Retribution Read online

  And yet he loved her deeply.

  He felt himself drifting toward sleep. He started to let himself go, falling down toward oblivion. And then a shout startled him back to consciousness.

  “We’ve got them!” yelled Sullivan.

  Aboard the Abner Read,

  northern Arabian Sea

  2150

  “THIS IS THE BRIDGE? I FIGURED IT’D BE A LOT BIGGER. GOD, it looks like an amusement arcade.”

  Storm bristled but said nothing as Major Mack Smith surveyed the Abner Read’s bridge.

  “Cool table. Moving maps, huh?”

  “We call them charts, sir,” said the ensign who’d been assigned as the Dreamland contingent’s tour guide.

  The rest of the Air Force people were crowding sickbay, but Major Smith claimed his sojourn in the water had left him refreshed. He certainly had a lot of energy, Storm thought.

  “How does this work?” asked Mack, raising his hand above the holographic display.

  “No, sir! No!” The ensign grabbed Mack’s hand before the major could swipe it through the display.

  “Hey, take it easy, kid. I wasn’t going to touch anything.”

  “The ensign was trying to point out that in some modes, the holographic table accepts commands much like a touchscreen,” said Storm stiffly. “So we look, don’t touch.”

  “I get the picture.” Mack smirked at Storm, then went over to the helm. “Almost like jet controls, huh?”

  It must have taken the helmsman a monumental effort not to elbow Mack as he breathed over his neck, looking at the ship’s “dashboard.”

  Pity he was so disciplined, thought Storm.

  “I didn’t think we’d be so low in the water,” said Mack. “I mean, did you guys take a hit during the battle?”

  “We took several,” said Storm. “None of which were serious. The ship is designed to sit very low so it can’t be seen by radar, or the naked eye for that matter, except at very close range.”

  “Wow. That’s wild,” said Mack. “It’s weird, though, you know? I mean, it’s a great boat and all. Don’t get me wrong. Glad to be here. But it’s low. What are we? Eight feet above the waves? Six?”

  “I’m afraid that’s classified, sir,” said the ensign.

  Storm decided the man would get shore leave and double beer rations for the rest of his life.

  “Sharkboat Two is one mile north, Captain,” said the helmsman.

  “Very good. Prepare to rendezvous.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.”

  “Two more of your Dreamland people are aboard the Sharkboat, Major,” added Storm. “Captain Freah and one of his sergeants.”

  “No shit. Man, it’s like a regular reunion.”

  “Isn’t it, though? Would you like to meet the captain on the fantail?”

  “There or the bar. Whatever you got.”

  DANNY FREAH RESTORED SOME OF STORM’S GOOD HUMOR, modestly taking very little credit in the disabling of the Iranian minisub that had helped provoke the war between India and Pakistan. Storm had already heard a full report from his men in the Sharkboat and was well aware that Danny and his sergeant had nearly drowned while disabling the craft. Had it not been for the two Dreamlanders, the sub surely would have gotten away.

  In Danny’s account, however, the Sharkboat arrived just at the critical juncture. The Navy people saved the day, securing the craft and fishing him out of the water.

  Storm was still soaking up the praises of his men when Eyes interrupted to tell him that several more downed Dreamland crew members had been found.

  “They’re from the Levitow,” Eyes told him over the ship’s intercom system. “They have six people in the water. They’re not far from the coast. Eighty miles southwest of us.”

  “All right, we’ll pick them up, too,” Storm said. “Are the Chinese near them?”

  “Negative. But there’s an Indian ship in the area. A guided missile frigate.”

  “I’m not afraid of an Indian frigate,” said Storm. He ordered the crew to plot a course to the downed airmen and set sail at top speed.

  “I’d like to participate in the rescue,” said Danny Freah after Storm finished issuing his orders.

  “I’ll tell you what, Captain. If my medical officer releases you to participate, you’re welcome to help.”

  “Thanks, Captain.”

  “No, the pleasure’s mine.”

  “The Levitow is Breanna Stockard’s plane,” said Danny. “She’s the colonel’s daughter.”

