Retribution (10 page)

He kept fighting. His anger grew. It pushed him, got him through rehab every day.

Rehab sucked. Sucked. But it was the only thing he could do, and he spent hours and hours every day—
every day
—working and working and working. Pumping iron, swimming, pushing himself in the wheelchair. He hated it. Hated it and loved it, because it sucked so bad it didn’t let his mind wander.

Thinking was dangerous. If he thought too much, he’d re
member the crash, and what it meant.

Breanna was with him the whole time, even when he didn’t want her to be. He took a lot of his frustration out on her.

Too much. Even a little would have been too much, but he took much more than that.

The amazing thing was, she’d stayed. She still loved him. Still loved even the gimp he’d become.

Gradually, Zen realized he had two motivations. The first was anger: at his accident; at Mack Smith, who he thought had caused it; at the world in general.

The second was love.

Anger pushed him every day. It got him back on active duty, made him determined to pull every political string his family had—and they had a lot. It made him get up every morning and insist that he was still Major Jeff “Zen” Stockard, fighter ace, hottest match on the patch, a slick zippersuit going places in the world.

Love was more subtle. It wasn’t until he got back, all the way back as head of the Flighthawk program, as a pilot again, as a true ace with five enemy planes shot down, that he understood what love had done for him: It had kept the anger at an almost manageable level.

Zen nudged against something hard in the water. He put his arm up defensively. The only thing he could think of was that he was being attacked by a shark.

It wasn’t a shark, but a barely submerged rock. There were others all around. A few broke the surface, but most were just under the waves.

He stared into the darkness, trying to make the blackness dissolve into shapes. There were rocks all around, as if he were near a shore. He pushed forward, expecting to hit a rise and find land, but didn’t. He dragged himself onward, the water too shallow to swim, expecting that with the next push he would be up on land. But the land seemed never to come, and when it finally did, it was more rock than land, somewhat more solid than the pieces he’d bumped over, but still rock.

He’d expected sand, a real beach. He wasn’t particularly fond of beaches, except that they gave him a chance to swim, which was something he’d liked to do even before it became part of his daily rehab and exercise. They also gave him a chance to watch Breanna come out of the sea, water dripping off her sleek body, caressing it.

He shook off the thought and concentrated on moving away from the water, crawling up a gentle incline about twenty or thirty yards.

Exhausted, he lay on his back and rested. A cloud pack had ridden in on a cold front, and as Zen closed his eyes, the clouds gave up some of their water. The rain fell strongly enough to flush the salt from his face, but the rest of him was already so wet that he barely noticed. The wind kicked up, there was a flash of lightning—and then the air was calm. In a few minutes, the moon peeked out from the edge of the clouds. The stars followed, and what had been an almost pitch-black night turned into a silver-bathed twilight.

Zen sat up and tried to examine the place where he had landed. There were no large trees that he could see, and if there were any bushes, they blended with the boulders in the distance. He groped his way up the hill, maneuvering around loose boulders and outcroppings until he reached the crest. There was another slope beyond, and then the sea, though it was impossible to tell if he was on an island or a peninsula, because another hill rose to his right.

He turned back to the spot where he had come in, perhaps a hundred feet away. The water lapped over rocks, the tops of the waves shining like small bits of tinsel in the moonlight. The sound was a constant
tschct-tschct-tschct
, an unworldly hum of rock and wave.

One of the rocks near the shoreline seemed larger than the rest, and more curiously shaped. Zen stared at it, unable to parse the shadow from the stone. He scanned the rest of the ocean, then returned, more curious. He moved to his right, then farther down the slope.

It wasn’t a rock, he realized. It was a person.

Breanna, he thought, throwing himself forward.

Indian Ocean,
off the Indian coast
0043, 16 January 1998

D
ANNY
F
REAH CROUCHED AGAINST THE SIDE OF THE
A
BNER
Read
’s boat, waiting for the chance to pluck one of the fliers from the water. The boat was a souped-up Zodiac, custom-made for the littoral warcraft that carried her. Special cells in the hull and preloaded filler made the boats difficult to sink, and the engine, propelled by hydrogen fuel cells, was both fast and quiet. Danny decided he would see about getting some for Whiplash when he got home.

