by John Barnes
Howard was stroking Michiko’s breasts and hair, real soft and gentle the way she said she liked. She was handling Isaac, who was breathing like he was about to finish.
Something went off like a cannon. Isaac, sitting up, bumped heads with Michiko; they were both still apologizing when Lenya, the Russian lady that owned the place, knocked on the door and said, “Howard, Isaac, so so sorry, something happen to your truck, dress and come out, okay?”
A few minutes later, hastily stuffed into their clothes, barefoot on the sunny parking lot, they stood stupefied in awe by the burned and scarred truck bed and the shattered windows. One other car, nearby, had taken a big crack in the rear window, but Reverend Nickleson had already driven it off to the auto-glass place, saying he didn’t want to involve his insurance company.
The cop who came out, unfortunately, was Matt Storey, who had enough trouble figuring out how to fill out speeding tickets, so no matter how much they tried to tell him about the two mystery bottles they’d been carrying in the back, he just kept shaking his head and saying it was probably kids. It was dark before he left to write his report, which would say something blew up in the pickup truck bed and it was probably kids.
After they swept the glass off the seat, Howard tried starting the truck. It was drivable, though it stank like a firecracker, and most of the gauges weren’t working.
“Probably leaking everything everywhere, too,” Isaac said, shining his flashlight under it. “Got oil and radiator, at least, dripping, and a couple things I ain’t sure of. But if we top up the oil and drive it home slow and careful, we can probably get it there. Think we got gas leaking?”
Howard sniffed. “I don’t smell any—just the sulfur from those bombs.”
Lenya told them no charge, rain check, and she’d take care of paying Michiko. “Reminds me when I’m still one of the girls, back in Brooklyn,” she said. “I had me a real good customer, one day he goes out, turns on his car, boom, he’s not a good customer no more. I even gone to his funeral and cried, especially when I seen he had a pretty wife and a bunch of kids. Never did heard what that was all about. You boys ain’t have no enemies?”
“Just bums going after the recyclables,” Isaac said.
“There’s a bum in my recycling cart this afternoon. I chase him away. He tells me God loved me anyway.”
“I doubt it was him,” Howard said.
As they drove through town, keeping it to about fifteen miles per hour from fear of the gas tank and because of the shattered windshield, Isaac said, “You know, old Lenya will still be feeling generous about that rain check tonight, but she might not in a week. It’s only about three miles, we could walk back in an hour. I say we park this thing, walk on in, let Lenya spoil us, and maybe catch the last of Game Seven and have us a steak at Mary’s. Hitch a ride or take a cab after. It’s been a day.”
“Me too, on everything,” Howard said.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. NEAR THE BOUNDARY OF JAMMU WITH AKSAI CHIN. DISPUTED TERRITORY CLAIMED BY CHINA. INDIA, PAKISTAN. AND KASHMIRI SEPARATISTS. JUST BEFORE DAWN. LOCALLY. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.
“Green Leader, Green Flight is authorized to cross over into Aksai Chin. The American satellites have laid you an intercept course at 321 degrees 9 minutes; we’re relaying it to your computer now—”
The flight leader passed orders to the other three planes in his flight. “Looks like we’re cleared to go get them.”
“How was it authorized so quickly?” Green Two, the pilot of one of the two fighters in the flight, asked.
Normally the flight leader would have reprimanded the excess chatter, but he was excited and nervous himself. “They told me the Americans told—not asked—Beijing and Islamabad to let us do this.”
The four Sukhoi jets of Green Flight flew on, high above the spectacular, deadly wastelands: the Aksai Chin, a flat, featureless saline desert surrounded by the high Himalayas. It could be reached by road for less than half the year, was more than three miles high with almost no rainfall, and offered death by thirst, starvation, or exposure at all times of year; three nations and one liberation movement claimed it, but not one of them would have expended a single life to maintain the claim.
