Authors: Jim DeFelice
NADT’s headquarters was not marked from the highway, although Fisher surmised he was in the right place by the strategic rock formations that sheltered video cameras along the driveway. A half-mile in from the road, a row of closely spaced trees partially hid a picket fence extending around the property; the pickets themselves half camouflaged a grid of wires, probably electrically charged.
A guard post sat where the fence and one-lane access road met. Two security officers in nondescript uniforms stepped out to flag Fisher’s car down.
His Bureau credentials did not work their usual magic, but the guards did grudgingly admit him after calling for instructions. Fisher drove through the gate, over a bridge, and past a moat with geese that looked as if it had been stolen from a Disney movie; he almost expected to find Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs waiting for him at the front door.
Close. A woman in a black business suit, her skirt cut so high it had less material than a napkin, flagged him down near a long concrete apron punctuated by cement barriers.
“Mr. Fisher?” She leaned into his car, filling it with so much perfume, Fisher would have gone for a gas mask if he’d carried one. The top of her shirt was strategically arranged to highlight the natural skin tones of her chest; NADT obviously didn’t fool around.
“I was this morning,” said Fisher from his car.
“Very good, sir. Will you follow me?” Her tone was somewhere between officious and luscious. “Someone will come for the car.”
“Why not?” Fisher got out and followed Snow White to the one-story black glass building. The dwarfs were nowhere to be seen.
A single security desk stood in the exact center of the vast space; there was no other furniture, not even a potted plant on the first floor. Fisher’s guide smiled at the guard—he looked to be at least eighty and very possibly was the evil queen in butch disguise—then turned abruptly toward a ramp that opened in the floor nearby.
“You won’t want to smoke in here,” warned the woman as they strode down the ramp toward a single elevator. “Sets off alarms. Nasty things come down from the sprinklers.”
“Water?”
“Some sort of gas,” she said.
Fisher was tempted to test the system but held off, worried that the gas might be an even stronger version of her perfume. There were no buttons in the elevator, and no floor indicators. The car moved smoothly downward for about thirty seconds, then stopped.
Still no dwarfs. Snow White led him down a long hallway to a large reception area, where another young woman in an equally short skirt sat at a glass-topped table, her nipples poking rivet holes through her blouse. Fisher began to wonder if he had somehow made a wrong turn and ended at a brothel.
“General Bonham is not here, Mr. Fisher,” said the woman at the desk.
“I can wait.”
“You really should have called ahead.” She traded a smile with Snow White. Fisher realized that his knowledge of Disney films was severely lacking; he couldn’t figure out who she was supposed to be.
Figaro, maybe? But that would make him Pinocchio.
Ouch.
“I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a long time,” said the woman. “I believe he’s in Montana.”
“Is he?” Fisher had already checked: Bonham was in fact en route to D.C. Not that he actually wanted to talk to him. “Maybe you could check for me.”
“I’m never wrong,” said the woman.
Fisher spotted a pot of coffee on a credenza nearby. “Can I have a cup?”
“I’m sorry—the coffee is cold,” said the woman.
“I drink it cold.”
She smiled indulgently.
“Actually, I’m looking for Justin Pierce,” said Fisher. “I understand he’s the titular head of the agency.”
The word came out smoothly, despite the innuendo.
“Mr. Pierce is never in,” said the woman.
Fisher scratched the side of his head, emphasizing his confusion.
“Lice?” asked the woman.
“I think they’re gone, actually,” said Fisher. “Shampoo worked wonders. I want to talk to Megan York’s boss. I believe that would be the head of the technical support team. His name was Lee, I think.”
“Her name is Sylvia Lee, and she is in Hawaii for a conference.”
“ABM tests?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Personnel records?”
The woman curled her lips. Now he remembered who she was supposed to be: Cruella, the dog-hater in
101 Dalmations
.
“Our personnel records are confidential. Unless you have a court order, of course. That’s the law.”