Jan Stewart was the first of the
Levitow
’s crewmen to be picked up. Her teeth chattered as Danny helped her in. One of the sailors wrapped a waterproof “space blanket” around her and gave her a chemical warming pouch. Dork—Lieutenant Dennis Thrall, a Flighthawk pilot—was next. His face was swollen and his lips blue.

Dork’s hands were so swollen that he couldn’t activate the warmer. Danny took it from him and twisted gently, feeling the heat instantly as the chemical reaction began.

“Thanks, Cap,” said Dork in a husky voice. “Where’s Zen?”

“Still looking.”

“He and Bree were going out after us. They had to jump.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Danny.

“They should be south of us,” said Lieutenant Dick “Bullet” Timmons, huddling next to Dork. Bullet had been the
Levitow
’s second-shift pilot. “We were flying west. They would have bailed only a few seconds later.”

“We’ll find them,” said Danny.

He glanced over his shoulder at the Indian frigate, sitting in an oblong splash of moonlight a mile away. The Indians had volunteered to help with the rescue, but no one knew whether they could be trusted. It had been Indian missiles,
after all, that had shot down the
Levitow
.

“We were jumped by Indian MiGs and Sukhois on our way to deploy the EEMWBs,” Bullet told Danny. His voice was rushed; he seemed to need to tell what had happened to them, to explain why they were down in the water. “They kept nicking us. The Flighthawks were gone because of the T-Rays. Then finally, one of the Sukhois got us with an AMRAAMski. Plane held together but there was too much damage to keep it in the air. Bree did a hell of a job getting us out over the water and just holding it stable enough to jump. Really she did.”

“We’ll debrief back at the ship,” Danny told him gently. “It’s all right.”

But the pilot kept talking.

“She ordered everyone else to jump. She and Zen stayed behind. She was going to jump, though. Definitely. She was going out. Zen too. She knew she couldn’t fly it back. And there was no way she was landing in India. The
Levitow
was shielded against the T-Rays. She wouldn’t have let them have the plane, even if she could have landed it. No way.”

“Relax,” Danny said, grabbing another warmer for him. “We’ll find them.”

Indian Ocean,
off the Indian coast
Time unknown

Z
EN KNEW BETTER THAN TO FLAIL AGAINST THE WAVES
,
BUT
he did it anyway, throwing himself into the teeth of the tide, pushing and pulling and swimming and dragging himself to his wife.

It
was
Breanna. He knew it before he could see her face in the pale light, before he could make out the raft, or the horse-shoelike collar she still wore. He just knew it.

What he didn’t know was whether she was alive.

He fought against doubt, battering his arms against the
rocks.

Ten feet.

But those last ten feet were like miles. The water rushed at him as if the ocean wanted to keep her for its own. Zen clawed and crawled forward, pushing toward her, until finally he touched the back of her helmet.

His fingers seemed to snap back with electricity. His guard dissolved. If she hadn’t even taken off her helmet, how could she be alive?

“Bree,” whispered Zen. “Bree.”

His voice was so soft even he had a hard time hearing it over the surf.

“Bree, we have to get to land. Come on, honey.”

Not daring to look at her face, not daring to take off her helmet, he reached into the raft, looped one hand gently around her torso, and began pulling her toward shore.

Dreamland
1112, 15 January 1998
(0043, 16 January, Karachi)

J
ENNIFER
G
LEASON FOLDED HER ARMS AS THE ARGUMENT
continued over which weapons to ship to Diego Garcia.

“Anaconda missiles give the Megafortress pilots a long-range antiaircraft option,” said Terrence Calder, the Air Force major who headed the AIM-154 program. “In addition, they can use them against land targets if necessary. You don’t have to worry about the mix of Harpoons and AMRAAM-pluses. It’s win-win.”

“Not if the guidance systems don’t function perfectly,” said Ray Rubeo.

“They’ve passed most of the tests.”

“There’s that word ‘most’ again,” said Rubeo. “Most means not all, which means not ready.”

