Nerve Center

Chapter 44

When he realized that he had shaken the MiG and Raven, Madrone pumped his hands in the air, as elated as he had ever been in his life. But after he turned control of the Boeing over to the computer, his sense of triumph began to drain.

There were problems. The Flighthawks were in perfect shape, holding behind Hawkmother as it hugged its way through the mountain passes. But they were more than halfway through their fuel reserves; while their engines were thrifty in cruise mode, they would need to be refueled.

He could do that. They’d planned to. He’d gone through the simulations, and Hawkmother had been loaded with extra fuel.

But sooner or later he’d have to find fuel for the Boeing.

Where? It wasn’t like he could put down at a gas station and pull out his credit card. Who the hell was going to give him jet fuel without asking a lot of questions? Or demanding a lot of money?

Why had he gone off without a plan? What madness possessed him? He tucked out of the mountains — L.A. was a vast glow to the left, the Pacific a dark haze beyond.

Madrone began to shake, his body suddenly cold. He felt a light pop at the top of his head, and then he began to fall, or feel as if he were falling.

He’d dropped out of Theta.

The twinge of panic swirled into a full-blown typhoon. The entire Air Force would be after him, all of the military. He’d been screwed before — Army generals and personnel bastards and Pentagon phonies had screwed him out of his advanced-weapons project at Los Alamos, yanked his clearances. They’d claimed he needed a rest, but he’d known they were out to screw him because of what he’d done in Iraq. He’d shown them up, nailing those tanks with his men. Bastards.

Madrone forced himself to sit back in the seat. He was losing it, giving in to paranoia.

The headache started to return. He pushed air into the bottom of his lungs, loosened the muscles at the top of his shoulders.

He hadn’t wanted to run away. But here he was. The pilot and copilot had ejected; he was in control of the ship.

They’d call it mutiny. Put him in jail for life, and he’d never see his daughter.

She was already dead.

Kevin ran his fingers across his forehead. He couldn’t think straight. The universe was breaking apart.

He had to get back into Theta. Now.

Chapter 45

Minerva Lanzas folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the back of the bulldozer. The hazy sun cast a brown light over the dusty mountain airstrip, tinting the colors like a faded postcard. If she’d been in a better mood, she might have almost thought it romantic.

But if she’d been in a better mood she would not be here in Pej, caught between the Amazon and the mountains of Serra Curupira, in exile — Dante’s third ring of hell.

Three months before, Colonel Lanzas had been one of the most important officers of the Força Aérea Brasileira, the Brazilian Air Force. She had obtained her position through the usual means — family connections, politics, sex, even skill as a pilot and commander. As commanding officer of an elite group of FAB interceptors attached to the Third Air Force south of Rio de Janeiro, she’d had power, prestige, and the potential for great wealth. She had managed to shed her third husband — a once-useful if pedestrian diplomat and military attaché — and begun to amass a personal following that extended to the Army as well as the Air Force. At thirty-one, she’d looked forward to a bright future not just in the military, but in Brazilian politics as well.

But then she had overplayed her hand, misjudging the ever-shifting currents of the country’s politics. The result had been a disastrous showdown with the Navy — and then this.

Two decades before, the Brazilian Navy had attempted to expand its power by clandestinely adding aircraft to its fleet forces. Then, the Air Force generals had carefully parlayed news of this into a magnificent power play that assured them of dominance in the government for many years. So it seemed likely that when the admirals once again tried something by secretly purchasing Russian destroyers and sending out feelers for MiGs, the evidence would propel the Air Force to even greater heights. General Emil Herule hoped to become Defense Minister, a short step to President. Lanzas and the white-haired Air Force leader had done good business in the past, with an occasional foray into matters of pleasure; her decision to lead a flight to gather intelligence seemed a logical and profitable gesture.

Colonel Lanzas personally commanded a four-ship element of F-5E Tigers over the screening force around Minas Gerias, the Brazilian Navy’s aircraft carrier. The film in her plane confirmed Air Force suspicions about the two new destroyers. Her camera also discovered that the carrier’s catapults had been modified to launch Mirages — a fact confirmed by the takeoff of the planes.

The two Mirages attempted to intercept the Tigers. At some point, one of the Navy planes used its radar to lock on her group. There was only one possible response. Both Mirages were destroyed in the subsequent battle.

Minerva had splashed one of the planes herself. Like all of her engagements, it was short, quick, and deadly. But it did not bring the desired result.

Brazil in the 1990’s was very different than the 1960’s. The President and his Cabinet backed the Navy in the inter-service imbroglio, even though the admirals had clearly violated the law. General Herule was reassigned to a minor desk job in Brasilia. Most of the generals and colonels who had backed him were jailed. Lanzas, after some negotiation, got off with mere banishment. Her family had helped finance the President’s election, after all. Negotiations had been complicated by several factors, not the least of which was the destruction of the Mirages. A sizable payment from the colonel’s personal fortune had finally settled the matter.

There had been rumors before the showdown that Lanzas possessed two atomic weapons. The admirals fortunately did not believe the rumors, or the negotiations might have been considerably more difficult. They considered that the woman colonel was like all women, a contemptible temptress ready to use her tongue in any way possible — something several of them could personally verify. Brazil did not have its own nuclear program, and even her wealth could not purchase a bomb from another country. Besides, who would be so unpatriotic as to bomb their own country?

But in actual fact Minerva Lanzas did possess two devices, though in some ways they were as impotent as the admirals’ personal equipment.

Designed during a joint-service project with a renegade Canadian weapons engineer several years before, the warheads were to have been fired by a massive artillery device. The gun, had the design worked, would have propelled them roughly twenty miles. About as long as a desk, with the diameter of a bloated wastepaper basket, they had small payloads that were only a third as powerful as the primitive weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The design was relatively primitive — a focused detonation of high explosives propelled a seed nugget of fission material into a small bowl shaped of plutonium at a speed and temperature just high enough to start a chain reaction.

The project itself was an utter failure. The artillery piece proved much more likely to shatter than launch even a dummy shell. The computer simulations of the warhead showed its yield would be very “dirty,” with the long-lasting radiation likely to spread precariously close to the firing position. And finally, Brazil had never been able to obtain the plutonium the weapon’s final design called for.

Lanzas had been assigned as a monitor for the project; her reports lambasted it. But when the government abandoned the initiative, she acquired several of the early shells with their high-tech explosives and trigger mechanisms through blackmail, bribery, and in one case, murder.

Her wealth was not so great that she could obtain weapons-grade plutonium. But she could find uranium, which not so coincidentally had been the subject of one of the earlier designs. Shaping the radioactive metal was expensive and dangerous, but in the end the only thing that shocked her was how small the radioactive pellets were.

The Navy adventure had interrupted her efforts to adapt the warheads for practical use as missiles. And while she had arranged for two top weapons engineers to follow her here within the next few days, she now faced an even greater problem — even if she managed to scrounge material for a missile chassis, she lacked a suitable plane to launch the missiles from.

Minerva tucked her hands into her leather jacket and surveyed the packed dirt strip. Ten bulldozers—”borrowed” from a rancher nearly fifty miles away — had carved an additional three hundred meters out of the rocky soil, making the strip just long enough to comfortably land her Hawker Siddeley HS 748, an ancient twin turboprop known to the Brazilian Air Force as a C-91. The sturdy but far from glamorous transport was now the centerpiece of her command. In fact, it was her only plane.

Despair curled around her like a snake, squeezing the breath from her lungs. Her money was nearly gone; she had no influence beyond this small strip. When she had arrived, she had hoped for revenge, but as the days dragged on it became increasingly clear that there would be no opportunity for it. When the strip was finished, she might — might — be lucky to host a visiting KC-130H and an occasional squadron of F-5’s, or Tucanos, as they rotated north to patrol the Venezuelan-Colombia frontier every third or fourth month. Even that would only happen if catastrophe struck Boa Vista, several hundred miles away.

She told herself not to despair. Fate would deliver her an opportunity, just as it had in the past. She would shape her bombs into something useful; she would find a way to use her charms and the last of her money. Fortune would send her a chance, and she would make the most of it.

At worst, she would have revenge.

Chapter 46

Madrone pushed his back gently against the seat, his head rising with the flow of air into his lungs. Slow, slow — he pushed everything into the breath, resisting the temptation to concentrate on the tickling sensation at the corner of his temples. He could hear the rain in the distance. Thick trunks of trees appeared before him, materializing from the fog. His lungs rose to the top of his chest, pushing him against the restraint straps. He had to hold his back perfectly erect, his boots flat on the floor.

In.

The storm drenched him with wet, sticky water. A torrent ran down the back of his hair to his neck to his shoulders, sizzling along the metal of his spine.

They were on the course he had plotted, running toward Mexico.

He needed to find a quiet airfield, a place big enough so he could land Hawkmother, but not quite so big that they would ask a lot of questions.

They would always ask questions. They were after him. They hated him.

Madrone forced himself back to the cockpit of the Boeing. He could land — he saw the procedure on his right, felt the way it would feel in his brain.

Find an airport now. The computer held a list.

They would use the identifier beacon to track him. He could turn it off by cutting its power.

Where was it, though? Beneath his left arm somewhere. The 777 suddenly lurched to the left. Madrone realized he had done that with his inattention. He imagined himself in flight again, felt his brain floating with Hawkmother. The plane leveled out, pushing its wings level.

