Retribution

by Dale Brown

  Robot planes were the future of the Air Force. But they just didn’t give you the same kick in the pants the heavy metal did.

  He brought Hawk Two down through a thin deck of clouds, accelerating as he pushed toward a thousand feet. They were nearing the northern edge of a search zone designated as I-17, after the warhead that supposedly had crashed here. He was over Pakistan, and though marked on the maps as desert, the area was far from uninhabited. He saw a cluster of small houses on his left as he leveled off. There was no activity, however; he was in the zone affected by the T-Rays.

  Starship checked quickly on Hawk One, which was flying an automated search pattern to the west. That area was much more desolate, without even a highway in sight as the Flighthawk trundled along at five hundred feet, moving at just under 200 knots.

  Unlike Zen, Starship preferred controlling the Flighthawks from the standard control panels rather than using one of the flight helmets. He could see more at a glance, and had no trouble zoning out the rest of the noise around him.

  He punched a preset to flip his main screen back to Hawk Two, then nudged the joystick to nose the aircraft downward. Just as he dropped through six hundred feet he spotted what looked like a large skid mark in the earth about five hundred yards to his right. The computer flagged it as well, sounding a tone in his headset.

  Starship leaned Hawk Two gently onto her right wing, dropping his speed as he headed for the end of the ditch. He was moving too fast, however, and before he could get a good look was beyond his target. He came back around, lower and slower, and this time saw what looked like a garbage can half wedged in the earth.

  “Colonel, I have something.”

  “Roger that, Flighthawk leader. Give us the GPS points.”

  Starship tapped the object on the screen, locking the data into the computer before transferring it. He put Hawk Two into an orbit around the warhead, then took control of Hawk One to begin a new search.

  “Looking good, Starship,” said Dog a few minutes later. “Dreamland Command confirms that’s warhead I-17. One down, five to go.”

  On the ground in southeastern Pakistan

  1120

  “WE’RE JUST ABOUT WRAPPED UP HERE, COLONEL,” SAID Danny, using his portable mike pack instead of bothering with the smart helmet. “We should be leaving for I-8 in about thirty minutes.”

  “We’ve found I-17,” Dog told him. “It’s a little farther north than the projections show. There are some settlements nearby.”

  Danny checked the paper map as well as his global positioning device. The device had been found about twenty miles outside of the projected landing points, the first time the projections had been wrong.

  It looked to him as if the villages could be easily avoided. However, there was a highway just a mile northwest of the site; they’d be in full view when they landed.

  Danny debated whether they could afford to wait until nightfall, when villagers would be less likely to interfere. Weighed against that was the possibility that the warhead might be discovered before they got there.

  Since it was close to the village, it seemed likely that someone had already seen it. The area was in the zone affected by the T-Rays, and isolated to begin with. Maybe the villagers had no one to tell.

  “I think we’re best off sticking with the present plan, and go after I-17 at dusk,” Danny finally told the colonel. “Would it be possible to keep it under surveillance in the meantime?”

  “Doable.”

  “One other thing, Colonel—I’m wondering if we could bring up a few more men from the Whiplash detail, along with more of our gear. The Marines are great, but they’re stretched kind of thin. Admiral Woods wants everything found and out ASAP.”

  “We only have three men to run security at Diego Garcia as it is,” said Dog.

  “The only thing they’re doing there is watching the lizards.”

  Dog knew that it wasn’t quite the no-brainer Danny made it out to be. While Diego Garcia was among the most secure bases in the world, some of the gear the EB-52s carried was so classified the Navy security people would not be authorized to enter the hangars. While the chances of a problem were remote, any resulting security violation would have severe consequences for the commander.

  “All right,” said Dog finally. “Get them up there.”

  “Thanks, Colonel.”

  An atoll off the Indian coast

  Date and time unknown

  THE BOAT WAS SURPRISINGLY SMALL, MORE LIKE A LOG IN the water than a canoe. Zen flattened himself on the rocks, watching as it made its way across the shallow lagoon toward the area where he’d spotted the first turtle. Whoever was in the boat didn’t seem to notice him.

