucking as the door was opened. “Hold it steady!” Danny screamed. “This is going to be hard enough!”
“Fuck you. I’m trying,” said the pilot over the com unit.
No way he was making the shot.
ZEN WAITED FOR THE OSPREY PILOT TO TELL HIM HE was ready. The Egyptian fighters were now less than thirty seconds away, as was their country’s border. The Tomcats were about sixty seconds behind.
Sweat poured from every pore in his body, from his forehead to his back to his toes. His mouth felt like a smelter’s forge.
“We’re ready,” said the Osprey pilot.
Did he want to kill Mack, get his revenge? He could, easily. Hell, he’d essentially been ordered to.
No one would know he’d done it on purpose. All he had to do was stay on the trigger a hair second too long as the Flighthawk swooped in, or give just a hiccup’s worth of rudder the wrong way.
Or miss altogether. Let the Tomcats take the blame for killing him.
Jeff didn’t want to kill him. Just cripple him.
True revenge.
He couldn’t. Too many things prevented him. Duty. His conscience. Bree, in an odd way.
“We’re ready,” repeated the Osprey pilot, and Zen nailed the Flighthawk down, zooming toward the Piaggio, nudging the right engine into the boresight.
An inch the wrong way.
He squeezed. A thin line of smoke appeared behind the propeller on the right engine. Before the line turned into a wedge he had leaned ever so slightly left, put three rounds into the second engine, depriving the Piaggio of power.
DANNY BENT HIS LEG AGAINST THE OSPREY’S momentum as the rotorcraft shot forward. The seaplane seemed to stop in midair, tilting forward, its nose falling right beneath him.
He saw the bastard Iranian, right through the glass. The man had a gun, but Danny didn’t see that, saw only the wide base of his neck above the canopy edge.
He squeezed the trigger.
THERE WAS A POP, THE SOUND A CHAMPAGNE CORK makes.
So this is what fate sounds like, Mack thought. This is what it feels like to die.
Then he realized he wasn’t dead at all.
Mack pulled on the controls, trying to hold the seaplane in an unpowered guide into the water.
In the next instant he slammed forward, waves lapping and someone screaming in his ears. He heard himself say he was alive and he heard someone, maybe the Imam, maybe Jeff Stockard, maybe even his own conscience, tell him it was more than he deserved.
Dreamland
24 October, 0700 local
BY THE TIME COLONEL BASTIAN WAS ABLE TO GET TIME on the secure satellite line to Greece, he’d seen the CNN report on the raids twice. In the sonorous words of the overpaid commentator, the “Greater Islamic League is defunct and peace is once more assured.”
Dog wasn’t so sure. True, the Iranian mullahs had officially withdrawn their threat to attack shipping in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. And since they no longer had Silkworm missiles or MiGs, perhaps their pledge to “work with the UN and OPEC” on “important matters of commerce” could be taken at face value.
And true, the Libyans had been so decimated by the attacks on their facilities that their exalted leader would have to dip into his dress allowance for at least a decade to restock supplies.
Only two U.S. servicemen had died in the entire operation: a Marine killed in combat, and another killed by his captors while a prisoner in Somalia. All other U.S. personnel were safe, including Mack Smith. The downed stealth fighter had been destroyed, preventing—at least for now—further spread of the technology.
Still, the conflict had proven exactly how volatile the post–Cold War world really was. This small-scale conflict had taken several aircraft carrier battle groups, a Marine MEU, and units from Delta Force to resolve. Not to mention Dreamland.
Of course, some might argue that without Dreamland it might not have been resolved at all.
Some. Not him. Not directly anyway. He didn’t have to—not with Magnus steering things above him.
“Colonel, that you?” snapped Danny Freah over the phone line.
Dog slid back in the chair at Dreamland’s secure conference center, ordinarily used for reviewing projects and teleconferencing. With a few changes, it might work as a decent command bunker; it had a large projection screen at the front of the room that could be fed from the secure video, phone, and satellite lines.
At the moment, the screen was blank. It sometimes took a while for the video code to make its way down.
“Well done, Captain,” said Bastian. “I hear congratulations are in order all around.”
“We kicked butt,” agreed Freah.
“Daddy?”
The video finally snapped on. Breanna stood front and center, her soft features and tired eyes staring upward at the camera. Danny was holding a phone receiver behind her. Jeff Stockard was near the back of the room, talking with an enlisted man. Jennifer Gleason and one of the Megafortress crew members were also looking on, sitting on steel folding chairs. Gleason had a sixty-four-ounce bottle of Pepsi in her hand.
But Dog saw only his daughter.
“Hi, baby,” he said.
“Mission accomplished,” she said.
“Good job, Captain,” he said. He stood up, realizing that they were seeing him too. “Major Stockard, everyone, very good job. How’s Major Cheshire?”
“She’s okay,” said Breanna. “She lost a lot of blood, but the doctors say she’s in no danger. Mack is okay too.” She began to laugh. “Last we saw him he was arguing with the doctor about whether he was dehydrated or not.”
“What’s Raven’s status?”
“It’s going to take a few days to button up the cockpit properly,” said his daughter. “Sergeant Parsons is on his way up from Ethiopia to assess the damage. We could get it home right away, but it seemed foolish to take the chance.”
“No, I don’t want you to take any unnecessary risks, not at this point,” said Bastian.
He didn’t really want her to take necessary ones either, he thought.
“I’ve had some good news about Dreamland—and Whiplash—in the last half hour,” Bastian said quickly, hoping she wouldn’t see the concern in his face. “We’ve got funding. We’re definitely in the budget. And Whiplash is going to be up-rated to active squadron status.”
“What exactly does that mean?” asked Freah.
“Whiplash is going to make use of Dreamland technology, working with some of the advanced systems,” said Bastian. “In much the same way you did in Somalia and Libya. Only, we’re going to plan for it from now on. There are a few details to work out,” he added. “Well, a hell of a lot of details. But we have a green light, and serious support at the command level. And beyond.”
“Congratulations,” said Freah.
“You guys get all the credit,” said Dog. “So listen, since you’re all in Greece, and since it’ll be a few days before your plane is ready to leave anyway, I suppose a few days’ R&R would be in order. I hear there are some nice ruins to inspect.”
“I’ve had my fill of ruins,” said Freah. “I’m up for the beaches.”
“Me too,” said Bree.
“Personally, I like ruins,” said Jeff, rolling forward. “But the only sight I feel like seeing for a while is a nice thick mattress.”
Breanna put her hand down to his shoulders. It was nice seeing people so committed to each other, Bastian thought. Good that they could survive all the adversity they’d seen.
&nb
sp; And wouldn’t Gleason look good in a bathing suit?
“My satellite time is almost over,” said Dog. “If you need anything, you know where to get me.”
“The hell with that,” said Freah. “We’ll just get hold of Sergeant Gibbs.”
“Dreamland Command, signing off,” said Dog.
DALE BROWN
Dale Brown, a former U.S. Air Force captain, is the author of twelve previous bestsellers. Brown lives in Nevada, where he often can be found in the skies, piloting his own plane.
Jim DeFelice’s recent techno-thrillers include Brothers Keeper (2000) and Havana Strike (1997), both currently available in paperback from Leisure Books. Jim has also written more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction for young people. He lives with his wife and son in upstate New York, and can be contacted by E-mail at [email protected].