Strike Zone (31 page)

“About a million dollars' worth of computer parts here,” said Stoner as Danny climbed the largest pile. The old PCs—some dated to the first IBM models—provided a surprisingly solid base for him to stand on.

“Just think of how much they cost new,” said Danny, pulling up the viewer and getting to work.

Over the Southern Taiwan Strait
2115

Z
EN DID AN
instrument check on the Flighthawk as he looped south of the target area, confirming that the aircraft was in the green and in good shape. Zen had flown the U/MF so long now that he had an almost extrasensory feel for it; still, as he told his young charge sitting next to him, you couldn't take anything for granted.

“There were twelve people near the gate on that last pass,” said Kick as Zen finished his check. “That's six more than before.”

“Uh-huh,” said Zen. “Maybe we just missed them the last time.”

“Might be. But it looks to me like they came with two more cars.”

“Probably just a shift change,” said Zen. “But let's take another look when we swing back.”

Kaohisiung
2117

D
ANNY STEADIED THE
viewer, completing the last of the series. Stoner had gone down toward the buildings to do more reconnoitering; Danny packed the gear away and hooked back into the Dreamland circuit with his com device. Zen warned him a security patrol was approaching the area where they were.

“They're on the other side of the building,” said Zen. “They have a pickup.”

“Thanks,” said Danny. He stared into the shadows at his left, waiting for Stoner to reappear. He missed his Smart Helmet—not only did it have an integrated night viewer with magnification, but he could have popped up a screen showing where his team member was. He planted a pair of his video “bugs” in the ref-use pile, then added the transmitter to the collection of discarded CPUs.

Damn thing looked right at home.

The Dreamland techies confirmed that the gear was on-line.

“So what's inside the buildings?”

“We're still analyzing it,” said Charlie Tombs, who was back at Dreamland handling the data flow. “Go on and get out of there.”

No shit, thought Danny, but before he could reply, bright light filled the overhead sky. A siren sounded and someone back by the building began shouting.

“Back to the water! Go!” yelled Stoner, running toward him.

“What the hell?” asked Danny.

“Go! Go!” said Stoner, and as if to punctuate his command an automatic weapon began firing from back by the warehouses.

Over the Southern Taiwan Strait
2119

Z
EN HAD ALREADY
started to bank away from the target area when he saw the explosion. He tucked back eastward and almost immediately got a warning from the computer that he was flying at the edge of their control range.

“
Penn
, I need you closer to our target area,” he said calmly.

“Hawk leader, we're trying. We have a request from an air traffic controller and—”

“I need you closer,” insisted Zen. “Team may be under fire.”

“Understood,” said Alou.

Zen felt the big plane sway beneath him, lurching closer to the shoreline.

“The guards are coming around toward the dock area,” said Kick, watching from the other station.

“Let's distract them,” said Zen. He pushed the Flighthawk downward, diving toward the buildings from about eight thousand feet.

“How?” asked Kick.

“Like this,” said Zen, starting to pickle the air-defense flares.

Kaohisiung
2120

A
S THE LIGHT
show sparkled directly over the road at the front of the complex, Danny put his head down and ran for all he was worth back toward the dock. Stoner was waiting for him at the eight-foot fence, an M203 grenade launcher in his hand.

“You can't shoot that,” Danny yelled at him. “We're under orders.”

“It's smoke,” said the CIA agent. “Fog up their night gear.”

He pumped a few rounds into the area back by the computer piles, in effect laying out a curtain they could escape behind.

Danny felt his heart thump as they went over the fence and ran to the dock area. He stopped, pulling his flippers out of his pack, but then jumped into the water with his shoes, figuring it would be safer to change in the water. In his haste he fumbled with his gear and nearly lost one of the flippers; a mouthful of putrid water reminded him he wasn't a SEAL.

“Let's go,” hissed Stoner.

“I am,” said Danny, stroking out after him. He could hear voices on the shore, curses, he thought; something loud ripped behind him.

A machine gun?

