Retribution (31 page)

Cursing, he got up and stalked to the missile. He expected some good-natured ribbing from the Marines gathered around the warhead, but they were silent, staring at the banged-up metal.

One of the access panels on the warhead had separated from the rest of the skin just enough to let light shine through from the inside.

Light. The internal works had not been completely fried.

Jennifer knelt down in front of the panel without saying a word. Danny watched as she took a star-head screwdriver from her small pack of tools and gingerly unscrewed the panel. A bank of LEDs on the circuit board were lit.

“Huh,” she said.

Danny reach to the back of his helmet for the communications button.

“You see this, Dreamland?”

“Yes,” said Anna Klondike. “Stand by. And please tell Ms. Gleason not to touch anything.”

Aboard Dreamland
Bennett
2130

D
URING THE WHOLE FLIGHT
,
PILOT
M
ICHAEL
E
NGLEHARDT
felt out of sync, as if he’d stepped into a movie moving about a half frame faster than he was.

It was ironic. He’d been
so
keyed up for the sortie before it
happened, so ready to go—and so mad at Dog for taking him off the last mission—but now everything just seemed wrong. Or he seemed wrong, almost out of place. The crew didn’t respond to him the way they used to. In the space of twenty-four hours, less, they’d become strangers. And so had the plane.

“Indian radar site just powered up,” said his copilot, Kevin Sullivan. “Shouldn’t be able to see us from this distance, but it may catch the Osprey on the way out. We’ll have to alert them.”

“Yeah, roger that.”

“You want me to do that?”

“Yeah, jeez, come on, Kevin. Do it.”

“Two aircraft from the southeast,” announced Sergeant Rager, the airborne radar controller. “At 250 miles. MiG-29Bs. Must be out of Adampur.”

Englehardt’s heart began to pound, and suddenly his throat felt dry. He checked his position on the map, then double checked, basically stalling for time.

What was he supposed to do?

He’d been in situations like this dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times—in simulations. He’d always handled it then.

Now?

Now he was still moving a step behind. What was going on?

“Flighthawk leader to
Bennett
—you want me to send
Hawk Two
out that way?” asked Starship, downstairs in the Flighthawk bay.

“Roger that,” he said. “Check them out. Copilot—Kevin, they challenge us?”

“Negative.”

“Radar, continue to track. If they continue on course, we’ll ask their intentions. If they show hostile signs, we’ll shoot them down.”

His voice cracked as he finished the sentence. Englehardt winced, hoping no one else would notice. Then he reached for the water bottle he kept tucked in his pants leg, his throat bone dry.

Jamu
2143

J
ENNIFER GOT DOWN ON HER BELLY SO SHE COULD SEE THE
interior of the weapon better, then pushed the electronic probes toward the two points at the far end of the circuit board. The narrow, needlelike probes felt as if they were frozen solid. Anna Klondike had assured Danny that taking the measurements would not cause the weapon to explode. But Jennifer had had too much experience with integrated circuits gone bad to feel completely at ease.

“OK,” she told Danny as the needles made contact. “Take the reading, please.”

“Zero.”

Jennifer pulled the probes back, then straightened.

“Well? What did they say?”

Danny put up his hand. He was wearing his smart helmet, visor up, listening to the experts at Dreamland.

“They say there’s about a twenty percent chance that it’s armed,” he told her. “If that’s the case, it can go off at any time.”

“No way.”

“You want to talk to them?”

“Yes.”

Danny pulled off his helmet and put it on Jennifer’s head. It felt heavy, and she had to steady it with both hands.

“This is Jennifer Gleason.”

“And this is Ray Rubeo,” said the scientist. “Why am I talking to you?”

“This bomb is armed?”

“There is a possibility.”

“If it was armed, it would have exploded by now.”

Rubeo snorted.

“Don’t you think?” Jennifer added, slightly less sure of herself.

“The fail-safe circuitry is dead,” said Rubeo. “Now is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“You have the experts there. What do they think?”

“They are divided. We have steps for you to take.”

