Cyclops One

Chapter 1

At least fifty yards separated Colonel Thomas Howe from the dozen people clustered around the nose of the test plane, but even at that distance she seduced him. A thick flight suit and a layer of survival gear obscured the soft curves of Megan’s body, but he could still sense the sway of her hips. His lips tasted the perfumed air around her; his thumb caught the small drop of sweat forming behind her ear. Megan York had her back to him, but she pulled him forward like a mermaid singing to a castaway.

If he’d stopped there, fifty yards away — if Howe had turned and gone across the cement apron to where his own plane waited at the edge of the secret northern Montana airstrip — a dozen things, a million things, might have been different. Or so he would tell himself later.

But Howe didn’t stop. He continued toward her, drawn by the warmth he had felt the night before as he had undressed her. Blood rushed to his head; the air grew so thick he could barely breathe.

When he was about ten yards from her, Megan turned. Seeing him, she frowned.

Her frown was a bare flicker, lasting only a fraction of a fraction of a second, but in that instant a hole opened in his chest. Despair, then anger, erupted from it.

Had he been alone in a house or a building, Howe would have punched the wall or whatever fell in range. But he was not alone, and this fact and his training as a combat pilot made him cock a smile on his face.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey yourself.”

“What’s up?”

“What’s up with you?”

The others standing nearby seemed to fade back as they stared at each other. Finally, Howe blinked and slung a thumb into the side of his survival vest. His anger returned for a half moment, and then he felt a great loss, as if they hadn’t made love for the first time only a few weeks before but for the ten thousandth time, as if they’d grown old in each other’s arms and now she wanted to leave.

Until that moment he hadn’t realized he was in love. It hadn’t been real, like a bruise on his arm or a broken rib. Until that moment desire had been just sex, not something that could cling to his chest like a tight sweater you could never take off.

“Looks like it’s going to rain,” she said.

“Hope so,” he said.

Rain — heavy rain — was the purpose of the exercise today. The Cyclops laser in Megan’s modified 767-300ER had not been fully tested in foul weather. Developed as a successor to the airborne laser (ABL) missile-defense system, the weapon’s COIL-plus chemical oxygen iodine laser projected a multifaceted beam of energy through a nose-mounted ocular director system that was in many ways reminiscent of the nose turrets on World War II aircraft. The laser could strike moving and nonmoving objects approximately three hundred miles away. Using targeting data from a variety of sources, it could destroy or disable up to fifty targets on a mission, at the same time directing advanced escorts in their own more conventional attacks, thanks to a shared avionics system.

The escorts were themselves impressive weapons systems: F/A-22Vs, specially built delta-wing versions of the F/A-22 Raptor prepared by the National Aeronautics Development and Testing Corporation (NADT), which was also overseeing Cyclops’s final tests before production. The F/A-22Vs — generally called Velociraptors — traded a small portion of their older brothers’ stealth abilities for considerably greater range and slightly heavier weapons carriage, but their real advance lay in the avionics system they shared with Cyclops. With a single verbal request, the Velociraptor pilot could have an annotated, three-dimensional view of a battlefield three hundred miles away, know which targets Cyclops intended to hit, and have suggestions from a targeting computer on how to best destroy his own. The system was scalable; in other words, it would work as well with two Velociraptors as with twenty.

In theory, anyway. Only four F/A-22Vs currently existed in all the world, and there were only two Cyclops aircraft, though presumably today’s test would lead to funding for a dozen more.

“We ready?” Megan asked Howe.

“You pissed at something?” Howe said instead of answering. Besides flying chase, he was in charge of overseeing the system’s integration for the Air Force, the de facto service boss of what was in theory a private program until it proved itself and was formally taken over by the military. He was the top “blue suit,” or Air Force officer, on the project, though the hybrid nature of the program diluted his authority.

Dominic Gregorio pushed his big jaw between them, saying something about how they’d better hit the flyway before the weather got too tremendously awful. The forecast had the storm continuing for two or three days.

“Pissed?” asked Megan. “Why?”

A phony answer, he thought.

“We ready to hit the flyway?” repeated Dominic.

He giggled. For some reason the engineer thought flyway was the funniest play on words ever concocted in the English language.

“Kick butt,” Megan told Howe. She slugged his shoulder and swept toward her plane.

By the time the altimeter ladder on Colonel Howe’s heads-up display notched ten thousand feet an hour later, he had nearly convinced himself he hadn’t seen her frown. Howe pushed the nose of his F/A-22V right, swinging toward the south end of the test range. Megan’s 767 was just settling into its designated firing course about three hundred yards ahead, wings wobbling ever so slightly because of the severe turbulence they were flying through. The synthesized radar image in Howe’s tactical display showed the plane as well as its course; its annotations critiqued Megan’s piloting skills, noting that she was deviating from the flight plan by.001 degree.

Howe’s Velociraptor, with its delta wings and nose canards, had been designed to work with Cyclops as a combination long-distance interceptor and attack plane, able to switch seamlessly from escort to bombing roles. The long weapons bay beneath its belly would include a mix of air-to-air AMRAAM-pluses and air-to-ground small-diameter GPS-guided bombs; the bays at the side would have either a heat-seeking Sidewinder or an AMRAAM-plus, an improved version of the battle-tested AIM-120. Roughly a dozen feet longer than a “stock” Raptor, the Velociraptor’s massive V-shaped wings allowed it to carry nearly twice the fuel its brother held. Its rear stabilizers were more sharply canted and included control surfaces operated with the help of a hydrogen system to radically change airflow in milliseconds, greatly increasing the plane’s maneuverability.

“Birds, this is Cyclops. We’re in the loop,” said Megan, alerting Howe and his wingman that the test sequence was about to begin.

“Bird One,” acknowledged Howe. He looked down at the configurable tactical display screen in the center of his dash, which was synthesizing a view of the battle area ahead. The computer built the image from a variety of sources over the shared input network of the three planes; Howe had what looked like a three-dimensional plot of the mountain below. The large screen showed not just the target — an I-HAWK MIM-23 antiaircraft missile site — but the scope of its radar, a yellowish balloon projecting from the mountain plain. A red box appeared on the missile launcher, indicating that the laser targeting gear aboard Cyclops was scanning for the most vulnerable point of its target; the box began to blink and then went solid red, indicating it was ready to lock. Had this been a real mission, they could have fried it before it presented any danger at all.

Howe pushed his head back against the ejection seat, trying to will his neck and back muscles into something approaching relaxation.

Far below in the rugged Montana hills, the Army I-HAWK battery prepared to fire. The missile launcher was twenty nautical miles due north, a thick dagger in Cyclops’s course. When the 767 drew to within five miles, the battery would fire its weapon. A millisecond after it did, the phased-array radar built into Cyclops One would detect it. The turret at the nose would rotate slightly downward, like the giant eye of the Greek monster the weapon had been named for. Within seconds the laser would lock on the missile and destroy it between three and five hundred feet off the ground.

The only thing difficult about the test was the thick band of storm clouds and torrential rain between the plane and the ground. The rain was so bad the normal monitoring plane, a converted RC-135, which would have had to fly at low altitude through the teeth of the storm, was grounded. Cyclops had handled simultaneous firings from two I-HAWK batteries handily in clear-sky trials three weeks before; it had nailed SAMs, cruise missiles, tanks, and a bunker during its extensive trials. Only the bunker had given it problems; the beam was not strong enough to defeat thick, buried concrete, and the system relied on complicated image analysis to attempt to find a weak point, generally in the ventilation system. The analysis could take as long as sixty seconds — something to work on for the Mark II version.

“Hey, Colonel, what’s your number?” said Williams over the squadron frequency.

“Three-five-zero.”

“Got five even.”

Howe snickered but didn’t acknowledge. The crews had a pool on the altitude where the laser would fry the missile. Three-five-zero was 350 feet, and happened to be the average of the last four trials; five meant five hundred, the theoretical top of the target envelope. Given the results of the past tests, a hit there would be almost as bad as a complete miss. Williams was just a hard-luck guy.

“I can’t see a thing here,” added Williams. “What do you think about me dropping down to five thousand feet?”

“We briefed you at eight,” said Howe. “Hang with it.”

“I’m supposed to see what’s going on, right? My video’s going to get a nice picture of clouds.”

“Okay, get where you have to get. Just don’t get in the way.”

“Oh yeah, roger that. Don’t feel like becoming popcorn today.”

Howe flicked his HUD from standard to synthetic hologram view, in effect closing his eyes to the real world so he could watch a movie of what was happening around him. The grayish image of the sky blurred into the background, replaced by a blue bowl of heaven. Bird Two ducked down through faint puffs of clouds, its speed indicated as functions of Mach numbers in small print below the wing.

The holographic view could not only show the pilot what was happening in bad weather or night; using the radar and other sensor inputs, the Velociraptor’s silicone brain could synthesize an image of what was happening up to roughly 150 miles away. The image viewpoint could be changed; it was possible to essentially “see” what Williams saw through his front screen by pointing at the plane’s icon in the display and saying “first-person” to the computer. (The command was a reference to point-of-view directions in movies and books.) And this was only a start: The real potential of the computing power would be felt when unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs were integrated into the system, which was scheduled to begin after the Air Force formally took over the program; for now, UAV data could only be collected aboard the 767 at a separate station.

Howe found the synthetic view distracting and flipped back to the standard heads-up ghost in front of the real Persipex that surrounded him before scanning his instrument readings. Speed, fuel burn, engine temperature — every reading could have come straight from a spec sheet. The F/A-22Vs had more than a hundred techies assigned as full-time nannies; the regular Air Force maintenance crewmen, or “maintainers,” were augmented by engineers and company reps as well as NADT personnel who were constantly tweaking the various experimental and pre-production systems they were testing.

“Alpha in sixty seconds,” said Megan.

Something in her voice sparked Howe’s anger again. He squeezed the side stick so tightly his forearm muscles popped. For a moment he visualized himself pushing the stick down and at the same time gunning the throttle to the firewall. An easy wink on the trigger would lace the Boeing’s fuselage with shells from the cannon. The plane’s wings, laden with fuel, would burst into flames.

Why was he thinking that?

Why was he so mad? Because she hadn’t smiled when he wanted her to? Because he was in love and she wasn’t?

Screw that. She loved him.

And if not, he’d make her love him. Win her, woo her — whatever it took.

Howe nearly laughed at himself. He was thinking like a teenager, and he was a long way from his teens. At thirty-three, he was very young for his command but very old in nearly every other way.Emotionally mature beyond his physical years, Clayton Bonham had written when picking him from three candidates to head the Air Force portion of the project.Steady as a rock.

Except when it came to love, maybe. He just didn’t have that much experience with it, not even in his first marriage.

Megan did love him. He knew it.

“Thirty seconds. What’s Bird Two doing?” snapped Megan.

“Dropping for a better view,” he answered, his tone nearly as sharp as hers.

“That’s not what we briefed.”

Howe didn’t bother answering. They were flying into the worst of the storm. Lightning streaked around him. A wind burst pushed on the wings but the flight computer held the plane perfectly steady, making microadjustments in the control surfaces. Forward airspeed pegged 425 knots — very slow for the Velociraptor, which had been designed to operate best in supercruise mode just under Mach 1.5.

“Fifteen seconds,” said Megan.

More lightning. The only thing he could see in the darkness beyond the glass canopy were the zigs of yellow, heaven cracking open.

“Ten,” said Megan.

An indicator on the RWR panel noted that the I-HAWK radar had locked on the stealthy chase planes as well as Cyclops.

“Five seconds,” she said.

Howe blew a full wad of air into his mask. He felt her legs again, her smallish breasts against his chest.

Blow her away with something special: a week in Venice. They were going to have some downtime once these tests were done.

“Alpha,” said Megan.

His HUD screen flashed white. In the next moment, Howe’s Velociraptor plunged nose-first toward the ground.

He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. Everything Thomas Howe had ever been furled into a bullet at the center of his skull. His head fused to his helmet and for a brief moment his consciousness fled. His heart stopped pumping blood and his body froze.

In the next moment something warm touched the ice.

Megan. Smiling, last night on the bed.

It was only a shard of memory, but it made his heart catch again.

Gravity slammed Howe against the seat as he fought to regain control of the plane. Bile filled his mouth and nose; it stung his eyes, ate through the sinews of his arms. He pulled back on the stick, but the plane didn’t respond.

He wanted to cough but couldn’t. The helmet pounded his skull, twisting at the temples. The F/A-22V threatened to whip into a spin. He pushed the stick to catch it and jammed the pedals.

Nothing worked.

The Velociraptor’s control system had gone off-line. That ought to have been impossible.

Engines gone.

Backup electricity to run the controls should automatically route from the forced-air rams below the fuselage.

Nothing. Too late.

Out, time to get out!

But the engines were still working. He could feel the throb in his spine.

Out — get out! You’ll fly into the ground.

The computer controlled the canopy. If it was gone, if that was the problem, he’d have to go to the backup procedure.

Set it. Pull the handle.

Out!

The controls should work. Or the backups. Or the backups to the backups.

Howe hit the fail-safe switch and clicked the circuit open manually.

Nothing.

Out!

Howe forced his head downward and forced himself to hunt for the yellow handle of the ejection seat. The blackness that had pushed against his face receded slightly, enough to let him think a full thought. Without control of the plummeting plane, he was no more than a snake caught in the talons of an eagle; the yellow handle was his only escape.

