Retribution (46 page)

A message flashed on the screen—the aircraft was identified as a civilian by its identifier.

“Override.”

A targeting reticule appeared. The plane had begun to turn back to the south, toward Las Vegas.

Dog was about to tell the computer to fire when the symbol went from red—locked—to yellow. The radar had lost the lock.

“Lock, damn it,” said Dog.

If the computer heard him, it didn’t let on. Dog switched to the manual control, using a small joystick that would let him designate the target the old-fashioned way. He hit the reset, moved to the cursor, and this time got a lock.

“Fire,” he said. “Fire Fox One!”

The missile ripped from the belly of the aircraft.

Over Nevada
2150

K
ERMAN FINGERED THE WIRES ON THE BOMB’S TIMER AS
the aircraft jerked up and down. He hadn’t been with his uncle when the timer was explained, and Sattari hadn’t bothered to show him how it worked. Still, it seemed like a simple device; there had to be a way to set it off immediately.

A set of wires had been soldered to contacts at the top of the switch. Kerman decided he had only to cross the contacts for the weapon to be triggered.

He had nothing to cross them with.

He could do it with a pen.

The plane jerked as he reached to his pocket. He fell backward to the deck.

There was no time.
Just strip the wires and touch them together
, he told himself.
Be done with it. Be done with it.

He clawed his way upright, then hunched over the timer.

As his fingers touched the wires, the plane lurched again. Kerman pushed down on the device with one hand and managed to pull the wires off the contact with his other.

The plane suddenly jerked upward and stopped shaking.

He was free! The American had given up!

He started to rise to run back to the cockpit. Then he stopped, realizing there was no sense doing that now. He reached back to the wires to push them together.

As he did, the front of the aircraft turned silver. It looked like a flash of light, but it was pure silver, a brilliant shade that he had never seen before.

Paradise, he thought.

Then silver turned to red, then black, then nothing.

Aboard Dreamland
Bennett
2151

S
TARSHIP SAW THE
A
NACONDA MISSILE CLOSE IN ON THE
Airbus’s cabin just as he was pressing the trigger on the Flighthawk’s gun. He rolled away, escaping most of the explosion. The Anaconda struck at the front cabin, decapitating the aircraft. The cockpit disintegrated, but the rest of the fuselage continued on, flying toward the highest of the Glass Mountains about sixty miles northwest of Dreamland.

By the time he got the Flighthawk turned back around, the headless Airbus was down to 2,000 feet. Its left wingtip hit the ground first, skittering along for a hundred feet or so before collapsing. The rest of the plane spun in toward the missing wing, tumbling into a rising cloud of smoke and dust.

“It’s down! It’s down!” said Starship.

Then he braced himself.

E
NGLEHARDT CLOSED HIS EYES
,
WAITING FOR THE INEVITABLE
flash of light. He pushed himself against the back of his
seat, expecting the air burst that would follow a nuclear explosion.

It didn’t come. After a minute he swung the aircraft back toward the site. Nothing.

They were a little more than twenty miles away, climbing back through 25,000 feet. He moved into a figure eight, intending to climb as high as possible.

“Sully, you with me?”

“With you, Mike.”

“No explosion.”

“Yeah, nothing.”

“Maybe coming. We high enough?”

“Yeah, just about.”

“You got the engines.”

“Yeah, I’m on it, bro,” answered Sullivan.

D
OG STARED AT THE IMAGE ON THE SCREEN, WAITING FOR
the massive white cloud—the famous mushroom cloud—to rise above the desert mountainside.

But it didn’t. Their missile had prevented it.

“Dreamland is sending a response team,” reported Sullivan.

“I have a helicopter en route,” reported Rager at the airborne radar, “and two Ospreys.”

Dog waited, listening. He knew every man aboard those aircraft, had brought most of them to Dreamland, or had at least approved their assignments.

Somehow, the fact that he was no longer their commander didn’t enter into his thoughts.

Minutes passed that seemed like days. He began to feel numb.

“Neutralized,” said Sullivan finally. “The bomb’s trigger section is off. It’s inert.”

“Take us to Dreamland,” Dog told Englehardt. “Take us home.”

DALE BROWN
is a former U.S. Air Force captain and the author of numerous previous bestsellers, including
Strike Force
and
Edge of Battle;
Brown lives in Nevada, where he can often be found in the skies, piloting his own plane.

Jim DeFelice’s recent thrillers include
Leopard’s Kill
(2007) and
Threat Level Black
(
2005
). Jim has also written more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction for young people. He lives with his wife and son in upstate New York and can be contacted by e-mail at
[email protected]
.

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