by Dale Brown
“Put the sensor right on the interior of the tube,” said Rubeo in his headset.
“Hey, Doc, I thought you’d gone for coffee.”
“Hardly. This is probably an exhaust manifold, Captain.
Not optimum. Move to the last pipe in the second row.”
“We’re tight on time.”
“I understand that.”
Danny walked to the edge of the platform. His knife made it through the inside layer of plastic, but there was another plastic pipe inside that the point could reach but not quite cut.
“Shit,” he said.
“Very good,” said Rubeo. “Open the pipe.”
“How?”
Rubeo didn’t answer. Danny took his pistol and fired through.
“That was expedient,” said the scientist. “Please take your sample now.”
Danny pushed the modified sniffer probe into the hole.
As he stood there he could see the Marine corporal running toward the hole in the wall with an armload of gear.
“Enough,” said Rubeo. “Now we would like a measure on the reaction chambers, the large tube structures directly behind you. Do not fire at those,” added the scientist. “While puncturing the inner piping is unlikely, if you did succeed, the concentration of chemicals could be quite sufficient to kill you and the rest of your team.” Danny took the ruler from his pocket—a laser unit not unlike those used on some construction sites. He made his way to the end of the tube and shot the beam down to the other end, then struggled to get a good read as the numbers kept jumping on the screen.
“Close enough,” said Rubeo. The handheld ruler didn’t have a transmit mode, but Danny realized that Rubeo had read it through his helmet inputs. “Now, one of those junction boxes would be very useful. Do you see it beneath the third band?”
“Why don’t I just take the whole damn chamber?”
“That would be infinitely preferable,” said Rubeo. “An admirable solution.”
Danny had to pick his way over two piles of debris to get to the box; as he climbed off the second he realized there was a boot sticking out. He bent down and saw that the pant leg above the boot was tan.
The boot moved slightly. He heard, or thought he heard, a groan from the pile.
Not one of my guys, he thought. Still, he found himself fighting an urge to stop and help the man.
“Do not damage the circuitry if possible,” said Rubeo as Danny pried the cover of the box off with his knife. The last two screws shot away and the metal cover fell away.
“Looks like a bunch of wires.”
“Yes,” said the scientist.
“You sure you want them?”
“Do you want me to explain how the probable current can be determined from the size and composition of the wires, and what other suppositions could be made—or should I skip to the math involved in determining the propagation of electromagnetic waves?”
“Fuck you, Doc,” said Danny, hacking at the thick set of wires.
Dreamland Command Center
0742
“MUCH MORE PRIMITIVE THAN RAZOR,” SAID RUBEO, TURNING away from the console.
“In the matter of size, yes,” said Matterhorn, one of the laser experts.
“In everything.”
“I disagree,” answered Matterhorn. “The size of the mirror array and the lack of mobility in the aiming structure indicates to me that they’ve found a way to target it by focusing individual frames at the reflective site.
They’ve obviously gone operational too soon, but that undoubtedly was a political decision.”
“Piffle,” said Rubeo. “Razor is several times more powerful.”
Dog took a step away from them, turning his attention back to the image from Dreamland’s miniature KH satellite. The high-resolution optics on the satellite could not be sent as video, but in rapid burst mode it updated every twenty seconds. The effect was something like watching dancers move across a strobe-lit stage.
Except, of course, the dancers were his people under fire.
“The mission has been invaluable,” Matterhorn said, probably sensing Dog’s annoyance.
The colonel ignored the scientist. More vehicles were starting from the barracks area. “Danny. Let’s get the hell out of there, okay?” he said, pushing the talk button on his remote.
“I’m with you, Colonel.”
Aboard Quicksilver,
over Iraq
1843
TORBIN FELT HIMSELF STARTING TO RELAX AS THE LAST OF the attack jets checked in, hooking onto the course for home. His fingers hurt and his neck was stiff.
“Crew sound off,” said Captain Breanna Stockard.
“Torbin, how are we looking?”
“Good,” he said. “Thanks for picking me up back there. I appreciate it.”