The fingers on his right hand cramped hard around the stick at the right side of the seat. He looked at them, trying to will them open.

They were locked around the molded handle. He looked at them again, uncomprehendingly: Why were they not letting go?

He pulled back on the stick, then pushed hard to each side several times. If the controls worked, the plane would shake back and forth violently, trying to follow the conflicting commands. But it did nothing.

A black cone closed in around his head.Let go, he told his hand.

Finally his fingers loosened. He reached for the ejection handle, wondering if the F/A-22V had started to spin. He could no longer tell.

Augering into oblivion.

Something stopped him as his gloved finger touched the handle. He looked up and saw the large hulk of the Boeing bearing down straight at him.

Instinct made him grab the stick again. It was a useless, stupid reaction in an uncontrollable airplane; if he pulled the eject handle, he might at least save himself. The dead controls had no way of stopping the collision.

Except that they did. The F/A-22V responded to his desperate tug, pushing her chin upward and steadying on her left wing. The 767’s tail loomed at the top of the canopy for a long second, the stabilizer an ax head above his eyes. Then it disappeared somewhere behind him.

Two very quick breaths later Howe had full control of the plane. He wrestled it into level flight. He called a range emergency — it was the first thing he could think to say — then tried to hail Cyclops.

Empty fuzz answered.

“Bird One to Cyclops,” he repeated over the frequency they had all shared. Ideas and words blurred together, his mind several steps behind his instincts; he couldn’t sort out what he needed to say, let alone do. “Two? Williams, where are you? Cyclops? Bird Two? No joy! Shit — lost wingman! Break off! Shit.”

Howe sent a long string of curses out over the radio before finally clicking off to listen for a response. He put his nose up, trying to get over the weather. Worried that he would hit either his wingman or the Boeing, he kept his gaze fixed on the sky over the heads-up display until he broke through the clouds. Only then did he look back down at his instruments.

Everything was back, everything. All systems were in the green. The only problem seemed to be the radar: completely blank.

The techies would pull their hair out over this one. He reached for the radar control panel on the dash, manually selecting search and scan mode. The auxiliary screen flashed an error message listing several circuit problems.

Then it cleared. The screen tinged green before flashing a light blue, the color of empty sky. NO CONTACT appeared in the right-hand corner. His position indicator showed he was now over Canada, just north of the intended test area.

Howe keyed the self-test procedure for his radar. As it began, he tried reaching Cyclops again.

“Bird One to Cyclops. Hey, Megan, you hear me or what?”

Howe waited for her to snap back with something funny. He felt ashamed of his anger now.

“Bird One, this is Ground Unit Hawk. What the hell is going on up there?”

“I had a major equipment flakeout,” he told the ground controller at the I-HAWK station. “Controls just disappeared. Looks like I still have a problem with my radar. Until your transmission I thought my radio was gone as well. I can’t reach Cyclops or my wingman.”

“Neither can we.”

“Give me a vector,” he said, twisting his head around to look for the planes.

“Negative. We don’t have them on our radar.”

“What?”

“We have you and that’s it. Cyclops and Bird Two are gone. Completely gone.”

Chapter 2

Timing was everything. Light up too soon, and either the attendant would notice or the smoke alarm would go off. Too late, and he’d miss at least two drags on the Camel.

Andy Fisher fingered his lighter as the Gulfstream dropped into its final approach to the runway. On a commercial flight, the most the stewardesses would do if he lit up now was tsk-tsk on the way out. But this was an Air Force plane, and the attendant wasn’t exactly a piece of eye candy: The sergeant looked like he could bench-press the plane. He also reeked of health freak, and had frowned when the FBI Special Agent asked for a refill after his fourth cup of coffee.

Still, a smoke was a smoke, and it didn’t make sense to miss a nice hit of nicotine because a Neanderthal was breathing down your neck. Fisher was already late for the meeting he was supposed to be at, and it was doubtful that the others on the task force would allow smoking there. Not that he would let that sort of thing bother him under normal circumstances, but this being a military matter, there was bound to be a full complement of uniformed types with guns available to enforce even the most egregious government usurpation of personal smoking rights.

The jet’s tires squealed loudly as they hit the runway. The plane settled onto the concrete with a slight rocking sensation, but Fisher had no trouble firing up the end of the cigarette.

“You ought not smoke,” growled the sergeant, sitting two rows back. “Pilot’ll have a fit.”

“He owns the plane?”

The sergeant threw off his seat belt and came forward, looming over Fisher.

“Thinks he does, the prick.”

Without a word Fisher handed the sergeant the pack. Both men were midway through their second cigarettes when the Gulfstream finally rolled to a stop. A lieutenant barely old enough to shave was waiting for Fisher with a driver and a Humvee.

“Welcome to North Lake, sir,” said the lieutenant as Fisher shambled down the steps, overnight bag slung over his shoulder. The man stood at attention, hand seemingly stapled to his forehead.

“You looking for change or a salute?” said Fisher, taking a final drag from the cigarette as he reached the tarmac.

“Uh, no, sir.” The lieutenant made a stiff grab for his bag, but Fisher held it tightly. It had most of his smokes; no way he was letting go of it.

“Where’s the water?” asked Fisher.

“Sir?”

“If this is North Lake, where’s the water? All I saw were mountains coming in.”

“Uh, I’m not following. The water supply is a well.”

“Deep subject.”

“Oh yes, sir.” Still playing puppy, the lieutenant jerked around and ran to open the back door of the Hummer for him. Fisher got into the front instead.

“I think we’re running behind,” Fisher told the airman at the wheel. “Let’s kick some butt.”

The driver complied, nearly sending the lieutenant through the back window as he whipped around on the blacktop. Fisher slumped against the door, starting another cigarette.

The base had been laid along the saddle of two mountains; what wasn’t concrete was rock. Two small hangars sat at the far end of the runway. A large concrete mouth yawned beyond them, the low-slung opening narrowing the profile to a secure hangar. Three small, pillboxlike structures sat about a hundred yards beyond it. They didn’t seem big enough to house latrines.

“Have a good flight?” asked the lieutenant from the backseat as they pulled toward the pillboxes.

“I didn’t puke,” said Fisher. “That was a plus.”

They stopped about ten feet from the smallest structure, a dark brown box of cement maybe seven feet wide and a little taller. A steel door sat in the middle. It reminded Fisher of the entrance to the rooftop stairwell in Brooklyn where he’d lost his virginity at age fourteen.

“The Ritz, sir,” said the driver.

As Fisher slid out of the vehicle the lieutenant went over and flipped the cover on a panel at the center of the door, revealing a small numeric keypad. He punched a set of numbers, then pressed his palm against a reddish-black square directly below. The door slid open.

“You’ll have to press your palm against the sensor on the doorjamb,” said the lieutenant as Fisher started to follow him.

“Which?”

“See the gray blotch there?” The lieutenant pointed toward the side. He added apologetically, “Once I’m in, I can’t step out or the door will slam and everything will freeze.”

Fisher sighed, then laid his palm against the sensor so it could be read.

“Um, and the cigarette, sir: I’m afraid there’s no smoking.”

“Alarms?” asked Fisher.

“And sprinklers.”

Fisher eyed him suspiciously. The kid’s peach fuzz was too obvious for him to be lying. Reluctantly the FBI agent finished the Camel and tossed it as he stepped through the doorway.

An elevator waited beyond the threshold. “More security downstairs,” said the lieutenant as they started downward. “They’re going to want to search your bag. And you’ll be escorted everywhere.”

“They know I’m one of the good guys, right? See, my white hat’s back home and it seems like a real pain in the ass to run back and get it.”

The lieutenant’s laugh sounded tinny against the pneumatic rush of the plunging elevator. “Yes, sir. But the nature of the project, and then with yesterday’s, er, incident…”

“I’ve been through this sort of thing before, kid,” said Fisher. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

They did have more security downstairs — a lot more. The narrow hallway was lined with Air Force security personnel holding M16 rifles with thick laser scopes at the top. There were at least six video cameras in the ceiling, and two sets of crash gates. Farther along, four men in civilian clothes guarded the entrance to a corridor that led to the main sections of the underground complex. The men looked like linebackers preparing to blitz a rookie quarterback.

“Jesus, what the hell are you guys expecting?” Fisher said as his bag was inspected for a second time.

“What are you expecting?” said a voice from down the hall. “The scan in the elevator showed you brought a dozen cartons of cigarettes and no change of underwear.”

“I ain’t planning on crapping my pants, Kowalski,” said Fisher. “I’m not part of the DIA.”

“You wouldn’t last in the DIA,” said Kowalski, appearing from down the hall. The Defense Intelligence Agency officer had worked with Fisher several times before.

“Oh, I’d make it — just get a double lobotomy and I’d fit in fine,” said Fisher.

“Yuck, yuck. Same old Fisher.”

“Same old Kowalski. Same old frumpy brown suit,” said Fisher, taking his bag back. “Add any ketchup stains since England?”

“Come on, they’re starting. Stay close to our friend here,” added the DIA officer, thumbing toward a large Air Force security type in battle dress with a flak vest and a very large gun holster at his side. “You can’t go anyplace without a minder no matter who you are. It’s worse than Dreamland. By the way, Jemma Gorman’s running the show.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, that was about her reaction when she heard you were coming.”

Jemma Gorman — officially, Air Force Colonel Jemma Gorman, special aide to the Air Force chief of staff temporarily assigned to the Office of Special Investigations — was holding forth in front of a wall of white erase boards as Fisher entered the small amphitheater briefing area behind Kowalski. Her reaction to Fisher’s arrival was friendlier than he expected: She ignored him, continuing her lecture without stopping.

“The planes disappeared precisely eighteen hours and fifteen minutes ago,” she told the audience of military and civilian investigators. “In that time we have conducted a thorough search of the continental United States. Neither Cyclops nor the missing F/A-22V landed at an airport in North America. We have two working theories. Theory One: There was some sort of catastrophic event. The planes collided, or something similar. They crashed—”

“Gee, you think?” said Fisher, just softly enough for her to pretend she didn’t hear. Gorman continued speaking, her eyes focused on some hapless speck of dust in the back of the room.

“—and because of the difficult weather conditions, locating them has been delayed.” Gorman pulled down a large map at the front — she’d always been good at visual aids — and indicated that the search area was mountainous and currently obscured by severe weather, which wasn’t supposed to break for several more hours. “You’ll note that a good portion of our grids are in Canada,” she said, segueing into a summary of the arrangements with the Canadians. Their major concern seemed to be the possible effects of the search on the local moose, rumored to be in rutting season.

“In addition to assets from the project team directed by General Bonham and NADT, USAF has conducted and will continue to conduct the search,” she added. “Major Christian is our lead on that aspect. He will keep us updated on the progress.” Gorman glanced sternly toward the second row, where an Air Force officer nodded grimly. Her own expression grew even graver, her brows furrowing on her forehead. “The other theory, Theory Two, is that the planes have been stolen. Unlikely. But we will exhaust that possibility in parallel to the search. Mr. Kowalski will head that team.”

“Pet,” said Fisher in a loud whisper. Kowalski, who had sat in the row in front of him, bobbed his head backward but said nothing.

“Kevin Sullivan from Aerodynamics Linx will head the technical team. We’ll have a subsection on sabotage to rule it in or out; Major Yei from CID will take the lead, along with the technical team headed by Al Biushi. You may remember Mr. Biushi from the NASA project last year. The malfunctions on the F/A-22V that landed have yet to be explained,” said Gorman. Her hands jabbed the air as if she were a conductor signaling the cannon for the 1812 Overture. “That will be a priority for the Velociraptor technical team, which will be headed by Jack Meiser from Locker Aircraft.”

Fisher pulled his cigarette pack from his pocket and slumped back in his seat, unwrapping the cellophane as Gorman went through administrative information about meeting places and quarters. Anyone else would leave this sort of minutiae to an aide or even a handout, but Gorman’s hands worked into a frenzy and she actually smiled while reciting, from memory, the telephone extensions of the various subgroups assigned in the base’s encrypted phone system.

The cellophane wrapper stuck at the corner of the pack. Fisher pulled it off with a loud flourish; one or two of the people in front of him shot nasty looks over their shoulders, as if he’d set off a stink bomb.

“Howard McIntyre from the NSC will be joining us from Hawaii via closed circuit this afternoon,” said Gorman sharply, a buried Brooklyn accent filtering into her words. “Most of you know Mr. McIntyre, but for those of you who don’t, he is the assistant to the national security advisor in charge of technology. He’s flying to Hawaii for the augmented-ABM tests, which are due to start tomorrow, but he’s also been tasked to keep the President updated. As you can well imagine, the White House is extremely interested in what’s going on here. I don’t have to tell you all how sensitive this is, not only in terms of national security, but politically. Especially politically. I expect all of you to be discreet.”

She looked directly at him as she said that.

“Discreet — my middle name,” said Fisher in a whisper. “Hey, Kowalski, who’s Bonham?”

“Retired two-star Air Force general who heads the National Aerospace Development and Testing Corporation, which is NADT,” whispered Kowalski. “The big boss of the project. NADT’s a contract agency with serious clout. They’ve developed a half-dozen weapons including the modified F/A-22s, and they’re responsible for testing and refining a bunch more, including Cyclops. Part of the drive to privatize non-warfighting military functions and save some cash. Bonham’s the main man.”