The rods of the interface that helped him work the controls spread around him, an infinite series of handles connected to clockwork. He stood inside a massive church tower. Bells sat above, worked by the rods. A large row of gears sat in a long rectangular box to his left. The mechanical gears of four massive clocks filled the walls. The tower smelled of stone dust and camphor. There were open windows beneath the clock faces. He could see through them to the outside. The tower sat in the middle of the rain forest. A storm raged all around.

He looked upward. He could see through the roof, though the rain did not fall here.

What was this metaphor? It had risen entirely unbidden.

The testing tower at Glass Mountain, where he’d been assigned when Christina was born. The place where they’d poisoned him.

Lightning crashed in the distance. Madrone turned his gaze slightly right, remembered his idea of the brain as separate rooms. He closed this one, put himself into the Flighthawks.

Less than an hour’s worth of fuel.

He turned his gaze left, then stepped back into the Boeing’s cockpit.

Two hours more fuel.

Refuel the Flighthawks. Then land, fuel the Boeing, take off feed the robots.

Yes.

Pain shot from one side of his head to the other. His skull snapped upward, shoved up by a tremendous force at the base. Breathe, he reminded himself.

He couldn’t. A panel with his vital signs appeared before his eyes. The green line of an electrocardiogram waved in front of him, flashed into a snake.

Pain enveloped him. The Boeing lurched toward the waves. Warnings sounded — they were very close to the water.

A hundred feet. Fifty.

Kevin. Kevin, I’m here. I believe in you.

The dark woman emerged from the forest. Her eyes were dark brown, the same color as her hair, pulled back from her face and flowing over her shoulders. Her bronze breasts swayed slightly as she walked toward him, naked in the light, misty rain.

I am in control, he told himself. He visualized himself sitting in Hawkmother’s cockpit. He pulled back on the yoke, pushing the plane away from the ocean. The plane responded easily, pushing her nose up in the rapid climb he set.

Climb to twenty thousand feet and refuel. Then find a civilian flight path. Have the computer keep the Flighthawks close to the 777, where they would be invisible.

Find a civilian flight to impersonate. Refuel.

The first thing he tried was tapping into the Mexican civilian control network. He thought there would be a database of flights, and that the Boeing’s flight computer could somehow access it. But if that was possible, he couldn’t find the right hook; his mind clogged and the best he could do was use the radio, talking directly to the tower at Hermosilla — a comical exchange of ¿Qué? after ¿Qué?

Then he got a better idea. He monitored transmissions from flights taking off from the airport, listening for call signs and then asking C3 to identify the plane types. He wanted something similar to the 777 flying southward.

After several minutes, he found a 707 bound for Mexico City — AirTeknocali 713. It was a cargo plane, and its course took it over the Sierra Madres. Adjusting the Boeing’s flight path to trail it was accomplished with a nudge.

Refueling the Flighthawks was equally easy. The Boeing extended the tail boom. The first buffet of turbulence off the big plane’s airfoil pushed the nose of Hawk One down, but Madrone found that the eddy helped hold the small plane in place; if he backed the engine of the U/MF off quickly as he approached, the nose of the plane moved to the nozzle like iron shavings to a magnet.

The Mexican plane, meanwhile, lumbered ahead, rising to 28,000 feet but barely pushing three hundred knots.

Madrone couldn’t make it to Mexico City, but that was just as well. There’d be too many questions there, and people expecting AirTeknocali. He found a smaller airfield nearer the coast, Tepic.

He looked to the right, examining the Boeing’s controls. He pushed the throttle bar gently, then edged the control yoke to the left, getting onto the exact path of the Mexican plane, though he was about five thousand feet lower.

He looked left, climbing into the Flighthawks. He punched them out of the 777’s shadow, felt the rush as their engines began to accelerate. The planes’ relatively small power plants couldn’t take them much beyond Mach 1.2, but they were considerably faster than AirTeknocali 713 and infinitely more maneuverable.

The Mexican plane grew in Hawk One’s visual display. C3 began giving him readings on its bearing and speed, then realized what he was doing.

“Intercept in eighty-five seconds,” the computer told him.

He pushed the two Flighthawks into a spread, their wings separated 131 feet, exactly an inch outside the Boeing’s.

Until the last moment, Madrone intended only to scare the pilot of AirTeknocali 713 into changing course. He had a vague notion of forcing the pilot far inland, spooking him long enough so there was no possibility of him interfering. Concentrating on flying had calmed Kevin somehow, removed the pain to a faraway place, focused his thoughts. But rage seized him as he rode the Flighthawks toward the wings of the cargo jet. A claw grabbed for the back of his head; he heard a jaguar or another big cat growling behind him. The anger at losing his daughter, the anger at being betrayed by the Army, by the people at Dreamland, by everyone, boiled into its scream.

Madrone flashed inches from the windshield of the Mexican jet with Hawk One, then took Hawk Two so close the wing scraped the cockpit glass, breaking it. The Mexican plane bolted upward, then nosed hard toward the ground, its pilot jerking hard on the stick as his windshield exploded and the force of the escaping air sucked at his clothes. Madrone rolled the Flighthawks downward, his mind between the two cockpits, flying them as one plane, flying them as if they were his hands. He was a giant, a vengeful god seeking revenge against all who had tried to hurt him.

The 707 — their 707 — flailed helplessly, trying to escape his grasp. As the pilot or copilot radioed a Mayday, Madrone shot Hawk One back across their path. The visual input from the robot plane caught the cockpit. The pilot’s seat was empty. The other man cried, eyes bulging as the jowls of his cheeks distorted with the violent gravity and atmospheric pressures.

The plane yawed into a spin.

Madrone pulled the Flighthawks back, rage spent. He told C3 to take the planes back to Hawkmother, then rushed away from them and their inputs, not wanting to know what happened to AirTeknocali 713, not daring to see the copilot’s tears as the plane crashed into the mountain.

From Hawkmother’s cockpit, he radioed Tepic and told him he had a fuel emergency.

He used English, but the response came in Spanish. He was cleared in to land.

As he approached. someone on the ground radioed him frantically. Was he AirTeknocali 713?

Yes, he said.

But the radar showed he was something else.

He’d turned the identifier off, at least.

He had no time to figure out if there was a way to spoof the radar or to puzzle out a proper response. Madrone was committed now. The fear and excitement of landing, the danger — it all calmed him, helping him concentrate. He didn’t worry about red tinges reappearing at the edge of his brain, or fear the bizarre dreams and startling metaphors ANTARES imposed on his thoughts. He simply flew.

The flight computer walked him into the airport. The strip was short — they’d have to go right into reverse thrust.

Doable. A good wind had kicked up to hit him in the nose. No problem here.

He jumped back to the Flighthawks. Madrone put them in a very low and slow orbit over the waves. They would be just barely within control range when he landed, but there was no one nearby to spot them.

What would they do if there was trouble? They had no shells in their cannons.

He could crash them into his enemies, burn the bastards to hell.

No. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. That wasn’t him. He’d felt bad even for the Iraqis after they’d killed them in the tanks.

Madrone found himself in the tower again, the storm flashing above him. He took a long breath, but it didn’t disappear. Someone cried below. There was a growl — the guttural yap of a jungle cat approaching its helpless prey. A jaguar about to strike.

Christina!

“I’m coming,” he told her. “I’m coming.”

He fell into Hawkmother’s cockpit. The plane settled down perfectly toward the runway, guided by the autopilot. Dreamland’s modifications to the airfoil allowed the plane to slow to seventy-seven knots without stalling; she could have stopped in half the distance.

The tower controller gave him a command. Madrone concentrated on steering, forcing everything else away. He spotted a plane being serviced near a hangar at the far end of the access ramp. He told the computer to take him there, felt a twinge of pain, but nonetheless realized his directions were being followed. His thoughts ransacked the computer, desperately searching for information on how to refuel the plane.

The onboard computer did not appear to hold the ground refueling procedures, but a schematic of the aircraft showed him where the main refueling panel was located on the fuselage.

He jumped to the Flighthawks — no one was nearby.

He jumped back to Hawkmother, saw from the video feed that a crew was refueling an old DC-9 in front of a warehouse-like building at the right side of the ramp.

The tower tried again to contact him.

He had to get out of the plane and refuel it himself. He’d have to convince them somehow to help.

To do that, though, he had to leave Theta and ANTARES.

The big Boeing rolled slowly to a stop. He couldn’t see the maintenance people working on the DC-9 anymore.

If he left Theta now, would he ever get back? If he got out of the plane, could he return?

Madrone took a deep breath, then closed his eyes and jumped.

He tumbled from a great height, passing through a thunderstorm. Time jerked sideways into a different dimension, as if each second split in half — one part fast, one part slow.

The thud when he landed shook every bone. When he opened his eyes, he was sitting in the ANTARES control seat, out of Theta, unconnected.

Carefully but quickly, Kevin removed the control helmet and the skullcap. The cabin lights stung his eyes. He rose, pushing past the control panels to the door. He unlocked it and pushed it open, at the same time retrieving an emergency access ladder kept in a small panel at the side of the door. The ladder was no more than a roll of chain links and metal bars; it swung wildly as he descended, further distorting his sense of balance.

He tumbled as he reached the ground, arms and legs unfurling in the warm, moist air. He lay on his back a moment, his senses as limp as his body.

I’ve escaped, he thought. I’ll never go back. I’m free of ANTARES; I’m free of the bastards trying to poison me, of Bastian and Geraldo, of Smith and Jeff. I’m free.

Why had they taken his daughter and sent his wife away? To turn him into a computer?

“Qué le pasa?” said a trembling voice above him. “What’s wrong with you?”

He looked up and saw a mechanic. His mind seemed to snap back into Theta. He jumped up.

