Retribution (36 page)

“Launch warning! SA-3s,” said Sullivan, the copilot, over the interphone.

The Megafortress lurched beneath Starship. He tried to shut out the cockpit conversation and focus on the Sukhoi, pushing
Hawk One
closer. The Indian had to turn to stay on course for the Megafortress. His turn inadvertently closed the distance with
Hawk One
. His tail appeared at the bottom of the screen. The targeting piper boxed it in black—out of range.

Starship told the computer to pursue the Sukhoi and took over
Hawk Two
. As he did, the Sukhoi began a hard turn west. It was far too early to get behind the Megafortress, Starship thought; he checked the sitrep and realized what was going on—the
Bennett
had altered its course to avoid the SA-3s, and was now flying almost due south toward the Indian. The Sukhoi was lined up and ready to launch its missiles at the Megafortress’s nose.

“Flighthawk leader to
Bennett
—you’re closing the distance with the Sukhoi.”

“Take care of him.”

“It would help if you kept your distance,” muttered Starship.

“Just fly your own damn plane,” answered Englehardt.

Starship pushed
Hawk Two
at the Sukhoi from above, taking on the plane from the forward right quarter. He managed to get a short burst into the fuselage before passing. The Sukhoi didn’t even seem to notice.

A warning sounded; the Indian pilot had managed to fire his two remaining radar missiles, both AMRAAMskis.

“M
ISSILES
,”
WARNED
S
ULLIVAN
.

“ECMs. Hang on.” Englehardt began pushing the Megafortress into a series of evasive maneuvers. He was tired, as tired as he’d ever been, yet so keyed on adrenaline his hands were shaking.

“Still on us,” said Sullivan.

“What’s with the SA-2 battery near the coast?”

“Tracking. No launch.”

“Sukhoi is breaking off, moving east,” said Rager.

“Sure. He’s out of missiles,” snapped Sullivan.

Englehardt’s neck was swimming in sweat. Even though the controls were electronic, pushing them felt like heavy work, and his arms and legs felt as if they were going to fall off.

“Missile two is gone. The first one is still coming,” warned Sullivan.

Englehardt slammed the airplane back to the north one more time, putting enough g’s on the air frame to get a warning from the computer. The AMRAAMski slipped by—but as it did, the guidance circuit in its tiny brain realized it had been fooled, and self-detonated out of spite.

Shrapnel spun through the air. A succession of light thuds peppered the right side of the plane.

The aircraft shuddered but responded to his controls, leveling herself off as Sullivan glanced at the sitrep to get his bearings. Warning lights began to blink on the dashboard, and before Englehardt could completely sort out what was going on, he heard a loud thud from somewhere behind him. The Megafortress seemed to move backward in the air. He
knew he’d lost one of his engines, but his adrenaline-soaked brain couldn’t figure out which one at first.

“Copilot, status. Engines,” he said.

“Three is out. Problems with four. Temp high, moving to yellow. Shit. Red.”

“Bring it down. Trimming to compensate,” said Englehardt.

“SA-2 site has fired two missiles,” said Rager.

“Bastards,” muttered Sullivan.

T
HE
S
UKHOI BROKE EAST AFTER FIRING, EITHER UNAWARE
t
hat
Hawk One
was shadowing him or thinking he could simply slip by.

Or maybe his pass had damaged the Sukhoi, Starship thought. The Indian aircraft was trailing black smoke from one of its engines.

The aiming cue on
Hawk One
went solid red, and Starship pressed the trigger. The first two or three rounds sailed to the right, but the rest ripped a large hole in the enemy’s wing.

“Get out,” Starship said aloud, even as he continued to press the trigger. “Bail. Time to bail.”

The wing flew entirely off, and the Sukhoi disappeared in a steaming cloud of smoke and flames. Starship throttled back and pulled his nose camera out to wide angle, looking for a parachute. But it was too late for the Indian pilots to hit the silk, too late for them to do anything. He felt a twinge of regret, sadness for the men and their fate, despite the fact that they’d been trying to kill him.