“Yeah, but get to the good stuff. What kind of underwear?”

“That’s more your department, but I’d guess boxers.”

“What about the little boss?”

“You mean Howe?”

“Sure.”

“Almost bought it in the chase plane.”

“Prime suspect.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Who else is important?”

“Guy named Williams in the other chase plane. Gone. Air Force. Never heard of him.” Kowalski stopped to look at his notes. “Lady named, uh, Megan York.”

“Air Force?”

“Contract test pilot. Works directly for NADT, like just about everybody else here. She’s about thirty. Supposed to be a dish. Haven’t seen the photos yet.”

“Put me in for the eight by ten. What kind of underwear does she wear?”

Gorman frowned severely in their direction, then looked back to her groupies in the front row. “I’m in the process of requesting more people for the monkey work. Again, I remind you: Everywhere you go on this base, you go with security. You know the drill. Questions?”

“I have one,” said Fisher quickly. “Where’s the smoking lounge?”

“For those few of you privileged not to know Special Agent Andrew Fisher, that is him in the rumpled gray suit. He is our lone representative from the FBI, assigned to be as annoying as possible. Obviously the Bureau does not believe this is a very important case. Agent Fisher likes to play class clown, though fortunately today he has left his red nose and floppy shoes at home. He will act as FBI liaison and attempt to grab as much glory as he can, while at the same time doing nothing more than drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, though not in that order.”

“I thought grabbing glory was your job,” said Fisher innocently.

Gorman gave him some dagger eyes, then turned to answer other questions from the assorted teacher’s pets. The only one that interested Fisher was the one she shrugged in answer to: Why hadn’t the emergency locator beacons on the downed planes been picked up yet?

The answer was, there were no locator beacons. Because of the nature of the project, the planes flew without ident gear that would identify them if properly queried. They didn’t have black boxes or any of the otherwise useful gear that would, presumably, have made them easier to find. In fairness, all the monitoring gear they were carrying for the trial exercises would ordinarily be more than enough to supply pinpoint positions in the case of an emergency. But whatever had blanked the systems in all the planes had made them impossible to track as well.

As the questions faded, Fisher got up to leave. A few people nodded at him, but with the exception of Kowalski and Gorman he didn’t know anyone here very well. Probably just as well: It would make it easier to bum cigarettes the first few days.

“Hold on, Andy,” said Gorman as he started toward the door.

“Hey, Gorgeous.”

“Knock off the crap. This is my show.”

“I saw your name in lights outside.”

“Just do your job.”

“And save your ass like in Italy?”

“There are two opinions on that.”

“Yours and everyone else’s?”

“Oh, you’re a master comedian.”

“Yeah, I’m doing Vegas next week,” said Fisher. “Look, I’d love to trade bon mots with you, but I’m dying for a smoke. Where do I find the pilot of the F/A-22. Howe, right?”

“Who says you’re talking to Colonel Howe?” Gorman’s cheeks not only colored red but seemed to rise on her face. “I just went through the various assignments. This—”

“If you’re going to be a pain, we can call General Whatzhisname and ask him to read that long paragraph from DOD Memorandum 17-85B. The verbiage is a bit obscure, but I think it says something to the effect that you have to cooperate with me or get a good spanking. Of course, if that’s what you’re interested in…”

“Just stay out of my way,” said Gorman, walking away so quickly her escort had to double-time down the hall.

“Let’s go, Kato,” Fisher said to the sergeant looming at his elbow. “Smoke, food, meaning of life. More or less in that order.”

“Sir?”

“You can knock off the ‘sir’ routine,” he told the noncom, who looked to be about thirty. The patch on the pocket of his combat camos declared his name was JHNSN. “I know you don’t mean it. Just call me Fisher. Or Andy, if you’re pissed off. Come on, I need a smoke.”

“We have to go outside.”

“Yeah, or the men’s room,” Fisher told him. “But today we’ll go outside, because it’s always nice to make a good first impression.”

Chapter 3

Howard McIntyre settled into his first-class seat, indulging in a fantasy about the stewardess who was pouring the champagne. He was just removing her bra when one of the two cell phones he carried in his suit jacket — he had a third in his briefcase, along with an encrypted phone — rang.

The attendant was just good-looking enough to tempt him not to answer, and he might not have if the call hadn’t been on his “A” phone, a special encoded satellite phone with global coverage reserved for his boss, National Security Advisor Michael Blitz.

“McIntyre,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“Sitting on the airplane, about to take off for Hawaii,” McIntyre told Blitz.

“Get off and call me.”

“It may be too late. We’re about to taxi.”

“Then find a parachute.”

“Doc—”

“Don’t give me the Doc line and don’t call me Professor,” said Blitz. “Get off the plane and call me back.”

McIntyre stifled a curse and got out of his seat, reminding himself for the one millionth time in the past year that being a public servant meant putting off personal pleasure in hopes of much greater rewards in the future.

Though at times it was hard to imagine what those rewards could possibly be.

Twenty minutes later McIntyre found himself standing in the middle of the rental car lot, briefcase and carry-on in one hand, secure KY-118 phone — handheld computer in the other.

“Mac, what’s the latest?” asked Blitz. The NSC head was already in Hawaii, which was obvious from the background noises of the reception.

McIntyre could have played dumb, but that would only lessen the already infinitesimal chance that he could talk Blitz into changing his mind about what he wanted him to do. Both men knew each other well enough — McIntyre had been Blitz’s graduate assistant a million years before — to guess exactly what the other was thinking.

“Uh, nothing new on Cyclops One as of two hours ago, Doc. I had a secure videoconference with them to do the rah-rah thing, but—”

“I want you up there ASAP.”

“Aw, Professor.”

“To the best of my knowledge, my current employer is the U.S. government, not Harvard.”

“I’m due in Hawaii for the augmented-ABM tests,” pleaded McIntyre. “I mean, my main area is technology, and if that’s not technology…”

“There are plenty of people here. More than we need.”

“But, uh…” It was difficult to argue that he was needed in Hawaii — in fact, almost no one was, outside the actual work crews who monitored the test missile firings. Three different company coalitions were taking part in the tests, which called for long-distance, low-altitude strikes of small warheads, such as those that could be carried by cruise missiles.

The augmented system would greatly enhance “standard” ABM capabilities, closing a serious gap in the defense system and making the U.S. impervious to attack. While the tests involved surface-launched missiles, the production model would include satellite batteries that would eventually provide global coverage. It would be the last and most powerful part of a complicated blanket that would include tactical coverage from Cyclops laser planes — great at short-range interception but very limited beyond three or four hundred miles — and high-altitude ballistic interceptions from the “normal” ABM system, which couldn’t target short-range warheads, let alone cruise missiles. When built, the augmented ABM system would revolutionize warfare. It might even make it obsolete.

Assuming, of course, the system could be made to work. Surprisingly, none of the companies responsible for the standard ABM system had done very well in the tests so far. The surprise winner in the simulations had been a team headed by Jolice Missile Systems.

McIntyre didn’t particularly like the Jolice people — arrogant rich bastards well connected in Washington. He expected them to fall on their asses in the Hawaii tests, though not before their hospitality party — which, if past was prologue, would feature the best available babes in Hawaii.

“You’re stuttering, Mac,” said Blitz.

“I don’t know that I can do anything Gorman and Bonham can’t. They assured me twenty minutes ago that they’d be recovering the planes anytime now,” said McIntyre.

That didn’t draw an immediate response, so McIntyre added, “There’s a couple of hundred — must be a thousand — people involved in the search. The weather was a bitch, and that’s the only reason it hasn’t been wrapped up yet.”

“The President just asked me why you weren’t there.”

“Yes, sir,” said McIntyre. “So, how do I get to North Lake?”

“I have a jet en route from Edwards right now.”

Dr. Michael Blitz paced the length of the room, his right hand rubbing the nubby outline of his goatee, his left hitched back into his belt. It was a pose the students in his international relations seminar at Harvard would have recognized as presaging a major pronouncement, more than likely some wild metaphor comparing a campaign in the Napoleonic Wars to a Cold War tête-à-tête between Nixon and Mao Zedong, with a snide reference to Henry Kissinger thrown in for laughs.

But this wasn’t Harvard. And while the suite of rooms in the Hawaiian hotel where he was pacing was considerably more luxurious than his usual academic haunts, at the moment he would have gladly exchanged the surroundings.

Not the job, just the surroundings.

The two floors below him swarmed with contractors whose companies had staked billions on the right to build the next phase of America’s global augmented ABM system. The name itself was anachronistic, considering that the intent of the next phase was actually to defend against non-ballistic warheads, but it was difficult enough to get the administration and Congress to agree on a goal; changing the name to something more appropriate — long-range, high-speed automated interceptor, for example — would have required political skills beyond even Blitz’s impressive repertoire. Integrated with the standard ABM system and short-range weapons such as the airborne laser and theater defenses, the augmented ABM system would provide a true, extendible shield for the world, finally fulfilling the Reagan vision of the 1980’s of making nuclear weapons obsolete.

For Blitz, the system represented an opportunity for an entirely new view of the world. America wouldn’t simply be the most powerful country on the globe; it would be the ensurer of peace. The augmented ABM system represented a chance at completely altering global politics, and even though he was cautious and conservative by nature, he couldn’t help but be awed by the possibilities.

On the other hand, the missile system would also make many rich people even richer. Thus, the representatives of the three coalitions in Hawaii for the tests were like rival motorcycle gangs who’d happened to pick the same town to rampage through. They were nice to Blitz, of course — overly nice, and very eager to run down their competition. Rumors of malfeasance, chicanery, and corruption were more common than the olives in the hospitality suites. And there were a lot of olives.

The tests were hardly Blitz’s only or even main worry at the moment. Losing Cyclops One and its F/A-22V escort during testing, probably over Canada, was a major headache, though he might be able to use it to persuade the President to dispense with NADT and the other quasi-governmental agencies and independent firms that had moved into place during the last administration to facilitate weapons development and procurement. To Blitz’s mind, farming out national security to private interests undermined the military and therefore national security itself, but it was a difficult notion to sell in these days of shrinking government.

Even the Cyclops accident paled next to the situation in India and Pakistan. Blitz and the rest of the National Security Council were receiving hourly updates on tensions there. Militants on both sides of the border were pushing for a serious confrontation, not just in Kashmir, but across the Rann of Kutch to the southeast. U.S. intelligence estimates had both countries mobilizing large parts of their armies and placing their nuclear forces at or near their top levels of alert.

“Dr. Blitz, it’s time for the conference call with the Japanese defense minister,” said Blitz’s assistant, Mozelle Clark, calling through the door. “And, uh, room service left a coffee cart outside. And, uh, goodies.”

Blitz had ordered the coffee but not the dessert. He opened the door.Goodies was an understatement: A two-tiered cake stood in the middle of several hundred assorted Italian cookies, along with a phalanx of profiteroles and rum cakes. An envelope stood amid the pile in the corner of the table, undoubtedly announcing which contractor had bestowed the sweets.

“Make sure there’s no cash in the envelope,” said Blitz. “Then dump the cookies.”

“Want me to give them to the security people?”

“No way,” insisted Blitz. “Take them downstairs to the lobby, find some four- or five-year-old, and tell them it’s an early Christmas.”

“They look good,” said Mozelle, who was eyeing one of the rum cakes.

“The Devil always does. Please, before I’m tempted to find out who sent them and hold it against them.”

“Secretary of State’s office called: They want another conference on India and Pakistan in half an hour. Word is, the secretary wants to send a delegation,” added Mozelle.

“Just great. You volunteering?”

Mozelle laughed, then grew serious. “You are joking, right?”

“Yes.” Blitz folded his arms. “All right, I give in.”

Mozelle gave him a quizzical look.

“Give me one of those cookies. Then get rid of the tray.”

Chapter 4

Howe sat in the steel chair, staring at the blank white board at the front of the room, arms crossed, feet flat on the floor. The latest of the marathon debriefings had ended only a few minutes before, more or less as the others had ended: with his voice trailing off mid-sentence and the investigators standing around nervously waiting for him to continue.

Most likely they thought he was haunted by the accident, affected because he’d lost his wingman and lover. That wasn’t it: He just didn’t know what else to say. He’d gone over and over and over it until the words had no connection to what had happened.

Probably they didn’t know Megan was his lover. They’d always been pretty careful about that, and no one had brought it up yet.

He could feel her next to him, laughing.

“You’ve never seen Ben-Hur? The greatest movie ever made?”

She’d said that three weeks ago, in the Starr Bar, the little place they’d found “off campus” a good fifty miles away. Megan had started to explain the movie to him, shifting her body to take the different parts in the chariot race, moving fluidly in the dim light of the small room, mesmerizing him. She’d continued after they paid up and walked to the car, pausing for a kiss, continuing as they rode down the deserted highway back to North Lake.

That was the moment he’d realized there could be many conversations like that — long, meandering talks in the middle of the night. When they lived together, or got married, conversations would go on for hours and days, even; he’d hear her talk and watch her hands moving through the air, mimicking the beautiful curves of her body.

When they got married…? Had he thought that then?

No. That was something he was thinking now. He — they — hadn’t gotten that far. It wasn’t even hinted.

Howe had been married once, and it was a bust. But Megan was different, ideas flowing from her, thoughts—

And the sex, of course.

