Nerve Center (22 page)

Sharkishki19 February, 1038

THE AUDIBLE FUEL WARNING IN MACK’S EAR HIT A NEW octave as he pushed to follow the Boeing. Dalton and his copilot didn’t answer his hails on any frequency, nor did Ma-drone.

At least the Flighthawks had stopped flashing in front of him, staying in a close trail behind Hawkmother. Mack recognized it as one of the preprogrammed flight positions.

As he closed the distance between himself and the big jet, the 777 took another lurch downward and the front end seemed to break apart.

“Shit, they’re out,” he said to Zen, yelling so loud it was possible he could be heard without the radio. “Fuck. They ejected. I think they ejected. Oh, Jesus.”

He slid the MiG into a bank, searching for parachutes. The truth was he couldn’t tell if they had ejected or if the front of the plane had blown apart—it was moving that damn fast.

Knife glanced at his fuel panel. Serious problems. Even if he turned back this instant, he might have to glide home.

He couldn’t see the Boeing anymore. Sharkishki’s radar had lost it in the ground clutter, but the IR scan showed the plane plummeting toward the mountains, a half mile ahead. He glanced over to mark the position with the GPS screen on the MUD. As he pushed the button, the Boeing disappeared from the screen.

“Plane’s going in,” he told Zen. He punched the IR gear, watching for the inevitable flare.

“Mack, what’s your status?” demanded Stockard.

“I lost them. They bailed and the plane nose-dived. Can’t find it on the infrared. I’m not sure why. Shit.”

“What’s your
fuel,
Sharkishki?” demanded Zen.

“Yeah. I have a fuel emergency. Returning to base,” conceded Mack. “I’ll upload the GPS telemetry. Aw, shit to fucking hell.”

Raven
19 February, 1050

ZEN’S CHEST COMPRESSED AS THE BOEING disappeared from the radar display. It felt like a snake had wrapped itself around him and squeezed.

He tried the override again in a desperate attempt to grab control of the Flighthawks, but the screens remained blank, the connection severed.

“We’ll be at Mack’s mark in zero-two,” said Breanna.

“Yeah,” answered Zen. The snake squeezed tighter. He checked on the status of the SAR flight that had just scrambled out of Dreamland—a pair of helicopters, one a Pave Low with an extensive suite of search gear, were about fifteen minutes behind them. Edwards and Nellis both had other units on standby.

“Aggressor, how tight is your fuel?” he said, calling Mack.

“Under control,” answered Mack.

Smith sounded more angry than concerned, though Zen thought he’d sound that way on fumes.

“There’s a civilian strip in your direct flight path if you need it,” Zen told him.

“No shit, Sherlock. Let me fly this one, all right?”

Normally, Zen would have told Mack to screw himself. But by now the snake had wrapped itself so tightly around his throat that he couldn’t get a word out of his mouth.

He was so damn impotent without legs, tied into a stinking wheelchair, a gimp, a cripple, a helpless lump of nothing.

A flame flared in the middle of his head, surging and glowing, flowing into a perfect round circle, a sun that went from red to pink to chromium.

He was helpless. He was back in the F-15 where he’d had his accident, going out at low altitude, crashing into the ground, crushing his spinal cord and losing his legs.

“Nightingale One to Gameboy. Please state situation. Major Stockard?”

He wasn’t helpless. He’d proven himself in Africa. Every day he got out of bed, he proved himself.

“Zen, the SAR flight is hailing you,” said Bree over the interphone.

“Gameboy to Nightingale One,” he said, muscling the snake away. “We have a plane down, two, hopefully three ejections. Rough terrain. Maybe the mountains. No fix, but we can make some guesses from the GPS where they were last seen.”

“Copy that,” said the Pave Low pilot, who had already been given the coordinates by Breanna. “Do you have anything fresh?”

“Negative,” admitted Zen. “We’re in the dark as much as you.”

V
THE RAIN FOREST

Aboard Hawkmother
Over Sierra Nevada Mountains
19 February, 1110

WHEN HE REALIZED THAT HE HAD SHAKEN THE MiG AND Raven, Madrone pumped his hands in the air, as elated as he had ever been in his life. But after he turned control of the Boeing over to the computer, his sense of triumph began to drain.

