by Jim DeFelice
Megan’s fingers, sliding across his shoulder blade, diving into the pressure points.
“Bird Dog One, you’re looking good,” said Robert Jerome. The Air Force major was in the knockdown tower, monitoring the test flight visually, while most of the technical people were in the bunker control room. “You still got your chops, Rock.”
“Roger that,” replied Howe. Few people used his old nickname, but Jerome had flown with Howe early in his career; they’d even teamed up in a Strike Eagle squadron over Iraq.
Like many call signs, “Rock” had not initially been a compliment. It came from one of his early flight instructors, who’d described his maneuvers during a flight and what they had done to the plane’s flying characteristics. Inevitably, it stuck with his mates, but had gradually become something of an honorific.
The mission boss gave him his new course heading and altitude, duplicating the leg of the Cyclops test where the problem had occurred. Howe’s shoulder spasmed; he pushed his head around slowly, trying to relieve it, mad at his body for tensing up. He hit his marks perfectly, but the knot in his shoulder had grown to the size of a boulder, and his hands were wet and jittering.
He was nervous — beyond nervous. He was having trouble breathing right.
Howe had flown over two dozen combat missions, shot down two planes and had a hand in a third, and this had never happened to him. But those engagements had been so quick, almost literally bang-bang, that he hadn’t had time to think.
Now thinking was all he could do.
“Not a peep of a problem,” said Jerome. He sounded a little disappointed.
“Yeah, roger that.”
“All right, we want to go around again. Use the synthetic view hologram this time,” said Matt Firenze, one of the scientists in the control room. He was asking Howe to switch the HUD into the synthesized view so they could run an additional suite of tests.
Howe traded some data verbally with the ground people, duping what the sensors were telling them as he pulled the big aircraft back around. One of the women on the ground somehow reminded him of his ex-wife, Carmen, with her sharp rasp. He thought of her now, her pouty frown, her cigarette hanging out of her mouth in the hotel room they’d had their honeymoon down in New Orleans.
He hadn’t thought of Carmen in quite a while. She was a bona fide nutcase, manic-depressive with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders: She had the diagnosis from not one but two different shrinks, their agreement apparently some sort of milestone of psychoanalysis.
The relationship had quickly disintegrated into a cycle of wild verbal fights, heartfelt apologies, and great sex — followed by weird accusations, wild verbal fights, heartfelt apologies, and even better sex. Howe had stuck it out sixteen months, but the marriage lasted that long only because he’d been overseas for much of the time.
He started to laugh, remembering her another morning sitting at their tiny kitchen table, hungover, breasts falling out of a gauzy, see-through nightshirt, arranging her tarot cards while the coffee poured through the machine next to the sink. She was beautiful in moments like that, unconsciously beautiful.
Very different from Megan.
Howe’s hands were so wet with sweat he pulled off his flight gloves, even though he habitually wore them when he flew.
He’d miss them if he had to eject. Involuntarily, his eyes hunted the yellow handle near the seat.
His marriage hadn’t thrown him off women completely. Sexwise, he’d had his share. He was far from a stud. Some guys could just walk into a bar and they’d be knee-deep in women. Howe wasn’t like that; he’d never been like that. But he had seen women since Carmen — plenty of women — gone to bed with them, made love.
No one like Megan, though. She was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. Her breasts a little small, if you were unbiased about it, as she herself used to say.
She talked about different things. She told him about a painting by Matisse; who the hell was Matisse? he’d wondered, and had to find out so he didn’t look like a total schmuck.
What card had Carmen used to tell his fortune? King of Swords?
“Telemetry is ready on our side,” said Firenze.
Howe had to punch a two-button combination on the right side of his instrument panel to change the HUD mode and initiate the test. He checked his speed and altitude first, gave the other flight instruments a quick read — went back over them more slowly, comprehending the numbers this time — and reached for the buttons.
The King of Swords wasn’t a good fit. Too airy, she said, too flighty. Fiery. Prone to crash.
Prone to crash.
Carmen’s eyes as she said that — accusing him of betrayal.
“I see a confused future,” she said.
“We’re ready for you, Colonel,” prompted the ground controller. Howe’s fingers still hovered over the buttons. His muscles had suddenly tightened to the point it hurt to move his fingers.
Jesus, what’s happening to me?he thought.I’m freaking.
He saw Megan’s body on the bed, then pushed the buttons.
* * *
Matt Firenze watched the numbers pop onto the second screen, raw assembler code blossoming before him. The functions were being translated in the first screen, and an array of monitors to his right were actually summarizing the data and its effect (or noneffect) on the aircraft. But Matt’s job was there on the twenty-one-inch cathode ray tube. Hexadecimals — the computer used a base-16 integer number system, corresponding to the physical registers — sloshed across the screen. Firenze had preprogrammed the computer to alert him to a difference from the expected sequence: The green numbers would turn red.
Green. Green. Green.
He kept staring.
* * *
Howe’s breath physically lifted the mask off his face. His arms and legs were moving — he was still flying the plane — but his head felt as if it were beneath a heavy blanket. His tongue sat dry at the bottom of his mouth.
