Nerve Center (27 page)

“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.