China patrolled there more often than the other nations, but today India was there first with the requested flight of two fighters and two fast reconnaissance planes to the target. Swift agreement by all parties that this was strictly a favor to the Americans and reflected nothing else had been enabled by their shared perception that the United States was about to go utterly berserk.
Dawn overtook Green Flight. The old silver Sukhois glinted with steely fire in the abrupt daylight, and the missile pods on two of them, camera package on the third, and radar/communications boom on the leader stood out like diagrams of themselves.
“I have it on radar,” the flight leader reported. “Confirming orders: We are to secure as many photographs as feasible, while repeatedly warning them; if we are defied, or not answered, we are to shoot them down at the last feasible prudent time.”
“Those orders are confirmed, Green Leader.”
Feasible prudent time. I suppose it wouldn’t be prudent if it weren’t feasible, and maybe vice versa. Green Leader shrugged the thought off; the phrase was obviously just cover for his superiors if anything went wrong.
The high peaks off to their east dazzled them like monster flashbulbs as the morning sun found angles from glaciers and snowfields into the pilots’ eyes. Long, deep shadows extended across the salt plain below, crawling visibly back toward the mountains in the first moment of dawn. In late October, the mountains were piled high and deep with snow; they would have been snowcapped even in July, but for practical purposes that inaccessible, high, far land below them had been in winter for more than a month.
Coordinating with an American satellite operator, two of their own radar operators, and what must be an American observer relaying information from a Chinese or Pakistani radar, they moved in on the target. “Green Leader, this is Green Three.” That was the camera plane. “I have him on visual, Green Leader, proceeding to close with him.”
They turned to follow Three and then they all saw it: a white 737 flying at what must be about its max cruising altitude, gleaming white in the morning sun. In moments they had closed with the white plane and were circling it in the air like American Indians around a covered wagon in one of their old Westerns. The 737 neither deviated from its course nor answered any radio hails, though there was a soft hiss in one distress channel.
“Green Three, do you have a clear photo of that tail?”
“Several. Yes, and in close, you can clearly see that it used to display a red Lion Airways logo, under that runny, patchy paint. I’m going in close to see if I can see anyone in the cockpit and perhaps photograph them.”
“I’ll follow you in for a look, myself.”
After two passes, and with just thirty kilometers left in authorized airspace, Green One and Three had seen no evidence of life; the 737 continued to fly on a constant heading and altitude. Nothing moved in any window. The recon planes backed off to observe.
“Green Two and Green Four, we’re clear now. You are authorized to close in and fire at will.”
Two and Four accelerated past them, taking up positions at an angle behind the white airliner. R-73s lashed out in long white streaks. Two’s rocket blew the port engine to fiery bits, and the wing fell away; as the airliner tipped, the second R-73 tailpiped the remaining engine, stripping off the starboard wing. The airliner’s fuselage tumbled wildly downward, end over end; the rest of Green Flight circled while Green Three descended for better pictures of the impact.
The fuselage slammed into the gray-white, stony ground and vanished in a great blob of white-hot flame. Green Three peeled away; a collision with wreckage thrown into the sky might have doomed him to crash into the nightmare void of the desert below.
“Did you get spectroscopy, Green Three?” Green Leader asked.
“The instr
uments say we’ve got everything we’re supposed to get. That was quite an explosion. I wonder what they had on board?”
“They’ll know when they analyze your recordings, but you know they’ll never tell us. All right, let’s head for home, we have a storm coming, and I don’t want to be here when it hits.” They wheeled and headed for home, four contrails tipped with silver spearheads; with nothing but itself to burn, the wreckage burned briefly, smoldered a little longer, and was as bitter cold as everything around it before noon.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. GILLETTE. WYOMING. 5:09 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
When Jason reached to knock on the door of Room 215, it opened. Suburban dad-type, knit polo shirt, cheapie chinos, penny-for-the-love-of-god loafers. “Hi, I’m Zach. I’d rather not be too close to what you have there, so I’m going to prop this door open”—he did—“and walk over to the Denny’s across the street. I’ll be having coffee at the counter. My stuff’s already in the car so here’s the key to the room.” He tossed the card onto the bed. “Are you carrying anything plastic you need to keep?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, my stuff ferments flexible plastic, loves beverage bottles but really any plastic, semiaerobic so you kill it with bleach or peroxide. There’s three gallon jugs of peroxide on the table—pour it over any surface you need to touch before you handle any of your plastic.”
