Retribution Read online

  American missiles, for the record.

  “If they pick us up, Major,” said Dish, “they’ll have a hell of a lot of questions about our plane. There’s no way they’re going to just let us go.”

  “We’re not going to be picked up by the Pakistanis, or the Chinese,” Mack told them. “We’re going to get over to the Abner Read.”

  “Hey, guys, I’m starting to get a little cold,” said Cantor.

  Mack looked over at Cantor. His teeth were chattering.

  “All right. We open one life raft,” said Mack. “We use that to get the hell out of here. Jazz, do the raft. Hang in there, Cantor. Dish’ll start a fire for you as soon as we get it open.”

  Aboard the Abner Read,

  northern Arabian Sea

  0736

  CAPTAIN HAROLD “STORM” GALE PUT HIS HANDS AGAINST the sides of his head, trying to stop the ringing in his ears. He’d been slapped against the deck and bulkhead several times by salvos from attacking aircraft and missiles. His head hurt, but he decided arbitrarily that it wasn’t a concussion, and that even if it was, it wasn’t worth going to sickbay for.

  The jagged cut in his leg from exploding shrapnel might deserve attention, but since the bleeding seemed to have slowed to an ooze, he’d deal with that later.

  The ship herself was in good shape. The holographic damage control display on the deck of the Abner Read showed that she had sustained only minor damage despite the onslaught of missiles fired at her over the past hour.

  What bothered Storm—what truly pissed him off—was the fact that his nemesis also remained afloat despite his own attack. The Chinese aircraft carrier Khan had taken three missiles from the Abner Read, and possibly a fourth from one of the destroyer’s smaller escorts, known as a Sharkboat, and the S.O.B. was still sailing.

  Unlike the Indian carrier he had sunk some hours before.

  “Captain, communication coming in from Fleet.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Storm, Storm, Storm!” exclaimed Admiral Jonathon “Tex” Woods. “What the hell are you up to now?”

  “Admiral.”

  “You sunk the Shiva?”

  “I believe that’s correct, sir. The Indian carrier is gone.”

  “Great going, Storm.” The admiral’s voice swelled with pride, as if he were Storm’s greatest fan and biggest admirer. In fact just the opposite was true. “And you disabled the Khan?”

  “I’m not sure of the damage to the Chinese, Admiral. The Dreamland people helped—they were invaluable.”

  “You’re being uncharacteristically modest, Storm—a welcome development! Even if you are complimenting Lieutenant Colonel Bastian and his crew.”

  Storm scowled. He didn’t like Bastian very much, but the colonel and his people had done an excellent job—and helped save his ship.

  “The Abe is steaming north to take up a patrol off the Indian coast,” said the admiral, referring to the USS Abraham Lincoln, one of the Seventh Fleet’s attack aircraft carriers and Woods’s temporary flagship. “Once the Abe is on station, you’ll receive new orders. In the meantime, get no closer than five miles to another warship—Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, or Croatian, for that matter.”

  Storm had no intention of getting involved in another firefight; he was out of Harpoon antiship missiles, and Standard antiair missiles as well. But the order angered him.

  “Why am I being ordered to withdraw?”

  “You’re not being ordered to withdraw. All combatants have agreed to stay five miles apart. You have a problem with that, Captain?”

  Woods’s belligerent tone was somehow more welcome than the phony proud-father routine he’d started with.

  “I don’t have a problem, Admiral.”

  “Good,” snapped Woods. “There’ll be a bottle of scotch with my compliments when you reach port.”

  Woods signed off. Storm called up the navigational charts on the holographic display at the center of the bridge and had his navigator plot a course south. As he was about to relay their new orders to his exec and the rest of the ship, the communications specialist buzzed in with a new call.

  “Cap, we have Dreamland Wisconsin on the Dreamland channel. It’s Colonel Bastian. The signal’s not the greatest; he’s using a backup radio.”

  Storm fumbled with the control unit on his belt. Squelch blared into his headset before he clicked into the right frequency.

