Cyclops One af-1

by Jim DeFelice

  “It thinks it’s looking for a squished Scud,” the technical expert had explained.

  “You don’t know who T. S. Eliot was?” Meagan asked.

  “No.”

  “T. S. Eliot was only the most famous poet of the twentieth century. Chr-ist.” She smiled at him.

  “What’d he write? ‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright’?”

  “Blake. That was Blake. T.S. Eliot wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’The Waste Land, Four Quartets.”

  “Big hits.”

  “The biggest. You really never, ever heard of them? In school or anywhere?”

  He shrugged again now, remembering, reliving the conversation.

  “How do you live in an age where death is constant?” she asked.

  “Is that a serious question?”

  “The Waste Landis about rebirth,” she told him. “You have to find a way beyond the cycle.”

  “How?”

  “If I knew, the poem would be boring. But I’ll tell you this: Fear death by water.”

  “Huh?”

  Her laughter dissolved the memory. It was a joke, a reference to a line in the poem, as she’d explained later by reading it to him. It was an interesting, kaleidoscopic poem — not that he knew much about or, to be honest, cared about poems. But they were as real to her as airplanes, and that intrigued him. It was different; it was one of the things that was interesting about her beyond her eyes, beyond the smooth curve of her hips.

  Yet, he still hated her for being a traitor.

  “What are we doing, Bird One?” asked Timmy, bringing him back to the present.

  “Two, we’re going to start the sweeps as we planned,” he told his wingman. “Anything on Guard?”

  “Negativo.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  The two delta-shaped aircraft plunged downward, arrowheads hurled by a god toward the snowy mountains below. There were no clouds today; under other circumstances this might have seemed a purely majestic view.

  “Don’t even see any mountain goats down there,” said Timmy in Bird Two.

  Howe let his speed bleed off gradually, coming below three hundred knots as he banked into the next search track. He lifted his right wing slightly, concentrating on the view ahead. They took a circuit and then another one, reaching the edge of their search box, then pulled around and began again, retracing their steps backward.

  The climate and terrain combined to make this a very difficult place to live, yet settlements dotted the valleys and roads ran around the steepest mountains.

  Resourceful species, humans.

  “Got a couple of aircraft at long distance,” said Timmy. “Shenyang F-8s, pretty far off — two hundred miles.”

  The Chinese F-8MII interceptors were double-engined interceptors that could be viewed as outgrowths of the MiG-21 family. In contrast to their forebears, they were not particularly maneuverable, but they could go relatively fast. Howe thought of them as a poor man’s updated MiG-25; equipped with radar missiles, they could be a severe annoyance.

  Not today. The planes soon passed out of range to the east. Howe kept making his tracks, varying his path and trying to keep his memories of Megan at bay.

  Something caught his eye when he reached the southeast corner of their search area for the fourth time. The sun had flashed off something a few miles farther into China — or maybe not, because when he stared in that direction he saw nothing.

  The tactical screen was clear, and the computer hadn’t said boo to him about seeing anything.

  Still, it was worth checking out.

  “Two, follow me.”

  “Got something?”

  “Just hang with me.”

  “On your butt, boss. Smells like aftershave — now that’s a story.”

  Howe pushed down in the direction of the glint. There was a peak there, a mountain 6,570 meters high — just under twenty-thousand feet above sea level. That was a decent altitude in an airplane, and beyond the rated ceiling of many helicopters — an important factor if a rescue mission was launched.

  Forget that. She’s not going to be standing down there waving her arms at you.

  “Got something?” asked Timmy as they crisscrossed around the peak and the nearby ridges.

  “Negative.” Howe looked at the ground through the canopy and then back at the tactical screen, back and forth.

  The AWACS working with them back near the Afghan border reported that an unknown aircraft was taking off from Lop, a small airfield in the Xinjiang Uygur region to the north. The contact, probably a small commercial transport, headed east.

  Howe checked his fuel state, deciding that a brief break from the search would help. And it did — sort of. As he looked back at the large display, he saw a double triangle in yellow at the right. Magnification made it look like a rock with a hatchet on it.

  He tracked back, practically climbing out of the cockpit to get a better view. It was just a pile of rocks.

  But there was something dark about a half-mile away, on the side of the slope facing India.

  Dark and gray — the color of Cyclops One.

  The computer bleeped a target tone.

  “Two, I think I’ve found it,” he said, changing his course.

  Chapter 7

  Special Forces Captain Dale “Duke” Wallace didn’t know exactly what to make of Fisher. The first thing the FBI agent had done on boarding the C-17A in Bahrain was to ask if there was a smoking section. The next thing he’d done was ask if they were jumping out.

  He seemed equally disappointed to hear that the answer was no on both counts.

  The C-17A Globemaster III had been designed as a combat-area transport, able to move people and gear great distances at a moment’s notice. Its interior measured two inches beyond sixty-eight feet (counting the ramp); six Marine Corps LAVs could be loaded inside with room left over for a company mascot or two. In this case, Duke and his team of SF troopers from the Army’s 56th SFG (A) were the only cargo. They sat along fold-down seats at the side of the aircraft, Alice packs and mission gear nearby, mostly dozing. Two of the men had stretched mats on the steel floor and were sleeping there.

