Текст книги "Nerve Center"

Автор книги: Dale Brown

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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.”

Sierra Nevada Mountains

19 February, 2018

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.

Aboard Raven

19 February, 2024

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.

Dreamland

19 February, 2043

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.”

Aboard Hawkmother

Over Central America

19 February, 2240 local

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!”

Pej, Brazil

20 February, 0340 local

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.