“Nada,” said Madrone. “Nothing’s wrong with me. I need to be refueled.”

The man stared at him. He had come from fueling the nearby plane and smelled like kerosene.

“What is this?” asked the mechanic in Spanish. He swept his hands, referring to the plane.

“I will pay you well to refuel me,” said Madrone. “Petro, petróleo aviación démelo, “ he stuttered, struggling but failing to get the words into presentable Spanish. He tried again, his brain reaching for the right room — the right part of ANTARES and the control computer, as if they were still attached, as if they had to be there somewhere. But even as he tried to find the words, he knew he couldn’t; he kept talking as he rushed toward the man, bowling him over.

Taken by surprise, the mechanic fell easily. They rolled on the ground, thrashing. Madrone felt everything as if it were being presented by the Flighthawk video feed. Then the Mexican managed to strike him on the side of the head where the ANTARES chip had been implanted.

The pain shocked him. The blood in his arms and legs drained away; his heart stopped.

Lightning flashed. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, the mechanic lay limp on the ground, neck twisted.

The mechanic’s assistant stood a few feet away, terror on his face. Madrone took a step and the man bolted.

Kevin ran to the fuel truck. The hose lay below the old McDonnell Douglas airliner, unattached. It rolled to an electrically operated spindle at the rear of the fuel truck, but Ma-drone didn’t bother with that. Instead, he jumped into the cab. The motor kicked over slowly, then caught. He drove quickly to Hawkmother, hands shaking, thoughts careening as the hose clattered on the ground behind him.

Pain mixed with anger and grief. The bastards had made him into a monster, made him kill his own daughter, kill his friends. Everyone had turned him against him.

Hawkmother’s fuel-access panel had been updated for the automated attendant system being tested at Dreamland; it whooshed open with a touch of the access button and a light blinked next to the receptacle access port, a guide for the robotic nozzle assembly. Madrone had no trouble inserting the fuel truck’s old-style hose, but couldn’t figure out how to get the fuel flowing. He punched the truck buttons madly, felt his head begin to ache.

He felt himself in Hawk One, circling above the ocean.

Madrone slammed the panel at the rear of the fuel truck, desperate. The hose jumped.

Sirens in the distance.

The jaguar raced for him, lightning flashing from its eyes.

Run. Run!

He had to do this. For Christina.

For himself.

For the dark woman, calling to him.

The fuel flowed freely, monitored and helped by the Boeing’s automated circuits, which could compensate for changes in the pump pressure and automatically controlled the flow.

The flashing lights of a police vehicle approached from the other end of the field. Kevin left the hose as it pumped, and ran to the Mexican he had killed on the tarmac. He searched the man’s jumpsuit pockets for a weapon.

Nothing but a butane lighter and cigarettes.

Lighter in hand, he ran back to the truck and the hose. The police were in a pickup truck, now a few hundred yards away. He would pull the hose from the plane and set the truck on fire.

Wouldn’t the Boeing burn as well?

Hawkmother wouldn’t permit him to simply remove the nozzle. He pulled and twisted, but it wouldn’t relent. He stared at the square buttons next to the receptacle assembly. Two were lit; pushing them had no effect.

He tried another, then a fourth. Nothing. He punched a large rocker switch, heard a whoosh. The hose fell into his arms.

The pickup slammed to a stop about thirty yards from fuel truck. The police jumped out, ducking behind the opposite side of the truck. A voice called over a loudspeaker in Spanish and then English for him to stop and step away from the plane.

The automated fueling system on the Boeing had stopped the fuel flow with a bubble of compressed air, then closed and safed its fuel system. Had Hawkrnother been interfaced with the Dreamland system it was designed for, the automated control on the other end would have felt the puff, reversed flow momentarily, and then shut off the pump and retrieved the hose, assuring that there would be no spill.

Here, the pump momentarily hiccuped, confused by the backflow pressure. Rather than shutting down, it sucked and then spat harder against the vacuum — after a brief moment of pumping nothing, jet fuel poured out everywhere. The hose slapped up and down against the pavement.

One of the policemen fired at him. Kevin grabbed the hose. As he began to run out from under the plane, he slipped and fell headlong on the tarmac. Jet fuel washed over him as the lightning broke above; he rolled in the rain, splashing through the gas and fumbling for the lighter. He needed a wick — he tore at his sleeve for the cloth, but the ANTARES jumpsuit didn’t give way.

He had a handkerchief in his pocket.

More shots. The dull, metallic click of an automatic weapon.

The pavement chipped near him. Time had split again; his brain fuzzed as if he were in the middle of an LSD-induced hallucination.

Madrone wadded the handkerchief, pushed it away, took the lighter, and clicked it. Flames burst everywhere.

Breathe, he told himself. Warmth enveloped him and he saw the dark woman a few feet away in the rain forest, beckoning as fire leapt up his shoulder.

Roll and breathe.

Agony.

The jaguar roared from the fire. Madrone took a long breath and pushed his hands down. The fuel truck turned into an outline of flickering red.

The chain ladder slapped against his hands. He pulled himself upward. The plane seemed unscathed, safe.

Kevin slammed the door shut, then jammed the helmet on his head. He was there, in the cockpit, surrounded by flames. He could see the dark woman and the jungle beyond.

The engines wound up.

More vehicles came, an entire armada. He began to back away, saw them all in the video.

Madrone looked to the right and he was in the Flighthawks. The U/MFs flashed upward from the ocean, streaking toward Hawkmother.

Back in the Boeing. Moving.

He would fly right through the trucks if he had to. One was an armored car.

Hawk One streaked at the armored car, slashing in front of her. The vehicle slowed, but did not stop.

Crash into it.

No. Not yet. Only if necessary.

An access ramp paralleled the runway. It was wide and would be long enough for him to take off, but only if he started from the beginning.

He couldn’t turn and keep the Boeing on the ramp. He’d have to back up.

Reverse thrust.

Hawkmother didn’t like the sudden change of momentum. She rumbled as the engines tried to follow his commands. Slowly, she stopped moving forward. Then, trembling, she inched backward on the narrow pathway.

Hawk One and Two danced before the armored car and a sedan. The armored car finally stopped. A police car reached the runway and began driving parallel to him.

The armored car began moving again.

The runway. They thought he would use it and were trying to block it off, ignoring the ramp. Good.

He had it now. He jumped back into the Flighthawks, harassed a knot of men piling off a pickup truck, sending them to the ground.

He looked left. He was in Hawkmother.

Full throttle. Go. Go.

The fuel truck exploded. Though it was by now several hundred yards away, the shock wave nearly pushed Hawk-mother off the narrow ramp. Her right wheels nudged the soft dirt.

He pulled back on the stick. The 777, not yet at eighty knots, far too slow to take off, hesitated. The safety protocols screamed.

He swept them away with his hand, demanded more thrust. The armored car began to fire its cannon at him.

Now, he told the plane, and she lifted into the sky.

Chapter 47

Jeff undid his restraints and leaned back in his seat as Raven rolled toward her hangar. The day had been impossibly long, and he’d had nothing to eat beyond the sludge from Ong’s zero-gravity Mr. Coffee. But the way his stomach was roiling, Zen was glad it was empty.

They had found and retrieved the copilot with help of SAR assets from Nellis, working at long distance. But the storm over the mountains had whipped into a fury as they worked, hampering even Raven and its sophisticated sensors. The pilot and Madrone were still missing, and no one had found the wreckage of Hawkmother or the Flighthawks.

“Major, you need a hand?” asked Ong behind him.

Poor egghead looked like he was ready to fall down on the deck and sleep there.

“Nah,” Jeff told him, swinging his chair out from its mounting. “I’m fine.”

“Tight squeeze,” said Ong.

“Yeah. You should see me trying to get into a phone booth.” He leaned forward, then levered his arms against the low-slung seat rests, maneuvering his fanny backward into the wheelchair. He supported his entire weight with his left hand, then walked it back a bit before sliding into the chair. He’d done it maybe a thousand times, but tonight fatigue made him slip a bit, and he nearly fell out as he plopped backward. He rolled to the hatch slowly, attaching the chair to the special clamps on the ventral ladder that allowed him to use the specially designed escalator.

Colonel Bastian was waiting on the tarmac. “So?”

“Dalton and Madrone are still missing. We think we have the area narrowed down,” said Jeff.

“McMann told me they saw a chute,” said Bastian. Colonel McMann was in charge of the search-and-rescue assets that had been scrambled from Edwards.

Zen nodded. “The infrareds didn’t find anything there. They were going to wait until morning to send some PJs down unless there’s a radio transmission. Bitchin’ terrain.”

Bastian nodded. “No use going out in this weather in the dark.”

“Crew’s beat,” agreed Zen, even though he and the others had debated going back out.

“Dr. Geraldo tells me you want to rejoin ANTARES.”

“Technically, I never left,” said Jeff.

“It’s a tight schedule until we get another Flighthawk pilot.”

“I realize that,” Jeff told him.

Bastian nodded, but the silence remained awkward.

“I thought I’d go downstairs and see if they made anything out from the mission data,” said Jeff. “See if we can turn up anything. I had Ong transmit the data when we were inbound.”

“Yeah, okay. Look, Zen …”

Bastian touched his shoulder, but didn’t say anything. In the dim morning twilight he suddenly looked very old.

“I’m okay, Dad,” he told his father-in-law.

Bastian nodded, then took his hand away. Zen gripped the top of his wheels.

“Dad?” said Dog, slightly bemused. Jeff had never called Bastian “Dad” before.

“Don’t get used to it, Colonel.”

