Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9) (24 page)

“Call it in,” the LT sighed after a moment. “They said to call in anything that seemed out of the ordinary. I think the Admiral wants the flyboys to get some practice.”

Sure enough, once they’d called it in and sent the data, the Air Station scrambled a couple of its fast movers to go out and have a look.

Chapter Eight

Without a way to detect the fact that she was being painted by radar, Ell remained unaware of the military jets homing in on her trajectory until the first one overflew her position. It came in from behind her at a slow overtake in order to give its pilot and cameras longer to eyeball whatever object they were chasing.

Captain Sam “Shaker” Thompson expected to find that they were chasing some fool in an ultralight. An idiot that didn’t even have a radio evidently, since they’d been unable to contact him on any band. Such a gossamer winged airframe with an exposed pilot and small engine could give a radar cross section nearly as small as they were seeing. The intermittent nature of the return, he expected, would be explained by some kind of angular cover over the engine that only reflected radar at certain angles. Then the pilot himself would produce the weak return they were getting the rest of the time.

That begged the question of what the idiot thought he was doing out here. Shaker had never heard of an ultralight that could make 130 knots and there was no chance he could get from Cuba to Mexico with the fuel load an ultralight could carry. Shaker extended his flaps and slowed further as he came up on the target, keeping his eyes peeled. He stayed a couple hundred feet up, not wanting the wake turbulence from his overflight to knock whatever kind of lightweight low flyer it was into the sea. That was assuming the flyer was an innocent which, of course, it might not be.

But, he didn’t see anything! He switched to infrared and all he saw was something the size of a human, an insulated human at that. Where were the engines? If only the moon was up. With light amplification he only saw waves… wait… as he got closer he could see there was
some
kind of object there. It looked something like a couple of small flying saucers, one in front of the other… Then it disappeared under his nose as he flew over. He pulled up and to the right on his stick as he fed in throttle, “Mover,” he said to his wingman, “make a pass. I didn’t see much. Whatever it is, it ain’t no ultralight. It’s painted dark and it hardly shows up on infrared. I have no idea what’s powering it. I’ll move up to overwatch.” As he circled around he said, “Uh, and, Mover, be advised that it looks like a couple of flyin’ saucers, one in front of the other.”

Moses “Mover” Malone shook his head. Shaker had been his partner for several years now and Moses would trust him with his life, but sometimes Shaker’s imagination could get out of control. He lowered his landing gear to turn on his landing lights, illuminating the sea in front of him.

Ell’s initial awareness of the first jet to thunder overhead had come from the glow of its engines as it passed. However, just after she’d looked up in consternation at the glowing jets, the wake turbulence struck. Because Shaker had passed over at about a hundred feet it didn’t knock her around too badly, but she was grateful for the AI which stabilized the hoverbike against the sudden oscillations. “Allan, how could they have found me? I should have been below the horizon from any of their radar installations, right?”

“That would be correct for ground based radar. They may have airborne radar surveillance craft aloft.”

Idiot!
Ell thought to herself.
You were in the Air Force and you didn’t think of an AEW!
She considered. The slopes of the flat surfaces on the periphery of the hoverbike tilted back 20 degrees. She did a little trigonometry. If the AEW was over Guantanamo, at fifteen miles out, the hoverbike would reflect a signal back to an airborne radar flying at 28,830 feet… well 29,172 if you figured in the curvature of the earth. If an AEW was flying anywhere around 30K they ought to get intermittent returns off the flat panels of the radar skirt as flight turbulence rocked the hoverbike a little and the angle of return lined up to hit the AEW.

Ell turned to see what the jet was going to do next and saw another jet coming up on her six. Of course, they would have a flight of two! This one was brightly lit. Stifling her impulse to turn sharply out of his path she told herself,
they aren’t going to shoot yet. They’re still trying to figure out what they’re looking at.
She figured that they must have been bombarding her with radioed orders to turn to Guantanamo and land, though she had no radio to hear them with. She could probably expect them to start shepherding her in that direction pretty soon.