“Yeah, the law’s a funny thing,” said Fisher. “Who deals with the contractors, Miss—”
“That would be Ms.”
“You deal with them?”
“Only the general.”
“Your accounting office is which way?” said Fisher.
“Accounting is handled by an independent firm,” said the woman.
“Organizational chart?”
“It’s being redone. Anything else?”
“If you let me take a shot at that coffee,” said Fisher,
“I’ll bark for you.”
The halls of the Rayburn Building were proportioned in such a way as to impress mere mortals as they walked down them, and not even Fisher was immune to their spell. He felt imbibed in the spirit of democracy as he found Congressman Matt Taft’s office; though a poor government worker himself, Fisher understood the inherent importance of his role as public servant.
That and the fact that he had a slight caffeine buzz on, due to the consumption of not one but two Dunkin’ Donuts Big Gulps on the way over from NADT. Cruella had denied him her own blend, even after he’d demonstrated a howl pro bono.
Besides drinking the coffee, Fisher had used the trip to bone up on who exactly Congressman Taft was, besides being Megan York’s cousin. His briefing came courtesy of a newspaper reporter at
The Washington Times
who owed him a few favors and thirty bucks from a Super Bowl bet gone bad. Fisher had frankly expressed his ignorance, which for some reason never failed to impress newspaper reporters, and had received a detailed description of the congressman’s career, only partially condensed from the newspaper’s computer morgue.
This had taken all of two minutes. Several janitors at the Capitol Building had higher profiles than Megan York’s cousin. The twenty-ninth ranking minority member on the House Armed Services Committee, his name had appeared in exactly two stories over the past twelve months, and one was about rolling eggs on the White House lawn.
The congressman was not in his office, which wasn’t particularly surprising. His legislative assistant, a short, gnomelike man with a beard that reached to his chest, agreed to see him after growling at the receptionist, who reacted by cracking her gum somewhat louder than before. Fisher took one look at the gnome’s brown-stained hands and reached into his pocket.
“Why don’t we go outside?” he said, holding up his cigarettes.
The legislative assistant nearly bolted through the door. They were barely on the steps before he reached back and took a cigarette from the agent’s pack, jabbing it into his lighter.
“Been trying to quit,” said the gnome.
“Gee, and you struck me as a reasonable guy,” said Fisher. He followed the gnome down the steps, watching as the man’s entire body underwent a transformation. Five minutes ago he had been an exploited career bureaucrat; now he was a maker of men.
“No way I’m quitting,” said the assistant.
Whatever else happened that day, Andy Fisher had saved another soul.
“This about Megan?”
“In a way,” said Fisher.
“They found her body?”
“Nah,” said Fisher. “You think she’s dead, huh?”
“After all this time? You don’t really think she’s still alive, do you?”
Fisher shrugged.
“Look, Matt’s in an awkward position,” said the gnome. “Obviously he wants her, uh, recovered. But he can’t put pressure on a top-secret project. Technically he probably isn’t supposed to know about it, since he’s not part of the intelligence committee.”
“Do
they
know about it?” asked Fisher.
“I don’t know.”
“What about his calls to NADT?” said Fisher.
“Which calls to NADT?”
“He didn’t try to get General Bonham?”
“He knows Bonham, of course; maybe he called and I didn’t know.”
“How does he know Bonham?” asked Fisher.
The gnome’s eyes opened a bit wider, then slunk back in their sockets as if retreating into a cave. “They’ve known each other for a while. But from where, I don’t know.”
“Does the congressman vote on appropriations for NADT?”
The gnome did a very interesting eye-rolling thing where his eyes seemed to disappear in the back of his head, then reappear at the bottom of his feet. The effect made it seem as if his eyeballs had traveled all around his body, a not unimpressive skill and certainly one that would be appreciated in Washington, where eyes had to be rolled several times a day, at least.
“His business interests are in blind trusts, if that’s what you’re getting at,” said the gnome. “The Tafts and Yorks and Rythes—the family owns a lot of high-tech stuff. Yeah, they’re connected. But they’re big in consumer goods and oil, energy: You’d expect it.”
