Wraith (21 page)

Nick had never been this insubordinate before, but the temptation to take advantage of his communications problem was too great. As long as Dream Catcher remained airworthy, he wasn't giving up on this mission.

Despite the exhilaration of going rogue, Nick wondered if he'd bitten off more than he could chew. He could not get the autopilot back online, and managing all of Dream Catcher's sensors while manually flying the aircraft was exceedingly difficult.

Finally he got his sensor array set up to his liking. The enhanced optical display in the center showed the desert ahead of him, with the cursor poised and ready to select a target. On his right side, he monitored the RF display, but there was still no sign that the enemy had any awareness of his presence. On the left he kept his color thermal display ready; heat signatures from personnel and vehicles would help him identify the correct building.

When he was comfortable with his displays and settled into a steady flight path, Nick decided to send another message to Danny. If anything it would serve to remind the developer that Nick was still in control of Dream Catcher, and to keep his finger away from that remote-detonation switch.

*   *   *

Danny turned back to his computer as the data feed lengthened again.

<70 MI FROM BRAVO>

“Hey, Drake, I just got another message from our boy.”

“What'd he say, ‘Just kidding, coming home now'?” Drake asked, looking up from the massive technical manual sitting in his lap.

“At this point, I wish he would,” said Danny. “To say that my SATCOM exchange with Walker has been tense would be an understatement. I've never been digitally berated before; it was markedly unpleasant.”

“How much fuel time does Dream Catcher have?”

“By my calculation, Nick's got just over an hour before he has to turn back and head for the gulf. What about you? Any luck with the doors? Any chance we might still recover him?”

Drake closed the Dash-1 technical manual he had been studying. “I've got nothing,” he said with resignation. “I've tried everything in the book and a few things that aren't. The right bay doors are jammed solid. Nick is definitely on his own.”

*   *   *

Nick watched the target compound grow larger on his display. It was a perfect match to the photo that Scott had loaded into Dream Catcher's data bank. At least this part was going according to plan.

He used his cursor to drag a box around the compound, just as he had done during the test flight. Then he zoomed in until it filled the screen. Without a normal forward image, it became difficult to fly again. He gave up trying to operate the sensors for a while and focused his energies on flying, filtering out the image and concentrating on the heads-up overlay. Once he had settled into a routine, he slowly returned to the targeting process, adding individual tasks, one by one, until he was able to fly and work the sensors at the same time. It wasn't a matter of learning how to fly all over again, but it felt close.

On the thermal Nick could see a few vehicles in the compound—two sedans, two Jeeps, and a few pickups—most parked near a low building on the southeast side. One of the sedans and both Jeeps had red blotches on the hoods, indicating that the engines were still warm, maybe idling. Keeping get-away vehicles ready certainly matched Saddam's paranoid style.

Then something in the corner of the thermal image caught Nick's eye. A small white circle flared and then subsided to a dim red. He increased the zoom to focus on the area and found a pair of individuals standing outside the building's entrance. Both of them appeared to be carrying rifles. The white spot appeared again, near the mouth of one of the men. It happened two more times before Nick finally realized what he was watching. The man was smoking a cigarette; every time he drew a puff, the hot end of the stick lit up the display. Nick laughed. The cigarette would make the Iraqi an easy target for any weapon with a thermal or infrared sensor. “They should add that to the Surgeon General's warnings,” he muttered.

The RF display was disappointingly blank. There were a few sparks of blue and red, but nothing big enough to isolate the audio. Doubt crept in, and Nick wondered if their intelligence reports were bogus; it certainly wouldn't be the first time. The warm vehicles and the guards outside were nice indicators, but he needed confirmation of at least one of the targets before he could send in the strike.

A moment later, a red blob exploded on Nick's RF display. He quickly tuned the image to narrow down the signal's location and found that it was coming from the same building where the man with the cigarette was standing. With a flash of his cursor and a few keypunches, he isolated the audio. He half expected the signal to be broken and difficult to understand, but it was as clear as a bell and he recognized the voice.

“La, la!”
the voice said emphatically in Arabic. “No, no! I told you, that is
not
good enough. You will have the Mercedes at the location in my communiqué in
four
days, or you will return my money.”

“Ya sayed,”
another voice responded. “But, sir, you must understand that the normal shipping channels are out of the question. The current tightening by the United Nations is causing an unavoidable delay.”

