Retribution (2 page)

“Can you break out a signal mirror and flash my cockpit?”

There was no answer.

“Mack?”

A beam of light flashed on the port side of his aircraft.

“Keep flashing me,” said Dog. He gently nudged the aircraft in the direction of the light, then turned the radio to the Dreamland frequency. “Dreamland Command, this is Colonel Bastian. You reading me?”

“Spotty but we have you,” responded Major Natalie Catsman. Second in command at the base, Catsman was manning Dreamland’s situation and control room.

“Can you get my precise location from the sat radio?”

“Affirmative, Colonel,” she said after checking with one of the techs in the background. “The scientists tell me we can triangulate using your transmission.”

Dog heard Ray Rubeo objecting in the background that her explanation wasn’t precisely correct and the procedure
would yield an error margin of plus-or-minus three meters.

“I’m going to overfly a spot and give you a mark,” Dog told her. “I’ll try it a couple of times and we can average out the location. I need it for the
Abner Read.
”

“Roger that.”

Dog lined up the Megafortress for a run over the splotches of light. He got his nose directly on one of the beams and ran it down.

“Now,” he told Catsman.

He took the computed position and passed it on to Storm. The navy captain grunted and told Dog it would take “a while” to get up there.

“How long’s a while?”

“A while is a while,” said Storm. “It may depend on the Chinese. They don’t appear to be in a particularly good mood.”

True enough, thought Dog. He switched back to the emergency frequency.

“Mack, can you hear me?”

“Just barely,” said Mack.

“
Abner Read
is on its way. It may take a couple of hours.”

“Tell those fuckers to get the lead out,” Mack replied. “The water’s starting to get cold. And that ship on the horizon looks like it’s getting closer.”

“Roger that,” said Dog. The ship was a Chinese frigate, and it had in fact turned in the direction of the downed airmen.

Dog banked too aggressively and the Megafortress sent a rumble through her frame.

“Sorry about that,” he told the plane. “I don’t mean to take you for granted.”

Aboard the
Abner Read,
northern Arabian Sea
0743

L
IEUTENANT
K
IRK
“S
TARSHIP
” A
NDREWS FINISHED THE
survey of the water around the Sharkboat and turned the
Werewolf back toward the
Abner Read.

“Sharkboat, Werewolf survey confirms no mines in the area,” he told the crew aboard the small vessel. Roughly the size of a PT boat, the Sharkboat looked like a miniature version of the
Abner Read
and was designed to work with the littoral destroyer. Lacking the bigger ship’s comprehensive sensors, the small vessels had proven susceptible to mines earlier in the deployment.

“Thanks much, Werewolf. We are proceeding toward rendezvous.”

Starship plotted the course back and let the computer take over the robot helicopter. Developed by Dreamland and originally intended to fight tanks and protected land positions, the Werewolf had been pressed into service as a naval helicopter gunship aboard the
Abner Read
. It proved remarkably adept at the job, so much so that Starship was now practically a regular member of the crew. The Navy people called him “Airforce” because of his service affiliation; the nickname at first had a ring of derision to it, but had come to be a compliment.

Starship rose halfway in the seat and turned around, trying to twist some of the knots out of his neck and back. His station was at one end of the destroyer’s high-tech Tactical Warfare Center.

Lieutenant Commander Jack “Eyes” Eisenberg gave Starship a thumbs-up. Eyes was the
Abner Read
’s executive officer, second in command of the ship and the majordomo of Tac, as the Tactical Warfare Center was generally known. Starship gave him a grin and turned back to his computer display.

“Object in water,” blurped the Werewolf computer.

“Identify,” Starship told the computer. He pointed at the touchscreen, obtaining a precise GPS reading as well as the Werewolf ’s approximation of its size.

“Unknown. Believed to be human,” said the computer.

“Tac—I have an object in the water. Could be a man overboard,” said Starship. He took control from the computer and pushed the Werewolf lower, slowing so he could focus the
forward video camera better on the object.

