Cyclops One (24 page)

Duke trailed along the south side of the road just a few yards behind the man who had the point. Their man had called from a point about a mile up the trail, near what passed for a highway here—right in the path of Indian troops pursuing a small band of Muslim guerrillas.

Poor bastard’s luck was holding.

He hadn’t called back yet, a bad sign. They had the building where he’d called from pinpointed about a quarter of a mile away. There was a village along the highway to the right; to the left the road switched back and forth like a snake, gradually making its way up a mountainside beyond. There were a few small houses in that direction; they’d check them after the building, then take stock before reconning the village.

Assuming the Indians and Pak guerrillas hadn’t started taking shots at them yet. The Osprey had let them off a quarter of a mile behind in a sloping field, then taken off. Duke had left one of his men and Fisher aboard to play cavalry if needed.

Duke came to the edge of the field behind the building. McIntyre had picked a good spot: It would have been easy to make a pickup here.

Poor dumb bastard. Just had horseshit luck.

“Let’s take a look,” he told his point man. But before they could approach the building, two figures dressed in dark brown clothes emerged from the opposite side of the field and ran toward the highway. Duke and his trooper ducked down, watching as the men—obviously guerrillas—checked the road and then crossed. Two others appeared from near the building, running up near the road and setting up a position there.

Trucks were coming down the road.

McIntyre fled in the direction of the helicopter, running toward the building he’d been in earlier. He got maybe a hundred yards before his lungs started giving out and he felt stitches in his side like knives. He stopped, then abruptly fell to his knees. Bright dots of red covered his knees; he stared at them, thinking for a moment that they were paint.

Then his stomach started to turn. He felt as if a fist had taken hold of his insides, punching upward. Vomit spewed from his mouth; for a minute, maybe more, he retched uncontrollably, only vaguely aware of his surroundings.

Deep instinct took hold of him then, made him wipe his mouth on his shoulder, forced him back to his feet. He left the idea—the absolute knowledge—that he was a murderer in the pool of puke and began walking toward the road. His legs shook; he was far past his limits of endurance. But the instinct that had picked him up would not let him stop. He walked to the stone wall, paralleling it for a short distance, tripping in the loose dirt and vegetation. Realizing that he could make better time on the road, he put his hand on the wall and went to hop over. He didn’t have the strength nor the balance; his legs landed awkwardly, but he managed to get both on the ground and, though stumbling, kept himself going.

Sounds were jumbled in his ears: vehicles—tanks, maybe—and gunfire. He walked a bit farther, maybe twenty feet, then realized something else was coming up the road from behind him. He climbed back over the stone wall and hunkered down, waiting for what seemed like an eternity. As he waited he realized he’d left the other gun behind at the wrecked shack; for a moment he actually considered running back to get it.

Instead he decided to try the phone again. He turned it on, waiting this time as the small screen flashed.

He thumbed the menu, selected, hit Send.

Nothing.

One of the guerrillas fired a bazookalike weapon at the lead truck as it rounded the corner. The missile plowed into the engine and exploded, but most if not all of the men in the back managed to get out before the fire really got going. In the meantime other troops surged up from behind, fanning out in pursuit of the guerrillas.

Duke’s communications specialist, who was maintaining contact with the Osprey and F/A-22Vs, slid over to the captain and told him that two Indian helicopters had been reported about twenty minutes away. They were being escorted by fighters. Meanwhile an armored vehicle was making its way up the road from the west; it would reach their position in another few minutes.

It was possible McIntyre was still in the industrial building, but if they were going to check it out, they were going to have to do it now.

“Tell the Osprey and the Velociraptors to stay close,” Duke told the como specialist. “As soon as we check that building, we’ll bug out.”

McIntyre stared at the phone. It was ringing.

It was
ringing.

He pushed the Talk button and held it to his ear. “Yes?”

“McIntyre, our guys are looking for you,” said Brott. “Are you in the building?”

“No,” he said. “I—I’m up the road about a mile. There’s a house—Wait.”

He heard something coming behind him, something big.

“Something’s coming for me.”

“We’re tracking you down,” said Brott. “Keep talking. We’re very close to you. I have somebody who’s connecting with the ground people now. You’re looking for a guy named Duke.”

“You’re breaking up,” said McIntyre. “My battery is dying.”

“Leave the phone on. Just—”

Brott said something else, but it was garbled. The tank was close now, very close.

McIntyre threw himself down. The heavy stutter of the diesel shocked the ground. He concentrated all of his energy on wishing it away, wishing it past him. As the sound began to fade he turned his head up just enough to see that there were soldiers walking behind it.

One of them shouted.

McIntyre jerked up, drew the gun to his side, and began firing. The dozen or so soldiers in the road dropped down, unsure at first how large the enemy force was.

Timmy had his cursor zeroed in on the armored personnel carrier, waiting for a decision.

“What we doing, Bird One?” he asked Howe over the short-range radio, checking his speed and altitude.