This was the point where she’d gone out. She’d been flying to his left; it was his left, wasn’t it? If he looked in that direction now, if he dared it, would he see her vanishing into the clouds again?
Her perfume lingered in his head.
As he regained control he’d come up there — and the plane loomed right before him.
How was that possible?
Its engines were working. Definitely working.
He’d trade places if he could. Surely he’d trade with her; let her live.
Carmen held the card out. Death: the grim reaper in a boat.
“Not death — change,” she said. “Big change, but not death in a literal sense. Psychic change. Like love.”
“Looking very good down here,” said Firenze. “Can we run over it again? Just the way you did it originally, turning the HUD back to standard setting at the right point.”
“Roger that,” Howe told them. “Coming around for take two.”
Chapter 11
When he was six, Amma Jalil had seen his mother set on fire by a Muslim madman.
He had been playing at the other end of the dirt-strewn street in the small northern India town where he lived. He happened to look down the block as the man ran into the neighbor’s house where his mother was visiting. A second later something billowed from the window; at first it seemed to be an oversized red sheet inflated by the wind. As he stared, the edges of the sheet turned yellow and climbed upward along the roof.
A figure encircled by a red robe, ran from the house. By the time he realized it was a person, she was rolling on the street. Even before he started to run toward her, he knew it was his mother. She jerked upright, then fell back like a sack of rice collapsing.
In the twenty years since that day, Amma Jalil had run the thirty meters to his mother many times in his imagination. Never had he managed to arrive in time to hear her last words or receive her blessings.
The Muslim died in the house, as did the neighbor and her two babies. Supposedly th
e terrorist had set it on fire because the land had once been in the shadow of a now long-gone Islamic temple, but such reasons were often given to justify groundless murder.
The next day Amma Jalil’s father and many neighbors burned down a block of Muslim houses. Amma Jalil watched them burn. He was puzzled afterward. He thought from something that he had heard that his mother would reappear after these new houses were burned, but she did not.
Several times since her death, he tried to feel the joy of revenge; perhaps it would come today.
Captain Jalil sat on a web bench a few feet from the rear door of the Mil Mi-26 assault helicopter, hurtling through the mountains near India’s Kashmir border. The helicopter and its sister ship ran six or seven feet over the ground at nearly 290 kilometers an hour, rushing toward a concentration of vans and radar dishes parked beyond a mountain rift on a narrow plain about ten kilometers ahead.
Each Russian-made helicopter carried seventy-three men armed with an array of weapons. But from Jalil’s point of view, the only important ones were Euromissile MILANs, man-carried antitank and bunker missiles that could take out a hardened target at three thousand meters. Six two-man teams carried the large, updated bazookas in each helicopter. The rest were simply there to make sure they found their targets.
“Five klicks from LZ,” the pilot told Jalil, communicating through a wired headset with the assault team leader. They were a minute from touchdown. “I have the pathfinders.”
“Yes,” said Jalil. He nodded almost imperceptibly to his senior NCO, sitting across from him. In the next ten seconds everyone in the helicopter seemed to catch on. The nervous rustling that had begun shortly after they boarded the helicopter at the base north of Srinagar ended. As the helicopter began to slow, every member of the assault team leaned forward in his seat.
This was the most difficult moment of the mission. The eight massive blades that propelled the helicopters kicked up an enormous amount of dust, even at a hard-packed landing strip. Their LZ was a camel trail in the middle of a narrow wasteland filled with grit and pebbles. Send too much debris into the Lotarev D-136 engines and the mission would have to be scrubbed. Jalil’s instructions were very clear: If he could not take the target precisely on time, he must send word that he had failed. Even though he did not like that particular order, he would dutifully follow it.
The helicopter landed roughly. The pilot said something over the intercom circuit — good luck, maybe — as the ramp door opened. Jalil jumped forward, one of the first men out.
The invaders quickly split themselves into three groups. Jalil went with Corps One, which would take the central approach to the target while the others came in from the flanks. They were running slightly behind schedule; he tapped at his watch as the corps leaders quickly checked their men and then set out. Each corps was subdivided into smaller teams, generally of six or eight men; one member within each team had a night optical device, or NOD, either an infrared or starscope viewer, usually the former. They needed them: It was exceedingly dark tonight, with an uncharacteristic full bank of clouds beneath the moonless sky and the desert.
It took nearly a half hour for them to walk the first kilometer. This was far too long. They had only an hour left to get into position to launch the attack.
Jalil worried that their weeks of training were now going against them; perhaps the men were too tired tonight to face the task before them. He went to each squad leader and urged him to move faster, waving silently with his hand. They made somewhat better time, reaching the midpoint to the assault within another half hour.
Jalil had the option of attacking the radars from long range with the MILANs; he had a good chance of taking out the dishes from two kilometers and in fact could see the outlines of one now through his infrared NOD. But he had planned a full-scale attack, with its much higher probability of success, and he intended on carrying that plan out. He checked with the other corps leaders; they, too, were making poor progress.