The Werewolf looked like a baby Russian Hokum helicopter. Propelled by a pair of counterrotating blades above, the unmanned aerial vehicle had a stubby set of wings and jet engines whose thrust could be tapped to help push its top speed out to nearly 400 knots—roughly twice what a “normal” helicopter could do. It was quite happy to hover as well, though the transition from top speed to a dead stop could be bumpy. In this case, Starship rode the chopper into a wide arc, descending gradually around his target.

“Could be a pilot,” he said, studying the screen. “I think it might be one of the Chinese fliers.”

“Location,” said Eyes calmly.

Starship read the coordinates off. “Smile for your closeup, dude,” he told the stricken man, pushing the freeze-frame on the videocam.

“Airforce, what’s your status?” barked Storm.

“Downed flier, approximately, uh, let’s say ten miles southwest of us, Captain.” Starship was used to Storm’s gruff way of communicating, and his habit of interrupting after Eyes had already given an order. The captain could be a genuine, class one jackass, but he was a good leader when the shit hit the fan.

Not as good as Colonel Bastian, but few men were.

“How far is that Sharkboat from him?”

“Take them almost an hour to get to him, Captain,” Starship told him. “We’re a lot closer, just about ten miles, and—”

“Here’s what we’re going to do, Airforce,” Storm told him. “The Sharkboat is going to take flyboy. You’re going to hover over him and make sure they find him.”

Storm snapped off the circuit. Starship, confused about why a vessel farther away was being tasked to make the pickup, turned around and saw Eyes looking over his shoulder at the Werewolf ’s video feed. Because of the ad hoc nature of the arrangement, the Werewolf ’s video and other sensor data was not available at the executive officer’s own station.

“Looks scared,” said Eyes, bending down.

“Probably in shock,” said Starship. Punching out of an aircraft at a few hundred knots took a lot out of the body. And while the Arabian Sea was relatively warm—the surface temperature was no lower than 68 degrees—it was still cooler than a human body. “Sir, you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Fire away.”

“How come the Sharkboat is taking him?”

“We’re heading north,” said Eyes. “Some of your Dreamland guys bailed and we’re going to pick them up, assuming we can get around the Chinese.”

Indian Ocean,

off the Indian coast

Time unknown

T
IME PAST MIXED WITH TIME FUTURE
,
THE PRESENT A TANGLE
unrecognizable, bizarrely shaped and shot through with pain.

Time lost meaning, and there was no meaning, there was no present or past, nothing solid, nothing reliable except confusion.

Major Jeffrey “Zen” Stockard lay on his back in the ocean, floating not on water but rocks, black rocks tinged with orange. Flames lapped at his face and his legs were packed solid in ice. When he breathed, his lungs filled with the perfumed air of lilacs.

What happened to me?

The voice came from the sky.

Am I out of the plane?

Zen tried to shake his head and regain consciousness. Instead of his head, his chest shook.

Where is Breanna? Where’s my wife?

A black blanket covered his head. He clawed at it, pulled and poked and prodded, but it would not yield. He gave up.

When he did, the blackness lifted to reveal a golden red
sun no more than a foot from his head.

The voice spoke again.

I’m out of the plane, but where is Breanna?

Zen blinked his eyes, trying to shield them from the sun. His brain began to sort things out, reconstituting his memory like a computer rebuilding its hard drive. It moved sequentially, from the very beginning, everything rushing together: He was in high school, he was in the Air Force, he had just qualified as a fighter pilot, in the Gulf War.

Good shot, Captain, that MiG never had a chance.

Selected as test pilot, assigned to Dreamland, in love.

Well, you’re too pretty to be a bomber pilot, why’d you slap me?

I do, I do, I do the happiest day of my life and no, the damn Flighthawk is going to hit my tail pain just pain just dark blank nothing who cares no one cares never and I will walk damn you all damn everyone because I will walk and I won’t walk I won’t won’t won’t will not give up will come back and who I am who I am?

Where is Breanna? Where is my wife?

Bree?

The voice called louder, pleading. Finally, he recognized that it was his voice, that he was calling for his wife, that he wanted her more than he wanted anything, more than he cared for his own life, certainly.

And then time asserted itself, and he was aware of the present. Zen fell into it, consumed by the swirling ocean of gray.