“I don’t know that I’d want to.” Bastian gave him a tired smile, and waved him on.

Chapter 48

Jennifer Gleason spread the printouts across the black lab tables, trying to see if there was a pattern to gibberish that had inserted itself into C3’s resource-allocation data.

Of course there was a pattern; there had to be a pattern. But what was it? Her diagnostic routines hadn’t a clue. Baffled, she decided to get them all on a printout in one place, mark them, and see if anything occurred to her. Scrounging tape and a marker, she laid out the pages of the printout, then began the laborious process of highlighting the interesting sections.

Following their usual protocol, the entire test session had been recorded on the diagnostic computers. The flight computer’s different functions were logged as they were monitored in real time, tracking flight commands and the U/MF’s responses. She also had a hard record of C3’s processing and memory allocations, which corresponded with the various instructions and inputs on the log. Specific commands — takeoff, for example — always resulted in a certain pattern of resource allocations, in the same way human brain waves corresponded to certain actions.

The correspondences were all there, a perfect set of fingerprints showing that C3 and the Flighthawks had worked flawlessly, at least until the point when Raven lost its link with Hawkmother over the Sierra Nevadas.

But the diagnostic program that she’d run to check for the correspondences had discovered a large number of anomalies in the allocations. Sparse at first, they’d increased dramatically by the time contact was lost.

They were short too, and didn’t correspond to actual or virtual addresses in the memory or processing units. But they were definitely there — as her yellow marker attested. Jennifer climbed onto the table, bending low to mark them. She was about three quarters of the way through when the door to the lab slid open.

“Hey, Jen,” said Zen, rolling in.

“Hi,” she said, continuing to mark the sheets.

“What are you doing on the table?”

“Cramming for the test,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Just a joke.” She lifted her knees carefully and slid off the table.

“Some view,” said Zen.

“If I’d have known you were coming I would have worn a miniskirt,” she said.

“Seriously, what are you doing?”

“Something strange happened with the Flighthawk control computer,” she said, explaining about the allocations.

“Maybe it’s just a transmission problem.”

“No way. We’ve done this a million times without anything like this showing up.”

“Not with ANTARES.”

“True.”

“This related to the crash?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

Jennifer tugged a strand of hair back behind her ear. “I don’t see how. You have no idea what happened?”

“Kulpin thought the flight computer on the Boeing whacked out and somehow took over.”

“Hmmmph.”

“Possible?”

What if the gibberish were code from the Boeing’s computer pilot?

“Well?” asked Jeff.

“I uh, well, probably not,” she said. “We’ve never had that kind of problem with the autopilot before. It’s basically a subset of the systems we’ve used in the Megafortress.”

How could the Boeing’s command computer leak across into C3?

Through the interrupts they used for the video, and to coordinate the flight information. But the gateway and thus ANTARES were in the way.

Impossible.

Impossible?

“Jen?”

“I just thought of an odd theory,” she said, explaining it to him. Zen’s eyes began to glaze after the first sentence, so she cut it short. “I’ll have to review a few sessions to see if I’m on the right track. I’m not sure I’m right, but it might be a start.”

“Do you have anything that can help us now? For the search’?”

“Sorry.”

Jeff started to roll away.

“Jeff, if you can get the hard drives back, we’d have a much better chance to figure out what happened.”

“Figuring out what happened isn’t my priority at the moment,” he said. “I want to find Dalton and Madrone.”

“So do I.”

Chapter 49

Sergeant Perse “Powder” Talcom leaned against the door window of the Pave Low as the big helicopter struggled against the wind. The cloud hanging on the mountainside seemed like a massive bear, trying to protect her young.

“Fierce fuckin’ rain,” he groused to Sergeant Lee “Nurse” Liu, who was standing behind him. “I can’t fuckin’ see fuckin’ shit.”

“Sleet,” corrected Liu. “Some of it’s even snow.”

“Whatever.”

“Use Captain Freah’s visor.”

“Helmet’s too damn heavy.”

“Then I will.”

Powder gave his companion a scowl, then braced himself to fit the smart helmet and its high-tech visor over his head. Freah’s suggestion that they take the new device had seemed like a great idea — until Powder put it on in the transport out to Nellis. The helmet had been formed for the captain’s head. It scraped the hell out of Powder’s ears going on, but floated around freely like a bucket atop a water pump once on.

No wonder officers thought differently than normal human beings; their heads were shaped weird.

Normally, a Pave Low would ride with two officers — pilot and copilot — along with a pair of flight engineers and two crew members manning the guns. This craft, Charlie 7, had been flying nearly nonstop since before the crash, and was now on its third crew. Besides the pilots and the Dreamland volunteers as SAR personnel, it carried only one flight engineer, a staff sergeant named Brautman who had drunk at least four liter bottles of Coke since the Dreamland volunteers had come aboard forty-five minutes ago. He definitely had a caffeine buzz — his chin bobbed up and down constantly and his arms buzzed like a hummingbird’s wings. Brautman kept getting up and down, pacing back and forth between the rear of the flight deck and the rest of the cabin, so jittery Powder felt like laying him out with a shot to the jaw.

“There, right there,” said Liu, pointing to the ravine.

Powder flicked the visor into infrared mode. A brownish blob appeared at the lower left of the screen; the weather cut down greatly on the available detail, but there was definitely something warm down there.

“Get us the fuck down there,” Powder yelled to Brautman, who relayed the request to the pilot without the expletive.

“Too windy,” was the reply.

“Fuck that.” Sergeant Talcom took off the helmet, and then nearly lost it as turbulence rocked the helo. Liu grabbed the helmet and Powder tottered forward, grabbing at the bulkhead like a drunken sailor.

“You gotta get us fuckin’ down!” he yelled at the two men on the flight deck.

As a general rule, Air Force SAR helicopter pilots, and Pave Low jocks in particular, had boulder-sized balls. With the possible exception of their mamas, they weren’t scared of anything. This particular pilot had flown deep into Iraq during the Gulf War, and had a scar on his leg to prove he had done so under fire. But he shook his head.

“The storm is too much, night’s coming on, and that’s not a man down there,” he told Powder.

“How the fuck do you know?” demanded the sergeant.

“Because we’ve been looking at that spot for five minutes on the infrared.” answered the copilot, pointing to the Pave Low’s screen. A strong gust of wind caught the helicopter, and he snapped his head back to the front as the pilot steadied the craft. “The scope is clear,” he added. “No one’s there.”

“He’s on ours!” answered Powder. He jerked his thumb back toward Liu. “Or something is! I’m fuckin’ tellin’ yaour gear spotted something.”

“Look, Sergeant, you do your job, we’ll do ours,” said the copilot. “And watch your language when you’re talking to an officer.”

“Hey, fuck that,” grumbled Powder.

Liu squeezed next to him, the helmet on his head. The Whiplash crew members’ discrete-burst com sets didn’t interface with the Pave Low’s interphone, so he hadn’t heard the discussion.

“I see something,” he shouted to the others over the whine of the engines.

“We know,” said Powder.

“Not a person,” answered the copilot.

“I know,” said Liu. “But I have a theory.”

“What?” said Brautman.

“If that object below is the ejection seat, which I believe it must be, then perhaps the pilot came out nearby.”

No shit, thought Powder.

“In this storm, he would seek shelter,” continued Liu. “There are caves on the south side of the ravine.”

“We can look.” said the copilot, all of a sudden Mr. Compromise. He said something into his mouthpiece and the pilot began nodding his head.

“You’re a fuckin’ diplomat, you know that, Nurse?” Powder told Liu.

The wash of the motors drowned out Liu’s reply. The two Whiplash troopers resumed their posts at the windows, trying to scan through the heavy fog and drizzle.

The helicopter lurched sharply left, so quickly Talcom thought they were going in.

“Got something!” yelled the flight engineer.

Powder bent forward to look at the IR screen. A small greenish blob congealed at the bottom of the screen around other greenish blobs in a sea of fuzz.

“Our fuckin’ guy?” he asked Liu, who was scanning with the CIV.

“Something,” replied Nurse. “The rain and sleet hinder the sensors.”

The pilots agreed the only way to find out was to go down there. But between the wind and the ravine, the closest the helicopter could come after three attempts was twenty-five feet.

“Tell the pilot to hold the fuckin’ thing steady and we’ll fuckin’ rappel,” Powder told Brautman.

“That’s a hell of a fall,” said the flight engineer.

“I ain’t plannin’ on fuckin’ fallin,” said Powder. “Come on — it’s gettin’ fuckin’ dark. We gotta kick ass here.”

Brautman consulted with the pilots through his corn gear. “He’s up for it if you’re up for it.”

The helicopter stuttered against a wind shear.

“Fuckin’ damn, let’s kick ass.”

“Hey,” said Brautman, grabbing Talcom’s shoulder. “You sure?”

“Fuck you.”

Brautman laughed and shook his head.

“What?”

“You curse worse than anyone I’ve ever met”

“Fuck off.”

“Ten bucks says you can’t get through the rest of the mission without using the F word.”

Powder snorted. “Sure. Now let’s stop screwin’ around and do it. Liu, give me the damn helmet back and put on your own. Mama always told me never go out in a storm without a hat.”

The Pave Low reared sideways as the door slid open for Powder and Liu. The wash of wind, sleet, hail, and rain against Powder’s body felt like a tsunami, sending him off balance into the bulkhead behind the cockpit. The sergeant smacked the back of his helmet against the metal and rebounded like a cue ball with bottom English.