  Fisher, on the other hand, was alternating slugs between two massive thermoses of coffee, which he’d somehow managed to obtain on the tarmac as he walked — walked, not ran — from the E-3 that had delivered him from the States.

  Fisher glanced up and saw him staring. “Want some?” he asked.

  Duke shook his head, then went over and sat next to him.

  “We’ll be landing in Afghanistan in an hour or so,” Duke told him.

  “Sounds good.”

  “We want to take right off.”

  “Makes sense,” said Fisher.

  “We have a transport en route, an MV-22. It’s going to meet us on the tarmac and fly us right to the wreckage they’ve spotted. Assuming that’s the wreckage. But I guess that’s why you’re here, right? You’re the expert.”

  “MV-22,” said Fisher. He took a long sip from the thermos bottle. “That’s the airplane that thinks it’s a helicopter, right?”

  “The Osprey, yes, sir. The MV-22 is a Special Forces version. Equipped with a chain gun in the nose, ports for mini-guns and additional weapons. Whatever we need we can get. We’ll get you in and out, no sweat.”

  “I investigated a crash of one of those three years ago, looking for sabotage,” said Fisher. “Wasn’t sabotage.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I investigated another one of those two years ago. That wasn’t sabotage, either.”

  “Are you making a point, Mr. Fisher?”

  “You sure I can’t smoke in here?”

  * * *

  Some hours later, Andy Fisher stepped out of the MV-22 into six inches of snow, surveying the wreckage of what had until very recently been a 767. He’d seen one of the engines as they’d flown in, and that would be enough to definitively ID the plane. Which was a good thing, because the rest of the aircraft had disintegra
ted beyond recognition.

  Airplanes could do funny things when they crashed, but usually what they did fell into general patterns. Fisher wasn’t a crash expert per se: The real experts got off on analyzing the way metal twisted, and could look at a burn pattern on a piece of cloth and tell you what the pilot had for lunch. Still, Fisher had seen enough to know that this plane had been wracked by something more than an anti-air missile before it exploded.

  Interestingly enough, the revolving turret where the laser had fired from was only beaten to shit as opposed to disintegrated beyond recognition. So it was easy to cinch the identification.

  “Our plane?” asked Duke.

  “Not a doubt,” said Fisher. “When do we get the forensics team in?”

  “We’re in China, Mr. Fisher. You aren’t getting any forensics people in here. There’s bound to be some sort of Chinese army patrol sooner or later. My orders are to assist you making an ID, then blow the remains up into little pieces.”

  “Be a hell of a lot better if we had a forensics team.”

  “Be a hell of a lot better if we were sitting on a beach, catchin’ rays,” said the SF captain.

  “Good point,” said Fisher. “We want to take samples so we can check for explosives. Something helped the plane go boom besides a bad attitude.”

  “Hey, down here!” shouted one of the soldiers from a ravine about fifty feet away.

  Fisher tagged after Duke, sliding down the rocks to a relatively flat plain about twenty feet wide. The soldier was standing over a twisted black blob of gear that looked as if it were covered with tar.

  “It’s a boot,” said Fisher.

  “How the hell can you tell?”

  Fisher knelt down near it. “Believe me. That’s what it is.” He picked it up and looked at it. The bottom half had been burned by high heat; Fisher guessed it would help the lab people recreate the fire and explosion. A bit of sock was evident in the mass, so even if there wasn’t any flesh in the blob there, they’d have a shot at DNA.

  Maybe. Of course, if the blob included bones or even just burnt flesh, that’d be even better.

  The FBI agent held it out to one of the soldiers, who suddenly looked a little pale. “Evidence.”

  “Don’t you want to, uh, put it in a bag or something?”

  “Nah,” said Fisher. “By the way, the foot’s not in it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just guessing,” Fisher admitted. “But if I told you it was, you wouldn’t take it, right?”

  “How can it be empty?” said the trooper, still hesitating.

  “Boot probably got blown right off while the foot and leg were burning to a crisp along with the rest of the body. Lab guys’ll get off on this.”

  The soldier took the boot without further comment.

  Fisher walked down another slope, surveying more of the scattered bits and pieces. A piece of green cloth lay tangled against a few rocks about twenty feet to the right, tangled with a long piece of burnt metal. Fisher bent down and saw that it was a collar from a flight suit — or at least might have been. He folded it and put it in a paper envelope from his jacket.

  “Watcha got?” asked Duke, tramping down the slope.

  “Cloth. We’ll look for DNA.”

  “Yeah? Will that work?”

  “Gives the lab something to do,” said Fisher.

  “The pilots have a good read on some more pieces west,” said Duke, who’d been talking to them on his radio. “There’s some good hunks out there.”

  Fisher took a long drag on his cigarette.

  “I need as many pieces of metal as we can get to test for explosives.”

  “Which pieces?”

  “The ones where the bomb was,” said Fisher, throwing his cigarette butt away and walking back up the hill.