“That’s what I figured,” said Fisher. “What board was he on, Ferris or something?”
“Ferrone? Nah, he resigned that.”
“You have a list of his family holdings?”
“Have to talk to the trustee.”
Fisher nodded. “He doesn’t like Megan, does he?”
The gnome shrugged, then drew his cigarette down to the nub. “Sure he does. She was close to his father, General Taft.”
Fisher shoveled out another cigarette. “Who was Taft? Like, the same guy who was president?”
The eye roll again. Fisher thought it was a real winner. “Fill me in,” he prompted, giving the aide another cigarette.
General Taft—part of the same family as William Howard Taft, president and jurist, but well removed—had been a bomber pilot in World War II and had actually written a book about his experiences—self-published, of course. He and his brother-in-law, Megan’s father, made a fortune adapting early computers so they could be used in targeting devices. That alone would have made them rich, if they hadn’t been rich already.
“So they struggled through the Depression all right?” said Fisher.
“Struggled? Ever hear of the Rubber Trust?”
“Prophylactics?”
The eyes again. “
Rubber
rubber. Before synthetics, it was as big as oil. Bigger. The family was hooked in. Great-great-grandfather of the congressman made a killing supplying Germany and France in World War I. When Wilson declared war, they stopped selling to everybody except the U.S.”
“How can Megan York be the daughter of somebody who fought in World War II?”
The gnome’s smile wasn’t nearly as interesting as his eye roll, and it had the unfortunate effect of ejecting an even greater than normal whiff of his bad breath.
“She’s a third-tier baby—you know, third wife. And it was the brother who fought in World War II. Megan’s father was younger, and that was a different marriage, which is why the names are different.”
“This is a close family?”
“Depends on your definition of
close.”
“What’s the book called?”
“
Flying through Fire.
I’ll lend you a copy: We got tons of ’em. Came out ten years ago and we can’t give ’em away, even on the campaign trail. Too big to stuff in people’s mailboxes.”
Fisher nearly passed on the book, expecting it to be a rambling self-congratulatory rumination on a life spent making a killing by selling weapons of destruction. Part of it may in fact have been that, but the opening chapter was anything but. In fact, it was a rather moving account of what it was like to fly the low-level incendiary bombing raids over Japan, knowing that the acrid smoke choking you was coming from things that ought never be burnt.
Taft spent considerable time talking about the effect on the victims, eloquently talking about how badly their lives must have been ruined. At the end of the chapter he wrote that he understood the raids had been ordered as part of an overall war effort. He did not regret his role in them, but at the same time he admitted they had killed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. This was the face of battle, he said, a condition of modern warfare where the lines between civilian and combatant were no longer clearly drawn. It was the reason, he said, that America must be strong to deter future wars and that, eventually, war must be made obsolete.
Four chapters from the end of the book, he explained how this would be done with a variety of weapons, including an ABM system.
Fisher, who’d started reading the book while standing on line for a burger and was now sitting alone at a table eating, flipped to the notes at the back. There was a section thanking everyone who had helped, including a long list of scientists and military consultants.
Bonham was on the list—as a colonel.
So was Megan, who got her own sentence: “One of the few who truly understands and is dedicated to the future.”
Unable to figure out exactly what that might mean, the agent tucked the book under his arm and went to work on the burger.
In the space of ninety seconds, everything had gone from perfect to seriously fucked up. Not only had the Indian MiGs resumed their course northward, but another group of planes—a mixture of MiG-29s and Su-27s, obviously an attack package with escorts—had just come into the large outer circle of Timmy’s tactical display. And the Pakistanis weren’t sitting on their hands either: The AWACS was reporting F-16s taking off from the base near Lahore, and four S-7s mustering over Islamabad, the capital.
