Retribution

by Dale Brown

  Dog’s maneuver had cost him so much airspeed that the missile shot past, still flying on the last vector supplied by the guidance radar. He saw it wobbling a few hundred feet overhead; instinctively he ducked as the warhead blew up two or three hundred meters in front of him.

  Fourteen kilograms of high explosive was more than enough to perforate an aluminum can, even if that can was covered over with an exotic carbon resin material. But the truly deadly part of the HQ-7’s warhead was the shroud of metal surrounding the explosive nut; the metal splinters the explosion produced were engineered to shred high performance fighters and attack aircraft. Fortunately, the designers envisioned that the warhead would be doing its thing behind the plane it was targeted at, not in front of it, and the majority of the shrapnel rained down well beyond the Wisconsin.

  Not all of it, however. The left wing took a dozen hits, the fuselage another six. A fist-sized slab of former missile punched through the top of the cockpit behind Dog. It crashed into the bulkhead at the rear of the flight deck, spraying more metal around the cockpit. Dog felt a hot poke on his right side, and winced as a splinter rebounded off one of the consoles and hit his ribs. It barely broke the skin, but still hurt like hell.

  Clearly, the shrapnel had damaged the plane. He decided a poke in the side was a small price to pay for the near miss, and started to climb again, angling southward, well out of the frigate’s range.

  Aboard the Abner Read,

  northern Arabian Sea

  0920

  HANDS ON HIPS, STORM WATCHED THE VIDEO FEED FROM the Werewolf in astonishment. The downed airmen seemed to have formed a human chain connecting their rafts with the robot helo. Any second now, he thought, one of them would suggest the helicopter turn around so they could try boarding the destroyer chasing them.

  More guts than brains, that bunch.

  He turned back to the holographic table, rechecking the positions of the Chinese ships. Then he reached to the com switch on his belt.

  “Sickbay, how’s our guest?”

  “Conscious, Captain. In shock, though. Looks like a concussion, but no other serious injuries.”

  “Can he be transported?”

  “I wouldn’t advise it, sir.”

  “That wasn’t the question.”

  “If it were absolutely necessary.”

  Storm flicked the controller. “Communications—send a message to the captain of the Khan. Tell him I have one of his pilots and I’m on my way to return him. Tell him I need to talk to him right away.”

  THE WEREWOLF’S SMALL SIZE AND SHIFTING LOCATION made it difficult for the gun radar to lock, but the Chinese were definitely out to earn an A for effort. The radar warning receiver kept flashing and then clearing, only to flash again.

  Finally, a shell arced toward the helo. It missed by nearly a half mile, short and wide to the right. The 56mm gun at the bow was effective at about 10,000 meters; the computer calculated it would be within range of the rafts in another sixty seconds.

  Starship notched the speed up to twelve knots.

  “Mack, can you get the raft tied in better?” he asked.

  When the major didn’t respond, Starship tried again, this time yelling into the microphone.

  Still no answer. The frigate was now forty-five seconds from range.

  “Fourteen knots,” Starship told the computer.

  Northern Arabian Sea

  0923

  MACK’S LEGS FELT AS IF THEY’D BEEN PULLED FROM HIS hips. The waves cracked across the bottoms of the two rafts, punching them up and down. This wouldn’t have been so bad, he thought, if they bounced together. Instead, they rumbled unevenly, thumping and jerking in a madly syncopated dance. It was as if he were standing on the backs of two rodeo bulls, each of whom were riding in the back of a poorly sprung pickup truck.

  T-Bone had his right leg and Dish his left. The others, except for Cantor, were holding onto them.

  “Hey, this is fun, isn’t it?” yelled Mack, trying to cheer them up.

  As if in reply, the Werewolf gave him a fresh tug. He suddenly jerked forward, the ride smoother—too smooth, he realized as he began to spin. He’d been pulled completely from the raft.

  “Starship, get me back! Starship!”

  Mack spun to his right. He caught glimpses of the destroyer as he spun. The Chinese warship seemed to gain a mile every time he blinked.

