Retribution (6 page)

Indian Ocean,
off the Indian coast
Time unknown

I
T HAPPENED SO GRADUALLY THAT
Z
EN DIDN’T NOTICE THE
line he crossed. One unending moment he was drifting in a kaleidoscope of shapes, thoughts, and emotions; the next, he was fully conscious, floating neck high in the Indian Ocean. And very, very cold.

He glanced around, looking for his wife Breanna. They’d gone out of the plane together, hugging each other as they jumped through the hole left by one of the ejection seats in the Flighthawk bay of the stricken Megafortress. Eight people had been aboard the plane; there were only six ejection seats. As the senior members of the crew, they had the others bail first, then followed the old-fashioned way.

Ejection seats had been invented to get crew members away from the jet as quickly and safely as possible, before they could be smacked by the fuselage or sucked into a jet engine. While certain aircraft were designed to be good jumping platforms, with the parachutists shielded from deadly wind sheers and vortices, the Megafortress was not among them. Though Zen and Breanna had been holding each other as they jumped, the wind had quickly torn them apart.

Zen had smacked his head and back against the fuselage, then rebounded down past Breanna. He’d tried to arc his upper body as a skydiver would. But instead of flying smoothly through the air, he began twisting around, spinning on both axes as if he were a jack tossed up at the start of a child’s
game. He’d forced his arms apart to slow his spin, then pulled the ripcord for his parachute and felt an incredibly hard tug against his crotch. But the chute had opened and then he fell at a much slower speed.

Sometime later—it could have been seconds or hours—he’d seen Breanna’s parachute unfold about two miles away. His mind, tossed by the wind and jarred by the collision with the plane, suddenly cleared. He began shifting his weight and steering the chute toward his wife, flying the parachute in her direction.

A skilled parachutist would have had little trouble getting to her. But he had not done a lot of practice jumps before the aircraft accident that left him paralyzed, and in the time since, done only four, all qualifying jumps under much easier conditions.

Still, he had managed to get within a few hundred yards of Breanna before they hit the water.

The water felt like concrete. Zen hit at an angle, not quite sideways but not erect either. There wasn’t much of a wind, and he had no trouble getting out of the harness. As a paraplegic, his everyday existence had come to depend on a great deal of upper body strength, and he was an excellent swimmer, so he had no trouble squaring himself away. The small raft that was part of his survival gear bobbed up nearby, but rather than getting in, he’d let it trail as he swam in the direction of Breanna.

She wasn’t where he’d thought she would be. Her chute had been released but he couldn’t see her. He felt as if he’d been hit in the stomach with an iron bar.

As calmly as he could manage, he had turned around and around, looking, then began swimming against the slight current and wind, figuring the chute would have been pulled toward him quicker than Breanna had.

Finally, he’d seen something bobbing up and down about twenty yards to his right. It was Breanna’s raft. But she wasn’t in it.

She was floating nearby, held upright by her horseshoe
lifesaver, upright, breathing, but out of it. He’d gotten her into her raft, but then was so exhausted that he pulled himself up on the narrow rubber gunwale and rested. He heard a thunderous roar that gave way to music—an old song by Spinal Tap, he thought—and then he slipped into a place where time had no meaning. The next thing he knew, he found himself here, alone in the water.

How long ago had that been?

His watch had been crushed during the fall from the plane. He stared at the digits, stuck on the time he’d hit the airplane: 7:15 a.m.

The sun was now almost directly overhead, which meant it was either a little before or a little after noon—he wasn’t sure which, since he didn’t know which way was east or west.

Five hours in the water. Pretty long, even in the relatively warm Indian Ocean.

He reached to his vest for his emergency radio. It wasn’t there. Had he taken it out earlier? He had the vaguest memory of doing so—but was it a genuine memory or a dream?

A nightmare.

Was this real?

Breanna would have one. Bree—

Where was she? He didn’t see her.

Where
was
she?

“Bree!”

His voice sounded shallow and hoarse in his ears.

“Yo, Bree! Where are ya, hon?”