Closing her eyes to think, Ell pushed up the hoverbike’s speed, running quickly up to two hundred knots. Control wasn’t as good at that speed so she lifted to about fifteen feet above the waves. She had Allan give her a feed from the upper rear camera on the hoverbike and saw the jet stop closing for a minute when her speed went up. Speaking to Allan to tersely give instructions, she watched the jet in her HUD. It must have had her painted pretty well with its targeting radar since it quickly brought its speed up and began closing once again. Ell turned a little to the right and the jet matched her. It dropped a little lower in the air and Ell suspected that the irritated pilot intended to give her a taste of some real wake turbulence on this pass. Something to convince her to cooperate without having to shoot any bullets at her. Ell pulled up to twenty feet above the waves in order to put more a little cushion between herself and the sea for the bouncing around she expected they were going to give her.

As the jet’s lights seemed to be about to illuminate her, Ell slid to the right in an effort to degrade any images it might obtain of the hoverbike. Then as it passed above, Ell turned left and banked hard to slow way down. Consulting with Allan she turned until the back end of the hoverbike was aimed directly at Guantanamo. The angular point at the back of the bike shouldn’t provide any radar return to the AEW. Well, except what the AEW could bring off of her body but the Kevlar suit’s radar absorption materials should reduce that somewhat. She leaned forward in her seat so that her back would bounce most of any radar reflection high into the sky.

Now she just had to shake the jets. Twisting in her seat on the bike to face the direction she’d been going she had the waldo push some of the tinsel from a syringe out through her umbilical port. Per her instructions a minute ago, Allan was setting the distance of the one ended port so that it would dispense her bastardized tinsel “chaff” at the distance she should have reached if she’d continued traveling at 200 knots.

Ell checked her speed. She was going about fifteen knots now. Even if the jets picked her up there was an excellent chance that their radars’ AIs would reject her as a seabird… well, unless they reset the AIs to look for surface boats…

Ell watched as the second jet turned and rose, evidently circling back to make another pass. The first jet sped up to make its second pass. It forged ahead, evidently fooled into believing she was still up ahead of her current location. Either not having seen her turn and thinking she
must
be up there, or hopefully taken in by the chaff appearing where they expected her to be? Unfortunately, she had no idea how much of the Mylar tinsel it would take to reproduce a radar return of the same cross section as that returned by the hover bike.

Ell twisted in her seat again and had the waldo dispense some more chaff. She had it push an entire syringe in one location, then split the next syringe into several small pushes, scattering what returns they created about. Then another whole syringe. She aimed them somewhat to the left of her original line of flight. Gratifyingly, she saw the jet bank somewhat to its left. They
must
be following the radar returns, the dark gray of the hovercraft and her suit would be pretty hard to see on this dim night after all.

Now she just needed to convince them she’d wrecked… Could a flare fool them? Or would it take something more?

While trying to think of something better, she put some more chaff out there, this time to the right, then a minute later to the left, as if she were banking back and forth trying to lose the jets.

Not having thought of anything better, Ell had the waldo fire five of the flares through the port as quickly as it could. This turned out to be very rapidly indeed as Ell watched a cluster of brilliant red spots burst into view out in the distance and drop to the sea. Unfortunately, to Ell it looked like a fireworks display rather than a wreck. She wished she could have put some thermite or other explosive through the port. The waldo did have some thermite available to it in the tunnel, but the thermite would have to be lit before it went through the port if it was going to be burning when it landed in the water. A brief vision of the burning thermite destroying the port, yet leaving a tiny sliver of thermite burning in her abdominal wall had convinced Ell not to try that particular strategy. She made a mental note that she needed some kind of remote igniter system for the thermite.

