Tom Clancy's HAWX

Chapter 40

"You're having all the fun up there in Shakuru, Loensch," Raymond Harris said with a grin, approaching Troy at the coffee urn.

The sun was just coming up, painting the sandstone bluffs west of Cactus Flat in the vivid colors that photographers stay up all night to capture. Harris was up awfully early for a man who had returned to the Flat after midnight.

"Not today," Troy said, returning the smile. "I don't have a flight scheduled until tomorrow. I'm going into town this morning to get some stuff at the drugstore."

In fact, he was going into Paiute Wells to attempt to make contact with the CIA.

"Your razor blades and deodorant can wait," Harris said, sipping his coffee. "I'd like to have you demonstrate Shakuru for me. I'd like to fly as your copilot for a short flight over the desert."

When Harris said "I'd like," Troy knew that it was to be interpreted as a direct order.

An hour later, both men were in their high-altitude space suits and doing a walk-around of the Shakuru. Troy took his place in the forward of the two tandem seats, and Harris lowered himself in behind. Technicians helped the two men seal their helmets and fasten the gloves to their suits.

With a thumbs-up from Troy, the massive flying machine was wheeled through the open doorway of the hangar and onto the tarmac. It was obvious by the way Harris went through the preflight checklist that he had done his homework on the operation of the aircraft.

Troy ran up the engines, handled the takeoff, leveled out at five thousand feet, and let Harris take the controls. He was an experienced pilot, and he handled the Shakuru skillfully. Troy felt him pull back gently on the stick and resume a climbing spiral.

"The rate of climb is sure better than you'd expect," Harris observed.

"That was my reaction the first time also," Troy agreed.

"Let's take this bird up to where we can see some of the view," Harris said.

"Copilot's airplane," Troy said into the intercom, indicating that he was letting Harris run the show. If Troy had been nervous about flying with the man less than a day after he had rifled his desk, the nervousness quickly faded.

The altimeter steadily climbed. Troy watched twenty-five thousand feet melt away, then forty-five thousand. Harris made occasional comments about the control of the Shakuru or the spectacular view. Troy felt him level out at eighty thousand feet and steady their course in a southeasterly direction.

"I had hoped to brief you on The Transition," Harris said. He said it so calmly that it took a moment for Troy to grasp what he was saying.

"I had hoped to speak with you about it, and about how I had hoped to bring you in as part of it."

"The Transition?" Troy said, feigning ignorance.

"The Transition," Harris said, his voice still calm. "I noticed that you've briefed yourself on it before I had the chance."

How?

Troy was speechless.

"I was very disappointed, Loensch. I was very disappointed to find you… you… of all people, going through the stuff in my office."

"Your Transition goes a bit far, doesn't it?" Troy asked. "It goes only as far as necessary, doesn't it?"

Troy could feel Harris's eyes drilling in on him from behind as he searched his mind in vain for a reply.

"Did you decide to burglarize my office on your own?" Harris asked. "Or are you working for someone?"

"I think you're playing with fire," Troy said at last. "Who are you working for?"

"Firehawk. I'm working for Firehawk… and so, I thought, were you," Harris said, feigning sadness. "It seems as though we are at cross-purposes here. I suggest that you do the honorable thing… pop the canopy and leave Shakuru."

Leave Shakuru? Troy thought about it. Bailing out at eighty thousand feet while wearing his pressure suit was doable.

"I'll be on the ground before you could get back to Cactus Flat. People back there will know about your scheme before you're able to land."

"With the parachute you're wearing, you'll be on the ground much faster than you think," Harris said. Troy could hear the smirk in his voice. In his mirror, he saw only the glossy black visor of Harris's helmet.

"Well, then I guess you're stuck with me," Troy said. "Unless you want to unlatch your harness at a hundred and thirty knots and try to throw me overboard."

"I was afraid of that." Harris chuckled. "One of us has got to leave… I guess it will be me."

"With you gone, I can land Shakuru anywhere. I don't need to go back to the Flat."