“Don't give me excuses!” the first voice replied angrily. “You made a deal. I am
not
one of your normal customers. I am not some wealthy simpleton with a lot of money and no brains. I know how your business works and I know that you can deliver on schedule.” The voice softened, taking on a very dark tone. “Let me put it to you this way, you little beggar. I will get my vehicle, on time
and
in the correct color scheme, or you will find yourself standing before Allah's judgment much earlier than you'd planned. Do you understand?”

Nick smiled. “Hello, Tariq,” he said out loud. “Tsk-tsk”—he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth—“making personal calls on company time is never a good idea.” He sent another text to Danny.

Merlin waited for his wingman to settle into position, climbing through ten thousand feet over the northern Kuwaiti desert.

“Shadow Two is established in trail,” the younger pilot said in a monotone.

“Shadow One copies. Maintain trail.” Merlin switched his F-117 to autopilot and made another check of his systems. This mission had better end differently than the test in 2001. He knew that it was a hollow hope; the fact that he was even airborne meant something had already gone terribly wrong. His flight of Nighthawks was plan B and there was no plan C.

Lighthouse had given him scant details. The B-2 would be unable to drop its bombs and he was to get his flight in the air; whether or not a good set of target coordinates was on the way was still unknown.

But Merlin had faith in his newest Triple Seven Chase recruit. If Baron still had air under his wings, he'd produce some coordinates. He had to.

“Shadow Two, this is One.”

“Go for Two.”

“Give me another systems check. We don't want to leave anything else to Murphy on this one.”

“Systems are good. What's our time to the target?”

“Forty minutes.” Merlin glanced at the open sky ahead. With his NVGs, he could see every star in the heavens. “I'm glad it's clear up here,” he told his wingman. “That haze layer we flew through on takeoff was pretty ugly.”

*   *   *

An unusually cool air mass had moved in from the Persian Gulf, forcing the oil burn-off in Kuwait to stay low and mix with the desert dust. The resulting haze shrouded Ahmed Al Jaber Air Base in a thick darkness that no stars could penetrate. Tent City was unusually quiet, even for this time of night. The blanket of haze muted all sound and turned a benign stillness into an eerie silence.

Oso sat on his cot, waiting for his shift to begin. He hadn't slept much, despite his exhaustion. He had backed down when Torch threatened to send him home, but the thought of what might happen if he had to lead Sidearm into action still unnerved him.

He heard a quiet voice just outside his tent, then the distinctive chirp of a brick—a secure handheld radio.

“Control, this is Sandy Alert One signing off. I'll be handing my brick over to Five momentarily,” the voice reported.

The brick chirped and crackled a response. “Control copies. Sleep tight.”

The tent flap opened and the pilot with the brick walked over to Oso's cot. “Hey, there,” he said in a tired voice.

“Hey, Magic.”

“You up already?”

“I've been up the whole time. I thought I heard some engine noise earlier. Is something going on?”

“Don't know. I heard it, too. I can't be sure, but I think a couple of Stinkbugs just took off,” replied Magic, using the common nickname for the Nighthawks. “There's nothing on the combat schedule, but I think you'd better get your crew ready just the same.”

Oso patted his friend on the shoulder. “I'll take it from here. You get some sleep.”

A dull nasal roar erupted from the cot behind him and Oso turned to look at Tank, who was still sound asleep. Several amusing and somewhat cruel ways to wake his friend flashed through his mind, but he opted for a simple shake instead. Tank stirred but quickly fell back into dreamland, rolling onto his side. Oso tried again. “Tank,” he whispered, shaking his friend with a bit more vigor, “wake up, man, we're on.” There was no response. The big pilot might as well have been in a coma.

“Fine,” said Oso, “we'll do it the hard way.” He looked down at a cardboard box containing a camel spider Tank had captured earlier in the day, but thought better of it and reached for Tank's canteen instead. Holding it a foot above Tank's head, he tipped it just enough to allow few ounces of water to splash his friend's forehead. Again there was no response.

Oso sighed. “You brought this on yourself, you know.” He turned the canteen completely vertical..

“Hey! What are you . . .” Tank sputtered and coughed, jerking up to a sitting position. He put his hands to his face and wiped the water from his eyes. “Explain to me why you're laughing and why I'm all wet,” he said, pulling his T-shirt away from his chest and wringing it out.