  Dizzy, he closed his eyes, then quickly opened them as the ocean bashed against his leg. Something flew at him—a bullet from the frigate’s gun, he thought. But it was only Dish, leaping out to grab him as the Werewolf swung back with him.

  The rafts twirled as the Werewolf once again changed direction.

  “Hang on, hang on!” Mack shouted to the others.

  “Look!” yelled Dish, pointing behind him in the direction of the frigate.

  Mack wanted to scream at him; there was no sense pointing out how close the frigate was. Dish turned around, then looked back up at Mack, a grin on his face.

  What the hell are you smiling about? he wondered, then glanced over Dish’s shoulder and saw that the frigate had turned off.

  Aboard the Wisconsin,

  over the northern Arabian Sea

  0925

  “THE KHAN HAS TOLD THE FRIGATE TO KNOCK IT OFF,” Storm told Dog. “They’ve turned away.”

  “Why were they firing in the first place?”

  “Why do the Chinese do anything?” said Storm. “They gave me some cock and bull story about the frigate captain believing he was rescuing Chinese pilots, but I don’t trust them to tell the truth. I don’t trust them at all.”

  Dog wasn’t sure what to believe. It was possible that the captain of the frigate believed he was rescuing his own men; the Khan had lost most of its aircraft, and the frigate probably wasn’t aware that the crew of the Megafortress had jumped out—after all, the plane was still flying.

  On the other hand, the transmissions on the emergency or guard band should have made it clear that the downed airmen were American.

  Unless, of course, the captain suspected a trick.

  “Now don’t you go screwing things up, Bastian,” added Storm. “Don’t use your weapons on the Chinese, as tempting as it may be. Don’t even power them up.”

  “What do you think, I’m going to crank open a window and take potshots at them with my Beretta?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  Dog snorted. All this time fighting together, and Storm was still a jerk.

  “I’m going to have to go south real soon if I’m going to make that tanker,” Dog said. “Can you handle the pickup?”

  “Go. We have the situation under control.”

  Under other circumstances, Dog would have flown over the raft, dipping his wings to wish his men luck and let them know he was still thinking about them. But he didn’t want to press his luck with the plane.

  As he found his course southward, he reached into a pocket on the leg of his speed jeans, fishing for a small pillbox he kept there.

  He rarely resorted to “go” pills—amphetamines—to keep himself alert. He didn’t like the way they seemed to scratch his skin and eyes from the inside. More than that, he didn’t like the idea of them. But there was just no getting around them now. The long mission and the physical demands of flying the Megafortress without the computer or human assistance had left him drained. He worked up some saliva, then slipped a pill into his mouth and swallowed.

  It tasted like acid going down.

  “Dreamland Command, I’m heading south,” he told Major Catsman. “See if you can get the tanker to fly a little farther north, would you?”

  II

  Lost and Not Found

  Indian Ocean,

  off the Indian coast

  Time unknown

  IT HAPPENED SO GRADUALLY THAT ZEN DIDN’T NOTICE THE line he crossed. One unending moment he was drifting in a kaleidoscope of shapes, thoughts, and emotions; the next, he was fully conscious, floating neck high in the
Indian Ocean. And very, very cold.

  He glanced around, looking for his wife Breanna. They’d gone out of the plane together, hugging each other as they jumped through the hole left by one of the ejection seats in the Flighthawk bay of the stricken Megafortress. Eight people had been aboard the plane; there were only six ejection seats. As the senior members of the crew, they had the others bail first, then followed the old-fashioned way.

  Ejection seats had been invented to get crew members away from the jet as quickly and safely as possible, before they could be smacked by the fuselage or sucked into a jet engine. While certain aircraft were designed to be good jumping platforms, with the parachutists shielded from deadly wind sheers and vortices, the Megafortress was not among them. Though Zen and Breanna had been holding each other as they jumped, the wind had quickly torn them apart.