She had promised to buy Ben-Hur from Amazon.com so they could see it. The DVD had to take a roundabout route because of the covers involved in protecting the secrecy of the base; it hadn’t arrived yet.

It wasn’t so much her death as her complete disappearance that drove a hole in his chest.

“You’re Colonel Howe, right?”

Howe jerked his head around. A tallish man with a pallid face stood in the doorway, shadowed by a tall Air Force security sergeant. The civilian wore a somewhat disheveled gray suit; he might be athletic under it — he didn’t look fat or particularly thin — but his body slouched in a way that made it hard to tell.

“Who are you?” asked Howe.

“Fisher, FBI.”

“You think the planes got kidnapped?” said Howe, getting up. He decided he’d been interviewed enough today.

“Actually, I think they were used in a bank robbery. Got a minute?”

“No,” said Howe. “I have to go check on the search.”

“Ah, Jemma can screw that up on her own,” said Fisher. “And if not, she has about a million people helping her. I want to know about Captain Williams.”

“What about him?”

“What kind of guy was he?”

“What do you mean?”

“As a person.”

Howe shrugged.

“Did he like money?” asked Fisher, as if he knew the answer was yes.

“Money?” The other investigators had gone over the flight procedures and the myriad details of what had happened ad infinitum, but this came completely out of left field. “What the hell are you getting at?”

“How about York?”

“Megan York’s family’s richer than hell. One of her cousins is a congressman. What is it you want, Mr. Fisher?”

“Rest of the people on her crew? There were four all together, right, counting her?”

“You think we crashed the planes for money?”

“ ‘We’?”

Howe’s anger had risen so quickly it surprised even him. He felt as if he were looking at himself from across the room, watching his body pitch forward, his arms stiff at his sides, hands balled into fists. He stuck his face about six inches from the FBI agent’s; they were nearly the same height, with Fisher maybe an inch taller.

The agent didn’t flinch. His expression, in fact, remained the same: quizzical puzzlement mixed with a certain reserve wariness. Howe pulled his face back, sensing he’d been purposely provoked.

“I was just thinking those planes are worth a hell of a lot of cigarettes,” said Fisher.

“I don’t have time for this,” said Howe. He pushed past and out the door.

“Quick temper,” Fisher told the sergeant trailing him as he worked his way out of the rat-maze of administrative offices beneath the control-command level of the underground facility. “If this were Perry Mason,” said the FBI agent, “we’d figure he had something to hide.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” said the sergeant.

“Johnson, if I accused you of taking a bribe, you’d get pissed off.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And if I accused your friend of taking a bribe, you’d probably also get pissed off.”

“Yes, sir, I would.”

“Yeah, me too. I can’t see why it changes anything for Perry. But he’s the man. Come on, let’s go see if the search parties have their coffee situation straightened out.”

Chapter 5

Captain Timothy “Blaze” Robinson — known as Timmy to his friends — pulled the F-16 through its turn gently, moving his whole body as he pressured the control stick. The Falcon did a graceful bank three thousand feet above the closest peak, tiptoeing around the Canadian Rockies as if afraid to wake them. Timmy nudged the aircraft straight and level, his movements the minimum needed to keep the plane on its course. He leaned his head toward the canopy, staring out at the terrain he’d been given to comb.

The search force included a half-dozen helicopters, several small propeller-driven craft that could fly low and slow in the mountains, a J-STARS aircraft with a bushel of sensors, and a U-2R providing near-real-time IR imaging. Still, Timmy flew as if finding his downed comrades were entirely on his shoulders. No high-tech sensor, no satellite image, could do a better job than his own eyes as they hunted through the shadowy slopes below. Two other pilots had taken this same workhorse F-16 over this same terrain on earlier shifts, but Timmy tracked over it as if it were virgin territory, sure that he would see something through the haze and persistent, lingering clouds.

By rights, Timmy should be the guy they were looking for. He was one of the F/A-22V pilots and ordinarily flew as Williams’s wingman; Colonel Howe had bumped him for the test, taking lead and slotting Williams behind him.

Timmy scanned his instruments, double-checking to make sure all systems were in the green. The F-16 had a smooth, easygoing personality, a can-do attitude that matched its versatility. She wasn’t particularly well suited to the SAR role, however; the propeller-driven and helicopter assets involved in the search could fly lower and slower much more comfortably, and had more eyes available for the search. That fact was reflected in Timmy’s assigned area, well out of the primary search grid. But neither the pilot nor the F-16 herself would have admitted this. Muscling her ailerons against the sharp wind vortices tossed off by the crags, the Falcon stiffened her tail and held off the breeze, sailing across the valley with the calm aplomb of a schooner on a glass lake.

The shared radio frequency being used to coordinate the search buzzed with voices. Grandpa — the J-STARS control that was coordinating the search — shifted assets around as the clouds slowly made their way off the mountains.

In a combat zone, a specific protocol governed when an airman would “come up” or broadcast on Guard frequency, the radio channel reserved for such emergencies and monitored by all of the searchers. These special instructions or spins conserved the limited battery power of the radios and made it more difficult for an enemy to detect or home in on the transmissions. But in this situation — and sometimes even in combat — a broadcast might be made at any time, especially if the downed airman heard a search plane overhead.

Timmy tried willing a broadcast into his ear; he heard only static, and even that was faint.

This long after a crash, what were the odds that someone had survived?

Not particularly good. Nor was it likely that one of the crew would be this far north. But it was possible. Moving at a couple of hundred miles an hour, you could travel relatively far in ten minutes, fifteen. There was no radar cover close to the mountains, and it was possible the planes had stayed in the air even longer. Punch out over the clouds, get pushed around a bit by the wind, hit your head somewhere — it was possible, if unlikely.

The searchers suddenly began chattering. They’d spotted something in a ravine. Metal.

Though the discovery was over a hundred miles to the west, Timmy felt his pulse jump. He slipped into another turn, dipping his wing and throttling back so he was just barely above stall speed, tiptoeing over the rough terrain. Something was there. He slipped around for another look.

The F-16’s General Electric F110-GE-129IPE power plant developed roughly 30,000 pounds of thrust and could move the Fighting Falcon out to Mach 2 in a heartbeat. The power plant had been engineered specifically to increase acceleration and performance at low altitude, allowing a pilot on a bombing run to accelerate quickly after his bombs were dropped. But here he wanted to do the opposite, and the engine grumbled slightly as the pilot dialed its thrust ever lower.

Timmy flew over the spot four times, making sure it was just a rock he’d seen, not a body. On his last pass he flew barely fifty feet from the ground, moving dangerously slow, just over 140 knots. Still, it was difficult to get a good glimpse of the ground, and the interplay of terrain and shadows played tricks on his eyes. Once more he broadcast his location on Guard, asking if Williams or anyone could hear him.

Going from the F/A-22V to the F-16 was a little like trading a BMW M5 for a Honda Civic. Both aircraft were well made, but the ideas behind their designs were very different. The base F/A-22 was a cutting-edge design aimed at creating the world’s best interceptor. All of the political wrangling and bureaucratic BS involved in its procurement — such as what Timmy viewed as the absurd designation change from F-22 to F/A-22—couldn’t gum up what was, at its core, a great fighting machine.

The F/A-22V took that design considerably further — without, he might have added, the political BS, since the work was all handled “off-line” by NADT. Specially designed to work with Cyclops as part of a new-era battle element, the aircraft was arguably the most versatile and capable ever constructed.

The F-16 was a lower-cost (though not cheap) jack-of-all-trades. Depending on its configuration, it could operate as an attack plane, a Wild Weasel or anti-SAM aircraft, a close-air-support mud fighter, or an interceptor. This Block 50/52 aircraft represented a substantial improvement over the original Block 15, the Air Force’s first production model, which nudged off the assembly line in the 1970’s. Even so, its base technology was older than Timmy and even Colonel Howe, and after flying the F/A-22V, the pilot would have felt severely handicapped in the F-16 in a combat situation.

Not overmatched, though. The F-16—which was known as the Viper as well as the Fighting Falcon, its more “official” nickname — had excellent maneuverability and acceleration at near-Mach and Mach-plus speeds, attributes that played well in a knife fight. The original lack of BVR or beyond-visible-range killing ability had been corrected with the fitting of AIM-120 AMRAAMs some years before, and the Block 50/52 aircraft’s APG-68 radar, with a range between thirty and forty-five miles and the ability to track up to ten targets simultaneously, was at least arguably as capable as anything the F-16 was likely to encounter.

Assuming, of course, that it didn’t encounter an American plane.

Timmy came to the end of the area he’d been assigned to patrol and began to track back south. As he did, the controller in the J-STARS coordinating the search effort hailed him.

“Florida Three,” he acknowledged.

“Florida, we have an area for you to check out, possible debris picked up by our Eyes asset.”

Eyes was a U-2 helping with the search.

“Florida Three acknowledges, Grandpa,” answered Timmy. “Feed me a vector.”

He selected military power, climbing quickly and tracking toward the area, which was so far north and east of the test area that he guessed it had to be a false lead. The mission specialist in the J-STARS gave him a detailed description of the terrain as he flew, saying there seemed to be a large piece of metal in or on a rockslide at the base of a sheer cliff in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies about two hundred miles due west of Edmonton. He described it as a broken silver pencil stuck in the side of a thousand-meter rockslide.

As Timmy neared the spot he took the plane down, asking the J-STARS specialist to describe the area again. J-STARS were E-8A or E-8C Boeing 707-type aircraft that had been developed as a joint project by the Air Force and Army. The aircraft had considerable surveillance equipment of their own, including a Norden AN/APY-3 multimode Side-Looking Airborne Radar. The complement of operators — there were a minimum of ten consoles, with room for up to seventeen, depending on the plane and mission — could process and coordinate information from a seemingly infinite variety of sources. They could direct and download targeting information to properly equipped Air Force attack planes as well as provide comprehensive battlefield intelligence to ground commanders. In this case, the operator was using a newly developed variant of the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (or JTIDS) data link to pass an infrared feed directly from the U-2R to his console. Some F-16s were already equipped with gear that would have allowed the specialist to punch a few buttons and relay the image directly to Timmy’s cockpit. Had he been flying one of the F/A-22Vs, the data would have been added to the synthesized three-dimensional rendering of the area on the tactics screen. The plane’s computer would have calculated his best approach and likely time to target, along with a fuel matrix and a suggested wine.

Timmy oriented himself, tucking down toward the cliff side. He took the first pass too fast and too high, streaking by the mountain so quickly, he couldn’t spot anything. His heart had started to pound; he realized as he pulled the nose of his plane back away from the ground that his hand was shaking.

He cut his orbit, pushing his wing down and falling back toward the target area. He backed his speed off and even considered putting down his landing gear to help slow down.

He didn’t see the grayish object until the third pass. From the air, it looked like the bottom half of an old ball-point pen buried under some loose gravel. It seemed too small to be an airplane and had no wings. Timmy banked to his right, circling around to get another view. He leaned forward from the canted seat of the F-16, pushing around, slowing the aircraft down to a walk. This pass was a tiptoe so close that his left wingtip nearly clipped the side of the hill.

There was definitely something in the crevice of the ravine. The bodies of both missing planes were covered with a dull gray next-generation radar-resistant skin — not the black coating of B-2s but something considered more durable and nearly as slippery. It was extremely difficult to see against the gray rocks and shadows.

But it was there. Or something was there.

Timmy spun back over it, this time going so slow that the aircraft bleated out a stall warning.

He could see a wing farther along, an almost perfect isosceles triangle sheered from an aircraft.

The Velociraptor.

He clicked his microphone to call the airborne search coordinator.

Chapter 6

Clayton T. Bonham waited impatiently as the MH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter he’d commandeered pitched through the mountains toward the area where the piece of metal had been found. He was just twenty minutes behind the initial-response team, which itself had arrived barely a half hour after the call from the flight that had made the find, but to Bonham it was too damn late already. When he gave an order, he expected it filled immediately, if not sooner. The Pave Hawk was moving close to its top speed, but that was hardly fast enough for him.

Bonham had been retired from the Air Force for nearly five years. Nonetheless, he still thought and acted like a two-star general; he even insisted on his subordinates calling him General.

Not insisted, exactly. Encouraged.

After all, as head of NADT, he was owed a certain amount of respect. He was responsible for developing the most important weapons the United States had developed since the hydrogen bomb.

An exaggeration, surely, and yet, one with some justification. When fully implemented, a Cyclops battle element could destroy anything from a hardened ballistic-missile complex to a terrorist one-man basement bomb factory, with minimal collateral damage. The possibilities were endless and, without exaggeration, revolutionary.

One of the crewmen standing in the rear of the helicopter with Bonham tugged at him slightly as a reminder that he was leaning across open space. Bonham glared at the young man, though the crewman had only been concerned about his safety. The helicopter settled into a hover; Bonham was out on the ground before the wheels hit dirt. He trotted across the road to where an Air Force major from the first team in waited to make his report. The major was flanked by a Special Tactics sergeant with an M16, as well as a civilian whom Bonham didn’t recognize.

“General,” said the major, bobbing his head in an unofficial salute.

“What do we have?”

“Piece of fairing from a large aircraft, very possibly a 767 type, though we’re still not sure.”

“Definitely a 767,” said the civilian.