“Is it going to blow up if I do the wrong thing?” Jennifer asked.

“It may. It may very well go off if you do the
right
thing.”

“I wish you had a sense of humor, Ray. Then I would think you were joking.”

Aboard Dreamland
Bennett
2150

S
TARSHIP CORRECTED SLIGHTLY AS THE
I
NDIAN
M
I
G
TACKED
gently to the north. The MiG was still on a dead run for the Megafortress, about a hundred miles away. The two planes were closing in on each other at a rate of about seventeen miles a minute.

“
Bennett,
this is Flighthawk leader. I’m about two minutes from the MiGs. What’s your call?”

“Let’s find out what their intentions are,” said Englehardt. “Sullivan, see if you can contact them.”

The pilot’s voice sounded a little shaky. Starship had flown with him once or twice, not long enough to form an opinion. He seemed tentative, but then the prospect of combat could do that the first time you faced it. Starship remembered his first combat sortie—he’d emptied his stomach as soon as they landed.

“Indians don’t answer our radio calls,” said Sullivan.

“Try again,” said Englehardt.

The Indians called the MiG-29 “Baez”—Eagle. The models coming toward the
Bennett
were the initial version produced by the Mikoyan Opytno-Konstruktorskoye Byuro in the 1980s. A twin-engined, lightweight fighter-bomber, the MiG-29 was an extremely maneuverable aircraft, and generally came equipped with a pair of medium-range R-27 Alamos and four shorter range R-73 Archers. The MiG was considerably faster than the Flighthawk, but had one serious disadvantage—its N019 coherent-pulse Doppler radar could not see the Flighthawk until it was in extremely close range.

The attack pattern Starship mapped out took advantage of
that; it was unlikely that the MiG driver would know he was there until the first bullets began smashing through his fuselage.

Assuming Starship got the go-ahead to fire. While the MiGs had not answered the calls from the
Bennett
to identify themselves, they hadn’t made any overtly aggressive moves, either.

Hawk Two
was now a minute away.

“
Bennett,
how are we proceeding here?” Starship asked.

“Just hang on a minute, Flighthawk leader,” said Englehardt.

“Roger that,” said Starship, throttling back.

E
NGLEHARDT COULDN’T BELIEVE THIS WAS HAPPENING TO
him. He just couldn’t think.

A voice inside his head seemed to be screaming at him:
Don’t blow it!

I won’t.

Don’t!

“Still nothing,” said Sullivan in the copilot’s seat. “They obviously know we’re here.”

“Their attack radars on?”

“Negative.”

Not answering their hails was provocative, Englehardt thought, but not threatening. His orders of engagement were pretty clear that he was to fire only if threatened.

On the other hand, if he let these planes get much closer and they did turn on their attack radars, it might be too late to get away.

“
Bennett,
this is Flighthawk leader. What do you want me to do?” asked Starship.

A good, legitimate question, Englehardt thought. And his good, legitimate answer was—he didn’t know.

“I don’t see these planes as a threat to us at the moment,” he told Starship.

“What if they’re carrying dumb bombs and are going to use them on the recovery team?” asked Sullivan.

He wants us to take them down, Englehardt thought. Maybe he’s right. Better safe than sorry.

“I have a suggestion,
Bennett,
” said Starship.

“Make it,” said Englehardt.

“Let’s move our orbit away from the ground team. See if they follow. I’ll keep
Hawk Two
near them, ready for an intercept.”

Good, Starship, good.

Englehardt wondered why he hadn’t thought of it—it was a simple, obvious move.

“Good. Let’s do that,” he said. “Sully, we’re going east.”

“Hey, I got something on the ground, on the highway that runs to the valley,” said Sergeant Daly, working the ground radar. “Four trucks, Humvee-sized. Moving through the passes. Real hard to get these suckers on radar with these mountains and vegetation. Yeah, all right—they’re about ten miles from the recovery area. Four of them.”

“Tell Captain Freah,” said Englehardt, the screech creeping back into his voice.

