The Reply

CHAPTER 37

The bouncer was holding, three hundred miles off the east coast of Africa. Turcotte and the others inside were listening to the radio nets of the various forces they’d set in motion. First into action were the four F-14’s to their west, attempting to clear the foo fighters out of the sky over the Rift Valley complex so they could move in and get the sphere.

“Sixty miles and closing,” Perkins’s navigator and weapons officer, Lieutenant Sally Stanton, reported. “Space Command reports no movement from the foo fighters.”

Perkins’s hands were steady on the controls of his F-14, trying hard to keep the plane under control. They were pushing the edge of the envelope and the plane was struggling with it. The F-14 was rated with a ceiling of 56,000 feet. Perkins and his flight were already passing through 62,000, over eleven miles high, and a half mile higher than any F-14 had ever been flown. “Fifty miles and closing,” Stanton reported. “Still nothing.”

“Good,” Perkins muttered. “Good so far.”

He had the wings of the plane in their full-out position, trying to grab as much of the thin air as possible. At this altitude he was worried about engine flameout. If either engine got too little oxygen it would quit. Restarting in flight was a tricky proposition, plus it would mean aborting the mission. “Forty miles and closing. Still nothing.”

“Flameout!” Perkins’s wingman called out over the radio.

Perkins looked to his left and watched the F-14 there peel off in a steep dive. He could see that one engine was still providing thrust, so the plane should make it back to the carrier, but they were down to three now.

“Thirty miles and—” Stanton was interrupted by another pilot reporting flameout.

“Both engines down. I’m going to hang with you and try to make it,” the pilot reported. Perkins looked out to his right. The third F-14 was already losing altitude. He knew it wouldn’t make it to the target zone.

“Turn away and get your engines started,” Perkins ordered the pilot.

Perkins felt a trickle of sweat slide down inside his oxygen mask. They were down to his plane and one other. When they reached the target, it was going to be one-on-one.

On board the bouncer Turcotte exchanged a worried look with Duncan. If they lost another F-14, they would have to abort.

“Twenty miles.” Stanton’s voice was calm. “We have two foo fighters heading our direction on an intercept course.”

“All right,” Perkins called to the one surviving plane. “Hold steady. Execute on my command. I have left and lead, you have right and trail.”

“Right and trail,” the other pilot acknowledged.

“They’re closing fast,” Stanton reported. “Fifteen miles. Intercept in thirty seconds.”

“Execute!” Perkins ordered. He pulled the nose of the F-14 up. They had passed through 63,000 feet when a warning light flashed on his console. His left engine had flamed out. Perkins immediately did the opposite of what had been drummed into him throughout years of intensive flight training: he shut down his right engine. Then he continued, fighting his instincts, shutting down every electrical system he had.

In the backseat Lieutenant Stanton did the same, cutting all her navigational and targeting computers, the radio, the SATCOM up and down links, and the missiles that rested under the wings.

She couldn’t even talk to her pilot through the intercom. The F-14 was now a very heavy glider, losing altitude rapidly. Perkins looked out and spotted the one remaining plane to his right, also dropping, all systems dead.

The electronic controls were out, so his eyes fastened on his attitude indicator, making sure he kept the plane as level as possible given that the horizon was a hazy line in the distance. He also watched the hand on the altimeter spin around rapidly, counting off altitude lost.

Sixty thousand feet and dropping.

Fifty-five thousand feet and still going down. Perkins looked around. Where the hell were the foo fighters?

He turned on the plane’s radar for two seconds, then turned it off. “Come to Papa,” he whispered. He again lit up the radar, trying to suck the foo fighters in.

He felt a pounding on the back of his seat. Stanton signaling. Perkins turned off the radar and looked about. There they were! Ahead and to the left, climbing to meet them, two small glowing orbs, rapidly closing in.

Perkins strained with the plane’s hydraulics, turning toward the foo fighters. He had his entire being focused on the left one, no longer able to spare any attention to determine whether the other plane had also spotted them.

Perkins let go with his left hand and flipped up a small plastic aiming circle, an anachronism that had been built into the plane simply on the incredibly small chance that the plane’s computer-driven forward targeting display, which was projected against the Plexiglas of the cockpit, would be down.

Perkins began struggling with the plane, trying to get the center of the aiming circle centered on the foo fighter. He knew he would have only one shot before the fighter was past him. He also knew he had to take into account his own speed and descent ratio while also factoring in the foo fighter’s trajectory. It was a situation to make even the sharpest ace of World War II cringe as the two craft were coming to meet each other at over two thousand miles an hour, one dropping in altitude at the rate of a thousand feet every ten seconds, the other climbing just as fast.

“Come on, baby, come on,” Perkins whispered to himself, his eyes focused. They would pass in less than five seconds.

The foo fighter was passing through the right bottom of the aiming circle as Perkins pushed hard right. His finger was resting lightly on the trigger built into his joystick. It was attached to the only electrical system still on, drawing such little amperage that the foo fighter couldn’t pick it up.

Perkins’s finger pulled back. The M16-A1 20mm cannon was on the left side, just below the cockpit. Perkins could feel the plane shudder as the milk-bottle-sized projectiles roared out of the mouth of the Gatling gun. He’d never fired it before with the engines off. He could hear the gun firing, the whine of the barrels spinning, the explosion of the rounds going off.

His eyes, though, were focused on the line of tracers reaching out from his plane toward the foo fighter. The tracers were high and right, then descended down as the foo fighter came up, right into the path!

Twenty-millimeter rounds smashed into the side of the foo fighter. It was built to project power, not armored to take such an unexpected attack. The uranium-cored rounds tore through, destroying the small Airlia computer on board and ripping apart the magnetic engine.

