Tomahawk (34 page)

“We don't have a leader,” a woman said defiantly. “We're all equal here.”

“This one,” Dan said, pointing to Murdoch.

Manhurin asked him, “Are there any more of you people in the woods?” When the protester didn't answer, he said to Decker, “Gene, pull in tight and reinforce. This could be a diversion.”

The security force commander spoke to a trooper; the man trotted off, rifle at port arms. Then he said to Murdoch, “The major asked you a question.”

The thin man said nothing, and Decker backhanded him. The crack of the blow seemed loud even against the howl of the wind. Dan looked at Manhurin, who stood with eyes narrowed. He understood. He wanted to hit somebody, too. But instead he said, “Steve.”

The flight commander blinked, seemed to recover himself.
“Don't do that again, Gene. Hear me? Prisoner of war rules.”

Decker looked around, and suddenly Dan realized how alone they were, how empty the forest around them was. “We ought to take them for a walk,” Decker said in a low voice. “Search them, make sure they don't have explosives or weapons, and then take them for a walk. Nobody'd miss these creeps.”

Manhurin took his arm and led him a few meters away. When they came back, the security commander's face was flushed, lips pressed tightly together. Dan caught the major's last sentence to him: “Not that I give a shit, Gene, but we don't need martyrs on our hands. Understand?” Decker looked away.

Manhurin looked at Dan's chest next. “Is that yours?”

“What?”

“The blood.”

“Oh, no, one of them threw it on me. When she saw we weren't going to let her get to the launcher.”

“We'll get you a clean set.”

One of the guards stepped away from the prisoners, carrying a cartridge box full of wallets, keys, and change. Manhurin peered in, rummaging around. Then his face changed. He held up a ragged sheet of paper, stared at it, and then motioned Dan in to share it.

They looked down at a map of the Primrose test site, a second- or third-generation photocopy, speckled and aslant, but obviously from the same source, if not from the same page, as the briefing package that had been distributed back at Crystal City. Two points were marked on it in pencil. One was the flight's initial location, where they'd been for the first set of firings. The other was their hop-skip relocation position, where they were now.

The radio crackled. “Sir, we're still on hold back here, Still got a green missile, but we're closing in on the end of the window. Do you want to scrub?”

Manhurin snatched it. “No. Resume launch sequence. Clear the fly-out vector.” To Decker, who had just come back, he said, “Put these people in the bunker. Double-guard them. And if any of them gets hurt—”

“I wouldn't dream of touching a hair on their saintly
heads,” Decker sneered. He jerked Murdoch to his feet, and shoved him toward the slit trench. “Move, you Commie piece of shit.”

Dan trailed them, guards and guarded, back to the bunker. Two of the protesters limped. The guards shoved them with rifles. He didn't object. The radio crackled, warning everyone in the open to take cover. He stood by the bunker door, glancing at his watch again, then turned to look back toward the launcher.

Just at that moment, as he turned, the booster ignited. Simultaneous with the roar, a white blast of smoke and flying snow bloomed, hearted with an intense orange flare. Fragments of blown-through canister and kicked-up rock and frozen mud whipped through the trees.

He held his breath, shielding his eyes, trying to see. Counting one thousand, two thousand from the first shattering blast of sound, sound that continued, piercingly painful from only a few hundred feet away. It vibrated in his chest, the way a balloon held in your hands hums when you speak.

A flaming sword emerged from the rolling cloud of smoke and snow and flame above the trees. Heat touched his upturned eyeballs. Fly, fly, fly! The missile rose on a roaring column of yellow flame, bright and building on a pillar of white. There was pitch-up…. He squinted up, frowning.

The missile, still boosting, lifted its nose. It was still gaining altitude, but it was pitching up hard. Pitching up
radically
… flying almost straight up now.

A groan came from around him. His throat closed as he urged it, Come back, come back. Where's the fucking guidance? he thought.

Then, to his horror, it nosed back over.