  The funny thing was, it seemed to clear the ringing in his ears.

  “Dreamland Wisconsin to Abner Read. Can you hear me?”

  “This is Storm. Dog, are you there?”

  “I thought I’d lost you,” said the Dreamland commander.

  “I’m here,” Storm told him. “We’ve sustained light damage. We’re rendezvousing with one of our Sharkboats and then sailing south.”

  “Five of my people parachuted into the water near the Khan,” said Dog. “I need to arrange a search.”

  “Give me the coordinates,” said Storm.

  “I’m afraid I can’t. My locator gear was wiped out by the T-Rays. They’re roughly twenty miles due north of the Khan.”

  Storm bent over the holographic chart, where the computer marked the ships’ positions with three-dimensional images. He was about sixty nautical miles away; cutting a straight line at top speed would get him there in two hours.

  Except he couldn’t cut a straight line and stay five miles from the Chinese ships.

  “See if you can get me a better location, Bastian,” said Storm. “I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  Aboard the Wisconsin,

  over the northern Arabian Sea

  0738

  DOG BLEW A FRUSTRATED WAD OF AIR INTO HIS MASK AND turned his attention back to the sea.

  “Dreamland Wisconsin to Mack Smith. Mack, the Abner Read is on its way. We need to find your precise coordinates for them.”

  “Not sure how I can help, Colonel,” snapped Mack. “Looks like they forgot to put lines on this part of the ocean.”

  “Can you break out a signal mirror and flash my cockpit?”

  There was no answer.

  “Mack?”

  A beam of light flashed on the port side of his aircraft.

  “Keep flashing me,” said Dog. He gently nudged the aircraft in the direction of the light, then turned the radio to the Dreamland frequency. “Dreamland Command, this is Colonel Bastian. You reading me?”

  “Spotty but we have you,” responded Major Natalie Catsman. Second in command at the base, Catsman was manning Dreamland’s situation and control room.

  “Can you get my precise location from the sat radio?”

  “Affirmative, Colonel,” she said after checking with one of the techs in the background. “The scientists tell me we can triangulate using your transmission.”

  Dog heard Ray Rubeo objecting in the background that her explanation wasn’t precisely correct and the procedure would yield an error margin of plus-or-minus three meters.

  “I’m going to overfly a spot and give you a mark,” Dog told her. “I’ll try it a couple of times and we can average out the location. I need it for the Abner Read.”

  “Roger that.”

  Dog lined up the Megafortress for a run over the splotches of light. He got his nose directly on one of the beams and ran it down.

  “Now,” he told Catsman.

  He took the computed position and passed it on to Storm. The navy captain grunted and told Dog it would take “a while” to get up there.

  “How long’s a while?”

  “A while is a while,” said Storm. “It may depend on the Chinese. They don’t appear to be in a particularly good mood.”

  True enough, thought Dog. He switched back to the emergency frequency.

  “Mack, can you hear me?”

  “Just barely,” said Mack.

  “Abner Read is on its way. It may take a couple of hours.”

  “Tell those fuckers to get the lead out,” Mack replied. “The water’s startin
g to get cold. And that ship on the horizon looks like it’s getting closer.”

  “Roger that,” said Dog. The ship was a Chinese frigate, and it had in fact turned in the direction of the downed airmen.

  Dog banked too aggressively and the Megafortress sent a rumble through her frame.

  “Sorry about that,” he told the plane. “I don’t mean to take you for granted.”

  Aboard the Abner Read,

  northern Arabian Sea

  0743

  LIEUTENANT KIRK “STARSHIP” ANDREWS FINISHED THE survey of the water around the Sharkboat and turned the Werewolf back toward the Abner Read.

  “Sharkboat, Werewolf survey confirms no mines in the area,” he told the crew aboard the small vessel. Roughly the size of a PT boat, the Sharkboat looked like a miniature version of the Abner Read and was designed to work with the littoral destroyer. Lacking the bigger ship’s comprehensive sensors, the small vessels had proven susceptible to mines earlier in the deployment.