Radars were coming up all across the subcontinent. The Velociraptor’s audible warning system sounded like a frenetic synthesizer, bleating out tones: A missile battery had just come to life about two miles south of Timmy. The computer ID’d it as an SA-8, a Russian-made mobile SAM with a range to about 42,500 feet and approximately ten miles. It hadn’t been briefed: There had been
no
mention of SA-8s in the Indian inventory. Nothing had locked on the slippery F/A-22V, but he wasn’t feeling particularly warm and fuzzy.
Timmy slid the Velociraptor eastward, pushing to get into an attack position to hit the MiGs at the end of the formation. They’d bunched as they came back north, but were now stringing out into the loose trail they’d flown before. The targets were easy to pick, but the sheer number of planes complicated the attack.
Not for Cyclops. The laser plane’s pilot gave a warning and the oversexed flashlight in its nose went to work. Timmy flexed his fingers on the side stick as Cyclops picked off the members of the flight one by one, taking them at precise fifteen-second intervals. The laser’s operator used his ultrasophisticated targeting gear to create a hot spot in the planes’ wings where their fuel tanks were; it was like putting a balloon against a thousand-watt lightbulb.
A kerosene-filled balloon. Even at fifteen miles away, Timmy could see the fireballs as the first planes in the formation popped. The third plane began to turn; that bought it perhaps ten seconds. Timmy looked at his tactical screen as the aircraft began to separate, aware now that they were in deep, unprecedented shit.
He had five octagonal targets in the middle circle. The MiG closest to him—twelve miles ahead on a direct line from his right wing root—blinked in the screen, then disappeared as the laser firing indicator lit. The other planes ducked east and west; one disappeared, apparently running into a mountain as it tried to escape.
Timmy pulled the Velociraptor south with a sharp bank and roll, acrobatically sliding around to follow the farthest plane if it got out of Cyclops’s range. It was unnecessary; he’d barely gotten his wings back level when the last Indian exploded. Poor fucking bastard.
It had taken just under three minutes to eliminate eight aircraft. Captain Robinson, who would objectively rank no lower than the top five percent of fighter pilots in the world and who was flying unarguably the world’s most advanced jet, would have taken at least twice as long to shoot down half that number from close range—and even then would have had to consider himself incredibly lucky, and his opponents incredibly stupid.
I’m surplus war material,
he thought to himself.
Washed up at twenty-five.
Howe steadied the Velociraptor at 35,000 feet, quickly reviewing everyone’s position as Cyclops finished off the Indian attack force. It had been easier than any of the tests they’d conducted over the past several months.
There wasn’t time to gloat, much less analyze it all: Both the Indians and the Pakistanis were filling the air with attack planes. Lucy—an American Compass Call electronic jammer that was also controlling a number of remote jamming drones—came south from Afghanistan to fill the air with electronic fuzz, making it difficult for the combatants’ radios and radars to work; they’d thought it a necessary precaution if things started to get out of hand, since it helped shield the easily seen Cyclops Two. But there was a definite downside, as both the Indian and Pakistani air forces interpreted the jamming as hostile acts by the other side. The jammers, meanwhile, degraded Howe’s ability to communicate with some of the far-flung members of his task force, though he had full secure communications with Timmy and Cyclops.
The question now was: What next?
His orders covered this contingency: If both sides went crazy, he was supposed to stand back and let them go at each other.
“Missiles in the air!” warned the AWACS operator. The Indians had detected and were targeting one of the ECM drones as it flew south over their border.
Losing the UAV was no big deal, but sooner or later his real aircraft were going to be in danger. At least two dozen Indian aircraft were now headed north; the Pakistanis had almost as many coming south.
They’d been so damn close. One radar blip, one general’s decision to rush ahead, one chance move somewhere, too subtle to be tracked down, had turned the MiGs around and started World War III.
There was still a chance. If he took out the Indians’ radar plane, the Indians would be blind. They’d have to pull back.
Hitting the plane would be exceeding his orders.
“Bird Two, you have EW1?” he asked Timmy, using the computer’s reference for the Indian radar plane.