“You left me no choice,” said Oso. “Waking you up is like trying to wake the dead.”

Tank rubbed his face with a towel. “So what's the deal—a long, boring graveyard shift, waiting for the Bat Phone to ring?”

“I don't know. Magic thinks something's up and I'd have to agree with him. A couple of jets took off earlier—might've been Stinkbugs—and they're not on the schedule.”

“Sounds like we'd better be on our toes.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

After Nick passed the coordinates to Danny, he had a decision to make. According to the original mission, he was supposed to hang around and get pictures of the aftermath, but that was based on the assumption that the B-2 would quickly move in and strike. Now he'd have to wait for the Nighthawks to enter the picture, and that might take a while. He checked his fuel gauge to see how much time he really had, and what he saw made his heart jump into his throat.

Dream Catcher was literally running on fumes.

Nick slapped the padded wall in frustration. Without the autopilot to help, he had been so busy flying and operating sensors that the fuel had completely dropped out of his cross-check. He should have had plenty, but the accident must have caused a leak.

He scooted back from the screens and looked down at the small warning panel next to the chin pad. A dim, amber light cautioned
LOW FUEL
. He looked back up at the display. Wasn't there supposed to be a caution message that popped up on the viewscreen as well? He knew there was; he'd read about it in Scott's stupid flight manual. It was just one more thing they had left to chance by skipping the rest of the flight tests.

Nick sighed. None of that mattered now. The fact remained that he was out of gas and deep in enemy territory.

A light
pop
sounded from the engine compartment as the last, weak fuel vapors ignited. Then the digital RPM needle wound back, along with the airspeed. Dream Catcher was a glider. Nick started a descent to keep from stalling and a turn to the south to head toward friendly lines, but his controls were already getting sluggish. Less than halfway through the turn, he lost all control of the ailerons. His right turn to the south deteriorated into a slow tilt back to the left—back toward the target.

Nick tried to remember how long the electrics were supposed to last after the engine died. Before he came up with the answer, the screens went blank and all the indicator lights blinked out. He was entombed in a pitch-black cocoon. The last image from the center screen still burned in negative detail on his open eyes: the target compound, growing larger, nearly centered on the display.

*   *   *

Danny stared at his readout in disbelief. “I think something's wrong, Drake. My readout has ceased.”

Drake looked back, his brow furrowed beneath his headset. “What do you mean, ‘ceased'?”

“As in: The data feed ain't no more.”

“Yeah. Got it. But what are the implications, Danny? And put 'em in simple terms that a pilot can understand.”

Danny could hear the tension in Drake's reply. He chose his next words carefully. “The problem is that I don't
know
the exact implications. I don't have positive data or negative data; I simply have no data at all. All I can tell you is Dream Catcher has some sort of new problem. It could be as benign as a loose wire or as bad as . . .”

“As bad as what?”

“As bad as a total system failure.”

Drake raised his eyebrows. “You mean a crash?”

Danny nodded.

“I'm not willing to accept that just yet.” Drake turned back to his flight controls. “Review the data feed. Find me a definite answer, and do it quick. We have two stealth fighters that are on their way to turn that place into a crater. If Nick crashed out there, I'll have to call them off.”

Danny stared at the figures on his readout, but the data was just a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers. He could feel the weight of the situation getting to him. As an intelligence analyst he'd been trained to work under pressure, but the urgency of his work was usually measured in hours. Now it was being measured in seconds—seconds that meant the life or death of a friend. He took a deep breath and forced his mind to focus. A pattern began to emerge, and the more he absorbed it, the easier it became until finally he had the answer. “How did I miss this?” he asked out loud.

Drake glanced back again. “How did you miss what?”

“The fuel numbers. They're dropping too rapidly. I think Dream Catcher sprang a leak.”

“Don't give me observations, Danny. Give me a conclusion.”

“He ran out of gas, okay? It's all right here. The engine shut down, the auxiliary batteries ran out, and Dream Catcher stopped transmitting.”

“And after that?” Drake pressed.

“The flight controls would only have lasted a few more seconds.” Danny left the engineer station and moved forward to take the copilot seat. “He's down, Drake. And, according to the last position that Dream Catcher sent me, he went down just south of the target. We have to call off the strike.”