Retribution (13 page)

Aboard the
Bennett,
near the Pakistan-India border
0600

S
HE WAS LIKE A THOROUGHBRED RELEASED FROM THE
chute, f licking her mane back as she bared her teeth and charged down the track. She put her head down and galloped, hard and proud, determined to hit her marks.

The Megafortress charged 150 feet over the Pakistani trucks at about 500 knots, loud and low. Looking like startled spectators at a horse race after a thoroughbred jumped the fence, the half-dozen Pakistani troops dove for cover.

“P-3 object dead ahead, one mile,” said Englehardt as the Megafortress continued toward their target.

“No offensive action from the ground troops,” said Sullivan, watching the rear-facing optical video. “Look more startled than anything.”

Dog stared at the screen in front of him, which was projecting the forward video camera view. The desert rose up then fell off into a slope. In real time, the ground was a blur; Dog had trouble separating the rocks from the shadows.

Englehardt pushed the nose of the aircraft down to get closer to the terrain, then counted off his turn, beginning a wide, almost leisurely bank to the east.

“Paks are still doing nothing,” said Sullivan. “Scratching their heads, probably.”

Dog hit the preset for the video screen replay, showing what the camera had seen in the past thirty seconds. He slowed the action down, freeze-framing the ground they had flown over.

“This looks like it might be it,” he said aloud, zeroing in on a gray mound on the left side of his viewer. The shape seemed a little jagged, but there was a line behind it, as if the object had dug a trench as it skidded in.

The more he looked at the image, though, the less sure he became. Where was the body of the missile? Why would it have come in on a trajectory that would allow it to ski across the landscape before stopping?

“Dreamland, I need your opinion on this,” he said, tapping the button to make the image available over the Dreamland channel.

“I don’t know, Colonel,” said Englehardt, who’d brought it up on one of his screens. “Looks like a rock to me.”

“Definitely a warhead,” said Sullivan. “Skidded in and landed nose up in the sand. Look at it.”

“Dreamland Command?” said Dog.

“We are examining it, Colonel,” said Ray Rubeo. “We will have something definitive in a few minutes.”

Dog glanced at his watch. Danny and the Marines would be at the go/no-go point in exactly thirty seconds.

“You want another run, Colonel?” asked Englehardt. “I can come in from the opposite direction.”

“No,” said Dog. “But let’s let the Pakistanis see us orbit to their north. If they’re going to get curious, let’s have them get curious in that direction.”

He took one last look at the screen, then pressed the preset on the radio to talk to Danny.

Aboard Marine Osprey
Angry Bear One,
over northern India
0610

T
HE TONE IN HIS HEADSET ALERTED
D
ANNY
F
REAH THAT
they were five minutes from the landing zone. Tucking the M16 the Marines had loaned him under his arm, he twisted his body left and right, stretching his muscles in anticipation.

Had they been in a Dreamland version of the Osprey, he would have been able to switch the view in his smart helmet so he could see the terrain in front of them. Then again, he thought, had he been in a Dreamland bird, he’d also be leading the mission. Right now he was basically a communications specialist, relaying information from Dreamland and the
Bennett
to Dancer, her sergeants, and the pilots of the three Marine Ospreys on the mission.

Once on the ground, Danny would work with two Navy experts to determine if the warhead was armed and could be moved. The men had been trained to handle American “broken arrow” incidents, cases where U.S. nukes had been lost or otherwise compromised. Besides his own training, he’d had experience disarming a live nuke two years before in Brazil.

“Danny Freah to Colonel Bastian. Colonel, what’s the status?”

“The experts are looking at the image right now. Shouldn’t be long.”

Danny turned and signaled to Dancer that they should go into a holding pattern. She’d just leaned into the cockpit when Dog came back on the line.

“It’s a warhead,” said the colonel. “Proceed.”

“Roger that.” He tapped Dancer and gave her a thumbs-up. The Osprey, which had just barely begun to slow down, picked up speed once more.

“What about the trucks?” shouted Dancer over the whine of the engines.

“I’m checking,” said Danny.