“Bitchin’ shit-ass weather,” said Powder, grabbing for the side of the door. He was careful not to use “fuck.” Ten bucks was ten bucks.

By the time he was three quarters of the way down the rope line, his thick weatherproof gloves were sopping wet. He managed to toe himself against a ledge six or seven feet over the cave Liu had spotted. The helo had descended a little further, but could hardly be called steady; one of the gyrations whipped him forward, and he just managed to avoid smashing his knee on the rocks. Leaning around the rope, Powder tried to see what the hell was below him — he didn’t want to be climbing through this shit for a lost mountain lion.

He couldn’t see much of anything except some very nasty-looking rocks. And sheets of rain, sleet, and snow.

Slowly, he worked himself down far enough to leave the rope. The helicopter began drifting backward as he went; he twisted and put one arm out to keep himself from smacking against the rock face opposite the cave. Finally, he found a ledge wide enough to stand on.

As soon as he let go of the rope, he slipped and tumbled halfway down a three-foot-wide crevice to his right. His curses became truly poetic, invoking the wrath not merely of God, but of the bastard recruiting sergeant who had steered him toward such a thank-shitting-less life. He continued to curse until he reached the cave, where he found Liu kneeling over a prostrate body.

“Alive. Barely. Hypothermia. Broken leg. Internal injuries,” said Liu over the Whiplash corn set. “It’s the pilot, Dalton.”

“Yeah. Think he’ll survive a shittin’ sling?” asked Powder. “He better. An avalanche may cover the cave opening any minute.”

“You’re pulling my pud, right?”

“Too big to pull, Powder.”

Talcom heard — or thought he heard — the rocks groan above. He popped out his walkie-talkie and told the crew to expedite the stretcher.

The wind died somewhat as they secured Dalton and brought him beneath the helicopter. The sleet compensated by kicking down harder.

Despite the fact that he was clad entirely in waterproof gear, water had seeped into every pore of Powder’s body. Even his liver felt waterlogged. He sloshed against the rocks, trying to keep the stretcher from spinning too much as it cranked upward. It had reached nearly to the doorway when the Pave Low stuttered backward, pushed toward the jagged peaks by an immense gush of wind.

“Hey, you bastard,” Powder shouted. “Crank him in before you go anywhere.”

He and Liu stared at the aircraft struggling above them, no more powerful than a grasshopper caught in the fury of the storm. The front of the helicopter pushed upward, then steadied back, leveling off. Brautman appeared in the doorway, fumbling with the mechanism for the stretcher. Dalton disappeared inside the hull.

Then the rear of the MH-53 veered to the left, the front of the big bird tipping against the wind. Powder thought the idiot pilot had forgotten them and was taking off.

In the next moment, the helicopter’s tail smashed against the rocks.

Chapter 50

“Excuse me, Colonel,” said sergeant Gibbs, opening the door to Dog’s office. “Secretary Keesh is on the line.”

Dog nodded, then turned back to Geraldo, who had only just come in. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me,” he told her. “This isn’t going to be pleasant anyway.”

“I understand, Colonel.” She stood. “I should be back at my lab in any event. You’ll contact me when Kevin is picked up?”

Even though he was a big believer in remaining positive, Dog found it hard not to grimace. If Madrone had managed to parachute — and at the moment there was no reason to think that he had, based on what the copilot had said — he would have spent more than seven hours in mountainous terrain in freezing weather.

“It’s okay, Colonel,” said Geraldo. “I realize the odds. But it’s best to sound positive.”

“I’ll keep you informed,” he told her as she walked out of the room.

Ax held the door for her. The sergeant rarely, if ever, did that for anyone, Dog thought to himself before picking up the phone.

Ax soft on Geraldo?

No way.

“Stand by for Secretary Keesh,” said an aide on the other line. The woman’s voice sounded muffled, as if she were speaking from inside full body armor — undoubtedly standard issue for anyone on Keesh’s staff.

“How the hell did you lose two airplanes?” demanded Keesh as the line clicked.

“Actually, sir, it was one 777 and two Flighthawks. We’ve recovered one of the pilots. Two others are missing, including the ANTARES subject.”

Dog paused for effect, pushing around the papers on his desk. Among them was an old photograph Ax had found while going through some old papers the other day; it showed Dog at an air show standing in front of a P-51 Mustang.

Damn nice airplane. He hadn’t had a chance to fly it, though.

“What is this going to do to the project?” Keesh demanded.

“At the moment, Mr. Secretary, we’re in the process of recovering our people. We haven’t even located the wreckage yet.

“You’re taking your damn time.”

There was no sense arguing with him. Bastian looked up as the door to his office opened again. Danny Freah stood there with one of his most serious expressions.

“With all due respect, sir, I’m advised by my security people that we’re speaking on an open line,” said Bastian.

“That’s not going to get you off the hook, Bastian.”

Dog was tempted — sorely tempted — to ask if Keesh thought he’d arranged the crash solely to make the Secretary look bad. But he merely told Keesh that he would keep him apprised through the proper channels, then hung up the phone.

“You’re not here about that line being open, are you?” Dog said to Danny, who was still standing in the doorway.

“They’ve lost contact with the Pave Low that Powder and Liu were on,” said Freah. “They think they went down. The storm’s pretty bad.”

“Excuse me, Colonel,” said Major Stockard, rolling up behind Danny. “Can I get in on this?”

“I don’t know that there’s anything to get in on, Jeff,” said Bastian.

“Nellis is asking for help in the search,” explained Danny, who obviously had already told Zen what was up.

“Raven and the Flighthawks can help,” said Stockard. “The IR sensors on the U/MFs are more sensitive than the units in the Pave Lows. We can get in through the storm while Raven stays up above.”

“We just lost two Flighthawks,” said Bastian.

“The Flighthawks had nothing to do with that,” said Jeff. He gave his wheels a shove, then pulled his hands close to his body as the chair rolled across the threshold, narrowly clearing the doorjambs. “We can be off the ground inside of thirty minutes. Twenty, easy. Raven’s ready to go. With the weather, the Flighthawks would extend our vision exponentially.”

“I don’t know Jeff. Those are our last two Flighthawks.”

“Why do we have them if we can’t use them?”

“You have to be tired as shit.”

“Screw that.”

Bastian folded his arms. If the Flighthawks ran into trouble in the heavy storm — and the weather report was anything but pleasant — Keesh would be unmerciful. Worse, the Flighthawk program might be set back six months or even longer.

But he had two missing men, plus two Whiplash team members and the crew of a Pave Low down. What was more important?

His men certainly. Unless you added in the lives of men who might be saved in the future by a squadron of Flight-hawks.

As for Secretary Keesh…

“SAR assets are strapped. They’re looking for help,” added Danny. “That was the only Pave Low available within a two-hundred-mile radius.”

“You sure you’re not tired?” Dog asked Jeff.

“Of course I’m tired,” said Zen. “But I’m not going to fall asleep now anyway.”

“Go for it.”

Chapter 51

Powder slogged his sodden boot up and over the rock outcropping, forcing his foot into the small crevice. Then he boosted himself over the razor-sharp diagonal, finally onto solid and relatively flat ground. The CIV and its helmet were heavy, but they did at least give him a pretty clear picture, even in these conditions — the helicopter sat on its side about a hundred yards away, its nose pointed down the opposite slope. One of its blades pointed into the air like a giant middle finger raised against the storm. The rain and sleet had turned back into snow, which had already piled about an inch high against the fuselage.

“Shit,” Powder told Liu, who was just clearing the ravine behind him. He pointed the flashlight attached to his wrist, showing Nurse the way.

“Light a flare,” suggested Liu, pointing left. “We’ll stage off those rocks if anything goes wrong.”

The night turned crimson-gray, the flare burning fitfully in the wet snow. They walked gingerly, unsure of their footing. The crash had forced the front of the helicopter’s fuselage together; Powder prepared himself for a gruesome sight.

He couldn’t see much at first. Liu climbed onto the chin of the helicopter, draping himself over it and then smashing at the side glass with his heavy flashlight and elbow. Powder took out another flashlight from his kit and clambered up.

Someone groaned inside.

“We’re here, buddy,” shouted Talcom. Adrenaline shot through him; he reached his fingers into the door frame and somehow managed to pry it open, the metal twisting as he did so. He got to his knees and then his feet, pushing the bent panel away with all of his weight. The mangled hinges gave way and the door flew through the air and into the snow.

The pilot and copilot were still strapped into their seats. Liu leaned in, slinking over the men to check on them.

“Pulses strong,” said Nurse. “Let’s take this slow in case they injured their backs.”

“Hey!” yelled a voice in the back. “Hey!”

Powder clicked the visor from starlight to infrared mode and scanned the dim interior. Fingers fluttered in front of a wall; the viewer made them look like worms in a lake, unattached to anything human.

The sergeant slipped the helmet back and yelled into the helicopter. “Yo!”

“Hello,” yelled Brautman. “Leg’s broke,” he added, his voice almost cheerful. “Otherwise, I’m cool except for whatever the hell is holding me down.”

It looked like a good hunk of the helicopter wall.

“You say the F word yet?” asked the flight engineer as Powder tried to push his way toward him.

“No way,” answered Powder. “You owe me ten.”

“Mission’s not done yet.”

“Need a pneumatic jack to get him out.” said Liu from somewhere outside the helicopter.

“Screw that.” Powder straightened in a small spot between the forward area and what was left of the rear compartment. He had enough clearance to sit upright, but still couldn’t see Brautman’s head. “I said ‘screw,’ not the F word,” he yelled back to the trapped crewman.

“I heard ya. You will.”