  “Thanks much, Werewolf. We are proceeding toward rendezvous.”

  Starship plotted the course back and let the computer take over the robot helicopter. Developed by Dreamland and originally intended to fight tanks and protected land positions, the Werewolf had been pressed into service as a naval helicopter gunship aboard the Abner Read. It proved remarkably adept at the job, so much so that Starship was now practically a regular member of the crew. The Navy people called him “Airforce” because of his service affiliation; the nickname at first had a ring of derision to it, but had come to be a compliment.

  Starship rose halfway in the seat and turned around, trying to twist some of the knots out of his neck and back. His station was at one end of the destroyer’s high-tech Tactical Warfare Center.

  Lieutenant Commander Jack “Eyes” Eisenberg gave Starship a thumbs-up. Eyes was the Abner Read’s executive officer, second in command of the ship and the majordomo of Tac, as the Tactical Warfare Center was generally known. Starship gave him a grin and turned back to his computer display.

  “Object in water,” blurped the Werewolf computer.

  “Identify,” Starship told the computer. He pointed at the touchscreen, obtaining a precise GPS reading as well as the Werewolf ’s approximation of its size.

  “Unknown. Believed to be human,” said the computer.

  “Tac—I have an object in the water. Could be a man overboard,” said Starship. He took control from the computer and pushed the Werewolf lower, slowing so he could focus the forward video camera better on the object.

  The Werewolf looked like a baby Russian Hokum helicopter. Propelled by a pair of counterrotating blades above, the unmanned aerial vehicle had a stubby set of wings and jet engines whose thrust could be tapped to help push its top speed out to nearly 400 knots—roughly twice what a “normal” helicopter could do. It was quite happy to hover as well, though the transition from top speed to a dead stop could be bumpy. In this case, Starship rode the chopper into a wide arc, descending gradually around his target.

  “Could be a pilot,” he said, studying the screen. “I think it might be one of the Chinese fliers.”

  “Location,” said Eyes calmly.

  Starship read the coordinates off. “Smile for your closeup, dude,” he told the stricken man, pushing the freeze-frame on the videocam.

  “Airforce, what’s your status?” barked Storm.

  “Downed flier, approximately, uh, let’s say ten miles southwest of us, Captain.” Starship was used to Storm’s gruff way of communicating, and his habit of interrupting after Eyes had already given an order. The captain could be a genuine, class one jackass, but he was a good leader when the shit hit the fan.

  Not as good as Colonel Bastian, but few men were.

  “How far is that Sharkboat from him?”

  “Take them almost an hour to get to him, Captain,” Starship told him. “We’re a lot closer, just about ten miles, and—”

  “Here’s what we’re going to do, Airforce,” Storm told him. “The Sharkboat is going to take flyboy. You’re going to hover over him and make sure they find him.”

  Storm snapped off the circuit. Starship, confused about why a vessel farther away was being tasked to make the pickup, turned around and saw Eyes looking over his shoulder at the Werewolf ’s video feed. Because of the ad hoc nature of the arrangement, the Werewolf ’s video and other sensor data was not available at the executive officer’s own station.

  “Looks scared,” said Eyes, bending down.

  “Probably in shock,” said Starship. Punching out of an aircraft at a few hundred knots took a lot out of the body. And while the Arabian Sea was relatively warm—the surface temperature was no lower than 68 degrees—it was still cooler than a human body. “Sir, you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Fire away.”

  “How come the Sharkboat is taking him?”

  “We’re heading north,” said Eyes. “Some of your Dreamland guys bailed and we’re going to pick them up, assuming we can get around the Chinese.”

  Indian Ocean,

  off the Indian coast

  Time unknown

  TIME PAST MIXED WITH TIME FUTURE, THE PRESENT A TANGLE unrecognizable, bizarrely shaped and shot through with pain.

  Time lost meaning, and there was no meaning, there was no present or past, nothing solid, nothing reliable except confusion.