There was no question that the Anaconda AIM-154 long-range strike missile was an excellent weapon. A scramjet-
powered hypersonic missile, it had a lethal range of nearly two hundred miles. It could ride a radar beam to its target, use its own onboard radar, or rely on an infrared seeker in its nose to hit home. For long-range or hypersonic engagements, the missile’s main solid motor boosted it to over Mach 3. As it reached that speed, the missile deployed air scoops, turning the motor chamber into a ramjet, boosting speed to Mach 5. Its warhead could be fashioned from either conventional high explosives or a more powerful thermium nitrate, which was especially useful against ground targets.

The only knock against the missile was the fact that, as Rubeo pointed out, it still had not passed all of its tests. Like any new weapons system, the Anaconda had a few teething problems; in this case, they were primarily related to the target acquisition system and its interface with the Megafortresses’ computer systems, which Jennifer had been helping fix for the past few weeks.

“I think we will err on the side of capability,” said Major Catsman finally. “We’ll ship the missiles to Diego Garcia and let Colonel Bastian make the final call.”

Rubeo frowned. A smug look appeared on Calder’s face.

Catsman looked frustrated. Unlike Colonel Bastian, who sometimes went out of his way to encourage dissent on military options, the major seemed frazzled by the differing opinions on how to help reinforce the Dreamland team. Since Colonel Bastian would have the final say on Diego Garcia, whether to send the Anaconda missiles or not was more a personnel issue than a weapons decision since sending the weapons would necessitate sending maintainers and techies to deal with them.

The real problem was the fact that only one radar-equipped Megafortress was available for deployment, and there was no answer to that; Catsman knew she couldn’t flip a switch and speed up the refurbishment process. The EB-52
Cheli,
just barely out of final flight testing, was already en route to Diego Garcia and would arrive shortly. The next radar version of the Megafortress wasn’t even due to get to Dreamland
from the refurbishment works for another month.

At least they had solved the problem of the two warheads that were missing from the projections. Rubeo found an error in the modifications that had been used to adapt the tracking program to its present use. But even that didn’t satisfy the scientist. Rather than accepting congratulations gracefully, he answered with the question: “And what else did we miss?

“The new Flighthawks will give the Megafortresses better capability,” said Rubeo, still not done arguing his point. “That’s all they need.”

“No, Ray, the matter is settled,” said Catsman. “We’ll send the Anacondas. And the new Flighthawks.”

Similar in appearance to the original U/MF-3, the U/MF-3D had more powerful engines and a control system that would let it be piloted much farther from the Megafortress. While they, too, were in short supply, the aircraft had already passed their tests and were ready to deploy.

Jennifer found her mind drifting as the discussion continued. She couldn’t concentrate on head counts and spare part contingencies; all she could think of was Dog.

He hadn’t even looked at her, or asked how she was, when he briefed the Command Center.

And he looked like hell.

He needed her. She needed him.

“I’m going with the MC-17,” she told Catsman as soon as the meeting ended. “I’ll help the technical teams. The new Flighthawks may need some work.”

“They don’t need a nanny,” said Rubeo.

Major Catsman just looked at her. Rubeo was right—the technical teams were self-contained. While she had worked on C
³
, the Flighthawk computer, her contributions were completed long ago.

“The Anaconda missiles also need work,” she said.

“Another reason not to send them,” said Rubeo. “And it’s not your project.”

“I’ve worked on them,” said Jennifer.

“We need you to do other things,” insisted Rubeo. “There
is a great deal of work.”

“If you think you should go,” said Catsman, “then you should go.”

“I think I should,” said Jennifer. “And I am.”

Indian Ocean,
off the Indian coast
Time unknown

Z
EN CRADLED
B
REANNA IN HIS LAP AS HE PULLED HIMSELF
up toward the peak of the slope. Finally he stopped, collapsing on his side. Breanna fell with him, her weight dead against his body. At first he was too exhausted to think, too wiped to feel anything. Then gradually he realized where he was and who was lying on top of him.

“OK, Breanna,” he said. “Breanna? Bree?”