* * *
STARSHIP GLANCED AT KICK AS THEY COUNTED DOWN together with Major Alou and the computer. The EB-52 vibrated madly, and the noise of the revving engines leaked past the noise-canceling headgear, a steady hum in the back of his head.
‘Two,” they said, and the Megafortress began to roll, cued by Major Alou up on the flightdeck.
“Three,” they said, and the Flighthawk engines whipped on. Starship felt himself pushed back in his seat as the Mega-fortress burst ahead in quick-takeoff mode. His view screen played a feed from the nose of the Flighthawk; he could see the tail of the other Megafortress disappearing to the right. The strip and surrounding jungle slid by, the EB-52’s speed ramping quickly. He could feel the plane starting to lift, gravity beginning to tilt his body back like the gentle rock of a cradle.
And then the plane sagged left. Something popped in Starship’s ear. A red emergency light blinked, and as Starship reached his hand to the screen control, a cold curtain of darkness descended around him and he fell unconscious.
ZEN SHUT DOWN THE FLIGHTHAWK ENGINES AND BEGAN cycling fuel into Hawk One, replacing what they had used to get off the runway.
“Indy
was hit,” Breanna told him. “They didn’t get off the runway.”
Zen felt his throat tighten. Trying to take off had been foolhardy, a ridiculous gamble. He was responsible for the men who’d been in that plane.
He glanced at the instrument screen on his left—he was using the auxiliary controls, since there hadn’t been time even to get his helmet—double-checking that he had enough fuel to launch.
“Ready to launch Hawk One in sixty seconds,” he told Breanna.
WHEN STARSHIP OPENED HIS EYES, HE WAS AT THE STICK of an F-15E. The altimeter ladder in his heads-up display showed that he had just notched up over forty thousand feet, and he was still climbing, winging upward like an angel called to heaven. The blue void of the atmosphere thinned as he rose, the color paling into white and then becoming almost black. The black deepened, and still he climbed, over a hundred thousand feet now, the altimeter calmly notching it off. One-ten, one-twenty, one-fifty, two hundred…
“I can’t go this high,” said Starship. “Not in a Strike Eagle.”
With that thought, the blackness turned red and he felt his body twisting hard against his restraints. His arm smacked against something hard and he heard a scream coming from the middle of his chest.
“I got to get the hell out of here,” said Starship, and by instinct he reached for the ejection handle, but he couldn’t find it. He managed to get his head down and look, then realized he couldn’t eject—they were too low, too low—
No, they were on the ground, and the seats hadn’t been properly prepared besides.
He saw one of the emergency lights blinking on a panel and realized they had crash-landed at the end of the runway.
“Out, out, out!” he yelled, and started to jump from his station. He couldn’t move and for a moment he despaired, thought he’d been crippled like Zen.
He’d kill himself before he lived like that, as much as he admired the older pilot.
And then he realized he was still buckled into his seat. A wave of relief powered into his legs and arms as he threw off the restraints, bolted upright, and started for the exit. He remembered Kick, turned and saw that he was still back in his seat. Starship shook him, then when he didn’t respond reached down and unsnapped the buckles, helped him up—more like picked him up—and dragged him behind him to the hatchway. The motor that worked the ladder growled as the lower door started to open. Something in the mechanism snapped and it stopped after moving only an inch or so. Starship pounded on the control, but it didn’t move. He swung around and tried kicking at the hatchway, first gently and then with all his weight, but nothing budged.
“Upstairs,” he told Kick, who was crouched over where he’d left him.
Starship grabbed his friend and tried pushing him up the ladder which led to the flight deck, but Kick was so out of it that he finally draped him over his side and back and pulled him up with him, crawling onto the rear of the long cockpit area. “Major Alou! Merce! Merce!” he yelled to Alou.
The pilot sat at his station, head slumped over, hand on the throttle slide. As Starship came close, he saw that the front wind panel and some of the aircraft structure around it had been shattered. A piece of metal twice the size of Starship’s hand had embedded itself in the side of Alou’s head. Blood covered everything around the pilot.