  Chapter 8

  Clayton Bonham had always believed that you could tell a great deal about a man by what he ordered at an expensive restaurant. In his particular case, the filet mignon — medium rare, with a pepper sauce and oyster mushrooms — meant that he was a solid, conservative man who appreciated the finer things in life, but nonetheless eschewed flamboyance.

  The choices of his guests fell in line with his theory. Congressman Taft had chosen a nondescript chicken and pasta dish from the lite side of the menu, an attempt not only to demonstrate that he was watching his weight but also that he was not a spendthrift; the dish was nearly the least expensive entrée, though least expensive was a relative term on M Street. Jeff Segrest, by contrast, had ordered a grilled salmon soup with foie gras mousse floating on a black corn taco — a bizarre though thoughtlessly flamboyant mélange that looked about as appetizing as the napkin covering the wrought-silver bread basket.

  The restaurant, named James after its owner and executive chef, ranked comfortably in the top tier of Washington power eateries, a fact that Bonham kept firmly in mind as he ate, since it meant that their conversation had to be circumscribed. This was not necessarily a bad thing, however; while he found Taft inoffensive, Segrest was a serial blowhard, and only the possibility that he would be overheard kept his boasts within somewhat reasonable bounds.

  It also meant that he was semidiscreet regarding Cyclops, which was what both men wanted to talk about.

  “Revolutionary,” said Segrest. “That was the President’s word.”

  “Yes,” said Bonham. Things in India had gone remarkably well — much better, in fact, than he could have hoped. Incredibly better. The intelligence agencies were closing in on the wreckage, with the early reports indicating that an Indian SAM had taken out the plane. Depending on what theory they began to favor about the aircraft’s theft, evidence would be supplied — nothing firm, of course, just hints and suggestions. A money transfer, a name on a visitors’ list, a credit card transaction — the sort of things the sleuth Fisher would eat up.

  The bastard had sniffed out the lake plan somehow, even though they hadn’t gone through with it. Bonham still hoped Fisher might manage to convince someone to have the damn thing drained. Serve the idiot right.

  “Do you think this is the end of war, General?” asked Taft.

  Bonham smiled. The President had used that phrase, and a number of commentators had picked it.

  “I think it’s a bit premature,” said Bonham.

  “My cousin thought the augmented ABM system more critical,” said Taft.

  Bonham smiled again, though this time much more tightly. Though anyone who really mattered would surely know who the men and their relationships were, Bonham nonetheless would have preferred that Megan’s name not be mentioned. She surely would have preferred that herself.

  “The antimissile system is critical,” said Segrest. “And when we get the contract, it will be a windfall.”

  More than a windfall, you greedy bastard,thought Bonham, sipping his wine. Segrest controlled a considerable portion of the Jolice and related portfolios, and so he had to be dealt with very carefully. Still, Bonham fantasized about the day when he would tell the fat pomposity to get out of his office.

  His White House office.

  “Don’t be premature,” Bonham said mildly.

  “We’ll score well in the next round of tests,” said Segrest. He looked at Taft. “The congressman agrees.”

  Bonham realized belatedly that Segrest wasn’t merely boasting: He was demanding that the weapon be used in the next round of tests.

  “The tests will show what the tests show,” said Bonham. He could feel his throat starting to close. “Anything can happen. Whatever the results, Jolice should be funded. An argument is there.”

  “More than an argument when the results of the first test are duplicated.”

  He was ordering it. Ridiculous!

  Bonham picked up the napkin from his lap and daubed at the sides of his mouth, surreptitiously glancing around the room to make sure no one was listening.

  The plan was to dismantle the weapon and the base, and to leave. Anything else was far too risky — f
or him especially. He’d gone to great lengths to cover their tracks.

  And why, really? Because of greed. Because Jolice and its backers stood to gain billions if the augmented ABM system was built. Never mind that it might not work. Never mind that companies much better suited to build it — Lockheed and Boeing, for example — were being flim-flammed out of the competition.

  Meagan York’s motives were pure, but no one else’s were, not even his. He wanted power, not money; at least he had the wisdom to realize when they’d gone too far.

  “I believe the weather in the Pacific is very tempestuous,” Bonham said, as close to a hint as he dared.

  “Nonsense,” said Segrest. “The weather there has never been better. Don’t you agree, Congressman?”

  “Oh yes,” said Taft.

  “We have to move along the course I’ve outlined,” said Bonham. He kept his voice low; still, he worried about being overheard.

  “No. That’s far too cautious. You’re conservative, General, a conservative by nature.” Segrest’s voice was so loud, it could have been a toast. Bonham pushed his teeth together, sure that others were staring. “The future — imagine the possibilities.”

  “Yes,” said Bonham.

  “Very rich possibilities,” said Segrest, signaling to the waiter for more wine.

  Chapter 9

  The first day after the crash, McIntyre managed to walk only a few hundred yards beyond the ravine where the helicopter had gone down. He lost his strength somewhere after midday and, lying down to rest, fell fast asleep. When he woke it was dark; he went back to sleep and didn’t open his eyes until the sun forced them open. He got up and began walking. After a while he realized the aches and stiffness he’d felt had melted into a gnawing hole in his stomach, something he thought must be hunger, though it felt slightly different than that, as if his stomach had been emptied and then twisted in his body.