“Roger that. I have him at about a hundred and fifty miles, coming north. He’s trying to vector their fighters. For escorts, Su-27s.”
“We’re going to take him out.”
“Now you’re talking.”
Howe told Cyclops Two what was going on, telling them to remain in their patrol pattern over Afghanistan and to let the two sides go at it. As they were talking, the Indian SAM struck the drone, destroying it.
“Should we take out Unk-2?” asked Timmy, referring to the unidentified contact.
The plane was now in a two-mile orbit over the Himalayas. Still unidentified, it seemed to be hugging the Chinese border, which to Howe meant that’s who was probably operating it.
“Negative,” he said. “They’re not a factor.”
“I think that’s what the Paks were reacting to.”
“If so, that’s because they’re clueless,” said Howe. He laid out his course and plan of attack to take the Indian AWACS. There was no need to be fancy; he and Timmy could take it straight at the Indian plane, which, despite its high-tech gear, probably wouldn’t detect them until they were about fifty miles away. At that point it would be within AMRAAM range, though he’d want to launch from inside forty miles to guarantee a hit.
“You want fat boy or the guard dogs?” Timmy asked.
“I’ll take the radar plane,” said Howe. “Target the closest interceptors, but don’t take them out unless they get hostile.”
“Guard dogs are mine.” Timmy’s tone guaranteed the planes would end up being considered hostile.
At their present course and speed, they’d be in range to fire in just under five minutes. The two American fighters streaked through the sky, their dagger-shaped wings cutting through the thin, icy air. Far below, millions of people slept through the night, completely unaware that their fates were being decided while they dreamed. Pakistan had twelve nuclear-tipped missiles and a single airdropped bomb; India had twice as many. The analysts who had briefed Howe had made a point of noting that it was very possible not all of the weapons would work if used. Both sides had had problems constructing and testing their weapons, and J.D. Powers wasn’t around to help improve quality control. But even if only half the weapons worked half as well as advertised, several million people would still die.
When he closed within seventy-five miles of EW1, the radar receiver caught the power spikes from the Sukhoi radars and painted them in the outer circle on Howe’s tactical scope, confident of their location. The radar in the big plane, meanwhile, continued to grope the sky unsuccessfully, its long fingers not quite sticky enough to grab him.
At sixty seconds to firing range, the computer had the attack completely mapped out for him; all he had to do was choose the option and push the button.
“I have something,” warned Timmy. “Shit—I’m spiked.”
“ECMs,” said Howe.
A ground unit had just come on to the west. It wasn’t an ordinary radar: Working with a microwave transmitter, it had managed to find Timmy’s stealthy profile. The electronic countermeasures quickly snapped the invisible chain that was trying to latch on to his wingman’s plane, but the damage had been done; the Indians knew they were under attack.
Not that it would do any good. He was thirty seconds from firing range.
“Guard dogs are coming for us,” warned his wingman.
“Yours,” said Howe. “Fire at will.”
* * *
Timmy tucked his wing down, angling toward the Sukhois as they separated from their mothership. They were roughly seventy miles away, each plane a mile right and left from his wings. He figured they’d go for some sort of bracket once he made it clear which plane he was going to attack; that pilot would move to engage while the wingman swung out, ready to pounce when the other broke. If Timmy kept coming down the middle—something they’d have to figure he might try, given the juicy target behind them—they could simply turn and have at him as he came past, confident that their Lyulka AL-31F turbofans would allow them to catch up in the unlikely event that they misjudged his speed; the Russian-built jets had an awesome capability to accelerate, matched by only one or two airplanes in the world, and exceeded by only one.
Which happened to be the plane they were going against. The fact that the Indian pilots apparently thought they were facing a lone Pakistani F-16 gave Timmy a tremendous advantage, as did their likely weapons set: The Indians were not known to have the most advanced Russian R-77 or AA-12 missiles, and while their R-27 Alamos were very potent, all of the radar versions were well known and could be knocked off by the Velociraptor’s ECMs. IR missiles, of course, were a different story—even the most obsolete heat-seeker could be a pesky PIA under the right circumstances—but Timmy didn’t intend to get close enough for the Sukhois to launch any.