“We got to get the hell out of here,” he told Kick. He started to go back down, thinking they could use the emergency hatchways at the forward part of the Flighthawk compartment. But then he realized it would be quicker to use the emergency roof hatches above the ejection seats, which could be blown out by the computer or by hand.
He squeezed past the center console, trying not to look at Alou. The consoles were still lit.
Starship got up on the seat, balancing awkwardly as he struggled with the hatchway. He fumbled with the large red bar that had to be pushed back to override the computer’s emergency system and access the controls directly. Once that was out of the way, he hit the thick, square button at the top of the panel, which blew all of the upper hatchways off at once.
“Up we go, up we go!” he yelled to Kick.
He put his head out of the hatchway, breathing a whiff of the hot, humid jungle air. A machine-gun started to fire in the distance.
Starship ducked back down. Maybe it would be better to stay in the plane, where at least there was a modicum of cover. But the Megafortress would be a target for whomever was attacking; he turned and yelled at Kick, who still hadn’t moved off the deck.
“Yo, Kick boy, time to get the hell out of here,” he yelled to his companion. Once again he draped the other pilot across his back, wobbling as he snaked around and then up through the hatchway. A green arm appeared over the black skin of the Megafortress as Starship pulled upward. His heart nearly leapt from his chest before he realized it was one of the Special Forces soldiers.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Starship yelled, more to himself than the soldier or Kick. More arms appeared around him. He resisted as they started to push him toward the ground, then realized they had him; he slipped into the arms of a burly Special Forces sergeant, who immediately pushed him down and in the same motion whirled and began firing at something in the jungle fifty yards away.
Southeastern Brunei
Exact location and time unknown
Every bone in his body felt as if it had been broken, and every muscle felt as if it had been twisted and bent and rearranged. But for Mack, the worst thing was the horrible taste in his mouth, which for some reason just wouldn’t leave him, not even after he gulped water from the nearby stream. He spit, he dunked his head, he stuffed the top of his flightsuit into his mouth—it stubbornly remained.
Mack started walking downstream, along the side of the stream opposite the one he had fallen down on. Within a few minutes he heard the rush of a waterfall. He climbed hand over hand down a scramble of rocks and dirt, descending nearly fifty feet before the ground leveled out in a bog. The only way through was over a jumble of felled trees. As he reached a run of boulders he finally caught sight of the waterfall, a spectacular spray that cascaded over a nearly sheer cliff. Mack, never much of a nature admirer, stared at the spray as it came off the flow, awed by it.
The bugs prompted him to move on. He threaded his way through jungle fronds, the stalks and leaves getting thicker and thicker. Finally he thought he might have to turn back and tried rushing ahead like a bull, crashing and struggling until he hit a clearing. Mack collapsed, resting for a few minutes; when he got up he saw that he had come out on a path.
He took it to the left, and within ten minutes heard voices in the distance. He froze, then moved off the trail, hiding as he tried to make out the sounds. They seemed to be kids, which meant he must be near a village; his best bet would be to go there and ask to be taken to the police station, where he could explain who he was.
As he took a step back on the trail, something crashed behind him; Mack spun just in time to see the back of some sort of animal disappearing into the vegetation.
When he turned around again, he found his way blocked by a short, squat man holding a large machine-gun in his beefy hands.
Brunei International Airport
1242
Prince bin Awg’s MiG-19 sat in the center of Hangar Two, an access ladder propped to its cockpit. McKenna decided to take that as an omen of luck, rather than an indication that mechanics had been trying to fix something when the attacks began. She spun the tractor she’d taken from the other hangar into position, jumped off, and pulled away the wheel chucks from the plane. She climbed up into the cockpit to check on the brake and found a helmet and parachute stowed there. Those were clearly signs of good luck.
The tractor filled the hangar with thick diesel exhaust as she stomped on the pedal and got it moving forward. The vehicle—its vintage was uncertain, but it had Chinese lettering on the dash—groaned as it tugged the MiG out of the hangar. The two Whiplash troopers helping her were just pulling up with the fuel truck that had been in the other hangar. McKenna threw on the brakes and jumped off the tug.
“Fuel it! Let’s go! Let’s go!” she yelled, running to unhook the tractor and get it out of the way.