Bonham glanced at the man, who had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The general liked definite opinions, and so gave the civilian only half the scowl he normally would have for interrupting. Obviously the man was one of the experts brought in by the Air Force to help with the operation.

“We’re going to airlift it out, get the technical people to take a look at it,” said the major.

“Waste of time,” said the civilian.

“This way, General,” said the major. He walked up the road about twenty yards, then began hiking up a short embankment. Bonham and the others followed. The metal had definitely come from an aircraft; it appeared to be one of the underside flap track housings that ran front to back on both winds beyond the engines on the 767. While it was certainly possible for an aircraft to lose one and remain airborne, as a practical matter, finding something that had been part of a wing meant the rest of the aircraft was somewhere nearby.

In a lot of pieces.

The civilian walked to one end of the metal and kicked it. “Dropped just about flat,” he said after a long drag on his cigarette.

“I can’t recall your name,” said Bonham, turning to him.

“Probably ’cause you don’t know it.” He blew a wad of smoke in Bonham’s direction.

“Well, let’s share it.” Bonham put his hands on his hips.

“Andy Fisher.” He waved the hand with his cigarette. “You’re going to find this piece of aircraft was dropped here. It didn’t come from a crash. It’s proof there wasn’t a crash.”

“Andy Fisher is with who?” said Bonham. “What company do you work for?”

“I’m with the FBI,” said Fisher. “And it’swith whom. Nuns were sticklers for grammar.”

“What are you doing here, Mr. Fisher?”

“At the moment I’m looking for a cup of coffee.”

“I don’t have time for bullshit, Mr. Fisher.”

“Yeah, neither do I,” said Fisher. “I’m kind of interested in that plane part, though. Figure out how it got here and we figure out who stole your plane.”

Bonham suddenly felt a cold chill on the back of his neck.Stole?

He jerked his thumb to the side and the FBI agent followed him a few feet away.

“Why do you think the plane was stolen?” Bonham asked.

“Well, where is it?”

“Obviously it crashed further north than the, uh, experts thought it did. In these mountains, with the weather we’ve had and are having, it can take quite a while to locate. We have a vector now; the search can take shape.”

“Yeah.” Fisher took a long pull on his cigarette. “You think your guys ran into each other?” asked Fisher.

“Of course not.”

“So what else could’ve happened?”

“Crashes happen for a lot of reasons.”

Fisher shrugged. Bonham couldn’t tell whether he was blowing smoke — literally — about the accident not being an accident or not.

“How do you know the metal piece isn’t from the plane?” asked Bonham.

“Oh, it is. It definitely is,” said Fisher. “I just think somebody put it out here for you to find.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Look at it: It’s not banged up enough to have fallen from, what, thirty thousand feet? Forty?”

“Try three or four hundred over the mountain,” said Bonham, now fairly sure the FBI agent was an idiot. “And you can’t go by how banged up something is in a crash.”

“True. I’ve seen weird things.” Fisher shrugged. “I think it’s bullshit.”

“How many crashes have you investigated?”

“A couple.” The agent took a very long drag on his cigarette, bringing it down to his fingertips. “Maybe a few more than that. I don’t really like crashes, though. Pretty much the technical people run the show.”

“Well, we have plenty of technical people,” said Bonham. “Why aren’t you back at the base?”

“This is more interesting than staring at Jemma Gorman’s tight ass all day.” Fisher took a long draw and then threw away the cigarette.

“Thank you for your opinion,” said Bonham sarcastically. Gorman actually wasn’t that bad-looking, but she was definitely a tight-ass.

“Hey, it’s free,” he said, walking back down the hill.

“Sir?” asked the sergeant who had been following Fisher.

“Stick with him,” said Bonham. “Make sure he gets the hell back where he belongs.”

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant scrambled down to follow.

“Double the search assets in this sector. Use this point as a starting point and assume the plane broke up as it went north,” Bonham told the major when he returned to where he was standing.

“Sir, uh, with respect, Colonel Gorman is in charge.”

Bonham glared at him.

“Yes, sir,” said the major.

One of the crew members from the Pave Hawk came hustling down the hill toward them. “General! Search teams are reporting a find about a hundred and fifty miles from here, due east.”

“A hundred and fifty miles?”

“Yes, sir. They think it’s the F/A-22V.”

“Let’s go,” said Bonham, starting back toward the landing area.

One of the other helicopters had just brought in a small ATV with a plow on it, and a pair of airmen were using it to cut a narrow zigzag trail down to the mountain crevice where the airplane had been found. The trail looked to be about wide enough for a shopping cart, but the two men certainly seemed to be having a hell of a time running the vehicle, and Fisher saw no reason to tell them their effort was probably a waste of time, since a heavy-duty lift helicopter was already en route from the base. Crushing personal initiative was a military job, and besides, one of the airmen had lent him a lighter.

Fisher also saw no need to go down and look at the wreck; it would be fairly jumbled, and his naked eye wasn’t going to tell him anything the technical people couldn’t. Besides, the one person worth talking to about it wasn’t going to answer any more questions in this lifetime.

What was interesting, however, was watching Bonham direct the response teams down toward the wreckage. Though well into his fifties, the ex-general hustled around as if he were in his mid-twenties. He wasn’t a stay-on-the-top administrator: The arms of the denim shirt were covered with grime, and his work shoes were well scuffed. Fisher had had a boss like that once, a real pain in the ass who basically wanted to solve every case himself. Had it ended there, it wouldn’t have been bad, but he was such a control freak that he had informants in every diner in the city, making it difficult to cop a cup and a smoke on Bureau time. And as far as he was concerned, every minute you breathed was Bureau time.

A doctor had gone down to check on the pilot’s body before it was removed. He trudged up the hill now, his green T-shirt soaked with sweat. As soon as he got to the apex of the trail, he collapsed on the pile of rocks there. Fisher slid down from his vantage point and went over to him.

“Hey, Doc. Hot down there?”

The doctor grunted something. It was summer, but it was probably only about sixty degrees.

“So, it was Williams, right?” asked Fisher, taking out his cigarettes. “Still strapped in, right?”

“You’re Fisher.”

“That’s what the cred says,” said Fisher. “Picture kind of looks like me, if you squint.”

The doctor grimaced. “Those things’ll kill you.”

Fisher held out the pack. “Want one?”

The doctor hesitated, then reached for the pack.

“Pretty gruesome, huh?”

“Let’s just say severe trauma,” said the doctor. He took a long breath on the cigarette, held it nearly thirty seconds, then exhaled. “Autopsy’ll have the details.”

“You think he was dead before the crash?” asked Fisher.

The doctor’s hand shook as he brought the cigarette to his mouth and took a drag.

“Was his body bruised?” Fisher prompted. “I’m kind of wondering, because if he was dead, well, then obviously that’s one line of expectations, and if he was alive, well, that’s another. It’d be pretty obvious on the face—”

The physician turned abruptly and began to vomit. Fisher had never met a weak-stomached doctor before, and looked on with scientific interest.

“You all right?” Fisher asked when the doctor finally stopped retching. He appeared to have had some sort of meat dish for lunch.

“Ugh,” muttered the man. Fisher took out a handkerchief and gave it to him.

“Not much left of the face,” managed the doctor.

“Warm?”

“I think he was alive at impact, yes,” said the doctor. “My g-guess would be unconscious. I’ve never seen such, such — The impact tore—”

He turned away and began to retch again.

“Fisher, what the hell are you doing? Why are you bothering my people?” demanded Bonham. “Why are you even here?”

“You commandeered my helicopter, remember?”

“Your helicopter?”

“I’m a taxpayer. When I remember to file.”

“There’s a time and place for everything. Show some respect.”

Fisher put his cigarette into his mouth, considering Bonham’s words. They seemed almost biblical.

Psalm-like, actually.

“So how do you figure the plane got so far north?” he asked Bonham.

The general gave him as exasperated look.

“Blacks out like Colonel Howe’s did, but then keeps flying?” asked Fisher. “Two hundred miles?”

“It’s probably less than one-fifty,” said Bonham. “I’m sure the crash experts will be able to compute it.”

“Yeah, they’re whizzes at this stuff. God bless ’em.” Fisher heard a helicopter arriving at the LZ and decided to see if he could hitch a ride back. “Keep the handkerchief,” he told the doctor. He looked up the hill for his bodyguard. “Come on, Johnson. Time for us to head home. I’m down to my last pack of cigarettes.”

Flying back on the helicopter, Fisher got involved in a philosophical discussion with the crew chief about whether the inventor of lite beer ought to be hanged or simply jailed for life. Because of that, he wasn’t prepared for the attack that met him on the tarmac.

“Fisher, who the hell do you think you are, screwing up a rescue operation?”

“Hey, Jemma. You’re looking particularly pallid today. Wanna cigarette?” said Fisher, walking toward the pillbox that housed the elevator into the bunker complex.

“You can’t smoke on this base,” said Jemma. “There’s all sorts of jet fuel and flammable materials.”

“Write me up.” Fisher poked out a Camel and lit up. He had a hankering for a Marlboro, but his Indian suppliers didn’t go for the image, so they were hard to get. “How come you’re outside during the day? Aren’t you afraid of melting?”

“Fisher, what the hell were you doing?” She placed herself in front of him in a pose that convinced Fisher she had been a linebacker in a previous life.

“Looking at a piece of metal from our plane,” he said. “Then Bonham decided to have me tag along to the F/A-22V crash. Damn far north, don’t you think?”

“They have the course already computed.”

“Sure,now they do: Why the hell didn’t they figure that out before? Would’ve saved a lot of trouble. You’re going to have to get all your little men on the situation board to shift north, right? What are the Canadians saying about this?”

“Computing crash sites isn’t as easy as you think.”

“Which is why Cyclops is still missing, right?”

Gorman pulled the bottom of her uniform jacket down, smoothing it.

“Better off pressing it,” said Fisher. “That’s what you get for sleeping in it.”

“I don’t sleep in my uniform.”

“Pink jammies with fuzzy feet?”

“What did you see up there? Was the pilot alive when the plane hit, or what?”

Fisher studied his cigarette a moment. It seemed to him that the burn tilted slightly to the west, no matter how he held it. Maybe it was a magnetic thing.

Figure it out and he could use it as a compass.

“Well?” asked Gorman.

“Doc thought so. I don’t think he has much experience, though. Make sure they check the blood for carbon dioxide levels, but I’d almost for sure rule that out. Say, tell me about Bonham. How old is he?”

“How the hell do I know?”

“If he’s not in the Army—”

“Air Force.”

“Yeah. So he’s retired, right? But everyone calls him general and acts like he’s hot shit.”

“It’s an honorific. And he’s head of the NADT. He is hot shit, as you put it.”

“He’s a pain in your ass, isn’t he?”

Gorman’s cheeks shaded dark red. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He thinks he’s running the investigation.”

“This is an Air Force investigation. I am in charge here.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t. Getting any pressure from Congress?”

“Congress? Why?”

“York’s cousin’s a congressman.”

Gorman shrugged. She obviously hadn’t known that, though she was about as likely to admit that as the pope was to confess he’d smoked pot in seminary. “Tell me about that piece of metal,” she said, changing the subject. “Was it from Cyclops One or not?”

“Oh yeah. We can discard the accident theory. Plane was definitely stolen.”

“What?”

“I’m going to start going through the personnel files. I was afraid it would come to this.” Fisher tossed his cigarette down. Mindful of Jemma’s concern about starting a fire, he crushed it out with his heel. “I hate using the Air Force computers. Maybe I can bribe somebody to do it for me.”

“Andrew—”

“I’d ask you but I know you’re busy.”

“For the record, your clearance on this case is strictly limited. It doesn’t cover the weapons system.”

“Jemma, my clearance is higher than yours. You know, maybe you should put a little starch into your shirt. Get rid of the wrinkles. They dock you for that, right? Demerits or something? Take away your cigarette privileges.”

Kowalski was heading the section reviewing the personnel records, which was, as Fisher predicted, using Air Force computers. The DIA agent took one look at him and shook his head as he entered the room. Fisher ignored him, walking toward the side of the large room where the coffee was sequestered.

“What’d you find in Canada?” Kowalski asked.

“Who the hell’s making the coffee here? You?” Fisher held up the pot. About half-full, it was as thick as Texas honey.

“I’ll send out if you tell me what’s going on in Canada,” said the DIA agent. “We’re just reading electrons here.”

“Found a part of an airplane.”

“And?”

“And it was obviously planted there. So whose bank account just grew by a billion bucks?”

“Fisher.”

“Come on. You’ve had enough time to dig up some dirt by now. A bank foreclosure, at least.”

Kowalski glanced at the sergeant who had accompanied Fisher into the room. “I’m afraid Sergeant Johnson shouldn’t be in on this discussion. Personnel matters are private.”

“Sean’s not going to talk, right? Besides, he doesn’t speak English.”

The sergeant gave a little smirk.

“Seriously, we can’t talk about this in front of anyone who’s not part of the investigation.”

“Maybe I might find something to eat,” said the sergeant. “Down the hall.”

“See, now you hurt his feelings,” said Fisher after the sergeant left. “Who’s our perp?”

“What happened in Canada?” asked Kowalski.

“Piece of the wing from the 767 that has some sort of serial number on it. Looked to me like it was dropped from five feet off the ground.”

“The engineers assessed it already?”