“Our boat's coming in!” yelled Stoner.

The warning came just in time—Danny pushed himself back as the hull of the speedboat passed within a few yards. Water churned everywhere; there were more shouts; Danny felt himself being lifted out of the
water and then flying away, hustled from an exploding typhoon.

“What the hell happened?” Sergeant Liu asked.

“One of the guards must have seen Captain Freah up on the pile,” said Stoner. “He fired a flare.”

“They were shooting at you,” said Liu.

“Guess we found the right place, huh?” asked Danny, finally pushing himself upright. “Anybody got a towel?”

Over the Southern Taiwan Strait
2135

W
HILE
Z
EN'S FLARES
had served their purpose in momentarily distracting the guards from Danny and Stoner, they had also attracted the attention of the local authorities. The CKKC as well as the local police and harbor authorities were rushing to investigate; Zen and Major Alou discussed whether they should admit they'd launched the flares as a mistake during their flight. But it would be difficult to explain how the small incendiaries had managed to travel nearly twenty miles from where the Megafortress—clearly visible on radar—was flying, and for the time being at least it seemed better to say nothing.

By the time a CKKC controller came onto their frequency to ask for help searching for “possible communist intruders,” Zen realized he'd blundered. They played through, joining a search off the coast.

“Want me to take the stick for a while?” asked Kick.

“Let me hold on to it,” said Zen. Then he reconsidered—the kid needed the time a heck of a lot more
than he did, and it wasn't like they were really going to encounter anyone.

“Yeah, good idea, Kick,” he told him, and they initiated the swap.

The radar capabilities of
Pennsylvania
made it virtually impossible for an airplane to fly anywhere within two hundred miles of it without the EB-52 catching a whiff, but the CKKC pilots didn't know that. They assumed that the Megafortress was equipped similarly to regular B-52s, which of course had very good radar, but weren't outfitted as a mini-AWACS. Zen felt a bit embarrassed as the pilots swept southward; he realized now how seemingly innocent misunderstandings during the Cold War had nearly led to hostilities several times.

“Hawk leader, we have a contact on the surface that's not supposed to be there,” said
Penn
's copilot, Kevin McNamara. “We're wondering if you can check it out.”

“Roger that,” said Zen. The information was fed in from the Megafortress, indicating two small boats—or possibly submarines—thirty miles directly to the west. “Kick—hop to it.”

“On it,” said the pilot.

 

W
HILE IT WAS
pitch black outside, the Flighthawk visor gave Kick a view as detailed as he would have if it were high noon. Synthesized from its radar as well as IR and optical feeds, the screen showed the sky as a light gray and the water a deep blue; if he wanted, Kick could choose any of a dozen preset schemes or even customize it with a 64,000-color palette.

A bit too much choice as far as he was concerned, but what the hell.

Kick pushed forward in his seat. It was difficult to square the movements of the Megafortress with the path of the plane he was controlling. Most of Kick's airtime had been in the cockpit of A-10As. While the Hog—the popular, though unofficial nickname had been shortened from Warthog—wasn't particularly fast, it was highly maneuverable, and a Hog driver got used to taking g's real fast. But this was different, bizarre in a way—he pushed his stick left and slightly forward, and his stomach began to climb nearly straight up.

“I have a shadow on the surface,” he told McNamara, the Megafortress copilot. “Feeding you visual.”

The shadow lengthened into the thick thumb of a submarine. Upstairs on the flight deck, the copilot had taken the image and presented it to the onboard computers, which searched for identifying marks and then compared these to an onboard databank. In this case, the mast configuration, along with a small fin toward the bow of the craft and a rounded nub at the conning tower, told the computer the submarine was a Chinese diesel boat, a member of the Romeo class originally designed by the Russians in the late 1950s. Though competent, the sixty-man submarines were hardly technological marvels.

“Good work,” Zen told Kick. “Look for the other further west.”

“On it.”

“I have a patrol vessel approaching from the east,” said the copilot. “I'm handing off the information.”