He had Dog describe the layout. The two trucks looked to have about six men in them. They were two miles from the warhead and maybe another half mile from the landing area. It looked as if they’d been ordered to the road and told not to leave it, but there was no way of knowing for sure until they landed.

“First sign of trouble,” added Colonel Bastian, “and we’ll fire a pair of Harpoons at them.”

“Acknowledged. Thank you, Colonel. We’re two minutes from the landing zone.”

Danny tapped Dancer on the shoulder and relayed the information. She gave him a thumbs-up. Her face was very serious, eyes narrowed, cheeks slightly puffed out, the shadow of a line—not a wrinkle, just a line—visible on her forehead.

“Marines! Make your mothers proud!” shouted Dancer as the Osprey touched down.

Danny went out with the corpsman and one of the bomb experts, toward the end of the pack. By the time he reached the warhead, the Marines had set up a defensive perimeter around it.

The scent of unburned rocket fuel was so strong, his nose felt as if it were burning. He’d run the whole way, and now had to catch his breath by covering his face with his sleeve. For a moment he thought he might even have to resort to the protective hood and contamination gear the Navy people had brought—gear that he knew from experience was so bulky he’d never be able to actually work on the bomb.

The warhead and upper end of the missile had buckled and split off from the body when they came to earth, skidding along the ground and making what looked like a shallow trench littered with rocks before stopping. On closer inspection, it was clear that the rocks were actually bits and pieces of the missile that had fallen off along the way. The warhead itself looked like a dented garbage can half submerged in the sand. The protective nose cone had been cracked and partly shredded, but the framework that covered the top portion of the missile remained intact. The black shroud of the bomb casing was visible below a set of tubes that had supported the cone section and the battered remains of instruments, electrical gear, wires, and frayed insulation.

Danny’s smart helmet was equipped with a high definition video camera, and he used it now to send images back to Dreamland Command.

“You getting this, Doc?” he asked, scanning the crash site and then bending over the warhead.

“I keep telling you, Captain, I’m not a doctor,” replied Anna Klondike a bit testily. “I wouldn’t associate with Ph.D. types.”

“I’m sorry, Annie. I thought I was talking to Ray Rubeo.”

“What Dr. Rubeo doesn’t know about nuclear weapons would fill a very large book.”

“How are you, Annie?”

“Cranky without my beauty rest. Please get closer to the base of the warhead,” she said, quickly becoming all business. “Scan down the body. Our first step here is to confirm that this came from a Prithvi SS-150.”

It took several minutes before the scientists were satisfied that it was indeed a Prithvi SS-150. The Prithvi family, derived from the Russian SA-2 surface-to-air missile, were all single-stage liquid fueled missiles; they differed mostly in terms of range and payload, though the family’s accuracy had also improved as the weapons evolved. The 150 could deliver a thousand-kilogram payload 150 kilometers.

As nukes went, the egg-shaped bomb Danny and the Marines were standing around was relatively small; its theoretical yield was fifteen kilotons, though members of the Atomic Energy Commission had told the Dreamland scientists its effective yield was probably ten to fifteen percent lower.

The difference meant the weapon’s blast would obliterate everything within 0.569 kilometers rather than, say 0.595. Since most people within 1.5 kilometers of either weapon would be burned or fatally radiated anyway, the difference was largely academic.

As he continued to pan the weapon, Danny could hear the scientists discussing the system among themselves in the background, sounding like they were looking over a new Porsche before it went on sale.

“So is this thing safe to move or what?” he finally asked.

“Please, Captain,” Klondike said from Dreamland Command. “This is going to take a little while. We’ve never seen a real Indian nuke before.”

“You’re not filling me with confidence, Annie.”

“You think you’ve got it tough?” she replied. “Ray Rubeo made the coffee.”

Aboard the
Bennett,
near the Pakistan-India border
0625

“P
AKISTANIS ARE USING THEIR RADIO
,” S
ULLIVAN TOLD
Dog. “They’re reporting helicopters and fighters in the area.”

“No points for accuracy,” quipped Englehardt.

“Yes, but at least now we know they have a radio,” said Dog, standing behind the two pilots. “Are they getting a response?”

“Negative.”