"I'll make you a deal," Harris said. "If you tell me who you're working for, I won't disable the autopilot override."

"What?"

"If you don't tell me who you're working for, and I disable the autopilot override, you won't be able to turn. You'll be stuck at eighty thousand on a southwesterly heading until after nightfall… by which time you'll be several hundred miles over the Pacific."

"With the lithium sulfur batteries, I can fly this thing anywhere in the world," Troy reminded him.

"Without lithium sulfur batteries, you'll fall like three tons of Kevlar and plastic when the sun goes down. By that time, you'll be hundreds of miles from shore."

With that, Troy felt the pressure of the canopy separating from the aircraft and the brief lurch as Harris jumped free. Without the canopy, the drag on Shakuru made it tremble a bit, but otherthan that, Troy felt little change. It was suddenly ninety degrees below zero in the cockpit, but sealed inside his suit, the ambient temperature was that of an air-conditioned office.

Troy touched the stick, attempting to turn, but Harris had, in fact, configured the autopilot to maintain its heading. He tried everything he could to disengage the autopilot, but to no avail. Ahead, across the land mass of California, he could see the Pacific Ocean, gleaming blue. The sun was still high in the sky, and Shakuru plugged on, heading southwest toward Santa Barbara and oblivion.

Did he suppose that Harris would have left him with control of the aircraft if he had said he was working for the CIA? Troy thought not.

He tried to find a radio channel on which to send a distress message, but the only place that his "Mayday" was heard was in his own intercom.

With his helmet on, Troy could hear nothing of the outside world, not the whir of the solar engines, not the thunder of the slipstream blowing around the windshield and into the open canopy.

Troy tried and retried to override the autopilot.

He shouted "Mayday!" until his own ears throbbed.

As he reached the picturesque California coastline, he could see the wriggling line of sandy beaches that separated the tan and green of the hills from the blue of the ocean.

Soon, there was no longer land, only that deep-blue crescent of the curving earth and the blinding glare of the soon-to-be-setting sun.

There was nothing to do but rehearse in his mind the steps he would take to escape as the big flying wing drifted down upon the sea — deploy his flotation gear and hope for the best. Into this scenario came memories of survival school, of Hal Coughlin, and of their tortured relationship.

When your mind replays events that have come full circle, they come full circle, and you are left with the void of silence. Into the silence came the voices.

Yolanda spoke and said she told him so. If he hadn't turned snitch, he would not be heading toward a watery grave.

Jenna, who had once loathed him, but who had once craved his touch, spoke of her guilt. Having made love to Troy, she felt the guilt of cheating on Hal. Having once expressed the longing of lust toward Troy, she then expressed the revulsion borne of that guilt and the knowledge that it was Troy who had killed Hal.

Cassie Kilmer, the woman with whom he had long planned to spend the rest of his life, had abruptly closed the door on that relationship, a relationship that once had seemed inevitable.

As the sun sank to the horizon, the solar panels, starved of their sustenance, grew weak, and the engines slowed gradually to a stop. The altimeter read forty thousand feet and sinking.

As the sun sank below the horizon, Shakuru sank slowly toward the Pacific and the massive bank of clouds that now separated the aircraft from the waves. The altimeter read twenty thousand feet and sinking.

As the altimeter declined to ten thousand feet and Shakuru drifted amid the cloud tops, Troy felt a jolt, and then another, as the huge aircraft was rocked by turbulence. Within moments, Shakuru was swallowed in a cocoon of gray. Rain lashed into the open cockpit as the gyrating aircraft drifted into the heart of the storm.

Troy remembered what a little clear air turbulence had done to Helios and gave up on his imagined escape as Shakuru touched the waves. Instead of landing in the Pacific within an aircraft that retained its aerodynamic integrity, he now expected to hit the water tangled in crumpled wreckage.

He looked out at the flapping wings with their dead engines, thankful that his soundproof cocoon spared him the sounds of snapping and tearing structural components.

The thought of dying in a plane crash occasionally crosses the mind of a pilot, but Troy had never imagined that it would be such an agonizingly slow death.