Kick changed his view to IR, thinking he could pick up the thermal trail of the submarine. But the change in the screen disoriented him.

“Use preset two,” prompted Zen. “The IR takes the lower left window next to the sitrep and you still have your main view on top. Watch your altitude.”

“Right,” said Kick. He nudged upward and asked the computer for the proper screen configuration. As it came in he got a distance warning. He backed off the throttle slider so abruptly he nearly flamed the engines. Disoriented, he pulled up out of his search pattern, afraid he was going to stall the U/MF right into the waves.

“Go back again,” said Zen.

“Okay,” managed Kick.

“It's all right. You did all right. Best thing to do sometimes is just take a deep breath. The system throws a lot of information at you and you have to learn to process it.”

“I'm all right,” insisted Kick. He immediately regretted the sharp tone in his voice, but there was no way to take it back; instead, he concentrated on getting himself back into position to resume the search.

 

Z
EN FOLDED HIS
arms in front of him, watching the Flighthawk screens with one eye and Kick with the other. The kid had just passed through a crisis, and how he handled himself now was key. If he got himself back on the horse—put the Flighthawk back into the search pattern, went after the other sub, didn't fuck up worse—there'd be hope for him.

This was exactly the sort of experience that could be the making of him. You had to fail, Zen thought; you had to taste the bitterness of screwing up in your mouth, and then get beyond it. And it was infinitely
better to fail in little ways, as Kick just had, than to wait for one big blowout failure to end all failures as Zen had.

There was no way to teach that, no way to simulate it in exercises. Kick—and Starship, for that matter—had to learn it for themselves. His job was to somehow get them to the point where they could.

“Team is recovered and heading back to the hotel,” reported Major Alou. “We can head back whenever you want.”

“Soon as Kick gets over that other contact, we can head back for the barn,” said Zen.

“Got it at two miles. It's diving,” said the Flighthawk pilot.

The submarine was similar to the other one they had seen. Data recorded, Alou set a course for home.

“Keep your eye out for an unidentified aircraft firing flares over the city,” added the pilot.

“If we see it, you'll be the first to know,” said Zen.

Dreamland Control
0700

R
UBEO STOOD BACK
from the computer screen, rubbing his temple fiercely. They had taken all the inputs from Danny's viewer and compiled them into a model, supplementing them with information from the Flight-hawk flyover and earlier satellite data.

“Problem, Doc?” asked Natalie Catsman.

“It's not an airplane.”

Major Catsman looked at the three-dimensional
mockup of Shed Building Two, which included legends showing items in the facility. The area next to the wall looked like a machine shop, with several stations set up that looked to contain presses and drills. Further back were large banks of some sort of computer equipment, though the Dreamland system could not render it with much precision.

“Recycling?” asked Catsman.

“You wouldn't need computer-controlled machinery for recycling,” said Rubeo. “This material here. It's a portable wall. It's shielding.”

“Shielding what?”

“Yes,” said Rubeo. “This piece here came from a centrifuge. Or could have. They're making bombs here. I believe they're nuclear weapons.”

Catsman, still new to Dreamland and the high-tech gear at its disposal, frowned as if she were overwhelmed.

“We need more data,” said Rubeo. “But look at this.”

He pulled up another screen filled with a row of numbers.

“The lottery?” Catsman laughed.

“Readings from Captain Freah's Geiger counter. They are above normal background levels. Material was taken through here, and there was an accidental spill. Small, but it contained minute traces of plutonium.”

“We have to tell Colonel Bastian about this right away,” said Catsman.

“Absolutely,” said the scientist.

Brunei
2220

M
ONITORING THE OPERATION
from the Dream Command trailer, Dog watched the fuss over the flares at the site and the subsequent patrols. Taiwan and Mainland China might be on the verge of historic discussions, but tensions were still very high—the wrong match at the wrong time, and they could just as well be exchanging gunfire as greetings. And war wouldn't be confined to the two Chinas. Units all across Asia had hiked their alert status.