Prince bin Awg’s engineers had updated some of the systems, mostly with Chinese equipment intended for the vastly updated J-6, whose design was based on the MiG-19 family. The radio was state-of-the-art, and a small GPS device had been jury-rigged to the right panel. Otherwise, the cockpit remained exactly as it had been when this model rolled off the line at Gorki in 1957—primitive even by Russian standards. McKenna switched on the backup battery and got a tentative read on her instruments, cinching her restraints at the same time.
“All right, that’s good,” she yelled at the men outside with the jet fuel. Her tanks were more than half full—more than enough to get her where she had to go. “All right, go. We’re going. See you at the end of the war.”
The twin Tumansky turbojets groaned as she brought them on line. Even with the brakes set the aircraft moved forward, and in fact when she removed them there seemed almost no difference. McKenna turned left onto the access ramp, snugging the canopy as she went. The aircraft started slightly to the right and she nearly went off the other side over-correcting; her controls felt sluggish and she thought one of the tires might be flat or close to it. A helicopter buzzed off to her left as she brought the plane onto the main runway. It seemed to be firing at someone but McKenna couldn’t spare the attention. The MiG was proving more of a handful than she remembered.
But she appreciated challenges.
The engines responded quickly as she goosed the throttle. The plane drifted right as she shot down the runway; remembering her earlier problem she treated the controls as gingerly as possible. As she hit one hundred and eight knots she began her takeoff rotation, lifting her nose wheel five degrees. But the MiG stayed stuck to the ground. Her forward air speed dogged, the aircraft struggled despite its lightish load; finally she managed to get it up, passing one hundred and sixty knots, just enough to lift off the ground. She crossed to the right, trying to stay clear of the area where the helicopters had been, climbing slowly and heading toward the ocean.
Now that she was airborne, the MiG’s speed built nicely, climbing up over two hundred and fifty knots. The controls got a bit lighter as she flew, and McKenna felt the pleasant tug of the old metal around her. The MiG-19 was the first supersonic fighter built by the Soviet Union; while it was quickly superceded in the Russian inventory by the MiG-21, the design had a number of virtues. It was built to go very fast and very high, enabling it to threaten the bombers of the day. The MiG’s speed would be a liability when she landed, even with the parachute that was standard equipment at the rear of the aircraft; the fact that the brakes hadn’t been particularly good was not a good sign.
But there was plenty of time to worry about that. McKenna decided there was no reason not to see what the plane could do. She gave her instruments a quick sweep, checked her altitude and the air around her, then pulled the throttle to afterburner.
* * *
“MIG IS OFF,” THE HELICOPTER PILOT TOLD DANNY.
“Pick up our guys,” Danny said, though the command was unnecessary—the pilot had already whipped the Quick Bird toward the hangar area.
“Danny, I have an update from the Malaysian air base,” said Jennifer. “They’re taking heavy fire. The command trailer has been hit by mortar fire. One Megafortress took off. Another is on the ground. They think it got hit. Colonel Bastian is overdue as well.”
“They asking for assistance?”
“They’ve radioed out to a Malaysian unit in the area. They didn’t get a response.”
Danny leaned back in his seat. Besides the length of time it would take to get there—upwards of an hour, if not more—they didn’t have the fuel.
“We’re ready to blow hangar one, Cap,” said Liu, breaking in. One had the Sabre and the Hunter, which McKenna has said were the most likely planes to be used. “Charges are set”
“All right, Jen, I’ve got a few things to attend to here. I’ll get back with you”
Danny was about to give Liu the okay to blow the planes when he saw the fuel truck on the tarmac near the hangar.
“Can we use their jet fuel?” Danny asked the pilot.
“We can use standard jet fuel, if that’s what it is,” said the pilot.
Danny clicked into the Dreamland circuit, asking Liu if he knew what sort of fuel he’d pumped into the plane. Liu had no idea. He then switched and spoke by satellite to Dreamland Command, where Major Catsman promised to get a fuel expert on the double.
“If I can smell it, I can tell if it’s okay,” said the chopper pilot while they waited.