“We’re hanging tight,” replied Howe. “They’re checking the building now. They want to see if he’s inside.”

A moment later Brott’s excited voice, filtered by static as it was relayed across the globe, broke into his helmet.

“There’s a tank—something—men firing at him. He’s a mile up from the building. He said there was a house.”

“I have a BMP,” Timmy said, referring to the infantry fighting vehicle leading the attack. Its turret and tracks made it look like a tank. “I’m going to take it out. Tell our guy to kiss dirt.”

Howe started talking to Brott, trying to get better details on the location. The Osprey chimed in, but Timmy was so intent on the target, the babble of voices didn’t register as one of the mini-bombs slid out from the belly. Guided by a GPS steering package, the bomb’s warhead struck within an inch and a half of the center of the BMP’s turret. Though the bomb weighed roughly half what an old Mark 82 did, the combination of its shaped high explosives and precision accuracy made it arguably as effective as a thousand-pound bomb, possibly even more.

In any event, such fine points were lost on the truck’s crew. The bomb blew through the thin armor skin as if it were the top of a tuna can, incinerating the men. Fragments from the shell of the personnel carrier flew into the squad of men who’d gathered behind it for protection, downing them all. Timmy had no idea of the casualty count; he just saw that he didn’t have a substantial target.

“Osprey, I see you,” he said, running over the road. He saw a lot of bodies down on the road, and a man running to the left. “Hot down there. Hold off!”

The MV-22 appeared over a ridge as he banked, the rotors on its long arms already pointing upward as it slapped down for a landing. The chain gun began spitting slugs in the direction of the flattened BMP.

Must be an Air Force pilot,
Timmy thought to himself.
Doesn’t like to take orders.

The aircraft appeared in front of him, its two arms held up in the sky as if it were descending a ladder. There was a gun at the chin, moving.

An Osprey.

His rescuers.

McIntyre threw down his rifle and held up the cell phone, desperate to make them see that he was on their side. But the gun blinked anyway, its roar so loud that he lost his balance.

He was dead, he knew he was dead.

Gradually he realized that the bullets were landing well behind him, back at the road. The gunfire stopped abruptly, the Osprey whipping around overhead, now behind him, now on the side, once more in front. McIntyre, his eyes filled with dust and his whole body vibrating, got to his feet. The plane stuttered in the air in front of him, then dipped forward.

Shit, the bastards got him! Shit!

McIntyre felt himself pulled forward. He was running; the aircraft was there, intact and unharmed. One of the crewmen was alongside, someone helped him in, they were moving, moving, whipping upward into a surreal swirl, his mind and body twisting in a frenetic mélange.

For a while he seemed to lose consciousness. Not that he blacked out—his brain just couldn’t process information. Then McIntyre found himself sitting along the wall of the aircraft, next to a man in a wrinkled business suit.

“I’d give you a cigarette,” said the man, “but this is the nonsmoking section.”

McIntyre blinked. He knew the man, though the part of his brain that would have connected his face to his name was temporarily out of order.

Andy Fisher.

“So, what do you know about Jolice Missile Systems, anyway?” asked Fisher, smiling and giving him a cigarette despite what he’d said earlier.

Howe took a pass over the road as the Osprey cleared. The SF contingent was already set for a pickup near the building. The Indians, somewhat confused about what was going on, were rushing down the road toward the BMP Timmy had splashed, bypassing the building.

Howe cleared through the pass, then circled back as the MV-22 rendezvoused with the ground team.

Two more Indian troop trucks were coming out from the village. Howe saw them stopping, men pouring from the back.

The lead truck was in the middle of his tactical screen. He hesitated for a second, but it was no contest: A shoulder-launched missile from there could easily splash the Osprey, and even an automatic rifle could do enough damage to take it down.

The small-diameter bomb spun out from his belly, zooming toward the truck. He dished a second one into the other vehicle, at the same time telling the Osprey what was going on. The MV-22 pilot thanked him; ten seconds after the second one exploded, he was airborne.

The Pakistani radar had turned itself off.

“Do we take out the MiGs?” asked Timmy, referring to the Indian planes coming north to help in what they thought was a firefight with Pakistani guerrillas.

“They’re not a threat. Hold off,” said Howe.

“Damn.”

“I love you, Timmy, but sometimes you’re a bit much,” said Howe, snapping his Talk button off.

Howe listened to the windshield wipers slap as the driver made his way through the security checkpoint at the entrance to the Pentagon. The rain came in wind-driven sheets, as if it were pieces of plywood thrown down from the clouds. Like everything else around him for the last forty-eight hours, it seemed completely surreal.

The cease-fire that had been declared between India and Pakistan was holding, and both countries had corralled, at least temporarily, the radical elements that had driven them to the brink of nuclear winter. India’s army had booted out what the spokesmen called “a parcel of radicals”; Pakistan was talking about elections. Meanwhile a committee of diplomats from both sides was discussing Kashmir.