  Zen had smacked his head and back against the fuselage, then rebounded down past Breanna. He’d tried to arc his upper body as a skydiver would. But instead of flying smoothly through the air, he began twisting around, spinning on both axes as if he were a jack tossed up at the start of a child’s game. He’d forced his arms apart to slow his spin, then pulled the ripcord for his parachute and felt an incredibly hard tug against his crotch. But the chute had opened and then he fell at a much slower speed.

  Sometime later—it could have been seconds or hours—he’d seen Breanna’s parachute unfold about two miles away. His mind, tossed by the wind and jarred by the collision with the plane, suddenly cleared. He began shifting his weight and steering the chute toward his wife, flying the parachute in her direction.

  A skilled parachutist would have had little trouble getting to her. But he had not done a lot of practice jumps before the aircraft accident that left him paralyzed, and in the time since, done only four, all qualifying jumps under much easier conditions.

  Still, he had managed to get within a few hundred yards of Breanna before they hit the water.

  The water felt like concrete. Zen hit at an angle, not quite sideways but not erect either. There wasn’t much of a wind, and he had no trouble getting out of the harness. As a paraplegic, his everyday existence had come to depend on a great deal of upper body strength, and he was an excellent swimmer, so he had no trouble squaring himself away. The small raft that was part of his survival gear bobbed up nearby, but rather than getting in, he’d let it trail as he swam in the direction of Breanna.

  She wasn’t where he’d thought she would be. Her chute had been released but he couldn’t see her. He felt as if he’d been hit in the stomach with an iron bar.

  As calmly as he could manage, he had turned around and around, looking, then began swimming against the slight current and wind, figuring the chute would have been pulled toward him quicker than Breanna had.

  Finally, he’d seen something bobbing up and down about twenty yards to his right. It was Breanna’s raft. But she wasn’t in it.

  She was floating nearby, held upright by her horseshoe lifesaver, upright, breathing, but out of it. He’d gotten her into her raft, but then was so exhausted that he pulled himself up on the narrow rubber gunwale and rested. He heard a thunderous roar that gave way to music—an old song by Spinal Tap, he thought—and then he slipped into a place where time had no meaning. The next thing he knew, he found himself here, alone in the water.

  How long ago had that been?

  His watch had been crushed during the fall from the plane. He stared at the digits, stuck on the time he’d hit the airplane: 7:15 a.m.

  The sun was now almost directly overhead, which meant it was either a little before or a little after noon—he wasn’t sure which, since he didn’t know which way was east or west.

  Five hours in the water. Pretty long, even in the relatively warm Indian Ocean.

  He reached to his vest for his emergency radio. It wasn’t there. Had he taken it out earlier? He had the vaguest memory of doing so—but was it a genuine memory or a dream?

  A nightmare.

  Was this real?

  Breanna would have one. Bree—

  Where was she? He didn’t see her.

  Where was she?

  “Bree!”

  His voice sounded shallow and hoarse in his ears.

  “Yo, Bree! Where are ya, hon?”

  He waited, expecting to hear her snap back with something like, Right behind you, wise guy.

  But she didn’t.

  He thought he heard her behind him and spun around.

  Nothing.

  Not only was his radio gone—so was his life raft. He didn’t remember detaching it. His head was pounding. He felt dizzy.

  Zen turned slowly in the water, positive he’d seen something out of the corner of his eye. He finally spotted something in the distance: land or a ship, or even a bank of clouds; he was too far off to tell. He began paddling toward it.

  After about fifteen minutes he realized it was land. He also realized the current would help him get to it.

  “Bree!” he shouted, looking around. “Bree!”

  He paddled harder. After an hour or so his arms began to seize. He no longer had the strength to swim, and simply floated with the tide. His voice had become too weak to do more than whisper. He barely had enough strength, in fact, to resist the creeping sense of despair lapping at his shoulders.

  Diego Garcia

  1600, 15 January 1998

  DOG WATCHED THE TANKER SET DOWN ON DIEGO GARCIA’S long runway, turning slowly in the air above the island as he waited for his turn to land. It had taken his damaged plane just under eight hours to reach Diego Garcia, more than twice what it had taken to fly north.