He waited, expecting to hear her snap back with something like,
Right behind you, wise guy.

But she didn’t.

He thought he heard her behind him and spun around.

Nothing.

Not only was his radio gone—so was his life raft. He didn’t remember detaching it. His head was pounding. He felt dizzy.

Zen turned slowly in the water, positive he’d seen something out of the corner of his eye. He finally spotted something
in the distance: land or a ship, or even a bank of clouds; he was too far off to tell. He began paddling toward it.

After about fifteen minutes he realized it was land. He also realized the current would help him get to it.

“Bree!” he shouted, looking around. “Bree!”

He paddled harder. After an hour or so his arms began to seize. He no longer had the strength to swim, and simply floated with the tide. His voice had become too weak to do more than whisper. He barely had enough strength, in fact, to resist the creeping sense of despair lapping at his shoulders.

Diego Garcia
1600, 15 January 1998

D
OG WATCHED THE TANKER SET DOWN ON
D
IEGO
G
ARCIA’S
long runway, turning slowly in the air above the island as he waited for his turn to land. It had taken his damaged plane just under eight hours to reach Diego Garcia, more than twice what it had taken to fly north.

His body felt as if it were a statue or maybe a rusted robot that he haunted rather than lived in. His mind could control all of his body’s movements, but didn’t feel quite comfortable doing so. He was a foreigner in his own skin.

Eyes burned dry, throat filled with sand, Dog acknowledged the tower’s clearance and eased the
Wisconsin
into her final leg toward the runway.

Owned by the British, Diego Garcia was a desert island in the middle of nowhere, a sliver of paradise turned into a long runway, fueling station, and listening post. It was an odd mix of three distinct time periods—modern, British colonial, and primordial—all existing uneasily together.

The rush of air around him seemed to subside as he dropped toward the concrete. The wheels screeched loudly when he touched down, and the sound of the wind and the engines seemed to double. Dog had practiced manual-controlled landings many times in the simulator, and had had a few real ones
besides. Even so, his hands shook as the Megafortress continued across the runway, seemingly moving much faster on the ground than she had been in the air. He had his brakes set, power down, and reverse thrusters deployed—he knew he should be stopping, but he wasn’t. He deployed the drag chute at the rear of the aircraft and held on.

The world roared around him, a loud train running in his head. And then finally the aircraft stopped—not gradually, it seemed, but all of a sudden.

The
Wisconsin
halted dead a good hundred yards from the turnoff from the taxiway. Dog let go of the stick and slumped back, too exhausted to move up properly. An SUV with a flashing blue light approached; there were other emergency vehicles, fire trucks, an ambulance, coming behind it.

After he caught his breath, he undid his restraints and pulled himself upright. Embarrassed, he flipped on the mike for his radio.

“Dreamland
Wisconsin
to Tower. Tower, you hearing me?”

“Affirmative,
Wisconsin
. Are you all right?”

“Get these guys out of my way and I’ll tootle over to the hangar,” he said, trying to make his voice sound light.

“Negative,
Wisconsin
. You’re fine where you are. We have a tractor on the way.”

“Welcome back, Colonel,” said a familiar gravelly voice over the circuit.

“Chief Parsons?”

“I hope you didn’t break my plane too bad, Colonel,” said Chief Master Sergeant Clyde Alan “Greasy Hands” Parsons. Parsons was the head enlisted man in the Dreamland detachment, and the de facto air plane czar. He knew more about the Megafortress than its designer did. “I have only a skeleton crew to work with here.”

“I’ll take your skeleton over Angelina Jolie’s body any day,” Dog told him.

“Jeez, I don’t know, Colonel,” answered Parsons. “If that’s the lady I’m thinking of, I’m afraid I’d have to go with her.”

L
IEUTENANT
M
ICHAEL
E
NGLEHARDT HOPPED FROM THE
GMC Jimmy and trotted toward the big black aircraft sitting on the runway in front of him. The right wing and a good part of the fuselage were scarred; bits and pieces of carbon fiber and metal protruded from the jagged holes and scrapes. The engine cowling on the far right engine looked as if someone had written over it with white graffiti.