“No, but you know what they’re going to say: ‘No definable parameters’ or some such bullshit. They might get something from looking at the side — the metal has a shear I don’t think could’ve happened if it just ripped off. Anyway, it’s definitely there as a red herring. The F/A-22V was over here about a hundred and, what, fifty miles?” He diagrammed it in the air. “Bonham went up there to check it out.”

“Bonham went there himself?”

“Yeah, my kind of guy. Except he don’t smoke. Can’t be perfect.” Fisher took a sip of the coffee, which was starting to grow on him: It was now merely undrinkable, as opposed to hideously undrinkable. “Slip a couple of lead plates in here and you could start a car,” he told Kowalski.

“That far north, huh?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. How the hell did it get way the hell out there, huh? Modelers screw up?”

Kowalski shrugged. “I had this A-10A case once. It flew for something like two hours before it pancaked in. Incredible.”

“Yeah, but our plane missed some serious mountains.”

“Talk to the experts,” said the DIA agent. “Don’t talk to me.”

“So what I’m thinking, then, is if the Velociraptor could go that far, then the 767 could go even further, because it has a clearer path and it’s higher. Right?”

“Presumably.”

Fisher took another sip of coffee. He must’ve hit a good spot in the cup before: It was back to being hideously undrinkable. “So, who’s the prime suspect if the planes were stolen? York?”

“No way,” said the DIA agent. “All the crew people are clean. This could be an NSA operation, with all the background checks they put these people through. They didn’t trust the DSS backgrounds. Special checks were done by an FBI unit after the DSS’s came back clean.”

“Oh, that fills me with a lot of confidence,” said Fisher.

The DSS was the Defense Security Service, whose checks included not only searches of data records but visits to former neighborhoods. The FBI checks would have been similar but in theory more in-depth.

The FBI agent walked over to the two long tables at the center of the room where Kowalski and the people helping him had set up several computers. Two had hardware keys — actually, special circuits that acted as encryption devices — enabling them to directly access a government top-secret intelligence network known as Intelink. The network worked like a highly secure Internet; hypertext links connected to several sources on different subjects. There were limits: Intelink information did not extend to Sensitive Compartmented Information, ultrasecret data available on a very restricted basis. Cyclops, for example, would not be found in a query there. Nor could the computers access SpyNet, which was another top-level network used more for strategic security information.

Special authorization was needed to get into the personnel files Kowalski was using, and Fisher had to go through the biometrics ID routine twice, squinting into what looked like a set of stationary binoculars.

“Who are you interested in?” Kowalski asked.

“York.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause she’s not here. I only talk about people behind their backs.”

“Weren’t you saying a couple of hours ago that Williams was the prime suspect?”

“Sounded like me.”

Kowalski snorted.

“See, that’s why it’s got to be York,” said Fisher. “What do you figure the odds are of me being wrong twice in a row?”

“Astronomical,” said Kowalski.

Chapter 7

McIntyre took some pleasure in seeing Clayton T. “I’m More Connected and Twenty Times More Powerful Than You’ll Ever Be” Bonham squirm as he tried to explain why the Cyclops aircraft had not yet been located.

Some pleasure. He was, after all, in Montana, not Hawaii.

“Colonel Gorman is in charge of the investigation and the search assets,” said Bonham, gesturing toward the large grid map at the front of the Test Situation Room, which had been commandeered to coordinate the search operation. “The Air Force took over the search a few hours after the accident.”

“What’d you do in the meantime?” said McIntyre.

Bonham glared at him, but said nothing. Calling NADT its own empire was an understatement; the ex-general had more power than Napoleon and was answer-able only to a board of directors that met once every millennium. The board members were, for the most part, low-key, old-line big shots with massive stakes in various defense companies. On the other hand, even McIntyre had to admit that NADT had an excellent track record making things work; even with the accident, Cyclops and the Velociraptor were impressive war machines.

Gorman was conferring with one of the search coordinators in the front of the room, which looked a great deal like the mission control facility that tracked Shuttle missions. Three long banks of workstations arranged stadium-style in a backward semicircle out from the front wall, where a large multiuse projection panel was framed by a number of small displays, each of which could be slaved to different input systems.

McIntyre took a few steps toward the center of the room, looking at the main map as he oriented himself. The F/A-22V had been found well north in Canada. They now expected that the 767 would be found there as well.

Gorman came over and McIntyre, who’d never met her before, introduced himself. She was a bit abrupt, clearly not happy that someone from the NSC had been sent to look over her shoulder.

Not that he blamed her.

As Gorman explained why the earlier parameters had been wrong — the complicated explanation actually made it seem as if they were right and the plane simply got up and walked northward — McIntyre’s eyes strayed toward one of the young officers in the front row. She was Air Force, a lieutenant with short, dirty-blond hair and military breasts. Feigning interest in the map, McIntyre began walking toward her, nodding as Gorman continued. The young officer looked up and smiled at him as he approached.

Dinner, a movie, a motel. Something with a hot tub — a little class for the woman in uniform, or out of uniform, as the case may be.

McIntyre was about three stations away when one of his cell phones rang. Unfortunately, it was the only one he absolutely had to answer.

“I have to take this,” he said, looking first at the lieutenant and then back at Bonham. “Someplace secure?”

Bonham’s office was austere, its furniture made of metal and the seats covered with what looked and felt like indoor-outdoor carpet. It was a sharp contrast to NADT’s Washington-area office, and in fact quite a bit plainer than really necessary; no one would have begrudged the former general leather upholstery and cherry accents.

Obviously intended to impress visiting congressmen.

McIntyre clicked on his phone as soon as the door was closed.

“Hold for the professor,” said Mozelle, Blitz’s assistant.

Using Professor was a subtle warning: The national security advisor was not in a good mood. McIntyre had just enough time to take a breath before he came on the line.

“Mac. I need you in Asia.”

“Asia?”

“India, to be exact.”

“But—” Hawaii then Montana, then New Delhi. Antarctica would be next.

“I want you to assess the readiness situation at as many frontline bases as you can imagine.”

“That’s a military function,” said McIntyre, though he knew it was hopeless. “Parsons would be—”

“Check the C option and report back.”

C option was shorthand for the possibility that India would launch a preemptive attack on the Pakistani military. While American spy satellites covered the area, their flight paths were well known and there was ample opportunity to work around them. McIntyre was being told to confer with embassy officials — in most cases undercover CIA agents — and work off a checklist of indicators, some subtle, some not, to supplement the satellite snaps and intercepts. While the CIA would prepare its own report, Blitz liked the idea of having a person in country he could rely on.

Such as it was.

“Sniff around,” continued the NSC head. “See if you can get to any of the Kashmir bases.”

“Oh God, Kashmir. All the way up there?”

McIntyre turned around in the seat. He could guess at what Blitz was thinking: Probably the conflict would all blow over, but he’d get a firsthand look at what the Indians’ capability was.

“You have a problem with that?” asked Blitz.

“All right,” he said. His plans regarding the lieutenant changed abruptly: He’d bag the movie and go straight for the motel, maybe even settle for his quarters. “I’ll grab the first flight in the morning.”

“There’s one already en route. I’m told it’s about ten minutes from landing.”

Chapter 8

When he finally reached his quarters, Bonham pulled off his shirt and pants and booted the computer before going to take a quick shower. His suite here was hardly that — two nearly bare rooms and a bathroom with a stand-up shower — and he bumped his elbow hard on the wall as he toweled off. Feeling a little less dusty, he went over to the computer and brought up the Internet interface; two clicks later he had ESPN.com on the screen.

The Red Sox had beaten the Yankees with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth. Hallelujah.

Spirits buoyed, Bonham clicked over to CNN, making sure, God forbid, that nothing had been reported beyond his early bland release on the accident. It hadn’t; the newspeople were concerned with the augmented-ABM tests, which had just been postponed another day due to technical problems with the monitoring network.

Bonham scrolled around in vain trying to find out what that meant. The reporters hadn’t been told, and it was impossible to divine from the statements they’d been given what was really going on. Delays had a tendency to mushroom, throwing everything off. The tests should have been concluded by now; every sixty minutes’ worth of delay added that many more problems for everyone.

But he had his own things to worry about. Fisher, for one, who had all the symptoms of a class-one trouble-maker. This wasn’t an FBI case — the Bureau had sent only one man, not the dozens or even hundreds it would detail for a blowout job — but Fisher was just the sort of bee buzzing in someone’s bonnet to screw up everything.

Bonham leaned back in his chair. He could find out about the agent easily enough with a few phone calls. But that was a tricky thing: People might interpret it as paranoia, or worse. Better to suffer through the slings and arrows of outrageous behavior. Besides, Fisher was probably more of a problem for Gorman than for him.

Served the stubborn bitch right.

Someone knocked on the door.

“General Bonham?”

“Tom, come on in,” he said, recognizing Colonel Howe’s voice.

“Door’s locked,” said Howe.

“Oh, sorry. Thought I’d be sleeping already,” said Bonham. He killed the computer and got up to open the door. “Checking the Red Sox. Beat the Yankees with a ninth-inning home run.”

Howe nodded. He wasn’t much of a baseball fan.

He also wasn’t much of a late-night visitor.

“Come on in,” said Bonham. “Drink?”

Bonham walked to the small bookcase where he kept a bottle of Scotch.

“No, thanks. I’m flying tomorrow.”

“You’re flying?”

“That’s why I came over,” said Howe. “The engineers want to put Bird One through its paces, and I’m going to do it.”

Bonham poured two fingers’ worth of Scotch into a tumbler, then went to the small refrigerator he kept in the corner of the room. The tiny ice tray in the unit’s freezer was about three-quarters full; he popped out two cubes and put it back.

“Have a seat, Tom. Take a load off.”

The sides of the small, foam-cushioned chair seemed to pop out as Howe sat on it, as if it were a balloon. Howe shifted uncomfortably, right leg over left, then left over right, then back. Bonham thought to himself that he would not have wanted to trade places with the colonel, who until a few days ago seemed to be riding the career rocket to a general’s star and beyond.

Bonham liked Howe. He was a good, competent officer, and while more than a bit impatient with the bureaucratic side of the job — almost a given for anyone with the flying background Howe had — he made up for it by delegating those responsibilities to people who could handle them.

A little unimaginative. But that could be a useful flaw. Bonham would see that his career wasn’t screwed by this. A few bumps, admittedly — Gorman was just the start — but with patience it could be overcome.

Hard for Howe to know that now, though. Surely he had no reason to be optimistic.

“Tough to lose a wingmate,” Bonham offered.

“Yeah,” said Howe.

“And Ms. York. I know you two were close.” Bonham swirled his Scotch, then took a long sip. Either because of the drink or the hangdog look on Howe’s face, he suddenly felt paternal. “We get through the inquiry stage, people are going to understand that what we do here is loaded with danger. Tragedy, people will understand. This isn’t a normal situation,” said Bonham. “It’ll be taken into account. You’ll probably be commended for saving the plane.”

Howe gave him a wan smile, surely not believing him.

“You know, when I was a young buck, we lost a Phantom over Alaska,” said Bonham, playing the old soldier who’s seen everything. “Didn’t find it until two years later. Person who found it, flying one of those old Otters or whatever the hell it was they call those things. Utter accident.”

The story wasn’t completely apocryphal; there had indeed been a crash in Alaska, though not while Bonham was there, and not by a Phantom. It had, however, taken considerable time to find, and Bonham knew enough details to use the story to make his point. And the Scotch warmed his mouth and throat in a way that he really, truly wanted to cheer the colonel up.

“Thing is, it can take forever in that wilderness to find a crash. We will eventually,” said Bonham.

“It’s odd that there was no satellite coverage,” said Howe.

The statement seemed particularly pointed. Bonham got up and refilled his drink.

“I guess they took that one out for repair or whatever,” said Bonham. “There are satellites, though. With the weather, where you were operating, they couldn’t see anything. From what Colonel Gorman told me, they have ample assets for the search. We’ll find it eventually. It takes time.”

“Has Fisher spoken to you?”

“The FBI agent?”

“He asked me if Williams needed money.”

Bonham laughed. “What, did he think he crashed on purpose?”

He shook his head as he drank the Scotch. A real bee, that FBI bastard.

“Listen, Tom, I wouldn’t worry about the investigators, especially the FBI and CID people. They run around, kick over chairs, stir up dust, see what happens. This Fisher — he’s probably just trying to rile you.”

Howe rose. “Well, I just wanted to give you the heads-up.”

“I appreciate it. You take care tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

After he locked the door, Bonham poured himself another drink, this one about halfway up the glass.

Chapter 9

They put Fisher and the rest of the investigators up in what passed for VIP quarters in a building near the base of the mountain, reachable via a road obviously built for a donkey cart.VIP here apparently meant you were entitled to running water — cold and colder — in the bathroom. There was a personal coffeemaker on the bureau; its carafe looked like a shot glass with handles. The coffee itself was World War I surplus; if he’d had the equipment, Fisher would have ground up the furniture’s cardboard drawers to add to the aroma.

The only thing that ticked him off, though, was the lack of a brew-and-pour device on the coffeemaker. The FBI agent was as much a traditionalist as anyone, but there were some pieces of technology that you just couldn’t live without. A Mr. Coffee without brew-and-pour was not only anachronistic, it was practically a torture device.