Jamu
2153

“N
OTHING,”
SAID
D
ANNY
F
REAH.
“Z
ERO.
N
O CURRENT.”

“Very good, Captain,” said Klondike. “Now we’re going to try the oscilloscope readings.”

Danny passed the information on to Jennifer, who sighed and sat back from the warhead, fluttering her fingers as if trying to get rid of a cramp.

“Can we take a short break?” Danny asked.

“As long as you need.”

Before Danny could acknowledge, there was a buzz on the line, indicating that someone else on the Dreamland network wanted to talk to him. He switched over to channel two, where Kevin Sullivan, the copilot of the
Bennett,
warned him about the ground units.

“They’re about ten miles south of you,” Sullivan warned. “Coming up that road that cuts back and forth through the val
ley. They’re hard to track because of the terrain and trees.”

“Copy that.”

Danny yelled to the Marine sergeant in charge of the detail, telling him to pass the word about the trucks. Then he switched back to Dreamland Command.

“How much longer before the warhead is safe to move?” he asked.

“Three more steps,” said Klondike.

“How long will it take?”

“Five minutes, maybe. But first we have a series of tests. If we get the wrong result—”

“We have ground troops moving in our direction,” Danny told her. “If I can get the hell out of here before they arrive, I’d be a very happy man.”

“Stand by.”

Danny flipped back to the
Bennett
. “How fast is that ground unit moving?”

“Not very fast,” replied Sullivan. “Maybe fifteen miles an hour. That road takes a lot of turns and switchbacks.”

“Can you give me a visual from
Hawk One
?”

“Affirmative. Stand by.”

“No, I’m going to have to get back to you,” said Danny. “I’ll talk directly to Starship.”

He ducked down to Jennifer and pulled off the helmet. “We have troops coming up the road in our direction. Find out the quickest way to get this thing ready to move. Then give me the helmet back, OK?”

She bit her lip, then nodded and took the helmet.

Aboard Dreamland
Bennett
2155

S
TARSHIP TURNED
H
AWK
T
WO
AWAY FROM THE
M
I
G
S
,
THEN
took over
Hawk One
. Slipping down toward the unit the ground radar had spotted, he cut between a pair of 3,000 foot cliffs and shot into an open valley.

The jagged road twisted and turned across what looked like a dry streambed. A dozen men were riding on the backs or tops of the four vehicles, which had their lights out.

“Starship, you with me?” asked Danny Freah.

“Yeah, here we go, Captain. This is a live feed.” He banked, and took another run up the road, this time from the rear of the column. “Four trucks, a dozen guys or so hanging on them. They’re moving pretty slow. About forty minutes away from you, maybe a little more.”

“Yeah, listen, take a run all the way up that road for me again, OK?”

“On it.”

Starship tucked the Flighthawk through a nearby canyon, then back up and over the low mountain before falling into the valley the road ran through. One of the passes was so narrow that the computer gave him a proximity warning as he shot through. Starship ignored it, tucking the Flighthawk to the right to stay with the trail.

He took a quick look at
Hawk Two.
The MiGs were about thirty seconds from overtaking it. So far they hadn’t changed course or acknowledged the
Bennett
’s repeated attempts to contact them. He notched up the Flighthawk’s speed, then jumped back into
Hawk One
.

“You see that ledge on my side of that tight pass?” Danny asked as Starship climbed over the recovery site.

“I think I know which one you mean.”

“Any chance you could get some rocks into it?”

“You mean start an avalanche?”

“That’s it.”

“Let me take another look.”

Starship brought the airplane around and swooped toward what looked like a sheer, solid cliff. He wasn’t sure the relatively small missiles the Flighthawk held would do much.

Now that he had the idea planted in his head, however, he started hunting for a place where it might work.

“There’s a spot about two miles south of you where a bunch of boulders are piled against the side of the road,” he
told Danny. “There are some small trees holding them back, but I think if I put the missiles there we’d get something on the road. Downside is, if it doesn’t work, I won’t have any missiles to use against the trucks.”

“Give it a shot,” Danny told him.