Powder backed out, gingerly climbing atop the wrecked helicopter. Liu stood on the ground near the door — the chopper body had been squeezed so tight it barely came to his shoulders. Moving forward on his knees, Powder looked for something to use to help lever the rear door off its rail. When he couldn’t see anything, he set himself at a forty-five-degree angle and managed to jerk the metal out in two loud rips, producing a two-foot-wide opening.

“I ate my Wheaties this morning,” he told Liu as he leaned back to rest. His arm felt like he’d pulled it out of its socket.

The helicopter creaked as he spoke. He straightened, then realized they were moving — not far, not fast, but definitely moving.

“We may slide down the slope,” said Liu.

“Shit,” answered Powder.

“Get the pilots out one at a time, ASAP.”

As Liu said that, he was already clambering back to the cockpit. He leaned in, trying to release the pilot from his restraints.

The helicopter slid some more, then stopped. Powder thought of trying to find something to prop it in place, but quickly dismissed the idea. He swung down and took the pilot’s body from Liu.

The pilot was heavier than he thought, and Talcom’s legs buckled as he carried the man toward the rocks they had pointed out before. The rocks didn’t offer much shelter, but they were easy to find in the swirling snow and sat on the other side of a large crack, which might — might — mean they were safe from the slide. Powder laid the pilot as flat as possible, then lifted the crash shield on his helmet to make sure he was still breathing. When the man opened his eyes, Powder nudged his cheek with his thick thumb, then closed the shield. He took off the CIV and smart helmet, placing them next to the pilot, and ran back to the Pave Low. Liu was just lifting the copilot out.

“You’re strong for a little guy, Liu.”

“He’s conscious,” said Liu, holding the man in front of him as if he were displaying a piece of meat.

Powder clambered up onto the helicopter. The aircraft slid a lot this time. “Damn,” he said, grabbing the copilot.

“I’m okay,” grumbled the man. “I can walk myself.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Powder, ignoring him. He turned to get off the helicopter, then noticed something peculiar — though the Pave Low had moved several times, it hadn’t pushed up any snow in front of it as it slid.

“That’s because the whole sheet of ice is moving,” explained Liu before ducking back inside the craft.

“Damn,” said Powder. “Damn, damn, damn.”

He helped the copilot back to the rock, then ran to Liu. The wind rattled the helicopter propeller back and forth. Powder heard a low rumble, as if a train were approaching from the distance.

“Liu! What the hell are you doing in there?”

“If we use this spar as a lever,” Liu answered from inside the cockpit, “maybe we can move the wall away.”

“The whole thing is moving,” said Powder. “Feel it?”

“Quickly then.”

“Shit.” Talcom squeezed around Liu to push his legs into the small opening to the rear of the helo. There was a loud groan from outside as he did.

“Hope that was the Abominable Snowman,” he said.

“Ice is giving way,” said Brautman.

Powder wedged his foot against the metal side of the helicopter and tried levering the piece of spar in the opposite direction. As he did, Liu dropped the flashlight.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Brautman told them. “Go.”

“Now who’s using bad words?” said Powder. The helicopter or the ice it was on slid downward, and he felt an empty impotence in his stomach.

“Screw this horseshit!” Talcom yelled, jamming his boots against the metal.

It snapped away, springing back as the door released from its latch. Snow and sleet and ice and rain fell through, twinkling artistically in the dim flare-light. None of them stopped to admire it — Brautman pulled himself upward through the hole, helped by Liu, who was outside. The flight engineer’s leg trailed behind him at an odd angle, and Powder felt a twinge in his stomach, thinking of how the damn thing must feel.

The twinge was replaced by full-scale nausea as the helicopter jerked hard to his left, starting to ride down the incline. It had finally slipped on the ice — which also shifted in its own direction.

“Get the hell out of here! Go!” Powder shouted. He’d started to push himself upward when he saw something moving beneath the twisted metal where the snow was falling.

Dalton, still strapped to the stretcher.

Chapter 52

Hawk Three knifed through the turbulence, accelerating toward the jagged, snow-laden peaks where the Pave Low had disappeared. While the flight computer could cope with the strong vortices of wind easily enough, there was little it could do about the ice trying to freeze on the wings. The lower and slower Zen went — and to do the search properly, he had to go low and slow — the more precipitation clung to the control surfaces. While not enough to keep the plane from flying, it added considerably to the difficulty factor in the swirling winds near the crags.

“Sector Alpha-Baker-1 is clear,” said Jennifer Gleason, who’d volunteered to come along and help monitor the scans. Major Cheshire had bumped Bree’s copilot and was at the stick; Bree had slid over to the second officer’s seat and was also studying the feeds.

“Alpha-Baker-2 is also clear,” snapped Breanna. Both women were examining the IR video from Hawk Four, which was being flown entirely by the computer through a ravine at the very northern edge of the search area. The weather there was not as severe and the terrain not as twisted as the area Zen was working himself further southwest.

Hawk Three hit a patch of clear air and shot forward as if her engine had ingested pure oxygen. Zen steadied his left joystick, glancing at the vital signs projected at the lower edge of the visor. Everything was in the green.

His attention back on the main screen, he saw a dull shadow at the edge of the approaching valley, below a triple-dagger peak. It wasn’t warm enough to be a body, but since it was the first non-rock he’d seen, he switched from the IR to the optical feed.

“Computer, zoom in the dark object at the bottom of Hawk Three’s visual feed,” Zen directed.

The computer formed a box around the image, which seemed to burst into the middle of his view screen.

Ejection seat.

“Mark location,” said Jeff.

“What do you have?” Jennifer asked over the interphone. “Jeff?” said Bree.

“Excuse me. Are you manning your scans?” he snapped. “Affirmative, Hawk Leader,” answered Bree testily. Jennifer said nothing.

“Raven, I have a piece of the seat, I think, from the Boeing,” Jeff said, technically speaking to Cheshire though they could all hear him. “I’ve marked it. I’ll continue to sweep the sector. Hawk Four is going to stay in the pattern we planned.”

“Raven Leader acknowledges,” said the pilot. Although Jeff was actually sitting a few feet below Cheshire on Raven’s lower deck, they had found it easier to communicate as if flying separate planes — which, of course, they were.

Zen pushed Hawk Three to the south, dropping her lower to scan close to a W-shaped ravine at the edge of a shallow mountain plateau. The severe storm shortened the IR’s range considerably, though from a technical viewpoint the fact that he was even receiving an image was impressive. Even light rain played havoc with conventional FUR systems.

As he neared the end of the ravine, a small shadow flickered into the upper right-hand corner of the view screen. He was by it before he could ask for a magnification; he pulled back on the Flighthawk’s joystick, then felt the plane fluttering in the heavy wind.

“Disconnect in zero-three,” warned the computer. The storm and jagged terrain degraded the link between the Hawk and its mother.

“Raven, I need you closer to Three,” snapped Jeff. He started to pull up, but saw something in the IR screen at the right-hand corner. He pushed toward it, despite the disconnect warning that flashed in the screen.

“Disconnect in zero-three, two—”

Zen managed to nudge the U/MF upward at the last second, retaining the data flow. But the storm whipped hard against the small plane’s wings. It pushed up and then down, yawing like a gum wrapper tossed from a car. Even with the assistance of the computer and the vectoring nozzles, Zen couldn’t get it where he wanted.

“Raven, lower,” he demanded.

“You want me to park on Mount Whitney?” snapped Cheshire.

“That’s too high.” He just missed a ravine wall as he tried to slide Hawk Three back toward the ridge where he’d seen the image. Hawk Three hugged the hillside, her altimeter nudging six thousand feet — half the altitude Raven needed to clear the surrounding peaks. This was too damn low for comfort, and even C3 began doing a Bitchin’ Betty routine, warning that he was going too low and too slow. Still, the only way to get a good view was to practically crawl across the terrain. Hawk Three’s forward airspeed nudged below ninety knots.

Stall warning. But something hot, real hot, filled the screen. Above — up. Jeff throttled and pushed the stick, climbing the side of the ridge.

“Disconnect in zero-three.”

“Nancy! Closer!”

“We’re trying, Zen!”

A red bar appeared at the bottom of his view screen as the computer continued counting down the disconnect.

But there was a man there. Definitely a man — two men, huddled.

As Zen went to push the GPS marker, the screen blanked into gray fuzz. The default sequence knocked the view screen back to the optical view from Hawk Four, which had just begun knifing east.

A magenta disc filled the screen; Jeff felt suddenly weightless, sliding backward. The right side of his head imploded, pain shooting everywhere — he closed his eyes as he spun back, caught by some trick of fatigue or exertion or merely disorientation. He couldn’t see, couldn’t think. Streaks of rain and lightning flashed by him, close enough to feel but not see. The world split beneath him, the fault line running through his spine.

Then he felt his toes. He could actually feel his toes.

The sun turned mercury red, then steamed off, evaporating in a hiss that filled his helmet.

An ANTARES flashback because he’d been thinking of Kevin?

Or because he’d taken the first dose of drugs as soon as Bastian gave the okay to rejoin the program?

That was less than two hours ago. The screen was back to normal — it had to have been a weird anomaly caused by the lightning.

And fatigue. He was getting damn tired.

“Sorry, shit, I’m sorry. The storm is too fierce here,” said Cheshire somewhere outside of his helmet. She apologized for the wicked, disorienting turbulence shaking the plane.

Raven shuddered, trying desperately to fight off a wind shear that dropped her nearly two hundred feet in the blink of an eye. The plane pitched onto her side, just barely staying airborne.