White House Situation Room,

Washington, D.C.

2145, 14 January 1998

(0745, 15 January, Karachi)

“T
HERE’S AN OPPORTUNITY HERE THAT WE HADN’T ANTICIPATED.”
National Security Advisor Philip Freeman’s face was beet red as he pleaded his cause. “It’s been thrown in our lap.”

Freeman glanced at Secretary of State Jeffrey Hartman, then at President Kevin Martindale. Jed Barclay couldn’t remember his boss arguing this passionately before.

“Of course there’s risk, but it’s not as great as it seems,” continued Freeman. “The T-Rays have been much more effective than we hoped. It will be days before power is restored. The
Lincoln
is within a day’s sail, and we still have the Dreamland assets in the region. If we recover those warheads ourselves, neither country will be in a position to challenge the other for years—years.”

“We need to know definitively where the warheads are before we give the go ahead for an operation,” insisted Secretary of Defense Arthur Chastain, speaking over the closed circuit communications system from the Pentagon War Room. “Without that, Mr. President, I can’t guarantee success. I’m not even sure I can with it.”

“Jed?” said Martindale.

“Space Command is working on the p-p-projections,” said Jed, referring to the Air Force agency responsible for monitoring satellite intelligence. “They say they’ll have something in twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours!” Martindale never shouted, but his voice was as loud as Jed had ever heard it.

“Mr. President,” said Chastain, “it’s going to take time to get the area under full surveillance. The satellites we couldn’t reposition were lost. Remember, we had to rush the operation before all the assets we wanted were in place, and even if they had been—”

“I don’t want excuses,” said Martindale. “Jed, tell Dreamland to find the warheads.”

“Begging your pardon, Mr. President, but besides Space Command, the National Reconnaissance Office is working on it, and so is Navy Intelligence,” said Admiral Balboa, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “I’m sure we can cut the time down considerably. We’ll have something in twelve hours, maybe less. And the Dreamland people have done enough.”

“See what Dreamland can do,” Martindale told Jed. He was calmer now, his voice softer, though it still had an edge to it. “Those scientists can figure it out. They always have some sort of high-tech trick up their sleeves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t think it’s worth the risk,” said Chastain. “The
Lincoln
doesn’t have ground forces that could make the pickups.”

“We have a Marine Expeditionary Force near Somalia,” said Freeman. “We can put them into action. And the Dreamland people.”

“The Marines are two days away,” said Chastain. “At least.”

“Not if they stage out to the
Lincoln
and then go ashore,” countered Freeman. “What do you think, Admiral Balboa?”

Admiral George Balboa, also speaking from the Pentagon, cleared his throat. While he and Freeman had often found themselves at odds, Jed noted that the two men had been meeting together a lot recently. If Balboa’s tone was any indication, they had come to some sort of understanding.

“It might be possible,” said the admiral. “The Marine Ospreys can fly to the
Lincoln,
then operate from there or even somewhere onshore until their assault ship arrives. Of course, we need to know where the warheads are. That’s the key.”

“What about the Dreamland people?” asked Martindale. “Can they recover the weapons?”

“There are too many warheads for them to do it,” said Chastain. “And three of their planes have been shot down.”

“Jed?”

“Um, their ground unit is intact, but, um, it’s not big enough to do it on its own.”

“I meant, what’s the status of the airplanes?”

“There were three planes on the mission. Two were shot down,” said Jed. “The third was the plane flown by Colonel Bastian. He was preparing to crash it into the Chinese aircraft carrier when the Chinese sent their nuclear-loaded bomber
back to the hangar deck. So six crews are in the water.”

“Have our people been picked up?”

“We’re still working on it. This has only happened within the last hour, sir. Thirty minutes.”

Martindale took a step toward the video conference screens. “Admiral, I want those people recovered.”

“I’m sure they’re working on it, sir,” said Balboa.

“Work harder.” Martindale turned around. “I’ll decide what we’re doing when I see the data on where the warheads are. But I agree with Philip. This is an historic opportunity. It’s worth considerable risk. Now you’ll have to excuse me. I have to tell the world what we’ve done.”