“Yes!” Perkins screamed as he watched the foo fighter drop out of the sky. His exultation was short lived, though, as he realized he was dropping through 45,000 feet and both his engines were cold. He immediately began the emergency procedures to restart.

On board the bouncer, the F-14 that had lost both engines and tried to stay in formation disappeared off the radar screen.

“Shit,” Turcotte muttered. He hoped the pilot and navigator ejected before the plane went down.

“One foo fighter is going down!” Zandra reported.

They watched the display on the small computer screen, the data relayed to them from Cheyenne Mountain.

“The other is hit too!”

A voice came over the radio. “This is Lieutenant Commander Perkins. We have splashed two foo fighters and are heading home.”

Perkins felt the thrust of the two Pratt & Whitney engines push him through the back of his seat and banked hard right. He could see the other F-14, engines on, pulling in beside him, the pilot holding his left hand thumbs-up so Perkins could see.

“That’s one for the record books,” Perkins said to Stanton.

“Let’s go,” Turcotte said. “We’ve got to get in there and get the ruby sphere.”

The pilot immediately pressed forward on the controls and they were heading for the Rift Valley.

“The foo fighter that hit my headquarters in Antarctica is back at the foo fighter base,” Zandra noted.

“That means they’re all back there now, right?” Turcotte asked.

“Correct,” Zandra said.

“Perfect.”

Turcotte thought it most interesting that a foo fighter had targeted Scorpion Station. Obviously the Easter Island guardian knew something about STAAR and its base; more than he himself knew, Turcotte darkly thought.

“Ready?” Commander Downing asked.

Tennyson’s hands were wrapped around a large red lever on the bottom floor of the Greywolf. “Ready.” He had just removed two bolts that kept the lever locked in place.

Emory was strapped into his chair. “Ready.”

“Release,” Downing ordered.

Tennyson pulled the lever over. There was a grinding noise, then the sound of thousands of steel ball bearings rattling against metal. Underneath the Greywolf the submersible’s ballast was sliding out of the portal Tennyson had just opened.

Tennyson clambered up into his seat and strapped in. Minus the ballast the Greywolf began to slowly rise, picking up speed as the seconds went by.

The two foo fighters, picking up no power emission from the submersible, remained where they were, now guarding empty ocean.

On the surface, forty miles to the east, Kevin Brodie was a Department of Defense civilian assigned to the crew of the Yellowstone. For the past twenty minutes he had been putting his laptop computer through its paces, furiously calculating, looking up current and depth data, rechecking, putting in figures as they were relayed to him from the Navy weapons specialist who was sitting at his side. Finally he looked up.

“I’ve got it.”

The weapons man picked up a radio mike. “Anzio, here’s the coordinates.”

Forty miles from the Yellowstone, the USS Anzio, a Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser, was waiting. As the weapons man gave the coordinates, the captain of the Anzio maneuvered his ship to the designated spot on the ocean’s surface and came to a halt. The ocean for forty miles in all directions was clear of surface vessels.

On the rear deck, weapons experts worked over a BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile. They were bypassing the sophisticated homing and arming mechanisms built into the missile and replacing them with a simple depth-activated ignitor. In other words they were reducing a missile worth four million dollars to a depth charge.

The petty officer in charge called up to the bridge and informed the captain they were ready. Shaking his head, the captain ordered the nuclear warhead in the missile armed. The petty officer did so, then stood back as a crane lifted the Tomahawk up and over the side of the ship.

Slowly the missile was lowered to the water’s surface. The cable holding the missile was released and it sank out of sight. The ship’s four General Electric gas-turbine engines had been running at high speed while this was going on. At the captain’s order the drive shafts were engaged, and the twin screws tore into the water.

The Anzio raced away to the east at maximum speed, while on the rear deck a SH-60 Sikorsky helicopter lifted off.

The Greywolf was rocketing to the surface now and it passed the missile on its way down at fifteen hundred meters depth. It had been Brodie’s job to calculate the exact location of the foo fighter base from the LLS reading, add in the local currents, temperature inversions, depth, weight and size of the missile and its warhead, and mix all those effects together to find the point on the surface where it should be dropped so that, falling free, it would explode, hopefully, right on top of the foo fighter base.

The Greywolf broke surface and the entire submersible popped into the air before settling down.

“Let’s move!” Downing yelled as he reached up and began unscrewing the hatch. Tennyson crowded in and helped him. They pushed the hatch out of the way. It tumbled free into the ocean, but Downing wasn’t worried about that. He climbed up onto the top deck and squinted into the fierce sunlight. He heard the chopper before he saw it.

The SH-60 swung over the top of the submersible, lowering a cage. Downing grabbed on to the cage and held it steady as Tennyson and Emory climbed in, then he squeezed in beside them.

“I’ll miss her,” he said to Tennyson as they were lifted into the air, the chopper heading east after the Anzio even before the cage began to be reeled in.

“She was a good ship,” Tennyson acknowledged as the Greywolf faded into the distance, a dark spot on a blue carpet.

They all flinched as the entire ocean surface erupted in a massive waterspout where the Greywolf had been.

Brodie’s calculations were excellent. The Tomahawk passed through the depth the igniter was set for less than fifty meters from the foo fighter complex.

The nuclear explosion took out not only the two foo fighters that had shadowed the Greywolf and the base, but a half-mile section of the East Pacific Ridge.

On the other side of the world Captain Mike Turcotte gripped Colonel Spearson’s weathered hand in his.

“Bloody good to see you, even if you do come flying in on one of those weird saucer things,” Spearson said.

“We need to get to the cavern,” Turcotte said as Duncan and Zandra followed him.

“Right this way.”

At the same time, back in the Pacific, Kelly Reynolds’s bouncer was settling down on the runway on Easter Island.