“Zen, I can’t get any lower than this.”

“Hawk Leader acknowledges,” he snapped. “C3, reestablish contact with Hawk Three.”

“Attempting,” answered the voice module.

“Try harder,” he said, even though he realized the voice command would merely confuse the computer. He altered Hawk Four’s course to close on the area Three had been surveying, and was within ten miles when the computer finally managed to restore full bandwidth with the U/MF.

Fail-safe mode during disconnect had caused the robot to fly upward out of the mountains. Because of that, Four was actually closer to the slope where he’d seen what he thought were men — or at least he thought it was closer, since he hadn’t marked it. Zen let the computer put Three into a safe orbit at fifteen thousand feet over Raven, and brought Four into the treacherous peaks. He flew south, then circled back, pushing downward as he came.

A fire burned at the left-hand side of his screen. Above to the right loomed a large object.

The Pave Low. Men nearby.

Jeff quickly marked the location.

“I have them,” he told Nancy. “Get me the SAR commander.”

“Coast Guard asset Colgate is already en route to our position, Hawk Commander,” answered Breanna from the copilot’s station, where she was handling communications. “ETA is ten minutes. They’re requesting you guide them in.”

“I have a flare on the ground. Two figures near a rock, three figures. Something else in the helicopter,” said Zen, nudging Hawk Four to get as close as possible in the storm. “Looks like the helicopter’s moving, sliding or something.”

“Opening Colgate channel. I think I’m getting something on Guard as well.”

The helicopter seemed to hop in the screen.

“Colgate better get a move on,” said Zen. “And Bree, if you can get the crew on Guard, tell them to get the hell off that ice. The whole side of that hill is heading for the ravine.”

Chapter 53

Powder shouldered against the helicopter spar, then felt something shove down behind him. Metal crunched and crackled — he pushed around what had been a flight engineer’s seat, kneeling and then crawling into the cabin opening. Dalton lay beneath some blankets just a few feet away, his legs exposed.

They were moving. The earth rumbled beneath them.

“Yo, Captain, I’m gonna cut you outta this,” said Powder, feeling along the stretcher for the restraints. “I sure hope your back ain’t messed up, ‘cause we gotta go.”

Dalton groaned, or at least Powder thought he groaned. Powder pulled his combat knife against the belts, slashing and hacking as the back end of the helo slid around. His hand Hew free as he reached the last strap. He lost the knife but grabbed Dalton, pulling him backward as he pushed upward to get out of the fuselage. Dalton dragged behind, still attached somehow.

“Come on!” shouted Powder, pulling. Whatever held the pilot down snapped free. Powder got his elbow on the metal side below the open doorway and pushed upward like a swimmer trying to rise from the bottom of a swimming pool. He managed to get out of the fuselage, dragging the pilot with him as they tumbled into the snow and ice and rocks. Powder got to his feet, clawing in the direction of the others as the mountain rumbled beneath him. Something hard hit him in the chest, but he kept moving, churning his legs and struggling to keep Dalton in the grip of his icy fingers. After about five or six yards he fell sideways into a fissure of earth, then lost his balance backward.

Something grabbed his scalp, yanking at it but losing its grip; nonetheless, it helped him regain his momentum, and he threw himself and the injured pilot forward, scrambling as a pair of arms caught his side and hauled him upward.

“Shit fuck,” he said, landing on the ground across the fissure near the rock, helped there by Liu and the copilot.

“You owe me ten bucks,” growled Brautman on the ground.

“Fuck yourself,” Powder said to him, easing Dalton to the ground.

“Want to try double or nothing?”

Despite the storm, they all started laughing.

Chapter 54

Raven had been outfitted as an electronics warfare and electronics intelligence or Elint test bed, and her sleek underbody included several long aerodynamic bulges containing high-tech antennae. Though not trained to squeeze the last ounce of reception out of the equipment, Bree knew enough to pinpoint the strongest areas of the PRC-90 transmission beacon as it bounced out of the rocks. The enhanced gear in Raven gathered different parts of the broadcast, in effect cobbling the full transmission from a series of broken shadows. The problem was making the PRC-90 hear them; the radios were strictly line-of-sight and the surrounding ridges gave only a narrow reception cone.

“I think they’re laughing,” Breanna told the others on the interphone.

“Laughing?” said Cheshire.

“Hang on.” She clicked back into the Guard frequency. “Charlie 7, this is Raven. Can you hear me?”

“Charlie 7. Got you Raven, honey.”

The crewman was definitely giggling.

“Honey?”

“Kind of wet down here,” responded whoever was handling the radio. “Send some umbrellas if you’re not picking us up.” Major Cheshire tapped Breanna’s shoulder.

“What’s up?”

“I think they’re suffering from oxygen depletion or something,” said Breanna, shrugging before giving the Coast Guard rescue helicopter a vector to the crash.

“Colgate acknowledges. Bitchin’ weather, but — we see them, we see them!” said the Coast Guard pilot, his voice suddenly jumping an octave. “We can get them as long as they stay in the clear there. We can get them!”

“Raven acknowledges. We’ll stand by.”

Zen took off his control helmet and leaned back as Jennifer dialed the video feed from Hawk Four into a common channel, allowing the pilot and copilot to view the rescue on one of the multi-configurable screens upstairs. It looked almost — almost — easy from here, as the Dauphin helicopter battled against the wind, rain, and sleet, hovering only a few feet from the downed crew.

“Kick-ass,” said Zen as Colgate took on the last man and bolted upward. “Kick-ass.”

“Yeah,” said Jennifer.

C3 flew the two planes in an orbit at fifteen thousand feet, now below Raven as she stayed well out of the way of the rescue helicopter. Zen rolled his neck and stretched his shoulders, taking advantage of the break to relax a little. He took a long, slow pull on his Gatorade, getting ready to jump back into things.

He already had a grid marked out to resume the search for Madrone and the downed planes. Between this position and the spot where Kulpin had been recovered, they’d have a fairly decent idea where the wreckage ought to be.

Finding it in the storm, of course, wouldn’t be easy. Even in perfect weather, the wreckage of an airplane could take days if not weeks to find.

And as for Kevin — given that they hadn’t detected a beacon or a transmission from him, it seemed likely that he had gone down with the airplane.

“You’ve used more fuel than you planned,” Jennifer told him. “With the storm.”

“We’re okay,” said Zen. “You worried?”

“Not about you.”

The way she said that made him think, for the first time, that maybe Jennifer was a little sweet on Madrone.

“We’ll find him,” he told her.

“You think?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Did he seem — has he been acting odd lately?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

“He came on to me just about attacked me — in the lab the other day. If Colonel Bastian hadn’t come in, I think he would’ve …” Her voice stopped. “He might have done something.”

“Kevin? Did you tell the colonel?”

“Well, no. I mean — I don’t know. It was all so … just weird.”

“Raven to Hawk Leader,” said Cheshire over the interphone, her voice muffled because the helmet was on his lap. “Ready to resume search?”

“Give me a minute,” he told her. He turned back to Jennifer. “Captain Madrone has been acting strange around you?”

“Just that time. He was like — I don’t know. It was like a different person.”

“I noticed something too,” said Jeff.

“Side effects of ANTARES?” she asked.

“Maybe.” Zen shrugged. He glanced down at his visor before putting his helmet back on.

Chapter 55

Things at Dreamland didn’t come to a standstill because of one crisis, however great it might be. And in fact, Dog believed that on the day Armageddon arrived he’d have a foot of paperwork to review and a dozen meetings to sit through before being cleared to see St. Peter.

It was only when the hunger pangs in his stomach echoed off the walls of his office that he realized it was nearly nine P.M. He made it as far as his doorway before being waylaid by Dr. Geraldo.

“I was just coming to see you,” she said. “I checked over in your quarters but you weren’t there.”

“Going for dinner,” said Dog. “Come on. You don’t have to eat, just talk,” said Dog.

“Actually, Colonel,” said Geraldo, grabbing his arm, “this really should be discussed in your office.”

Reluctantly, Dog led her back inside.

“I located Captain Madrone’s ex-wife,” said Geraldo.

“That was premature,” said Dog.

“I understand that,” said the scientist. “I thought, under the circumstances, it was appropriate.” Geraldo rushed on. “In any event, she seemed to want to talk. Did you know that Kevin had a daughter?”

“I’m not sure I recall that,” Bastian said. “I know he was divorced. How old is she?”

“She died a year before he was divorced.” Geraldo shifted uncomfortably in her chair, her fingers smoothing her stiff gray skirt. “It was five years ago, while he was working on a project for the Army through Los Alamos. The project itself was in the Glass Mountains in southern Texas. He worked there for a while, before she was born, and then immediately afterwards before going back to Los Alamos. His wife actually didn’t know what the project was. Kevin is very good at keeping secrets.”

Bastian nodded, sensing that that was a severe understatement.

“I’ve checked myself,” continued Geraldo. “It’s still codeword-classified, and I haven’t been privy to the details, but it dealt with nuclear weapons in some way. My guess, given his background, was that it had to do with tactical artillery, since I can’t imagine that it would involve TOW missiles. It’s probably irrelevant, except to Kevin.”

Soon after his daughter was born, Geraldo continued, she had been diagnosed with a rare but always fatal disease, anaplastic cancer of the thyroid. Highly malignant, the cancer began in the thyroid gland but spread quickly throughout the body. In her case, it had metastasized in her brain, lungs, and liver before being discovered.

“She died within three months of the diagnosis. It was an ordeal, as you can imagine,” said Geraldo. “Losing a child that young — losing any child, of course, it’s traumatic.”