It was only as he pulled
Hawk One
back toward the
Bennett
that he realized the Megafortress had been hit. The pilots were talking about the engines—they’d lost one and were about to lose another. The Indians had also just launched a pair of SA-2s at them, though from very long range.

Somewhere above the cacophony he heard a radio call, faint, indistinct, and yet familiar; very, very familiar.

“Zen Stockard to any American aircraft. You hear me?”

Zen? For real?

“Zen Stockard to any American aircraft.”

Starship punched into the emergency frequency.

“Zen! Zen! Where are you? Zen, give me a location.”

He waited for the answer. After ten or fifteen seconds passed, he tried again. Still nothing.

Had he imagined it?

No way.
Hawk Two
had picked up the communication; the aircraft was flying near the coast, now about ten miles south of the
Bennett
.

“
Bennett,
I think I had Zen on the emergency band,” Starship said. “I think I had Zen. Can we tack back?”

“We’re down one engine and about to lose another,” said Englehardt. “Try and get a location and pass it on. That’s the best we can do.”

T
HE
SA-2
S WERE FOLLOWING THEM, BUT
E
NGLEHARDT
thought they could outlast them as long as he held the Megafortress’s speed above 350 knots. They throttled engine four back but left it on line even though the instruments showed it running well into the yellow or caution area. Not only did he want all the thrust he could manage at the moment, but compensating for the loss of both engines on one side of the plane would cost even more speed.

He worked with Sullivan to trim the aircraft manually, hoping to squeeze a few more knots from it by pushing against the computer’s red line. The nose felt as if it was plowing sideways through the air, like the prow of a small canoe being pushed by the current in a direction its owner didn’t want it to go.

“Temperature on engine one is coming up,” warned Sullivan. That was the engine that had given them problems earlier in the flight.

“We’ll have to try backing it off a little,” said Englehardt.

“SA-2 is still tracking.”

Englehardt wanted to scream. Instead he took off power on
engine one, then scrambled to adjust his trim as the aircraft bucked downward. One of the motors that moved the outboard slotted flap on the right wing had apparently been damaged by the missile strike, and now the control surface began to balk at moving further. Finally it stopped responding completely.

“SA-2 is still climbing,” said Sullivan. “On our left wing.”

If he looked over his shoulder, Englehardt thought, he’d see the big white lance as it spun in his direction. He kept his eyes glued straight ahead, trying to keep the Megafortress as level as possible. There was no question of evasive maneuvers; they’d never survive them.

They wouldn’t survive a missile strike either. Better to go out fighting, no?

“Hang on,” said Englehardt, and he pushed the stick down hard, diving toward the earth.

Near the Chinese-Pakistani border
0046

T
HERE WAS A BUZZ AROUND HER, LIFTING HER IN THE AIR.

“What’s going on?” Jennifer asked. Her words morphed as they left her mouth, changing into the chirping of birds.

What was going on?

Danny Freah’s face appeared above hers.

“You’re gonna be OK, Jen,” he said. “All right?”

She understood the words, but they sounded odd. Then she realized he was singing.

Danny Freah, singing?

“You got shot. Your vest and helmet took most of the bullets, but one got your knee. We gave you morphine for the pain, all right? It shouldn’t hurt.”

“Shouldn’t hurt,” she said, her words once again changing, this time into the caw of a bird.

D
ANNY WATCHED THE
M
ARINES SECURE
J
ENNIFER’S SLING
inside the Osprey. One bullet had gone in the side of her knee
cap, exiting cleanly but doing a good deal of damage on its way. Though the other bullets hadn’t penetrated her body armor, she still had two cracked ribs and a good-sized concussion. The corpsman who treated her thought she’d be OK, as long as she got treatment soon.

Three Marines had been hurt during the operation. Two had relatively minor injuries to their legs, but the third had been hit in the face and lost a great deal of blood.

But it was Jennifer he worried about. He had to tell Dog—but he certainly didn’t relish the conversation.

He pressed the button on his helmet, then reconsidered. Better to wait until they were in the air.

“All right, let’s go,” Danny yelled. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Come on! Move it!”