  He considered slipping into the water but decided that he’d make too much noise. There was no way to escape—unless he was extremely lucky, eventually he would be spotted.

  He’d never done very well depending on sheer luck to get by. And maybe he wanted to be found. He needed to get help for Breanna. No one was answering his radio hails; the person in the boat was the only alternative.

  The Megafortress had been attacked by Indian planes and missiles, but maybe they thought they were going after a Chinese or Pakistani aircraft. The military wasn’t necessarily antagonistic toward Americans; on the contrary, the Indians had often helped U.S. forces, at least before this conflict.

  Maybe the person in the boat would be friendly. Maybe the Indians didn’t hate Americans and this Indian could be persuaded to contact someone without telling the authorities.

  But he knew it didn’t matter, because Breanna was going to die if he didn’t get help.

  She might even already be dead.

  Zen shook his head, chasing the idea away. Then he stood.

  “Hey!” he yelled, waving his hand. “Hey! Over here!”

  The figure in the boat turned his head in Zen’s direction, but the boat kept moving, crossing in front of him.

  “Hey,” repeated Zen. “Help,” the word “Help” coming from his mouth as a bare whisper.

  He was too proud to ask for help, too proud to admit defeat.

  Breanna would die because of his ego.

  “Hey!” Zen yelled. “Help! Help!”

  The boat slowed, then began to turn in his direction. The oarsman was short, small—young, Zen realized, a teenager or even younger.

  Zen pushed himself around and sat, arranging his useless but bruised and bloodied legs under him. They seemed to ache ever so faintly. He hadn’t experienced the phenomenon in quite a while. He’d been told it had to do with reflex memory stored deep in his brain and nerve cells.

  The boat was so shallow it got within a foot or two of the shoreline before beaching. A boy of perhaps nine or ten knelt in the bottom. His oar looked more like a battered stick than a paddle. He stared silently at Zen, perhaps five yards away.

  “Hello,” said Zen. “Can you help me?”

  The boy looked at him quizzically.

  “Do you speak English?” asked Zen. He’d assumed that everyone in India did, though this was not actually true. “English?”

  The boy nudged his stick against the rocks but did not reply.

  “I’m American,” said Zen. “USA.”

  “Sing sons?” asked the boy.

  Zen didn’t understand.

  “I’m a pilot. My plane had trouble and crashed,” he said. “I—there’s another pilot. We need to contact our base.”

  “Singsons? Simsons.”

  “You mean the TV show?” asked Zen. “The Simpsons?”

  “You know Simpsons?”

  “Bart Simpson?”

  The boy’s eyes grew wide. “You know Bart Simpson?”

  “Watch him all the time.”

  “Bart?”

  “We’re good friends,” said Zen. “Can you help me?”

  The young man looked at Zen suspiciously, then jabbed his stick against the rocks and quickly pushed away.

  “Hey, come back,” said Zen. “Don’t go. Do
n’t go.”

  But the kid had already turned around and was speeding away.

  “Well, that worked,” muttered Zen. “Maybe I should have told him Homer was my uncle.”

  Dreamland Command

  2300

  RAY RUBEO GOT DOWN ON HIS KNEES SO HE COULD GET closer to the computer screen.

  “You’re sure this is where they discovered warhead I-17?” he asked.

  “That’s the GPS reading from the Flighthawk,” the operator told him. “I verified it off the Megafortress.”

  “You look like you’re praying, Ray,” said Major Catsman, coming down the ramp toward him.

  “I may be, Major.” Rubeo frowned at the map. “We’ve found one warhead outside of the search parameters.”

  “And?”

  Rubeo sighed. There was no explaining things to some people.

  “It’s not possible for it to be outside of the search area,” he told Catsman, rising.

  “Well, obviously it is.”