The group scattered, some diving for the black mouth of the bunker, joining the captives inside, others going flat on the snow. He stood rooted, unable to look away from an all-up missile fueled for an eleven-hundred-mile flight
coming back toward him.
It wasn't that he didn't want to run. He just couldn't decide which way to go. But as he
stared helplessly, the missile steadied. It swung back and regained the vertical.

Still climbing, it vanished into the overcast. The radiance glowed from within it for a few seconds, then slowly vanished.

An ear-ringing silence descended on the woods. Smoke blew downwind. Then his knees started to shake, and he squatted in the snow to disguise their weakness.

‘That was exciting,” he said to Sparky. The engineer just shook his head.

When they'd recovered enough to make feeble jokes, he went over to the test van to see what they had for initial download. The tech said they didn't get instant readouts, but it looked like a transient guidance glitch. Missile attitude had showed ninety degrees at one point, straight up, but then it had recovered and re-executed pitch-down before heading off. “Downrange?” Dan said hopefully.

“Yeah, but not far. It got a minute out and started to lose altitude. Minute and a half, signal termination.”

“What, you lost it?”

“We didn't lose anything that was there to lose, sir,” said the tech. “In words of one syllable or less, it crashed, ninety-eight point seven seconds out of the can.”

Fucking great, he thought. He was turning away when Decker put his head in. “Everybody to the mess tent,” he said. He caught Dan's eye. “Sorry about flying off the handle back there, Commander. With the prisoners. I was just passing a joke.”

But Dan thought he didn't look sorry at all.

“Okay,” Manhurin said. “First off, our uninvited guests. I called Cold Lake to report their presence and request extraction as soon as this weather lifts. Gene, I want them out of that bunker and into a tent with heat. See that they have food, water, and medical attention.”

Decker said he'd take care of it. Looking at Dan, the flight commander said, “And take care of the Navy, here, too. I don't want him walking around in that.”

A sergeant brought him a new parka and Dan handed over the bloody one. There was still a stain on the pants,
but he decided it wasn't enough to bother changing right now.

A warrant officer Dan didn't know kicked off the postmortem. “Quick look, there's not much you can say. A pitch-up overcorrection early in the boost phase. Radical g forces. After that, we were basically watching a brain-dead airframe fly on booster power and aerodynamics.”

“Guidance?”

The Convair contractor rep said, “I don't think the guidance system was at fault here. Or at least it was fighting to recover. I don't go with ‘brain-dead,' either. Near the end of the boost firing, we were seeing recovery. The missile was actually back fairly close to transition-to-flight profile at that point.”

“They should be able to take quite a few g's,” Dan said. “They were designed for submarines.”

“Submarines pull a lot of g's?” the warrant said incredulously.

“No, but they get depth-charged. The missile's been qualified under MIL-S-nine-oh-one-C, underwater shock equivalent to depth charging.”

Manhurin said, “Okay, so then why didn't it tail-deploy, scoop-deploy, engine-start?”

The warrant spread his hands. “Maybe it did. But we aren't going to know until we get a look at it. And right now, I don't think we're going to.”

Dan had been thinking during this exchange. It sounded like the same failure mode Point Mugu had reported. The “anomalies” they suspected were due to booster-separation failure. But since the Navy firings took place over deep water, the spent boosters went into the drink and they'd never been able to find them. So they'd had to redesign blind.

Now they had the same type of failure, only over land. Dan asked him, “What do you mean, we're not going to get a look at it?”

“We had ninety-eight seconds' fly-out. That's thirty-some boost, actually closer to thirty-four seconds, according to telemetry. That puts the missile three, four miles out at separation. If it's anywhere near the envelope, it's traveling about six hundred feet a second. From there,
ballistics takes over.” Manhurin jabbed numbers into a pocket calculator. “A wild-ass guess, but you're probably looking at an impact point ten, twelve miles out. More, if the wings deployed.”

“Can we see a map?” Dan said.

Decker had the best, a Canadian contour map marked “Medley River,” showing the quadrant northwest of Primrose Lake in tones of green and white, with pale purple lakes and streams. They gathered around it. Dan noticed the grass-tuft symbols that meant marsh.

Decker said, “Here we are. I guess if we'd've had a transponder active, you'd have told us, right?”