Fortunately, Fisher was adept at dealing with such problems, managing a shuffle with two paper coffee cups that caught most of the dribbling liquid. What missed the cup added a nicely burnt aroma to the room’s musty odor.

Coffee depleted, Fisher ambled out of the room into the long, dimly lit hall, where he was immediately assailed by Kowalski.

“Not going to be fashionably late?” asked the DIA agent.

“I try not to miss breakfast,” said Fisher.

“No, for the briefing. Gorman didn’t call you?”

“I have a policy against answering phones in VIP suites,” said Fisher. “And I was probably in the shower.”

“You don’t smell it.”

“You’re getting funnier, Kowalski. Be joining the circus any day now.” Fisher lit a cigarette as they approached the steel doors leading outside. A pair of Humvees were waiting at the dust that passed for a curb in front of the building. As soon as they reached the entrance to the underground complex, the strong scent of burnt caffeine tickled his nostrils, pulling him in the direction of the conference room.

Two large coffee rigs had been set up outside the room. The sight and smell restored Fisher’s faith in the Air Force; finally a grouchy chief master sergeant had arrived and taken things in hand. His opinion was confirmed by the lavalike liquid that spewed from the urn. Fisher filled three cups, tripling them to keep from burning his fingers, then brought them into the small lecture room. Unfortunately, all the good seats were taken, and he wound up sitting in the front row.

“Glad you could join us,” sniped Gorman as she strode across the room.

“Your health,” saluted Fisher as he sipped the coffee. Its temperature had now dropped to five hundred degrees kelvin, just where he liked it.

“You have anything new?” she asked Fisher. She was in good form for such an early hour; her voice sounded like a cross between a snake and an injured lion.

“Found a few hot porn sites on the Internet. All amateurs.”

Gorman gave him one of her middling frowns. “You’re not being helpful.”

“I’m trying.”

“Would you be willing to interface with the Mounties, flesh out reports about low-flying planes?”

“I don’t speak Canadian,” he told her.

Gorman shook her head, then walked to the podium and began her meeting. She ran through the usual administrative diddly, then briefly summarized the present status of the search. As the team leaders gave their own updates, she stuck her nose into her notes.

“Hey, guest speaker coming up,” whispered Kowalski, who’d managed to find a second-row seat almost directly behind him.

“How do you know?” said Fisher.

“She always checks her notes for pronunciation before mangling somebody’s name.”

Sure enough, Gorman did have a guest, whom she introduced when everyone else was through. “For those of you who don’t know him, Stephen Klose is from the NSA. He doesn’t have a job title.”

That was obviously meant as a joke, since all of the Air Force people whose evaluations she could affect laughed. Klose came forward with an ultra-serious face, launching into the usual NSA bullshit about what he was going to say being “VSK”—very secret knowledge was the actual term the crypto-dweebs used at their dark castle in Maryland.VSK must not be used in any way that a normal human being might actually use it, and had to be permanently erased from the listeners’ brain cells upon the end of its period of usefulness, which by definition had already passed.

Klose then launched into a fairly technical ramble, which meandered through various alphanumerics before his tongue stumbled on the words a code variant common in high-level VPO connection communications.

“Whoa fuck,” said Kowalski with more than his usual eloquence. “You’re telling us the Russians stole the plane?”

“No. There was, uh, uh spying operation, and the transmissions came from them,” stuttered Klose amid gasps from the service people and titters from everyone else. “We’d have to decrypt the transmissions to be sure. We’re working on that. But given previous patterns, we’re reasonably sure.”

Klose rambled on about possible Russian motivations, clicking different maps and pictures onto the large screen. The spy plane’s route had been tracked: It was nearly a thousand miles away.

“It’s picking up telemetry with a towed antenna probe,” said Klose.

“Can it?” asked someone from the safety of the back row.

Klose shrugged. “Not effectively. But maybe. Definitely maybe. The capabilities—”

“So, basically, you’re just pulling our puds here,” said Fisher.

“Mister Fisher.”Gorman’s hiss was so perfectly snake-like, Fisher expected her tongue to poke him in the eyes. That hideous thought sent him back to his coffee, which, though considerably cool, was still pleasantly acidic.

Klose added a few technical details about the probable strength of the radio that had transmitted the signals, an explanation that involved sine curves and something about amplitude. The bottom line was that the Russians were probably aware that something had happened, but thus far there was no evidence that they had had anything to do with it. A thousand miles was, after all, a thousand miles.

“Fits with your stolen-plane scenario,” Kowalski told Fisher out in the hall when they broke for coffee.

“Nah,” said Fisher.

“The Dragon Lady thinks so,” said Kowalski. “Didn’t you see her eyes glowing when Klose started talking about the intercepts?”

“What Dragon Lady?” said Jemma, coming up behind them.

“Colonel Gorman,” said Kowalski, “I think you mis-heard.”

“I’m sure I didn’t.” Her glare drove the DIA agent away. “Andy, if we start looking in those lakes, can you head the team?” she asked.

“What lakes?”

“Bonham is pushing the theory that the plane is in one of the lakes. He wants to start close to the base, then work north.”

“He’s in charge?” said Fisher.

After he got the frown he expected, he added, “How does it fit with the Russian theory?”

“What Russian theory?”

“Klose’s.”

“That wasn’t a theory,” said Gorman. “The Russians were monitoring the flight. It’s just information.”

“You think they caused the malfunction?” asked Fisher.

The idea actually seemed not to have occurred to her. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t think so,” Fisher said.

“Andy, don’t do that.”

“What?”

“You float out an idea and then clam up. I can’t tell if it’s serious or not.”

Fisher shrugged. “Neither can I.”

Chapter 10

Howe applied full military power, rocking the F/A-22V upward as the first phase of the check flight was completed. The readouts were green and glowing; the engine absolutely purred and the jet seemed eager to erase any doubt that she was fit. He rode the monster thrust from the P&Ws through thirty thousand feet, roaring toward the stars with an acceleration that would have made an Atlas-series rocket envious. He started to level off as the HUD laddered through 35,000, still burning a healthy share of dinosaurs and still nailing every indicator to its sweet spot.

The techies on the ground gave him a verbal thumbsup as the Velociraptor’s thick shark’s skin brushed off a stream of turbulence at 43,000 feet. Howe slid into an orbit over the Montana wilderness, keeping the base in the center of his circle. Sweeping his eyes across the multiuse displays that flanked his tactical screen, he carefully examined each digit.

There were now about a dozen theories for the flakeout. Most involved some as yet unexplained energy spike through the shared radar-avionics system that somehow took out the main flight computers. But no simulation had been able to duplicate the problem.

Strip away the high-tech jargon and arcane formulas, and what the eggheads were saying came down to: Damned if I know.

Howe’s own opinion was that something in the telemetry exchange unit freaked out when the Cyclops weapon cycled up. The engineers, of course, said this was impossible — but they would find out for sure in a few minutes, when they cycled up the unit in Cyclops Two, sitting safely on the ground on the ramp in front of its bunker.

Howe pushed his head down, stretching the muscles in his upper back. His right shoulder had started to cramp; he could use a good back rub.

Megan’s fingers, sliding across his shoulder blade, diving into the pressure points.

“Bird Dog One, you’re looking good,” said Robert Jerome. The Air Force major was in the knockdown tower, monitoring the test flight visually, while most of the technical people were in the bunker control room. “You still got your chops, Rock.”

“Roger that,” replied Howe. Few people used his old nickname, but Jerome had flown with Howe early in his career; they’d even teamed up in a Strike Eagle squadron over Iraq.

Like many call signs, “Rock” had not initially been a compliment. It came from one of his early flight instructors, who’d described his maneuvers during a flight and what they had done to the plane’s flying characteristics. Inevitably, it stuck with his mates, but had gradually become something of an honorific.

The mission boss gave him his new course heading and altitude, duplicating the leg of the Cyclops test where the problem had occurred. Howe’s shoulder spasmed; he pushed his head around slowly, trying to relieve it, mad at his body for tensing up. He hit his marks perfectly, but the knot in his shoulder had grown to the size of a boulder, and his hands were wet and jittering.

He was nervous — beyond nervous. He was having trouble breathing right.

Howe had flown over two dozen combat missions, shot down two planes and had a hand in a third, and this had never happened to him. But those engagements had been so quick, almost literally bang-bang, that he hadn’t had time to think.

Now thinking was all he could do.

“Not a peep of a problem,” said Jerome. He sounded a little disappointed.

“Yeah, roger that.”

“All right, we want to go around again. Use the synthetic view hologram this time,” said Matt Firenze, one of the scientists in the control room. He was asking Howe to switch the HUD into the synthesized view so they could run an additional suite of tests.

Howe traded some data verbally with the ground people, duping what the sensors were telling them as he pulled the big aircraft back around. One of the women on the ground somehow reminded him of his ex-wife, Carmen, with her sharp rasp. He thought of her now, her pouty frown, her cigarette hanging out of her mouth in the hotel room they’d had their honeymoon down in New Orleans.

He hadn’t thought of Carmen in quite a while. She was a bona fide nutcase, manic-depressive with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders: She had the diagnosis from not one but two different shrinks, their agreement apparently some sort of milestone of psychoanalysis.

The relationship had quickly disintegrated into a cycle of wild verbal fights, heartfelt apologies, and great sex — followed by weird accusations, wild verbal fights, heartfelt apologies, and even better sex. Howe had stuck it out sixteen months, but the marriage lasted that long only because he’d been overseas for much of the time.

He started to laugh, remembering her another morning sitting at their tiny kitchen table, hungover, breasts falling out of a gauzy, see-through nightshirt, arranging her tarot cards while the coffee poured through the machine next to the sink. She was beautiful in moments like that, unconsciously beautiful.

Very different from Megan.

Howe’s hands were so wet with sweat he pulled off his flight gloves, even though he habitually wore them when he flew.

He’d miss them if he had to eject. Involuntarily, his eyes hunted the yellow handle near the seat.

His marriage hadn’t thrown him off women completely. Sexwise, he’d had his share. He was far from a stud. Some guys could just walk into a bar and they’d be knee-deep in women. Howe wasn’t like that; he’d never been like that. But he had seen women since Carmen — plenty of women — gone to bed with them, made love.

No one like Megan, though. She was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. Her breasts a little small, if you were unbiased about it, as she herself used to say.

She talked about different things. She told him about a painting by Matisse; who the hell was Matisse? he’d wondered, and had to find out so he didn’t look like a total schmuck.

What card had Carmen used to tell his fortune? King of Swords?

“Telemetry is ready on our side,” said Firenze.

Howe had to punch a two-button combination on the right side of his instrument panel to change the HUD mode and initiate the test. He checked his speed and altitude first, gave the other flight instruments a quick read — went back over them more slowly, comprehending the numbers this time — and reached for the buttons.

The King of Swords wasn’t a good fit. Too airy, she said, too flighty. Fiery. Prone to crash.

Prone to crash.

Carmen’s eyes as she said that — accusing him of betrayal.

“I see a confused future,” she said.

“We’re ready for you, Colonel,” prompted the ground controller. Howe’s fingers still hovered over the buttons. His muscles had suddenly tightened to the point it hurt to move his fingers.

Jesus, what’s happening to me?he thought.I’m freaking.

He saw Megan’s body on the bed, then pushed the buttons.

Matt Firenze watched the numbers pop onto the second screen, raw assembler code blossoming before him. The functions were being translated in the first screen, and an array of monitors to his right were actually summarizing the data and its effect (or noneffect) on the aircraft. But Matt’s job was there on the twenty-one-inch cathode ray tube. Hexadecimals — the computer used a base-16 integer number system, corresponding to the physical registers — sloshed across the screen. Firenze had preprogrammed the computer to alert him to a difference from the expected sequence: The green numbers would turn red.

Green. Green. Green.

He kept staring.

Howe’s breath physically lifted the mask off his face. His arms and legs were moving — he was still flying the plane — but his head felt as if it were beneath a heavy blanket. His tongue sat dry at the bottom of his mouth.

This was the point where she’d gone out. She’d been flying to his left; it was his left, wasn’t it? If he looked in that direction now, if he dared it, would he see her vanishing into the clouds again?

Her perfume lingered in his head.

As he regained control he’d come up there — and the plane loomed right before him.

How was that possible?

Its engines were working. Definitely working.

He’d trade places if he could. Surely he’d trade with her; let her live.

Carmen held the card out. Death: the grim reaper in a boat.

“Not death — change,” she said. “Big change, but not death in a literal sense. Psychic change. Like love.”

“Looking very good down here,” said Firenze. “Can we run over it again? Just the way you did it originally, turning the HUD back to standard setting at the right point.”

“Roger that,” Howe told them. “Coming around for take two.”

Chapter 11

When he was six, Amma Jalil had seen his mother set on fire by a Muslim madman.

He had been playing at the other end of the dirt-strewn street in the small northern India town where he lived. He happened to look down the block as the man ran into the neighbor’s house where his mother was visiting. A second later something billowed from the window; at first it seemed to be an oversized red sheet inflated by the wind. As he stared, the edges of the sheet turned yellow and climbed upward along the roof.

A figure encircled by a red robe, ran from the house. By the time he realized it was a person, she was rolling on the street. Even before he started to run toward her, he knew it was his mother. She jerked upright, then fell back like a sack of rice collapsing.