  “Yes. That’s my point,” said Rubeo. “What we have here is all math—Newton’s laws applied. We know exactly where the missiles should have fallen if the T-Rays worked as we think they did. So the only possible conclusion is that the T-Rays did not work in that manner. The T-Rays must not have disabled all the systems on the missing missiles. My guess is that the engines didn’t shut down when we believed they did.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It will be useful to examine the missile at I-17,” said Rubeo. “Maybe there is some shielding of some components and not others. Perhaps the T-Rays do not work as we believe they do. There is always a distance between theory and reality, Major. The problem is to measure that distance.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “I’d like one of our people to look at it closely.” Rubeo picked at his earlobe.

  “Danny Freah will be securing it.”

  “With all due respect to Captain Freah, I don’t believe his expertise lies in the area of electronics. I was thinking of Ms. Gleason. She is twiddling her thumbs on Diego Garcia. She would be of more use there.”

  “All right.” Catsman folded her arms. “Did you have to piss General Samson off so completely, Ray? Couldn’t you have been just a little more polite?”

  “I don’t do polite.”

  “You should learn,” said Catsman, turning away.

  Diego Garcia

  1300

  JENNIFER GLEASON TAPPED GENTLY ON THE SMALL LAPTOP as she rose. Wires snaking from the computer connected to a missile a few feet away. Tom Crest, one of the weapons engineers on the Anaconda team, looked up from one of the circuit boards in the warhead assembly.

  “Still?” he asked.

  “The anomaly is still there,” said Jennifer. “Even though the circuit checks out at spec on the bench, you’re getting some sort of error that has to be coming from the hardware.”

  “I’ll be damned if we can find it. It doesn’t come up more than one time out of a thousand.” Crest got up from the missile. “Jeez, it’s hot. You mind?”

  He put his thumbs under the bottom of his T-shirt, gesturing.

  “Go ahead and take it off,” said Jennifer. “If you don’t think you’ll get sunburned.”

  “Nah.” Crest pulled his shirt off, revealing a surprisingly tan and fit torso. For an engineer, Jennifer thought, he was pretty good-looking.

  Not that she was looking.

  “I wonder if maybe one of the software revisions on the microcode was done erroneously,” she said. “You’ve checked everything else.”

  “That was checked weeks ago.”

  “Maybe the check was wrong. You’ve looked at everything else.”

  “Looking at it again could take a couple of days.”

  Jennifer shrugged. She was about to volunteer to do it when the trill of a bike bell caught her attention. She turned around and saw Sergeant Lee Liu approaching on one of the Dreamland-issue mountain bikes the Whiplashers were using to patrol the area.

  “Jen, Major Catsman needs to talk to you right away.”

  “Really? OK.” Jennifer shaded her eyes. “Any word on Zen and Breanna?”

  Liu shook his head. “Sorry. Hop on and I’ll give you a ride to the Command trailer.”

  “Where am I going to get on?”

  “You can sit on the handlebars.”

  Jennifer eyed the bike dubiously.

  “Only take us a few minutes,” said Liu.

  “All right. But look out for the bumps.”

  RAY RUBEO, NOT MAJOR CATSMAN, GREETED JENNIFER when she arrived at the Dreamland Command trailer.

  “I hope you are enjoying your South Pacific sojourn,” said Rubeo testily.

  “Fun in the sun, Ray. Wish you were here.”

  “We have a real job that needs to be done.”

  Rubeo explained what had happened with the warhead located at I-17, and its implications.

  “Twenty miles is only a four percent error,” said Jennifer. “That’s not off that much.”

  “The search areas are twenty-five percent larger than the formulas calculated,” said Rubeo. “Which means that the missile traveled considerably farther than should be possible. It is far beyond the likely error rate.”

  “Maybe the formula’s wrong.”

  “Don’t you think I considered that possibility?”

  It was a sharp response, out of character even for Rubeo.

  Jennifer asked what was wrong. The scientist’s frown only deepened. Instead of answering, he changed the subject.