  Major Jeffrey “Zen” Stockard lay on his back in the ocean, floating not on water but rocks, black rocks tinged with orange. Flames lapped at his face and his legs were packed solid in ice. When he breathed, his lungs filled with the perfumed air of lilacs.

  What happened to me?

  The voice came from the sky.

  Am I out of the plane?

  Zen tried to shake his head and regain consciousness. Instead of his head, his chest shook.

  Where is Breanna? Where’s my wife?

  A black blanket covered his head. He clawed at it, pulled and poked and prodded, but it would not yield. He gave up.

  When he did, the blackness lifted to reveal a golden red sun no more than a foot from his head.

  The voice spoke again.

  I’m out of the plane, but where is Breanna?

  Zen blinked his eyes, trying to shield them from the sun. His brain began to sort things out, reconstituting his memory like a computer rebuilding its hard drive. It moved sequentially, from the very beginning, everything rushing together: He was in high school, he was in the Air Force, he had just qualified as a fighter pilot, in the Gulf War.

  Good shot, Captain, that MiG never had a chance.

  Selected as test pilot, assigned to Dreamland, in love.

  Well, you’re too pretty to be a bomber pilot, why’d you slap me?

  I do, I do, I do the happiest day of my life and no, the damn Flighthawk is going to hit my tail pain just pain just dark blank nothing who cares no one cares never and I will walk damn you all damn everyone because I will walk and I won’t walk I won’t won’t won’t will not give up will come back and who I am who I am?

  Where is Breanna? Where is my wife?

  Bree?

  The voice called louder, pleading. Finally, he recognized that it was his voice, that he was calling for his wife, that he wanted her more than he wanted anything, more than he cared for his own life, certainly.

  And then time asserted itself, and he was aware of the present. Zen fell into it, consumed by the swirling ocean of gray.

  White House Situation Room,

  Washington, D.C.

  2145, 14 January 1998

  (0745, 15 January, Karachi)

  “THERE’S AN OPPORTUNITY HERE THAT WE HADN’T ANTICIPATED.” National Security Advisor Philip Freeman’s face was beet red as he pleaded his cause. “It’s been thrown in our lap.”

  Freeman glanced at Secretary of State Jeffrey Hartman, then at President Kevin Martindale. Jed Barclay couldn’t remember his boss arguing this passionately before.

  “Of course there’s risk, but it’s
not as great as it seems,” continued Freeman. “The T-Rays have been much more effective than we hoped. It will be days before power is restored. The Lincoln is within a day’s sail, and we still have the Dreamland assets in the region. If we recover those warheads ourselves, neither country will be in a position to challenge the other for years—years.”

  “We need to know definitively where the warheads are before we give the go ahead for an operation,” insisted Secretary of Defense Arthur Chastain, speaking over the closed circuit communications system from the Pentagon War Room. “Without that, Mr. President, I can’t guarantee success. I’m not even sure I can with it.”

  “Jed?” said Martindale.

  “Space Command is working on the p-p-projections,” said Jed, referring to the Air Force agency responsible for monitoring satellite intelligence. “They say they’ll have something in twenty-four hours.”

  “Twenty-four hours!” Martindale never shouted, but his voice was as loud as Jed had ever heard it.

  “Mr. President,” said Chastain, “it’s going to take time to get the area under full surveillance. The satellites we couldn’t reposition were lost. Remember, we had to rush the operation before all the assets we wanted were in place, and even if they had been—”

  “I don’t want excuses,” said Martindale. “Jed, tell Dreamland to find the warheads.”

  “Begging your pardon, Mr. President, but besides Space Command, the National Reconnaissance Office is working on it, and so is Navy Intelligence,” said Admiral Balboa, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “I’m sure we can cut the time down considerably. We’ll have something in twelve hours, maybe less. And the Dreamland people have done enough.”

  “See what Dreamland can do,” Martindale told Jed. He was calmer now, his voice softer, though it still had an edge to it. “Those scientists can figure it out. They always have some sort of high-tech trick up their sleeves.”