  His body felt as if it were a statue or maybe a rusted robot that he haunted rather than lived in. His mind could control all of his body’s movements, but didn’t feel quite comfortable doing so. He was a foreigner in his own skin.

  Eyes burned dry, throat filled with sand, Dog acknowledged the tower’s clearance and eased the Wisconsin into her final leg toward the runway.

  Owned by the British, Diego Garcia was a desert island in the middle of nowhere, a sliver of paradise turned into a long runway, fueling station, and listening post. It was an odd mix of three distinct time periods—modern, British colonial, and primordial—all existing uneasily together.

  The rush of air around him seemed to subside as he dropped toward the concrete. The wheels screeched loudly when he touched down, and the sound of the wind and the engines seemed to double. Dog had practiced manual-controlled landings many times in the simulator, and had had a few real ones besides. Even so, his hands shook as the Megafortress continued across the runway, seemingly moving much faster on the ground than she had been in the air. He had his brakes set, power down, and reverse thrusters deployed—he knew he should be stopping, but he wasn’t. He deployed the drag chute at the rear of the aircraft and held on.

  The world roared around him, a loud train running in his head. And then finally the aircraft stopped—not gradually, it seemed, but all of a sudden.

  The Wisconsin halted dead a good hundred yards from the turnoff from the taxiway. Dog let go of the stick and slumped back, too exhausted to move up properly. An SUV with a flashing blue light approached; there were other emergency vehicles, fire trucks, an ambulance, coming behind it.

  After he caught his breath, he undid his restraints and pulled himself upright. Embarrassed, he flipped on the mike for his radio.

  “Dreamland Wisconsin to Tower. Tower, you hearing me?”

  “Affirmative, Wisconsin. Are you all right?”

  “Get these guys out of my way and I’ll tootle over to the hangar,” he said, trying to make his voice sound light.

  “Negative, Wisconsin. You’re fine where you are. We have a tractor on the way.”

  “Welcome back, Colonel,” said a familiar gravelly voice over the circuit.

  “Chief Parsons?”

  “I hope you didn’t break my plane too bad, Colonel,” said Chief Master Sergeant Clyde Alan “Greasy Hands” P
arsons. Parsons was the head enlisted man in the Dreamland detachment, and the de facto air plane czar. He knew more about the Megafortress than its designer did. “I have only a skeleton crew to work with here.”

  “I’ll take your skeleton over Angelina Jolie’s body any day,” Dog told him.

  “Jeez, I don’t know, Colonel,” answered Parsons. “If that’s the lady I’m thinking of, I’m afraid I’d have to go with her.”

  LIEUTENANT MICHAEL ENGLEHARDT HOPPED FROM THE GMC Jimmy and trotted toward the big black aircraft sitting on the runway in front of him. The right wing and a good part of the fuselage were scarred; bits and pieces of carbon fiber and metal protruded from the jagged holes and scrapes. The engine cowling on the far right engine looked as if someone had written over it with white graffiti.

  The ramp ladder was lowered from the forward section. Colonel Bastian’s legs appeared, followed by the colonel himself. His face was drawn back; he looked a hundred years old.

  “Colonel!” yelled Englehardt.

  “Mikey. How are our people?”

  “Mack and the others were picked up by the Abner Read several hours ago. They’re going to rendezvous with the Lincoln and get home from there.”

  “Good. What about everybody else?” asked Dog.

  Englehardt lowered his gaze, avoiding his commander’s stare.

  “Dreamland Fisher was lost with all crew members,” he said. “Wreckage has been sighted. The Levitow is also missing,” he added. “It went down near the Indian coast. We’re not exactly sure of the location. A U-2 is overflying the route. The aircraft carrier Lincoln will launch some long-range reconnaissance aircraft to help as well, once they’re close enough. They should be within range inside of twelve hours.”

  Losing any aircraft and her crew was difficult, Englehardt knew, but losing the Levitow would be especially painful for Dog—his daughter Breanna was the Levitow’s pilot. Her husband Zen had been aboard, leading the Flighthawk mission.