“My stuff makes nitric acid wherever there’s a fluctuating electromagnetic field, and powers off a temperature gradient,” Jason said. “Strong alkali, like lye, shuts it down temporarily and neutralizes the acid.”
“Thanks! Why don’t you walk out, and then I’ll walk in?”
“It’s a deal.” Jason stepped back to let Zach walk past the door and out into the sunlight. He was obviously careful not to step anywhere near where Jason had stood.
Not worrying about the Holiday Inn’s carpets since they’d never have time to bill Zach before Daybreak took hold, Jason poured peroxide over a big patch of the carpet, and followed up by sprinkling Liquid-Plumr there. He set his pack in the center, disinfected it, and gave it some more Liquid-Plumr, splashed more of the nasty chemicals onto his gloved hands and onto the plastic bags that had held his laptop and change of clothes.
With water from the faucet in a glass he had just removed from the hotel paper wrapper (SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION), Jason rinsed his sealed plastic bags, including the one with the laptop. He stripped and threw his clothes and shoes on the bed, helping the maid to scatter more of his nanospawn and Zach’s biotes.
After the long day, he took longer in the hot shower than he’d meant to—might as well enjoy the Big System one last time.
When at last Jason walked across the parking lot to Denny’s, the air tasted sweet and clean. Still an hour of daylight left? He reached for his watch before he remembered it had already died. Good fucking riddance. He was whistling “Natural Mountain Man” as he sprinted across the street.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 7:00 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
“So the Indian Air Force had good remote sensing?” Cameron asked.
The Air Force liaison said, “As good as ours—it’s the same gear, we sold it to them, and they know what to do with it. So yeah, we can count on this result. The spectroscope was consistent with light hydrocarbons—at a guess, that would be a largish tank of propane in the plane’s body, maybe juiced with a few cylinders of aviation oxygen. We think the pilot and crew probably parachuted somewhere over wild country not long after they dropped the bodies in Thailand; jumping into a jungle would be a lot better than riding the plane through the operation.”
“How did they know we’d get it together fast enough to shoot down the 737?”
“They didn’t have to. A big white airliner with two engines crashing anywhere in that part of the world would just have been one more good decoy.” Nancy Telabanian sat back, folding her arms around herself. “Because the Indian pilots are good and know their business, we can be pretty sure about three important facts: It’s almost certainly the Lion Airways plane stolen from Sentani, with its tail repainted; it’s consistent with being the plane that dropped the bodies of Samuelson’s three key liaisons into the market square in Thailand; and it was unmanned by the time we shot it down. And it couldn’t possibly have been a Dreamliner. So Air Force Two is still somewhere, and the blow is going to fall… somewhere.”
Marshall—whoever or whatever his official job and title were, he seemed to be the one in charge of getting useful graphics up in a short period of time—spoke over the loudspeaker. “Per your request, Mr. Nguyen-Peters, we’ve got a graph to show estimated arrival times on the West Coast and other locations. Shall I put it up on the main screen?”
“Yes,” Cam said, “I think you’d better.”
The map of the eastern Pacific, and western North America, could not have been clearer; it showed the ocean as black, areas where the 787 could already have hit as red, and areas still safe as aqua. Hawaii and coastal Alaska from the Bering Sea almost to the panhandle were red. So far the West Coast was aqua. But a tongue of red crept down toward Juneau, inexorably south, like a glacier of fire and blood, widening as it went.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. RAPID CITY. SOUTH DAKOTA. 5:04 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Marshalene still had half a tank and a full charge, but she’d had way too much liquid, and besides, she was bored. She liked truck stops because they always had a lot of silly junk that she could buy, and show to people to show them how she was kind of above it all, but not like being all superior, just she knew this stuff was junk and some people bought it for real.