Shaker swore. He’d never gotten another visual on the strange craft and it had somehow modified its own radar return. Neither he nor Mover had been able to pick it up at all over some significant stretches and the boys back in the Hawkeye had reported the same. But then it suddenly appeared again as an even brighter flash on radar. It was as if it had somehow stored up all the radar waves hitting it while he and Mover couldn’t see it, and then had let all that pent-up signal go at once. It appeared with a strong return, then disappeared, then reappeared with a small return. It was swerving back and forth faster than Shaker could believe. Just when Shaker was thinking he’d never get eyeballs back on it again, it wiped out spectacularly, shooting hot stars that overloaded his infrared imaging. A minute later nothing remained. No radar signals, no aircraft, only five little hot spots of burning material floating on the waves. The hot spots looked kind of like flares he mused. But, why would someone shoot off flares while they were wrecking?

Maybe they
were
flares? Trying to make it look like the craft had wrecked? Maybe the guy’d been shooting low chaff to either side of his track? Such chaff, falling quickly into the water, might have resulted in the jinking, bright returns on radar that immediately disappeared?
Shaker watched his radar carefully, searching for another return up ahead, no matter how faint. He even had his AI accept speeds down to that of a boat and up to that of a missile. Nothing appeared…

Shaker called back to base, requesting a helicopter fitted for search and rescue. He doubted anyone could have survived the crash of such a tiny craft at two hundred knots, but they had to look. He and Mover continued circling the crash site, watching for survivors, or the saucers sneaking away, but seeing nothing… just as he’d feared.

Now almost forty knots southwest of Mover and Shaker, Ell watched Jamaica’s northern shores rise up above the horizon in her HUD. She was flying the hoverbike tilted a little to the side to travel the direction she wanted despite keeping the bike’s pointy back end aimed at the AEW presumably circling above Guantanamo. About the time the search and rescue chopper started circling the site of the “wreck” she coasted in over the shoreline and lifted up into an uninhabited area of the hills behind the beach at Montego Bay. The sun was rising out of the sea as Ell whispered in to make a landing.

Ell brought the hoverbike down on an overgrown road a little way from the moderately traveled road it intersected. The scrubby vegetation on the road was eighteen to twenty-four inches high. That was good because it indicated that no one came out into the area. It was bad because the tops of the bushes would be noticeably broken and flattened by her landing. She lifted the hoverbike a little higher and looked over the side at the swaying plants. Confirming a flat spot under the growth, she leapt off the bike and lightly to the ground. Without her weight, the hoverbike bounced upward momentarily, then stabilized. Speaking to Allan, Ell had him lower the bike back down and move over until she could grab it by the saddle. Holding it up she had Allan stop the fans. Turning the bike up on its side she slid it into the gap between two trees. Some leaves covered it nicely.

Proud of how nicely she’d concealed it, Ell started to pick her way through the growth to the main road. But then she stopped and looked back at the hiding place for the hoverbike. After a moment she shook her head and walked back to it. On its side between the two trees it couldn’t take off. If for some reason she needed the bike to come for her, instead of her returning for it… having it on its side would be a big problem.

She pulled the bike out and carried it to a slight dip in the overgrown road. Leaning it on its side against a tree, she tromped down the grasses and plants then set the hoverbike down right side up on the flattened plants. She looked down into the big fans to make sure no stems were sticking up into the blades. Fairly confident that they were clear she had Allan spin them up very gently to confirm it.

Ell started back down to the bigger road again, cussing the stickers catching at her jeans.

***

Viveka read the news about Donsaii with dismay. With Donsaii imprisoned what would happen to the offer of employment Donsaii had made to Viveka? Viveka’s spirits, so high for a while had plummeted. First her “groping dot” tragedy, now this. She desperately wanted to contact D5R to ask if she still had a job upon completing her degree. Unfortunately she realized that the only contact address she had was for Donsaii herself.

Viveka had set herself to learn all she could about carbon macromolecule synthesis. Would all that effort be wasted? Would she even be able to get a job as a woman in India where men still dominated engineering?

She looked up public contact info for D5R and started to initiate a contact, but then sat back. She decided to let a month pass. Maybe Donsaii would have been released by then. Or maybe Viveka was only rationalizing a delay in getting the bad news?