The test technician: “Right. That's why I called it as a crash rather than as a chuter.”

Manhurin asked, “You're sure the recovery package didn't deploy?”

“Not a hundred percent, but if all the telemetry stops at once, that's usually a hard-impact scenario.”

“So we don't have a beacon. What was the last vector?”

‘Two niner two. True.”

Dan walked his fingers out. The last one landed on something called the Shaver River, east of an unnamed lake that was no larger or smaller than scores of others. The map showed nothing else out there, no road, only a faint dotted line, which, when you looked closely, the legend said was a trail, cut line, or portage.

“What about it?” he asked Thompson. “Can we get some personnel up there, do a search?”

“In this? Forget it. It can close down anytime to zero vis, and I mean zero. This is the kind of storm coming where people get lost and die between the house and the barn.”

He figured the Canadian was indulging in a little exaggeration. So far, the visibility hadn't been that bad. “Well, we've got compasses. Here's what I'm thinking, K. T.—”

“Forget it,” said Manhurin. “I'm as eager to find that bird as you are, but I'm not going to risk my people out there. We're technicians, not Arctic-trained Special Forces. Let's wait till the storm's over and we can get a
helo up. Take our infiltrators back, turn them over to the Mounties, then go looking for it.”

“By then, it'll be covered with snow. It'll be years before somebody falls over it. If we get out there right now, we might even see smoke.”

“Not with my men.”

“Well, I'm going to take a look,” Dan said.

“Forget it,” said Manhurin, biting it off. “K. T.'s told us this is nothing to fool around with. You're not going; nobody's going anywhere till this lifts.”

“Can we have a word?”

There wasn't much privacy at the far end of the tent, so Dan kept his voice down. “Look, you're not in my chain of command, Steve. So don't give me these flat negatives. I respect your refusal to risk your men. But we need that missile back. This could bust our transition-to-flight problem.”

“Is it worth dying over?”

“I don't plan to die over it. If I can get to that southern ridgeline, I'll be able to get a look out over the river valley. Maybe almost as good as from the air. That was a fully fueled missile. If it went down hard, like your guy says, I'm counting on smoke. If I see any, I'll shoot a couple of lines of bearing and come back. Then we can go get it when things clear up.” He put his hand on the major's shoulder. “All I need's a Hummer and a compass, and that map.”

“You're not going alone.” Manhurin raised his voice. “Gene! Who we got who's good in the woods?”

“Sullivan's my best. Orienteering. Expert shot. Climbs mountains in his spare time.”

“See if he wants to volunteer to go out with the commander.” Manhurin turned away, and Dan didn't see any friendliness in his eyes anymore.

He had a moment of doubt in the Hummer, getting ready to move out as soon as Sullivan came back from the barracks tents. The snow had closed down already. It was hard to see the LCC fifty yards away. He wondered how much worse it was going to get. Sullivan, a wiry, red-faced southerner, seemed unperturbed, though. He'd put
together a couple of packs of gear in case things went sour. They lay in the back of the Hummer, along with Decker's contributions: portable radios, flashlights, spare batteries, a heater and fuel, an armload of MREs.

Deep down, he didn't really think they were going to find anything. But at least he'd be able to say he'd looked.

Sakai leaned in. “I'm going, too.”

“No, Sparky. No point risking three guys where two can do the job. Probably a wild-goose chase anyway.”

‘Then why you going?”

“Just on the off chance.” Dan gave him instructions, told him to go over the software again and see if there was anything that could cause a pitch-up overcorrect. “I don't know if they're going to launch tomorrow, but if they do, scrub down that part of the code first.”

Sakai hesitated, then nodded and stepped back.

Sullivan came out of the snow carrying two sleeping bags and what looked like a mountain tent, all packed into sausage-tight green nylon bags. He tossed them in back and got in. “Me drive, you navigate,” he said. “How's that sound?”

“Like a plan.” Dan traced a route. “First thing, we gotta go back toward Primrose, then hang a left at the lake. Cross over into Saskatchewan, then come back along this dotted line above the river.”