“Not a problem. Chris?”
Torbin tried to stretch away some of his cramps as the others joked. Had he screwed up? Normally the copilot handled the missile shots, but he should have taken the radars down himself.
Nobody else thought he’d messed up, though.
Ironic—on the other missions, he’d been the one convinced he hadn’t failed, and everyone else pointed the finger. Now it was the other way around.
So was he a screw-up?
The computer snapped a warning tone at him.
“Radars, airborne,” he relayed to the captain. “Three, four—helicopters coming north.”
“They’re not ours?” asked Breanna.
“Negative, negative. ID’d as Mi-8 Hips,” he said, reading the legend on the panel. “Assault ships. I have a bearing.”
“Hang tight everyone,” said Breanna. “Torbin, give the heading to Eagle Flight. Chris will punch you through.”
“They’re on a direct line for High Top,” said Chris Ferris.
“The fighters will take care of them,” replied Breanna.
In Iran
1855
THE HIND BUCKED AS THEY THREW THE CAPTURED GEAR inside. The rotors revolved at low RPM, their wash making it difficult to move in a straight line. The part of the mirror assembly they’d cut away proved so heavy that the two Marines had to help Egg and Pretty Boy get it out of the building; even then they dragged it most of the way.
“Something moving beyond the fence,” warned Liu.
“Can’t see through the smoke.”
“Okay,” said Danny. “Liu, Hernandez, fall back. We’re buggin’ out.”
“Two more of those disk things inside,” yelled the Marine corporal.
“All right,” said Danny. “I’ll get the last array and then we’re gone.”
He tossed his plundered CPU unit inside the Hind, then ran back to the building, heading toward the arrays. Light filtered through the smoke; a fire flared in fits near the tunnel entrance at the other side of the building. Danny moved through the red and gray shadows like a goblin slithering through a haunted house. As he jumped up onto the raised metal platform of the control area his knee gave way; as he sprawled off the side he managed to snag his arm on a metal railing, but then lost it. He fell face first to the ground without getting his hands out to break his fall.
He cringed, expecting to hit hard and on his face; instead his chest and face landed on a large, soft pillow.
Not a pillow, but the stomach of a dead Iranian soldier.
Danny turned his head to the side, his helmet’s visor magnifying the dead man’s green eyes. Wide open in the dim light, they stared at him as if to ask why he had come.
Danny pushed himself upward, ignoring his throbbing knee. The disk array sat on the floor a few yards ahead.
He moved toward it, meanwhile scanning the interior.
Two large suitcaselike arrays sat next to a small screen; he slung his gun over his shoulder and hoisted them from the floor. They were lighter than he thought but hard to hold in his hands as he began picking his way back outside.
He’d gotten about a third of the way when a fresh explosion rocked the building.
He stopped, regaining his balance, then began again. He could hear the helicopter revving outside, felt his own adrenaline surging.
This is why I’m here, he thought. How could he tell Jemma that? How could he explain it to her friends or politicos, to anyone who wasn’t right in the middle of things?
It was more than the rush. Part of it had to do with patriotism, or fulfilling your duty, or something difficult to put exactly into words, even to your wife. Danny pushed forward, sliding against a piece of mangled machinery, ducking to his right. An automatic weapon popped outside.
A hand grabbed him from the side, a hard clamp that whipped him around and threw him down. An AK-47 appeared over him as he fell, the gun barrel flaring.
In that moment Captain Danny Freah knew what heaven would be like. For all his years of protesting that he was not religious, for all his poor churchgoing, his in-frequent prayers—in the moment that bullets flew toward his chest, he felt the warmth of unending rest. Something soft and feminine whispered in his ear, a voice not unlike his wife’s, telling him he had nothing to fear forever more.
Then hell opened up with a violent thunderclap, lightning shrieking in a violent arc. Debris fell around him, clumps of dirt and sod as he was buried alive.
Hands pulled him up, warm hands, old hands.