The ramp ladder was lowered from the forward section. Colonel Bastian’s legs appeared, followed by the colonel himself. His face was drawn back; he looked a hundred years old.

“Colonel!” yelled Englehardt.

“Mikey. How are our people?”

“Mack and the others were picked up by the
Abner Read
several hours ago. They’re going to rendezvous with the
Lincoln
and get home from there.”

“Good. What about everybody else?” asked Dog.

Englehardt lowered his gaze, avoiding his commander’s stare.

“Dreamland
Fisher
was lost with all crew members,” he said. “Wreckage has been sighted. The
Levitow
is also missing,” he added. “It went down near the Indian coast. We’re not exactly sure of the location. A U-2 is overflying the route. The aircraft carrier
Lincoln
will launch some long-range reconnaissance aircraft to help as well, once they’re close enough. They should be within range inside of twelve hours.”

Losing any aircraft and her crew was difficult, Englehardt knew, but losing the
Levitow
would be especially painful for Dog—his daughter Breanna was the
Levitow
’s pilot. Her husband Zen had been aboard, leading the Flighthawk mission.

“What about Danny Freah and Boston?” Dog asked.

“They were picked up by a Sharkboat after they disabled the Iranian minisub. The Sharkboat is due to rendezvous with the
Abner Read
and another Sharkboat in ninety minutes.”

“What’s the status of the
Bennett
?” Dog asked.

“Our engine has been replaced and we should be ready to
launch within the hour,” said Englehardt. Mechanical problems had scratched the airplane from consideration for the original mission, and while they weren’t his fault, the pilot couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt. “I’ve prepped a Search and Rescue mission and would like to help join the search for our guys.”

“Are there still cots in the upper Flighthawk compartment?”

“Yes, sir, but we don’t have a backup crew.”

“I’m your backup crew,” said Dog. “Let’s get in the air.”

Ring E, Pentagon
0825, 15 January 1998
(1825, 15 January, Karachi)

A
IR
F
ORCE
M
AJOR
G
ENERAL
T
ERRILL
“E
ARTHMOVER”
Samson checked his watch. Admiral George Balboa, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was nearly ten minutes late.

Admirals always thought they could be late for everything, Samson thought. But he forced a smile to his face and kept his grousing to himself.

As a younger man, the African-American general would have assumed it was because he was black. But now Samson realized the problem was more generic: no one had any manners these days.

Then again, that was one of the benefits of command: you didn’t need manners when you outranked someone.

“General, would you like some more coffee?” asked one of Balboa’s aides.

“Thank you, Major, but no, I’m fine.”

“There you are, Samson,” barked Balboa as he entered the office. “Come in.”

Balboa’s tone suggested that Samson was the one who was late. Samson hadn’t risen in the ranks by insulting his superiors. Especially when, as he hoped, they were about to deliver good news. So he stifled his annoyance and rose, thanked the
admiral’s staff for their attention, and followed Balboa into his office.

“You’ve heard the news about India and Pakistan, I assume,” said Balboa, sliding behind his desk. An antique, it was said to have belonged to one of the USS
Constitution
’s skippers—a fact Samson wouldn’t have known except for the brass plate screwed into the front, obviously to impress visitors.

“I read the summary on my way over,” said Samson.

“What do you think of the developments?”

Samson considered what sort of response to give. Though classified, the report hadn’t given many details, merely hinting that the U.S. had used some sort of new weapons to down the missiles fired by both sides. It wasn’t clear what was truly going on, however, and the way Balboa posed the question made Samson suspect a trap.

“I guess I don’t have enough details to form an opinion,” he said finally.

“We’ve shot down twenty-eight warheads,” said Balboa. “The Navy sank an Indian aircraft carrier and several Chinese ships that tried to interfere. The President is continuing the operation. He wants the warheads recovered.”

“I see,” said Samson.

“The Dreamland people were in the middle of things. They fired the radiation weapons. Power is out throughout the subcontinent.”