Unpopular Science

Chapter 39

“Dad, you there? Come on, Pops, talk to me!”

“Jack, I had given you up for dead!”

Jack almost breathed a sigh of relief as he muscled the EVIDA under Mach and felt the click of the wings locking into their fully extended position—but the plane kept shaking.

“Loser IT dropouts!” Fast exploded. “Why can’t the Navy hire some real engineers to design their gear?”

“Jack, say again?” Fastbinder radioed.

“Can’t talk now. I’ll call ya back, Pops.” Jack reduced speed even more and felt the aircraft wobble uncertainly in the direction he steered it. He was out over the Atlantic when his air speed reduced to three hundred miles per hour.

The EVIDA project leaders boasted a stall speed of 125 miles per hour.

“So why is the dam thing stalling?” Fast exclaimed. He pumped more juice into the engines and pushed the EVIDA into a tentative stability that wouldn’t last long. Fast thumbed on the autopilot and grabbed the laptop.

He groped under the passenger seats, which were installed by the brilliant engineers at the Navy who intended for the EVIDA to be hidden in plain sight by pretending to be an officers’ transport plane. Fast yanked out a cushion with a label that said that, in case of a water landing, the cushion could be used as a flotation device.

The EVIDA choked on her fuel as Fast blew off the cockpit entrance. “Good riddance,” he told the 1.6-billion-dollar hunk of junk as he stepped out.

He deployed his stealth chute and drifted away as a pair of fighter planes screeched a few thousand feet overhead. The fighters watched the EVIDA ditch in the Atlantic, but they never saw the young man who ejected.

Fast wasn’t a happy camper. A heck of a lot of work had gone down the drain tonight. His only consolation was that, maybe, if he was lucky, the data dump received from Clockwork, now stored in his laptop, might give him a clue about who it was who had beat him.

Because tossing a robot head onto the nose of a screaming jet took special skill. Fast would need ingenuity and strategy to overcome such skill.

His flight goggles’ nosepiece extended to cover his mouth and nose. His empty cushion covering was a backpack that was filled halfway with steel air cylinders. There was a waterproof pack alongside them that accommodated the computer. Fast zipped it closed as he drifted down to the surface of the Atlantic.

Just before he submerged. Jack took a last look at the lights of the shore.

It was gonna be a heck of a long walk.

General Elvgren “Bad Dog” Rover was reading the paper and pretended not to notice his assistant was on the phone. The captain hung up.

“Sir, the BOIID went into the Atlantic.”

The general’s wolfish grimace came and went, detecting something unsaid. “We shot it down?”

“It was shot down,” the captain said. “By someone. Over D.C.”

“Gang crossfire?”

“Unknown, Sir.”

“If it was over D.C., then it was gang crossfire.”

“Well, the street gangs in D.C. are some of the best-equipped in the world,” the captain said uncertainly. “Still, this aircraft was designed to take antiaircraft rounds—”

“Not so far as we know, officially,” Rover said, rattling his newspaper. “Gang crossfire. You writing the press release?”

‘Yes, Sir.”

“Gang crossfire.”

“Yes, Sir.”