“Shittin’ fuckin’ hell, that raghead almost got you point-blank,” shouted Gunny, who’d somehow materialized over him. He had his arm wrapped around Danny’s chest—Gunny had pulled him down—and began dragging him outside. “Beat shit hell outta your pizza boxes.”
“Yeah,” said Danny, still dazed.
“Well come the fuck on,” said the Marine sergeant. His machine gun still smoked in his hands.
“Yeah,” said Danny. He paused at the wall, then leaped back to grab the mangled disk arrays, pulling them with him outside.
The sun washed everything pure and white—even the three bodies of Iranian soldiers who had tried to cut off their escape.
“Let’s go!” yelled Liu, running up to grab one of the boxes from Danny’s hands. “The whole Iranian air force is coming for us.”
“What’s that, a pair of fuckin’ crop dusters?” said Gunny.
“Try a dozen MiG-29s and six F-5s for starters,” said Liu, physically pushing Danny into the helicopter. “The Megafortress is going to blow up the building—we don’t need charges. Let’s go!”
Aboard Raven,
over Iran
1903
ZEN HAD TO CHECK HIS FUEL AS HE ROSE TO CONFRONT the jets scrambling from Tabriz. The two planes, ID’d as F-5Es, were relatively primitive, unlike the MiGs coming off the concrete at Hamadian and Kemanshah. But they were more than a match for the Hind and close enough to intercept them.
“I’m zero-two on the lead plane,” he told Alou.
“Copy that. Launching JSOW on laser site,” replied the pilot.
Raven was running behind the Flighthawk by seven miles; even if the primitive radars in the F-5E Tigers would have difficulty spotting it, by the time Hawk One closed on them the black plane would probably be visible, at least as a disconcerting speck in the distance.
There was a dull clunk from somewhere far behind Zen as the smart bomb popped off the rotary launcher in the rear bay.
“I’m going to head-on the son of a bitch,” he said, as much a note to himself as a piece of intelligence for the Raven pilot. “Break north. Stay with me.”
“Copy that.”
“Impact at three, two …” said the copilot, counting down the bomb hit on the laser.
Zen lost track of the conversation on the flight deck as the weapon scored a direct hit on the director assembly. Gray and black smoke furled and then mushroomed from the hole in the center of the building. A concussion shook the building, shattering five of the supports and causing the north wall to implode.
Then things got nasty.
As the explosion vaporized the metal tube and stand at the heart of the director, shrapnel from the smart bomb shot through a four-inch gas pipe near the side of the building. A second or so later the escaping gas was ignited by a fire that had licked its way out from one of the control units. The flames flew back into a large, pressurized reservoir tank. This exploded so brightly it set off the IR warning in the Megafortress’s tail, even though by now they were a good distance away. The building’s roof vaporized into a skyrocketing fireball, which burned so quickly that it blew itself out—though not before rising nearly a thousand feet and incinerating everyone who had been in the shed when the bomb hit.
Zen turned his attention back to his own targets. The Iranian jets, flying at just over the speed of sound, were at twelve and fourteen thousand feet, respectively, separated by about a half mile. They were traveling much too fast to engage the Hind; belatedly, they began to slow. The computer plotted Zen’s attack for him, and diplomatically didn’t post the odds of a heads-on attack with a cannon working at such speeds. His goal, however, wasn’t to nail them but simply break their approach.
The computer cued him to fire before he could even see the first aircraft. He waited an extra second, squeezed the trigger, then corrected right to get a quick shot on the second aircraft. As he started to bank, something red flew through it; one of his bullets had managed to rip through the fuel lines of the lead aircraft, turning it into a fireball.
It was a one in a thousand shot—Zen thought to himself that he should have played the lottery that day.
The second airplane turned hard to the north, accelerating away and taking itself out of the equation. Zen didn’t care—he threw the Flighthawk south and began hunting for the MiG-29s.
“Good shooting,” said Alou.
“Thanks.”
“Bandits are accelerating,” reported the copilot. “Positive IDs—Fulcrum Cs. You have two bearing one-niner off your nose.”