He made a cut south, purposely taking the fighters away from his flight leader. That put him temporarily on the nose of the plane on his right, which didn’t react. The radar locked both bandits tight and the Velociraptor prompted him to fire. Timmy waited a few more seconds, riding in so he’d be positioned better to hunt the other planes.
“Fire one, fire two,” he said finally. The interceptor seemed to grunt its approval: The AMRAAM vertical ejector launcher spit the missiles from the ventral bay with a force of roughly 40 g’s. Timmy didn’t make the traditional radio call warning that he had fired; the shared radar and weapons system took care of that for him, giving Howe an audible tone as well as designating the targets and showing the missile tracks on his screen.
As soon as the missiles were away, Timmy hit the throttle and accelerated, his focus now on the two Sukhois that had hung back with the AEW plane. He knew they’d be somewhere between the 767 and him, but he wasn’t exactly sure where: ECMs, apparently aboard the big plane, had managed to significantly degrade his sensors.
Something for the tech guys to work on.
The radar plane was about ten degrees to the southeast with its gas pedal to the floor and descending. He guessed the other Sukhois would be near its tail. He checked Howe’s position—running in from the east, no more than ten seconds from firing—then decided that he would just hold his course for a bit until his targets turned up.
The Velociraptor gave him a buzz. His first missile had hit home. Target one was history.
Something had gone wrong with the second shot, however. The Sukhoi was turning and accelerating, trying to solve the mathematical equation that would give it a shot on his tail. Timmy’s RWR went ape shit: The Sukhoi fired a pair of Alamos from twenty miles. Timmy threw the Velociraptor into a set of hard zigs, chaff exploding behind him to confuse the radars in the missiles’ noses. He lost one almost immediately, but the second was working with super glue: It hung on his back even though he was taking nearly 8 g’s with his evasive maneuver.
Timmy felt his heart smack against his ribs:
This
was what he liked about flying. He jabbed at the ECM controls, even though the fuzzbuster was already singing songs in fifty different languages at once. A hard turn west, more chaff, a flick on the stick and he came clear, the missile detonating itself about two and a half miles from his right wingtip.
There wasn’t any time to celebrate—the RWR called out a new warning: A pair of SA-2A SAM missiles had just been launched five miles ahead, and damned if one of the Sukhois he’d been looking for hadn’t chosen this moment to turn up—three miles behind his butt.
Smack in the middle of heat-seeker range, a point which the Indian pilot underlined by launching two missiles, then following up with two more.
Howe waited until Timmy had engaged the Sukhois to make his move. The Indian AEW aircraft wasn’t particularly difficult to follow. As he closed to twenty miles Howe’s holographic HUD caged the target with a rectangular “fire” cue, showing that it was now in easy range for the AMRAAMs. He waited a second longer, making sure the gear wasn’t being overly optimistic, then dished out a pair of AMRAAMs; within seconds the missiles were galloping forward at Mach 4.
Howe turned his attention to his wingman, who was drawing a lot of interest to the southwest. One of the two fighters Timmy had engaged had dodged his missiles and was sweeping around from the north, angling for a rear-quarter attack. The RWR lit with fresh contacts, this time from ground-based radars; the Indians were throwing everything into this one, launching SA-2As, their best long-range anti-aircraft missiles. Timmy danced in the right corner of Howe’s screen, another Su-27 behind him.
“Two, your six!” warned Howe. “Break!”
“Yeah, I see the asshole,” replied Timmy. “Fucker’s dead meat.”
Howe wasn’t too sure of that, but he was too far away to help his wingman with that pursuer. Instead he went for the throttle, aiming to keep the northern Sukhoi off. With his momentum down he didn’t quite have a shot; he had to build more closure or momentum toward the enemy or his arrow would be shrugged off at long range.