It was dinner time and the café smelled good with all the white-trash cookin’, and she decided she could stand country music for some good meatloaf and pie. Besides, the lot had been so crowded, she teased herself, that she’d had to walk all the way here from where she’d parked, almost back by the highway.
The booth felt good and there were three cheesy bobbleheads and a couple cool T-shirts to linger about buying, so it was almost an hour before she got back on the road. Meanwhile, the wind under the Prius shifted, and nanoswarm blew across the parking lot and on into Rapid City itself; more than a hundred more trucks, bound all over the northern United States, were infected, along with four big transporters hauling wind-generator blades to Fort Collins, a Gray Liner bound for Winnipeg, and seven diesel-electric locomotives, three headed into the DME system and four for the old Great Northern. Within twenty-four hours, nanoswarm from Marshalene’s Prius would spread from Manitoba to northern California and Vancouver to Little Rock. It so happened that Jason’s eggs were among the most efficient ones out there, producing some of the fastest-reproducing nanoswarm, and Jason had been right all along; Marshalene’s car was perfect for the job. In any evolutionary system, tiny advantages become gigantic population shifts; it was nothing more than that.
ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES LATER. ABOVE ANGEL STADIUM. ANAHEIM. CALIFORNIA. 4:20 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Well, I guess I’m seeing the World Series, after all, Greg Redmond thought, circling Anaheim at forty-three thousand feet, all the higher the old A-10 could go. What he’d been told back in Arizona, while the ground crews ran around madly, was enough to scare the shit out of any sensible man with a wife and three small kids—phrases like get there ASAP, you’re already late, vitally important to obey all orders at once, and the single scariest phrase in the military lexicon: This is not a drill.
The Navy had the front line. Somewhere far out over the horizon, F-18 Super Hornets out of North Island NAS and LeMoore were scouting up and down the coast, using the hastily-given tactical callsign “Noseguard.” They were highly capable planes, each carrying more-than-good radar and a full array of long-range and visual-range missiles, but there weren’t many of them. Still, if the enemy designated “Bad Dreamliner” happened to come in through any of the territory the Super Hornets were covering, they had the tools for the job.
That was the scariest part
. The CO had told them that there was “Unlimited authorization to destroy that plane.”
Greg’s buddy Nate had said, “Sir, I’m not clear. Unlimited authorization means—”
“Unlimited authorization means unlimited. Nothing is off-limits as long as that 787 gets destroyed before it can get to where it’s going. Use the Sidewinders, use the big gun, hell, use the Mavericks or ram the sonofabitch if you have to.” Greg had swallowed hard; the Mavericks were used to take out tanks, and it did not sound like the CO was kidding about ramming, either. “Everybody who is out on this mission—and they have called out everybody—is carrying the full suite of weapons. They are there for you to use. Of course, avoid collateral damage if you can, but if you can’t—destroy Bad Dreamliner. There’s no such thing as exceeding this order. Clear?”
And all the Hog Drivers on the bench had nodded, and said, yes, yes, sir, clear.
Greg wondered if everyone remembered what he did. Not about his own plane, but about some of the others. Some Super Hornets, on a stop-at-all-cost mission, might be carrying nukes. Whatever was on that thing had to be a nightmare.
Behind the Noseguards, in the middle range, from just over the horizon to perhaps eighty miles out at sea, were the Tackles—the main interception force, still being gathered from a dozen air bases. Land-based Navy and Marine F-35s out of North Island, with their extra fuel and longer patrol times, were already flying search patterns up and down the coast; Air Force F-35s and F-22s out of Holloman AFB in New Mexico were arriving and joining them. The fence was getting thicker, but it still had holes.