“Sure.”

“The etiology of the disease is not clear. There are many theories. But thyroid cancer in general has been linked to radiation.”

“So he blamed his work,” said Bastian.

“Oh, yes. He blamed himself and his work, and his superiors who had assigned him that work,” said Geraldo. She explained that the safety precautions, let alone security procedures, prevented any young child from getting near radioactive resources or reactors. So Madrone had apparently concluded — at least for a short time — that he had somehow poisoned his daughter.

“Patently impossible,” said Geraldo. “No way it could have happened. But in grief, we believe many things.”

“So what killed her?”

“The disease is so rare that it’s impossible to know. A random malfunction of genetics would be my guess, but it’s the sort of thing I can’t say. Only God knows.” Geraldo shook her head. “What’s important is that in his grief he became paranoid and suicidal. 1 use the terms advisedly; the ex-Mrs. Madrone says he saw a counselor.”

“That is not in his file.”

“Nor is the fact that his security clearance was removed for a time. It appears only that it lapsed as he was transferred. I’m still trying to reach his superior, a former Colonel Theo Glavin. I believe he’s now a civilian with the Department of Energy.” Geraldo spread her fingers for a moment, studying them before resuming. “Apparently this commanding officer was sympathetic, with his own child around the same age. He still sends Mrs. Madrone a Christmas card, though they were never really close. I only have this from the ex-wife, understand. Kevin was popular and had worked hard — you know how intelligent and likable he is — and everyone felt deeply sorry about his daughter’s death. Beyond that, he was a decorated war hero. So apparently people thought they were doing good by protecting him.”

Dog slid back in his chair. He too had felt sorry for people under his command; he too had often found a diplomatic way of getting things done without ruining a person’s career.

“I don’t like any of this,” said Geraldo. “Kevin never told me had a daughter, just that he was divorced. And as for the rest …” She shook her head and refolded her arms in front of her chest. “Technically, none of this would have disqualified him for the program. He did tremendously well on the tests, and as far as I can see has gone further faster than any ANTARES subject, including Captain James. He has an incredibly supple mind. Perhaps that is how he was able to hide this from us, since I would have thought the tests would have revealed it.”

“James was subjected to the same tests, wasn’t he?” Dog felt all of his reservations toward ANTARES resurfacing. He cursed himself now for not standing up more forcefully, for not refusing to go ahead with it, even if it meant resigning.

He should have followed his instincts.

“We’ve improved the tests as well as the procedures,” said Geraldo. “Or at least we thought we did. Knowing this — knowing how he reacted at a point of great stress in the past would have influenced me. I might have eliminated him from the program. But the fact that he was able to keep such a secret — that is extremely worrisome. I would not have chosen him for ANTARES.”

“All right,” said Dog. “Unfortunately, it may very well be irrelevant now.”

Chapter 56

Madrone’s thoughts twisted around the computer’s, tangles of wires that ran through everything he heard and saw. They pulsed red and black; at times he tried to follow them through the tangles, but got hopelessly lost.

The elation he’d felt at escaping the Mexican airport and refueling the Flighthawks had dissipated. Hungry and tired, he vacillated between wanting this all to end and not wanting to give up.

Bastian and the others would blame him for killing Dalton and Kulpin, not to mention whoever had died at the Mexican airport. They’d charge him with murder, treason, theft of government property — they’d invent charges to persecute him with.

They didn’t need charges, the bastards. They wanted to kill him, the way they had killed his daughter.

Worse. They would keep him alive, hound him every day. They might even be manipulating this now — Geraldo and Bastian and Stockard had set him up, hadn’t they’? Made him join the program, then concocted a series of petty tests, waiting for him to snap. They knew about his daughter. They were probably working with the people who had made him kill her.

The bastards had planned it all. Why did they hate him? What had he done to them?

It couldn’t just be Iraq. It had to be Los Alamos, something there. He’d killed one of the tactical artillery programs, made a few generals look bad by pointing out the obvious.

Madrone needed only a fraction of his attention, a small slice of his ability, to fly the planes. His mind hungered for more, ranging across the universe of possibilities in a feeding frenzy.

What would he do? He would crash the planes into the rain forest, be done with it all, end their plot against him.

He saw Christina lying on the hospital gurney, frowning at him. “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy.”

A cheap shining gurney. The bastards didn’t even have the decency to give her a real bed. She’d spent her final days in treatment, between sessions, dying, dying, dying in the mold-stinking hall as she waited.

By the time they reached the children’s wing, her eyes were closed, and she would never reopen them. Even the doctor admitted it, the bastard doctor who wouldn’t even give her morphine when she began to cry, the son of a bitch.

He wanted to kill them. He would kill them.

Lightning flashed and the plane lurched onto her right wing. Madrone had entered another storm, but it was the chaos of his mind that sent the aircraft reeling. There were so many conflicting emotions and impulses — suicide, revenge, hatred, love. They slammed against each other, physically pushing his head back in the seat, literally tearing at the neurons and other cells of his brain.

The ANTARES circuitry spat back wild arcs of energy into the system, befuddling the Boeing’s control system; the plane began to yaw, threatening to slide into a spin. The Flight-hawks, set by C3 in a basic trail pattern, faithfully mimicked their mother plane, rocking behind her at 25,000 feet.

Madrone knew he had to end this somehow. The pain threatened to overwhelm him. He felt the faint pings at the corner of his temples that meant he was slipping out of Theta-alpha.

If he went out now, he’d never get back in time to prevent himself from crashing.

Part of him wanted exactly that. Part of him wanted to just crash into the jungle below — he was over Colombia now — end it all in a flash of flames.

But other parts of him wanted to live. And those parts won out. He saw the rain forest enveloping him, heard the music Geraldo had played. And he felt the dark woman approaching, the shadow who had come unbidden from the recesses of his desire.

Come to me, she told him. I will show you the way.

Madrone’s rapid pulse eased. He felt his way into the cockpit of the big plane, stared for a moment at the holes the ejection seats had made, then took the controls firmly. The plane leveled off; he checked his systems, made a correction to deal with the fury of the storm.

He had less than an hour’s worth of fuel left in Hawkmother.

Landing at a major airport or military base was out of the question. But where?

The database in the navigational unit covered only the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. He wanted something in Brazil, in the rain forest.

Have the Flighthawks scout for him.

He took a long breath, his head rising as he held it, and saw himself inside Hawk One. Madrone pushed down, gliding toward the earth like a falcon.

He tucked his wings back. The canopy exploded below. The jungle was everywhere, thick with green, howling with the screeches of animals.

A long strip.

No good. Military planes.

A bulldozed runway. Too short; probably a smuggler’s haven.

The long river, winding past the marshes. Smoke curled in the distance, a fire fighting the drizzle.

Madrone shook violently as the skin on his face froze. He was back in the tower in the middle of the storm, pelted by hail. Lightning jagged all around him.

End it, growled the jaguar’s voice.

He turned back.

End it.

The tower. He was on the range at Glass Mountain, siting the artillery, telling them where to fire.

No, it was the church where they’d held the service for Christina.

It was both of them together.

Kevin felt himself starting to fall. Concrete appeared to his right. Bulldozers. The runway was too short.

His temples stung. He held the stick of the 777 in his hand, smelled the incense from Christina’s funeral, saw Jennifer Gleason tearing off her clothes.

“No!” he yelled. “Land! Land! Land!”

Chapter 57

The plane materialized from the darkness, bursting down from the mountains and steadying its wings over the mountains. Lights on, gear down, it was obviously going to land.

An hour before, Minerva had been unable to sleep and had decided to walk around the base in the fading moonlight — an unusual decision, at least so early in the morning. Had she had some sort of unconscious premonition?

If so, of what? Disaster? Other people’s deaths?

She glanced toward the building where the security team she’d summoned on her radio was just now rushing into a jeep. When she turned back, the big jet, a Boeing 777 or something similar, lumbered onto the runway. Whoever was flying it was damn good, but still, he was trying to land in the dark on a concrete and packed-dirt runway. The plane’s nose flared as the engines slammed into reverse thrust. Dirt and gravel shot everywhere as the aircraft funneled toward the jungle at the far end of the runway. It thumped from the concrete onto the dirt, blowing tires as it skidded. There was a shriek and then a boom and then a drawn-out hush. Minerva waited for the explosion and fire, the dust so thick in the air that she couldn’t see.

Something whirled down at the top of the dust cloud. Two large birds fluttered above, buzzards expecting carrion.

As the dust settled in the moonlight, Minerva realized the Boeing had managed to stop at the end of the rampway. Even more incredibly, it hadn’t caught fire and its landing gear was still upright.

She began to run toward it, coughing from the dirt in the air. The plane bore no markings, not even registration numbers.

What an incredible thing, she thought; if she had been more superstitious, she would have sworn it was a sign from heaven.

A stairway opened with a tart whoosh from the rear belly of the plane.

Minerva unholstered her pistol, waiting as two members of her security team joined her. Then she stepped onto the stairway, peering up at the dim red interior of the plane.

As she did, the vultures fluttered down nearby. They weren’t birds at all; they were sleek black aircraft unlike any Minerva had ever seen. About the size of small automobiles, they seemed to her some odd offspring of a mating between F/A-18’s and UFOs. A small series of LEDs blinked along their noses, the lights flashing in a pattern that seemed to imply the planes were watching her.

There was a noise behind her. Minerva spun back to the airplane, holding up her pistol. A man in a black flight suit staggered down the steps.

“Help me,” he said before collapsing in her arms.