“How are we doing down there, Danny?” Dog asked over the Dreamland Command line.

“We have to start checking the circuits to make sure it’s dead,” Danny replied. “Then we can get it out of here.”

“You have an ETA on when you’ll be done?” Dog asked.

“Working on it, Colonel.”

Dog flipped off the mike.

“Paks may be scrambling aircraft from Faisal,” said the airborne radar operator, Sergeant Rager. “Have two contacts coming up. Distant.”

“Types?” asked Englehardt.

“Hmmmph.” Rager adjusted something on his console. The computer identified aircraft at very long range by comparing their radar profiles with information in its library; depending on the distance, the operators used a number of other comparison tools to narrow down the possibilities.

“Old iron,” said Rager finally. “F-6. Pair of them. Bearing…looks like they’re making a beeline for the trucks.”

“Farmers, huh?” said Sullivan, since the F-6 was a Chinese version of the Russian MiG-19 Farmer, a venerable Cold War fighter.

A two-engined successor to the famed MiG-15 of Korean War vintage, the design had proven surprisingly robust. Reverse-engineered and updated by the Chinese, the plane was
exported around the world. The Pakistani versions had been retrofitted with Atoll heat-seekers, and could not be taken lightly, especially by a Megafortress flying without Flighthawk escort.

Which was just fine with the
Bennett
’s pilots. While neither had seen combat, their basic Megafortress training included extensive simulated combat against F-6s, as well as more capable aircraft.

“Scorpions,” Englehardt told Sullivan. The long-range AMRAAM-plus missiles could knock the F-6s out of the air before they got close enough to use their heat-seekers. “I’m going to slide north.”

“Hold your course,” Dog told the pilot. “The Pakistanis are our allies. Let’s see what they’re up to before we start thinking of shooting them down.”

“Yes, sir,” said Englehardt, clearly disappointed.

Great Indian Desert
0630

T
HE FINAL ARMING CIRCUITRY ON THE
I
NDIAN NUCLEAR WARHEAD
appeared to use a two-stage process, detonating the weapon only after it had traveled for a specified period of time and passed back through a designated altitude. The altimeter had been fried by the T-Rays and crushed in the crash, rendering the warhead inert.

Probably. The weapons people at Dreamland were worried that the nanoswitches that initiated the explosion might have survived the T-wave bombardment and the crash, and could be activated by a stray current. Since they didn’t know enough about the weapon to rule that out, they decided to take further steps to disable it.

“The odds against some sort of accidental explosion are very long,” said Anna Klondike, trying to reassure Danny. “Much worse than hitting the lottery.”

“So are the consequences,” said Danny. “How long will it take to disassemble?”

“We’re still working on what we want to do,” she said. “In the meantime, please treat the weapon as if it were live.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” said Danny.

A beeping signal indicated that Dog wanted to talk to him, and switched to another channel on the Dreamland network.

“Freah.”

“Danny, we have two Pakistani aircraft approaching from the north. When are you getting out of there?”

“Unknown at this time,” he said, and explained what Klondike had told him.

“This could take a while, Colonel,” added Danny. “The scientists don’t want to make any guesses about the weapon.”

“Nor should they. Bastian out.”

An atoll off the Indian coast
Date and time unknown

Z
EN KNEW THAT HIS JURY-RIGGED PUP TENT WOULDN’T BE
featured in
Architectural Digest
anytime soon, but it did cover both him and Breanna and would keep them
almost
dry if it rained. There was no way to keep warm, however, and though he thought the temperature was probably in the seventies, he felt a decent chill coming on.

If he’d had the use of his legs…

The idea was poison. He pushed it away.

The best way to warm up would be to start a fire. He decided he would explore. He made three broadcasts on the emergency channel, close together; when no one responded, he tucked the radio under Breanna’s arm, then bent over and kissed her on the back of her head.

“I’ll be back, baby,” he told her, crawling up the shallow hill behind them to survey their domain.

Aboard the
Bennett,
near the Pakistan-India border
0632

“B
ROADCAST ON ALL FREQUENCIES,”
D
OG TOLD THE
B
ENNETT’S
copilot. “Let’s make sure they hear this.”