That was just the start. Israel and the Palestinians had scheduled a conference to focus on Jerusalem’s future, and there were rumors that the president of South Korea was planning a visit to North Korea to discuss unification.

To hear the talking heads on TV speak—and Howe had spent yesterday in a hotel room doing almost nothing but—the world was entering a new reality, a place where permanent peace was possible. America had stopped a war. That had never happened before. There was awe in people’s voices, deservedly so.

Howe, who’d been there—who’d not merely seen the results but actually was responsible for them—couldn’t quite process it. He thought of Megan, dead in Cyclops One: Why hadn’t she shot down the missile targeting her? It would have been child’s play, an easy shot.

Easy, maybe, if you weren’t there.

Why had she taken the plane in the first place? Why was she a traitor, a liar?

The questions were a numbness now; he didn’t really ask them, didn’t ponder them. At the moment no one was really sure she’d even been in the wreck; DNA analyses of the recovered remains had not been finished.

The car stopped. There were umbrellas outside. Howe saw the umbrellas but not the men holding them. He got out of the car; people were smiling at him, congratulating him. He started to walk with them. He forced himself to smile, laughed at a joke about being escorted into the Pentagon, not out. An admiral met him just inside the door, began pumping his hand. Howe fell into place, walking down the corridor. He’d been in the building many times before, but this was different, very, very different; it was almost like being plucked from the stands of a football game, hustled down to the locker room, and suited up to play quarterback.

Or rather, it was as though he’d already done that, and thrown the game-winning pass. He was a hero.

Hero.
People actually used that word. Real people, not giddy girls. Admirals and generals and captains and majors and real people.

To Howe, a hero was somebody who jumped out of a foxhole and ran through a jungle as machine guns were firing and mortars exploding, picked up a guy on the ground, and hunkered back to the lines with him. A hero was a Marine, or a grunt, or maybe one of the Air Force Special Tactics guys, or the SF soldiers who’d snatched McIntyre from the ground fight.

A pilot who shot down ten or twelve or even one or two fighters, or went down against enemy ground fire to save a bunch of guys pinned down—who held his breath and his bowels while all hell broke loose—those guys were heroes.

He’d done that, he reminded himself.

“I want to thank you again, Colonel, for saving me.”

Howe smiled at the man standing before him, then belatedly realized that it was McIntyre.

Somehow, in new clothes and smelling like he’d just stepped from the shower, the NSC official seemed in worse shape than when they’d reached the base. He seemed to have shrunk, and clearly he’d lost weight, considerable weight, just in the past two days.

“You doing all right?” Howe asked.

McIntyre barely moved his head as he nodded, and pulled his arms tight to his body, forearms pitched outward as if they were the tucked wings of a bird. “Hard to get sleep.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

Others pressed in behind McIntyre, trying to say hello, trying to add their personal congratulations.

“I’m glad we got you out,” said Howe.

“If I can do anything for you, I will,” said McIntyre.

Howe watched him recede into the background of the room as the knot of people swelled. They began moving from the reception to a small auditorium.

Megan would have eaten this sort of thing up in her sleek black dress, with her VIP smile. She was used to dealing with these kinds of people, movers and shakers. Why had she fallen in love with him, anyway? Just to use him?

No. He couldn’t let himself believe that—couldn’t let go of that last strand of respect maybe.

She did love him, even though she was a bitch and a traitor, and if that boot they’d found belonged to her, or if some of that charcoaled metal contained her remains, he’d spit on it.

Part of him would. The other part would just shake his head.

Belatedly, Howe realized everyone around him was rising. The President of the United States had come into the room and was approaching the podium.

Howe felt his face flushing, even before the President pointed him out in the front row. Then D’Amici launched into a short, punchy speech about how America had met the challenge and would continue to do so, thanks to the men and women in this building and the armed services beyond. It was a good, uplifting talk, punctuated by enthusiastic applause.

There was no mention of McIntyre: Doing so might embarrass the Indians at a delicate point. Nor, of course, was there any mention of Cyclops One.

There weren’t even any medals. Those would come later, undoubtedly as part of another media event.

Timmy sat a few chairs away from him, beaming like a lightbulb. He was a good kid, a fine aviator—a better pilot than Howe, really, though only time would tell if he had the stomach it took to get into the upper command ranks. Howe thought he did; Timmy even joked with the President when he shook his hand. Good for him.

Howe just smiled and nodded, smiled and nodded.

When the President had left, Bonham came over like a long-lost uncle, congratulating Howe and introducing him to several two-and three-star generals and admirals. He shook maybe three dozen hands, smiled a lot, nodded even more.

“You’re going to go far,” Bonham told him. “Very, very far. I told you. I told you.” The former general leaned close to him. “DNA preliminary result is in,” he said in a whisper. “Megan York’s on the flight jacket. Positive match.”

Bonham pulled back. “You’ll be head of the JCS one day. Maybe President.”

“Great,” was all Howe could think of answering.