There were problems. The Flighthawks were in perfect shape, holding behind Hawkmother as it hugged its way through the mountain passes. But they were more than halfway through their fuel reserves; while their engines were thrifty in cruise mode, they would need to be refueled.

He could do that. They’d planned to. He’d gone through the simulations, and Hawkmother had been loaded with extra fuel.

But sooner or later he’d have to find fuel for the Boeing.

Where? It wasn’t like he could put down at a gas station and pull out his credit card. Who the hell was going to give him jet fuel without asking a lot of questions? Or demanding a lot of money?

Why had he gone off without a plan? What madness possessed him? He tucked out of the mountains—L.A. was a vast glow to the left, the Pacific a dark haze beyond.

Madrone began to shake, his body suddenly cold. He felt a light pop at the top of his head, and then he began to fall, or feel as if he were falling.

He’d dropped out of Theta.

The twinge of panic swirled into a full-blown typhoon. The entire Air Force would be after him, all of the military. He’d been screwed before—Army generals and personnel bastards and Pentagon phonies had screwed him out of his advanced-weapons project at Los Alamos, yanked his clearances. They’d claimed he needed a rest, but he’d known they were out to screw him because of what he’d done in Iraq. He’d shown them up, nailing those tanks with his men. Bastards.

Madrone forced himself to sit back in the seat. He was losing it, giving in to paranoia.

The headache started to return. He pushed air into the bottom of his lungs, loosened the muscles at the top of his shoulders.

He hadn’t wanted to run away. But here he was. The pilot and copilot had ejected; he was in control of the ship.

They’d call it mutiny. Put him in jail for life, and he’d never see his daughter.

She was already dead.

Kevin ran his fingers across his forehead. He couldn’t think straight. The universe was breaking apart.

He had to get back into Theta. Now.

Pej, Brazil
19 February, 1510 local

MINERVA LANZAS FOLDED HER ARMS ACROSS HER CHEST and leaned against the back of the bulldozer. The hazy sun cast a brown light over the dusty mountain airstrip, tinting the colors like a faded postcard. If she’d been in a better mood, she might have almost thought it romantic.

But if she’d been in a better mood she would not be here in Pej, caught between the Amazon and the mountains of Serra Curupira, in exile—Dante’s third ring of hell.

Three months before, Colonel Lanzas had been one of the most important officers of the Força Aérea Brasileira, the Brazilian Air Force. She had obtained her position through the usual means—family connections, politics, sex, even skill as a pilot and commander. As commanding officer of an elite group of FAB interceptors attached to the Third Air Force south of Rio de Janeiro, she’d had power, prestige, and the potential for great wealth. She had managed to shed her third husband—a once-useful if pedestrian diplomat and military attaché—and begun to amass a personal following that extended to the Army as well as the Air Force. At thirty-one, she’d looked forward to a bright future not just in the military, but in Brazilian politics as well.

But then she had overplayed her hand, misjudging the ever-shifting currents of the country’s politics. The result had been a disastrous showdown with the Navy—and then this.

Two decades before, the Brazilian Navy had attempted to expand its power by clandestinely adding aircraft to its fleet forces. Then, the Air Force generals had carefully parlayed news of this into a magnificent power play that assured them of dominance in the government for many years. So it seemed likely that when the admirals once again tried something by secretly purchasing Russian destroyers and sending out feelers for MiGs, the evidence would propel the Air Force to even greater heights. General Emil Herule hoped to become Defense Minister, a short step to President. Lanzas and the white-haired Air Force leader had done good business in the past, with an occasional foray into matters of pleasure; her decision to lead a flight to gather intelligence seemed a logical and profitable gesture.

Colonel Lanzas personally commanded a four-ship element of F-5E Tigers over the screening force around
Minas Gerias,
the Brazilian Navy’s aircraft carrier. The film in her plane confirmed Air Force suspicions about the two new destroyers. Her camera also discovered that the carrier’s catapults had been modified to launch Mirages—a fact confirmed by the takeoff of the planes.