In the twenty years since that day, Amma Jalil had run the thirty meters to his mother many times in his imagination. Never had he managed to arrive in time to hear her last words or receive her blessings.

The Muslim died in the house, as did the neighbor and her two babies. Supposedly the terrorist had set it on fire because the land had once been in the shadow of a now long-gone Islamic temple, but such reasons were often given to justify groundless murder.

The next day Amma Jalil’s father and many neighbors burned down a block of Muslim houses. Amma Jalil watched them burn. He was puzzled afterward. He thought from something that he had heard that his mother would reappear after these new houses were burned, but she did not.

Several times since her death, he tried to feel the joy of revenge; perhaps it would come today.

Captain Jalil sat on a web bench a few feet from the rear door of the Mil Mi-26 assault helicopter, hurtling through the mountains near India’s Kashmir border. The helicopter and its sister ship ran six or seven feet over the ground at nearly 290 kilometers an hour, rushing toward a concentration of vans and radar dishes parked beyond a mountain rift on a narrow plain about ten kilometers ahead.

Each Russian-made helicopter carried seventy-three men armed with an array of weapons. But from Jalil’s point of view, the only important ones were Euromissile MILANs, man-carried antitank and bunker missiles that could take out a hardened target at three thousand meters. Six two-man teams carried the large, updated bazookas in each helicopter. The rest were simply there to make sure they found their targets.

“Five klicks from LZ,” the pilot told Jalil, communicating through a wired headset with the assault team leader. They were a minute from touchdown. “I have the pathfinders.”

“Yes,” said Jalil. He nodded almost imperceptibly to his senior NCO, sitting across from him. In the next ten seconds everyone in the helicopter seemed to catch on. The nervous rustling that had begun shortly after they boarded the helicopter at the base north of Srinagar ended. As the helicopter began to slow, every member of the assault team leaned forward in his seat.

This was the most difficult moment of the mission. The eight massive blades that propelled the helicopters kicked up an enormous amount of dust, even at a hard-packed landing strip. Their LZ was a camel trail in the middle of a narrow wasteland filled with grit and pebbles. Send too much debris into the Lotarev D-136 engines and the mission would have to be scrubbed. Jalil’s instructions were very clear: If he could not take the target precisely on time, he must send word that he had failed. Even though he did not like that particular order, he would dutifully follow it.

The helicopter landed roughly. The pilot said something over the intercom circuit — good luck, maybe — as the ramp door opened. Jalil jumped forward, one of the first men out.

The invaders quickly split themselves into three groups. Jalil went with Corps One, which would take the central approach to the target while the others came in from the flanks. They were running slightly behind schedule; he tapped at his watch as the corps leaders quickly checked their men and then set out. Each corps was subdivided into smaller teams, generally of six or eight men; one member within each team had a night optical device, or NOD, either an infrared or starscope viewer, usually the former. They needed them: It was exceedingly dark tonight, with an uncharacteristic full bank of clouds beneath the moonless sky and the desert.

It took nearly a half hour for them to walk the first kilometer. This was far too long. They had only an hour left to get into position to launch the attack.

Jalil worried that their weeks of training were now going against them; perhaps the men were too tired tonight to face the task before them. He went to each squad leader and urged him to move faster, waving silently with his hand. They made somewhat better time, reaching the midpoint to the assault within another half hour.

Jalil had the option of attacking the radars from long range with the MILANs; he had a good chance of taking out the dishes from two kilometers and in fact could see the outlines of one now through his infrared NOD. But he had planned a full-scale attack, with its much higher probability of success, and he intended on carrying that plan out. He checked with the other corps leaders; they, too, were making poor progress.

“Run,” he told one of his lieutenants, jogging next to him.

Without answering, the man began to double-time and then lope forward. The others in his squad followed. As Jalil moved to issue the command to another of his men, that squad also broke into a trot.

They reached their final staging area thirty seconds late. Jalil thought it prudent to rest them all an additional five minutes before passing the word to begin.

Eight groups of men began moving forward, two holding back in reserve. The two squads in the middle stopped after they had gone about a hundred meters; their targets loomed before them, less than a half-kilometer away. Jalil stayed with these men until he was sure that their missiles were properly prepared and aimed, with each of the two radar dishes and its attendant operator van zeroed in by not one but two missiles. When he was satisfied, Jalil radioed the other groups. Corps Two on his right was just getting into position, but Corps Three was still at least ten minutes from its launch point, and probably more. That was a bad sign: It was the only one of the three groups that had Highway Five in sight, and thus the only one that could stop or even spot potential reinforcements. More important, it was tasked with cutting one of the two land lines from the complex.

Jalil urged the lieutenant in charge to move faster, then handed the radio handset to his communications specialist and turned his attention back to his own men, waiting in the shadows a few hundred meters ahead.

The attack had to be launched in twelve minutes. The plans, carefully coordinated with the Indian Air Force, provided exactly a two-minute window to take out both radar dishes, the transmission towers, and the land lines, isolating the early-warning facility. At the end of that window, the first wave of attack jets would pass overhead, spreading out through the radarless corridor Jalil and his men had provided to launch a preemptive strike against Pakistan’s nuclear force.

The planes were undoubtedly already en route. The lives of their pilots counted on his success.

The men tasked to blow up the transmission towers reported in. There was no one guarding the approach; the charges would be prepared shortly.

No one guarding them?

Suspicion jabbed Jalil. Their intelligence people had predicted lax security — the Pakistanis were famously lazy — but this seemed unbelievable.

Unbelievable!

Jalil’s communications specialist tugged his sleeve. Jalil saw one of his sergeants pointing in the distance, then heard the truck he was alerting him to.

A patrol, heading in their direction.

Jalil pulled up his night glasses. It was an American Humvee, undoubtedly one of the vehicles left to the Muslim devils when they had deceived the superpower into thinking they would fight against the terrorists in Afghanistan. There was a weapon on the back; an antitank gun, he assumed.

They would have night-vision gear as well, though they probably lacked the IQs to use it properly.

The Hummer passed by his team and continued onward, oblivious.

Jalil gave the order for the attack to begin. Two of the three radio towers crumbled simultaneously, the explosions sounding like a stack of chairs falling in a banquet hall. The third fell a second later, but the sound was drowned out by the short screech of a banshee as the first MILAN missile plowed into one of the radar vans.

Then hell opened her mouth and fire spit into the desert. The great god Shiva, the destroyer, hurled his bolts into the Muslims’ early-warning system, obliterating it. Two heavy machine guns, lugged from the helicopter, began cutting down the three Pakistanis foolish enough to emerge from one of the personnel trailers.

A second later the trailer caught fire. Jalil put down his night device and watched as a pair of tiny flames emerged from the larger ones, spit falling from a mouth. They ran a few feet and then collapsed. He thought again of his mother and remained unsatisfied.

“Send the word to the planes,” he told his communications man. “Destroyer has struck. The path is clear.”

“Done,” said the como specialist.

Jalil relaxed. The live-fire simulation was over. They could rest now. The next time they did this, it would be for real.

Chapter 12

Fisher watched the video again, studying the white lines. The lines were virtual contrails — computer-generated plots of changes in the atmospheric temperature and composition of the air due to aircraft engines. Below each was a green data log indicating what aircraft had made the track.

There were a few dotted lines — places where the radar had temporarily lost the input or, more likely, the expert explained, places where the records had gotten blurred for various reasons. The storm system had greatly complicated the process; the team responsible for the data — Air Force personnel and two satellite-radar experts from Raytheon — kept cautioning that they had only a 95 percent degree of certainty that they had everything. But everything they had was accounted for.

Fisher scrolled the display upward to the area covering the territory where the Russian spy plane had been tracked. “He’s there before the test?”

“Absolutely,” said the scientist at the keyboard, Tom Peters. He’d brought his CD-ROMs to one of the ancillary labs to go over the data with Fisher; they were the only ones there. “Flying those loops.”

Fisher nodded. The NSA data showed that the spy plane flights had been going on for several weeks on an irregular pattern, not always coinciding with the tests at North Lake.

The techies told him there was no way the Russians could have caused the malfunction. Fisher was inclined to believe them, except that they couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for the malfunction.

But one conundrum at a time. He scrolled back to the area where the accident had occurred.

“So, if there was another plane here, like really close to these guys while they’re in the test area, we’d see it?” Fisher asked Peters.

“Well, like I said, a ninety-five percent—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know: If this were a baseball game, five times out of a hundred you’d lose. Otherwise, it’s a team of Babe Ruths at every position.”

“Yup,” said Peters. He’d used the baseball metaphor earlier. “See, the satellite isn’t really designed to track contrails per se. What we’re doing is throwing the data through a program analyzing aerosols and—”

“Gotcha,” Fisher told the scientist. “Go back to the event, okay?”

The scientist clicked his keys and then popped up the test area. The lines here were all dotted.

“Storm. We had to extrapolate,” said Peters.

“So the storm screws it all up. Technically speaking.”

“You could put it that way.”

“Would other people know that?”

“What other people?”

Fisher shrugged. “You totally lose the airplanes?”

“Well, we know where they end up.”

“We know where two of them end up,” said Fisher. He pointed to the dotted line showing Cyclops heading north over the point where the plane part was found. “Do we know this?”

“Well, within—”

“Hang loose a second, Doc. Stay in the batter’s box, okay? The thing is, your dotted line could go anywhere.”

“No. It could only go in areas where the atmospheric conditions match the proper parameters, and of course it’s starting with a certain vector, course, thrust—”

“Which can give the wrong results, as the location of crashed Velociraptor showed.” Fisher folded his arms. “Where’s the five percent?”

“The likely place for the error?”

“Yeah.”

Peters scratched the top of his head. “Well, first of all, you have to think of this as three-dimensional, not a straight line. It’s following a certain — It would have to be under a kind of river in the sky, if you want to think of it that way.”

Peters’s voice trailed into wolflike growling noises.

“Problem, Doc?” asked Fisher.

“Thinking.” Peters began pounding the keyboard, his growls escalating. “Yeah, okay, here.”

The screen showed a wide ridge of thick clouds running roughly north to south, about seventy-miles wide and then widening as it followed the storm.

“If we didn’t know where it had started from, you could guess anywhere in here,” said Peters. “More or less. I mean, if you want the real analysis—”

“This’ll do,” said Fisher. “This kind of an unusual weather pattern?”

“I’m an atmospheric scientist, not a meteorologist,” said Peters.

“Yeah, but you can do that weatherman stuff with your eyes closed, right?” said Fisher, realizing the Ph.D. had been offended.

“Very common,” said Peters. “I can tell you we deal with this pattern all the time. And anytime you’d have the tests they set up for here, to get this sort of heavy weather. You’d have it. See, the cold front—”

“Thanks, Doc. Listen, if you come up with a formula on who’s going to win the World Series, let me know.”

Chapter 13

He had very big hands. They folded over hers the way her father’s had, and that memory made her vulnerable. Memory was a weakness, just as emotions were.

She longed for him now, even though she knew he’d been a mistake, a last-minute indulgence.

Not an indulgence. A temptation, a suggestion of what might have been had her fate been different.

Megan York spun her head around the cockpit quickly, checking on the crew.

“IP in two miles,” warned the copilot. The IP was the initial point for their run, similar to the point an attack plane would use when calculating a bombing mission. It signaled the ingress into the actual target area, generally the most dangerous part of the mission and necessitating a series of precise maneuvers so the bomb or missile could be launched. In this case, the IP was 309 nautical miles from the actual target, and the maneuvers were mind-numbingly simple: The plane had to fly around a three-mile track at precisely 34,322 feet.

“We’re there,” said the copilot.

“Starting turn,” said Megan, tugging gently on the controls. She executed a very shallow bank, coming south about twenty degrees.

“Two F/A-18s,” said the weapons officer, whose screen interpreted passive intercepts from the radar warning receiver or RWR as it compiled target data.

“They have us?”

“Negative. Well out of range; they’re headed east.”

“Gun up,” said Megan.

“Gun up,” he said.

I’m ready now,she thought to herself.We’re ready. The delays had caused considerable complications, but they weren’t a factor now. Others would deal with them; she wouldn’t. Her job was here.

“We have target data,” said the laser operator. He exchanged a few words with his assistant, who was sitting next to him.

“On course,” said the copilot.

Megan took one last look at her instrument readings. She had to turn the aircraft over to the computer while the weapon was fired.

“Engines are in the green,” said the copilot. “We’re on beam.”

“Turning control over to the computer in zero-five,” said Megan. “Counting down.”

If it weren’t for the tone in her headset, she wouldn’t even have known that the computer had taken the plane. Megan leaned back, a spectator now on the most important flight of her life.

Second most important, maybe. The first had been the one when she’d stolen Cyclops One.

“Tracking target…. Calculated firing time is ten seconds,” said the laser operator.

Megan looked at the target screen as the seconds drained off. When the timer hit zero, a tone sounded in her earphones. It cut off about half a second later, replaced by a tinny static and then utter silence.

“We have a hit,” said the laser operator jubilantly.

“Yeah!” shouted the copilot.

“My control,” said Megan calmly, taking the helm back from the computer.

“Target destroyed!” The laser operator’s voice had gone up two octaves.

“Oh yeah,” said the copilot.

“Coming to course,” said Megan. “We have a long way to fly, gentlemen, and considerably more to do. I suggest you postpone your celebrations until we land.”