“Run,” he told one of his lieutenants, jogging next to him.
Without answering, the man began to double-time and then lope forward. The others in his squad followed. As Jalil moved to issue the command to another of his men, that squad also broke into a trot.
They reached their final staging area thirty seconds late. Jalil thought it prudent to rest them all an additional five minutes before passing the word to begin.
Eight groups of men began moving forward, two holding back in reserve. The two squads in the middle stopped after they had gone about a hundred meters; their targets loomed before them, less than a half-kilometer away. Jalil stayed with these men until he was sure that their missiles were properly prepared and aimed, with each of the two radar dishes and its attendant operator van zeroed in by not one but two missiles. When he was satisfied, Jalil radioed the other groups. Corps Two on his right was just getting into position, but Corps Three was still at least ten minutes from its launch point, and probably more. That was a bad sign: It was the only one of the three groups that had Highway Five in sight, and thus the only one that could stop or even spot potential reinforcements. More important, it was tasked with cutting one of the two land lines from the complex.
Jalil urged the lieutenant in charge to move faster, then handed the radio handset to his communications specialist and turned his attention back to his own men, waiting in the shadows a few hundred meters ahead.
The attack had to be launched in twelve minutes. The plans, carefully coordinated with the Indian Air Force, provided exactly a two-minute window to take out both radar dishes, the transmission towers, and the land lines, isolating the early-warning facility. At the end of that window, the first wave of attack jets would pass overhead, spreading out through the radarless corridor Jalil and his men had provided to launch a preemptive strike against Pakistan’s nuclear force.
The planes were undoubtedly already en route. The lives of their pilots counted on his success.
The men tasked to blow up the transmission towers reported in. There was no one guarding the approach; the charges would be prepared shortly.
No one guarding them?
Suspicion jabbed Jalil. Their intelligence people had predicted lax security — the Pakistanis were famously lazy — but this seemed unbelievable.
Unbelievable!
Jalil’s communications specialist tugged his sleeve. Jalil saw one of his sergeants pointing in the distance, then heard the truck he was alerting him to.
A patrol, heading in their direction.
Jalil pulled up his night glasses. It was an American Humvee, undoubtedly one of the vehicles left to the Muslim devils when they had deceived the superpower into thinking they would fight against the terrorists in Afghanistan. There was a weapon on the back; an antitank gun, he assumed.
They would have night-vision gear as well, though they probably lacked the IQs to use it properly.
The Hummer passed by his team and continued onward, oblivious.
Jalil gave the order for the attack to begin. Two of the three radio towers crumbled simultaneously, the explosions sounding like a stack of chairs falling in a banquet hall. The third fell a second later, but the sound was drowned out by the short screech of a banshee as the first MILAN missile plowed into one of the radar vans.
Then hell opened her mouth and fire spit into the desert. The great god Shiva, the destroyer, hurled his bolts into the Muslims’ early-warning system, obliterating it. Two heavy machine guns, lugged from the helicopter, began cutting down the three Pakistanis foolish enough to emerge from one of the personnel trailers.
A second later the trailer caught fire. Jalil put down his night device and watched as a pair of tiny flames emerged from the larger ones, spit falling from a mouth. They ran a few feet and then collapsed. He thought again of his mother and remained unsatisfied.
“Send the word to the planes,” he told his communications man. “Destroyer has struck. The path is clear.”
“Done,” said the como specialist
.
Jalil relaxed. The live-fire simulation was over. They could rest now. The next time they did this, it would be for real.
Chapter 12
Fisher watched the video again, studying the white lines. The lines were virtual contrails — computer-generated plots of changes in the atmospheric temperature and composition of the air due to aircraft engines. Below each was a green data log indicating what aircraft had made the track.
There were a few dotted lines — places where the radar had temporarily lost the input or, more likely, the expert explained, places where the records had gotten blurred for various reasons. The storm system had greatly complicated the process; the team responsible for the data — Air Force personnel and two satellite-radar experts from Raytheon — kept cautioning that they had only a 95 percent degree of certainty that they had everything. But everything they had was accounted for.
Fisher scrolled the display upward to the area covering the territory where the Russian spy plane had been tracked. “He’s there before the test?”
“Absolutely,” said the scientist at the keyboard, Tom Peters. He’d brought his CD-ROMs to one of the ancillary labs to go over the data with Fisher; they were the only ones there. “Flying those loops.”
Fisher nodded. The NSA data showed that the spy plane flights had been going on for several weeks on an irregular pattern, not always coinciding with the tests at North Lake.
The techies told him there was no way the Russians could have caused the malfunction. Fisher was inclined to believe them, except that they couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for the malfunction.
But one conundrum at a time. He scrolled back to the area where the accident had occurred.
“So, if there was another plane here, like really close to these guys while they’re in the test area, we’d see it?” Fisher asked Peters.
“Well, like I said, a ninety-five percent—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know: If this were a baseball game, five times out of a hundred you’d lose. Otherwise, it’s a team of Babe Ruths at every position.”