“Slot Dance radar is active. Velocity-search mode,” added the radar operator. “Should we jam?”
“Let’s hold that off as long as possible,” said Alou.
“They may not know we’re here. Zen?”
“Yeah, roger that. Working on an intercept,” he said.
“Fentress?”
“Boss?”
“Keep an eye on my fuel.”
“Yes, sir.”
Actually, the computer would do so, but Zen suddenly felt he wanted Fentress in the mix.
“Hawk One is being scanned,” warned the computer as he crossed to within ten miles of the easternmost MiG.
“MiGs are coming for us,” warned the copilot. “We’re inside Aphid range—they don’t seem to have us yet.”
“Go to ECMs,” said Alou.
“If you go to ECMs you’re going to cut down my maneuverability,” warned Zen. While the Flighthawk and C3 used uninterruptible bands, its backup circuits were limited by the fuzz, and as a precaution the Flighthawk had to stay within five miles of the mothership. “Wait until they lock.”
“Full ECMs,” insisted the pilot.
Cursing, Zen pulled his stick to the right, looping back to get closer to Raven. Breanna would never have punched the panic button that quickly; Raven hadn’t even been spiked.
“Still coming. Looking for us,” said the copilot.
“Prepare AMRAAMs,” said Alou. “Open bay doors.”
“That’s going to increase the radar profile five hundred percent,” said Zen. “They’ll see us for sure.”
“Hawk leader, fly your own plane.” Zen pushed his stick hard left, rolling his wing around and gunning for the two MiGs. The closest was now within seven miles of Hawk One—easy range if he’d had a radar homer. C3, anticipating him, gave a plot for an attack that featured a deflection shot on the close plane with a quick jink that would put him head-on-wing to the second.
“Fuel is down to ten minutes,” warned Fentress.
“Hawk,” said Zen, acknowledging.
“Being scanned. Target aircraft are locking on Hawk One,” warned the computer.
Good, thoug
ht Zen. Get me, not Raven.
“Scan broken. Thirty seconds to intercept.”
“We’re spiked!” warned the copilot. “Shit.”
“Fire missiles,” said Alou. “Brace for evasive maneuvers.”
Zen leaned forward into the attack as his cue flashed red. The Iranian MiG pitched downward as Zen began to fire; he followed through a curving arc, aiming ahead of the enemy’s nose, in effect firing his bullets so they and the MiG would arrive at the same point at the same time.
The copilot and radar operator were screaming about missiles in the air, Fentress told him the other MiG was trying to get on his tail, and Alou ordered chaff as Zen fought to keep his attention on the glowing pipper in the middle of his head, the bright red triangle that doomed the MiG to destruction. The Iranian squirmed and flailed, now left, now right, up then down. And then its nose fell away and the wings shot upward, the Flighthawk’s bullets sawing it in half.
“On your butt!” warned Fentress. “Missiles!” Zen tucked left. A large shadow zipped past his windscreen cam—a missile. He turned right, couldn’t find his prey, kept coming, finally saw the large-nosed bird tilting its wing over in an evasive maneuver. Something seemed to pop from the right wing—one of Raven‘s AMRAAMs hitting home.
“Yeah,” said the copilot.
Alou’s congratulations were cut short by a thunderclap and the shudder of a volcano releasing its steam. Zen felt himself weightless and then thrown against his restraints so hard one of the belts sheered from its bolt at the base, leaving him hanging off the side as Raven rolled into an invert, then plunged into a fifty-degree dive toward the earth.
Aboard Quicksilver,
over Iraq
1910
BREANNA HEARD THE AWACS ALERT AND KNEW IMMEDIATELY what had happened.
“Chris, get us a course to the Iranian border.” She didn’t bother to wait, turning the plane immediately to the east.
“We’re almost twenty-five minutes away,” said the copilot.
“Understood.” The throttles were already at max, but she tapped them nonetheless.
“Whiplash Hind is about zero-two from the border,” said Chris, plotting their position. “Raven is engaging MiGs and F-5Es.”