The two Mirages attempted to intercept the Tigers. At some point, one of the Navy planes used its radar to lock on her group. There was only one possible response. Both Mirages were destroyed in the subsequent battle.

Minerva had splashed one of the planes herself. Like all of her engagements, it was short, quick, and deadly. But it did not bring the desired result.

Brazil in the 1990’s was very different than the 1960’s. The President and his Cabinet backed the Navy in the inter-service imbroglio, even though the admirals had clearly violated the law. General Herule was reassigned to a minor desk job in Brasilia. Most of the generals and colonels who had backed him were jailed. Lanzas, after some negotiation, got off with mere banishment. Her family had helped finance the President’s election, after all. Negotiations had been complicated by several factors, not the least of which was the destruction of the Mirages. A sizable payment from the colonel’s personal fortune had finally settled the matter.

There had been rumors before the showdown that Lanzas possessed two atomic weapons. The admirals fortunately did not believe the rumors, or the negotiations might have been considerably more difficult. They considered that the woman colonel was like all women, a contemptible temptress ready to use her tongue in any way possible—something several of them could personally verify. Brazil did not have its own nuclear program, and even her wealth could not purchase a bomb from another country. Besides, who would be so unpatriotic as to bomb their own country?

But in actual fact Minerva Lanzas did possess two devices, though in some ways they were as impotent as the admirals’ personal equipment.

Designed during a joint-service project with a renegade Canadian weapons engineer several years before, the warheads were to have been fired by a massive artillery device. The gun, had the design worked, would have propelled them roughly twenty miles. About as long as a desk, with the diameter of a bloated wastepaper basket, they had small payloads that were only a third as powerful as the primitive weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The design was relatively primitive—a focused detonation of high explosives propelled a seed nugget of fission material into a small bowl shaped of plutonium at a speed and temperature just high enough to start a chain reaction.

The project itself was an utter failure. The artillery piece proved much more likely to shatter than launch even a dummy shell. The computer simulations of the warhead showed its yield would be very “dirty,” with the long-lasting radiation likely to spread precariously close to the firing position. And finally, Brazil had never been able to obtain the plutonium the weapon’s final design called for.

Lanzas had been assigned as a monitor for the project; her reports lambasted it. But when the government abandoned the initiative, she acquired several of the early shells with their high-tech explosives and trigger mechanisms through blackmail, bribery, and in one case, murder.

Her wealth was not so great that she could obtain weapons-grade plutonium. But she could find uranium, which not so coincidentally had been the subject of one of the earlier designs. Shaping the radioactive metal was expensive and dangerous, but in the end the only thing that shocked her was how small the radioactive pellets were.

The Navy adventure had interrupted her efforts to adapt the warheads for practical use as missiles. And while she had arranged for two top weapons engineers to follow her here within the next few days, she now faced an even greater problem—even if she managed to scrounge material for a missile chassis, she lacked a suitable plane to launch the missiles from.

Minerva tucked her hands into her leather jacket and surveyed the packed dirt strip. Ten bulldozers—”borrowed” from a rancher nearly fifty miles away—had carved an additional three hundred meters out of the rocky soil, making the strip just long enough to comfortably land her Hawker Siddeley HS 748, an ancient twin turboprop known to the Brazilian Air Force as a C-91. The sturdy but far from glamorous transport was now the centerpiece of her command. In fact, it was her only plane.

Despair curled around her like a snake, squeezing the breath from her lungs. Her money was nearly gone; she had no influence beyond this small strip. When she had arrived, she had hoped for revenge, but as the days dragged on it became increasingly clear that there would be no opportunity for it. When the strip was finished, she might—might—be lucky to host a visiting KC-130H and an occasional squadron of F-5’s, or Tucanos, as they rotated north to patrol the Venezuelan-Colombia frontier every third or fourth month. Even that would only happen if catastrophe struck Boa Vista, several hundred miles away.

She told herself not to despair. Fate would deliver her an opportunity, just as it had in the past. She would shape her bombs into something useful; she would find a way to use her charms and the last of her money. Fortune would send her a chance, and she would make the most of it.