Aboard Dreamland
Bennett,
over India
0050

T
HE
B
ENNETT
MOMENTARILY TURNED INTO A FALLING BRICK,
accelerating toward the earth as Englehardt put her into a power dive. She leaned on her good wing, accelerating briefly to the speed of sound. The air frame shuddered but held, a thoroughbred celebrating its sudden release from the gate.

The SA-2 that had been tracking them began to arc in pursuit, but there was no way it could turn quickly enough. Fuel gone, it flailed helplessly for a few more seconds before self-destructing several miles beyond the Megafortress.

Englehardt had avoided the missile, but now he and Sullivan had another fight on their hands. Giddy with the burst of speed, their racehorse didn’t want to come level, let alone slow down.

“Engine four is in the red,” said Sullivan.

“Take it offline,” said Englehardt.

“Shutting down four.”

Englehardt backed off engine one himself. That left him one good power plant.

“Unidentified aircraft coming from the west,” said Rager. “Two planes. Three hundred miles.”

Just what I need, thought Englehardt.

“Starship, we have two aircraft coming from the west.”

“On it,
Bennett
.”

“Feet are wet,” said Sergeant Daly at the surface radar, signaling that they were over water.

“Planes ID’d as Tomcats,” said Rager.

“Sullivan, contact those guys and let them know we’re on their side,” said Englehardt. “Then help me set up a course to the refuel. We’ve got a long way home.”

Northeastern Pakistan
0100

“M
ANY OF THE CIRCUITS ARE BURNED OUT,
G
ENERAL.
I cannot make it work as it was designed to. I simply don’t know enough.”

Abtin Fars stood up slowly. He was a tall, thin man well into his fifties; he wore glasses but clearly needed better ones, for he was constantly fiddling with them as he examined things.

“You are an expert, Abtin,” General Sattari told him gently. “You can fix anything.”

“Some things. This is beyond me.”

Abtin seemed pensive, and Sattari feared that the true problem here was not his lack of knowledge but his conscience. The general worried that he was withholding his knowledge because he did not want to arm a nuclear weapon.

“The intention is to use it against Dreamland,” said Sattari. “The American force that killed our people at Anhik.”

Abtin had been friends with several of the engineers and
technicians slaughtered at Anhik when the Americans raided the laser project Sattari had started there. But no emotion registered on his face.

“A difficult problem,” said the engineer finally, ducking back to look at the warhead.

Sattari watched him work with his various instruments and tools. The general himself knew nothing about how to make the weapon work. It had taken considerable trouble and expense to locate Abtin; finding a replacement would be very difficult.

He could put a gun to the man’s head and order him to fix the bomb, but how could he be sure it would explode?

He had to be patient, but that was nearly impossible.

“I could put in a very simple device,” said Abtin finally, still bent over the warhead. “It would allow the weapon to detonate at a set time. There would be no fail-safe. Once set, it would explode. These circuits here,” added Abtin pointing, “these are good. But placing the new circuit in, there is a chance that it will accidentally initiate the explosion.”

“If you tell me what to do, then I will take the chance myself. You won’t have to. You can be far away.”

“With this device, General, it would take many hours to reach safety.” Abtin rose. “I’ll make a list for you. The items we need are easily obtained.”

Aboard the Abner Read
0110

“W
E’RE ON STATION.”

Storm turned toward Eyes and nodded. The executive officer blinked and looked around the bridge apprehensively. He seemed out of place, as if he were a gopher who’d popped up from underground and arrived in the middle of a wedding.

“Say, Captain, do you have a minute?” Eyes asked.

Storm pointed in the direction of his cabin, which was reached through a door at the back of the bridge.

“You’re treating me like I’m the enemy,” Eyes told him after they reached Storm’s quarters. “I’m not.”

“No?”

“The order to stop trailing the
Khan
was Admiral Woods’s order, not mine.”

“You’re on his side.”

“I don’t take sides, Storm. I follow orders.”

“Damn it.” Storm pounded his desk. Since his “talk” with Admiral Woods, he’d kept his emotions bottled up and stayed mostly to himself. He’d said no more than was absolutely necessary, and to some extent managed to push his disappointment and anger away. Now it raged free in his chest, surging through his whole being. “I was so damn close,” he told Eyes.