  “The Whiplash team is going to recover the weapon in a few hours. It needs to be examined by someone with expertise,” said Rubeo.

  “I’ll get up there as soon as I can.”

  “When?”

  “Soon, Ray. Relax.”

  “That does not seem possible,” he said, and the screen blanked.

  Jennifer got up from the communications desk and walked over to Sergeant Liu in the trailer’s common area. “How soon will the Whiplash Osprey be back?” she asked.

  “Not for several hours,” said Liu. “What’s up?”

  “I need to get up to the border area between India and Pakistan to look at a weapon with Captain Freah. I’d like to be up there in a couple of hours.”

  “Couple of hours can’t be done,” said Liu. “But I do know how you can get up there just after nightfall. If you’re willing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The ride will be a little, er, bumpy.”

  “It can’t be as bad as the bike ride,” said Jennifer. “I’m all ears.”

  An atoll off the Indian coast

  Date and time unknown

  ZEN DIDN’T KNOW WHAT SORT OF FISH LIVED IN THIS PART OF the ocean, but he did know that sharks were spread out across the globe. He knew too that they had an incredible sense of smell, and would come from miles away to strike bloodied prey.

  He also knew that with the sun sliding low in the sky, there was no way he’d make it back to the tent before it got too dark to see, if he crawled over land. Swimming might take an hour at most; it was a risk he was going to have to take.

  He pulled the knife from the turtle’s shell and held it in his teeth, ready to use. Then he pushed his way down to the water. Positioning himself at the edge of the water, he took a breath and started to swim. He held the turtle in his left hand, closest to the open sea, and stayed in water as shallow as possible. At times he felt his legs dragging against the rocks.

  Except, of course, he didn’t. Because he couldn’t feel anything in his legs.

  He pushed as well as swam, stopping several times because the knife made it difficult to breathe. He was nearly back to the tent where he’d left Breanna when he heard the voice calling to him over the waves.

  “Friend! Friend of Bart! Where are you?”

  He stopped paddling for a moment, listening as the voice called for him again.

  Should he go back? Was it a trap?

  Unsure, he decided his first priority
was getting the dead turtle back to the tent. He took a few more strokes, then beached himself for good, crawling out of the water with the turtle, a little worse for wear but still intact. Even as he pulled the animal onto the rocks, he worried a shark would rise up and snatch it from him, Jaws-style.

  Zen slipped the knife in his belt and pushed up the rocks toward the tent. He had to stop twice, exhausted, to gather his breath. Finally, when he was about twenty feet from the tent, he looked up and saw a figure standing next to it.

  “Bree!” he shouted.

  Then he realized the figure was too skinny and short to be his wife. It held up a stick.

  “Who are you?” he demanded, sliding his hand down to the knife.

  “Whoareya?” said the figure.

  “Simpsons?” asked Zen.

  The figure took a step closer, coming out of the shadow. It was a kid, though not the same one he had seen earlier. He was older, a little bigger. He held the stick out menacingly, as if it were a spear.

  “Who are you?” asked the youth.

  “Hey, where’s your friend?” Zen asked. “The Bart Simpson fan?”

  The boy didn’t say anything.

  “Did he tell you I know Bart Simpson?”

  There was a shout from behind Zen. He whirled, the knife out and ready.

  It was the boy he’d seen earlier.

  “You do know Bart Simpson?” said the kid.

  “My best friend.”

  The other kid shouted something and pointed. It took Zen a few seconds to realize he was pointing at the turtle.

  “Food,” said Zen, gesturing at the dead animal. “I’m going to start a fire.”

  Both kids started talking at once, first in a language he couldn’t recognize, then in English. Gradually, they made him understand that they had come to the island to hunt for turtles and wanted his.

  While the two kids spoke English, Zen had trouble understanding their accents.

  “The turtles have to be bigger,” said the younger boy.

  “We take,” said the older boy.

  “I don’t think so,” Zen told him.