  “Bastian’s daughter?” Storm hadn’t realized Colonel Bastian had a child, let alone that she was in the Air Force and under his command. “Bastian doesn’t seem old enough to have a pilot for a daughter.”

  “You’d have to take that up with the colonel himself, sir.”

  Aboard the Bennett,

  over the northern Arabian Sea

  2151

  DOG GRABBED ONE OF THE HANDHOLDS ON THE AUXILIARY control panel of the surface radar station as the Megafortress plunged closer to the water, pushing into a low orbit around the tiny rafts bobbing about twenty miles from the Indian coast. A fitful splash of white blinked from three of the small boats, emergency beacons showing the Bennett where they were.

  Captain Jan Stewart, who’d been the Levitow’s copilot, was on the radio with Sullivan, telling him that all six of the crew members who’d gone out together had been able to hook up. There were no serious injuries, said Stewart, and now that they saw the Megafortress’s flares bursting through the cloud deck, they were in excellent spirits.

  But the Levitow had been carrying eight people, not its usual six.

  “Breanna and Zen went out after us,” Stewart told the Bennett’s copilot. “They were going to jump through the holes left by the escape hatches. None of us saw their parachutes. We’re sure they got out.”

  Her voice sounded almost desperate.

  “Indian Godavari-class frigate, four miles due south,” reported Sergeant Daly over the Bennett’s interphone circuit. “Godavari is equipped with OSA-ME surface-to-air missiles. NATO code name Gecko SA-N-4. Radar guided; range ten kilometers. Accurate to 16,400 feet.”

  “How long before the Abner Read gets here?” Dog asked Sullivan.

  The Bennett’s copilot told him that the ship had estimated it would take about two and a half hours.

  “I’ll bet the Indian ship saw their flares and is homing in on the signal from Stewart’s radio,” added Lieutenant Englehardt, the pilot. “They’ll be close enough to see the beacons in a few minutes, if they haven’t already.”

  “Let’s find out what they’re up to,” said Dog. “Contact them.”

  He put his hands to his eyes. He was tired—beyond tired.

  “Colonel, I have someone from the Indian ship acknowledging,” said the copilot. “Ship’s name is Gomati.”

  Dog pushed his headset’s boom mike close to his mouth and dialed into the frequency used by the Indian ship. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Tecumseh Bastian on Dreamland Bennett. I’d like to speak to the captain of the Gomati.”

  “I am the executive officer,” replied a man in lightly accented English. “What can we do for you, Colonel?”

  “You can hold your position away from my men,” said Dog. “We are conducting rescue operations.”

  The Indian didn’t immediately reply. Dog knew he had a strong hand—the Bennett carried four Harpoon missiles on the rotating dispenser in her belly. One well-placed hit would disable the frigate; two would sink her.

  And despite his orders not to engage any of the combatants, Dog had no compunctions about using the missiles to protect his people.

  “Colonel Bastian,” said a new voice from the destroyer. “I am Captain Ajanta. Why are you warning us away from the men in the water? We intend to offer our assistance.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, we’d prefer to take care of it ourselves,” Dog told him.

  The Indian officer didn’t reply.

  “I think you insulted him,
Colonel,” said Lieutenant Englehardt over the interphone.

  “Maybe.” Dog clicked back into the circuit and took a more diplomatic tact. “Gomati, we appreciate your offer of assistance. We already have a vessel en route and are in communication with the people in the water. We request that you stand by.”

  “As you wish,” replied the Indian captain.

  “I appreciate your offer to help,” said Dog. “Thank you.”

  Indian Ocean,

  off the Indian coast

  Time unknown

  WITH HIS ARMS COMPLETELY DRAINED OF ENERGY, ZEN drifted along in the blackness, more flotsam than living being. He’d never been broken down so low, not even after he woke up in the hospital without the use of his legs.

  Then all he’d been was angry. It was better than this, far better.

  For the longest time he didn’t believe what they told him. Who would? Doctors were always Calamity Janes, telling you about all sorts of diseases and ailments you might have, depending on the outcome of this or that test. He had never liked doctors—not even the handful he was related to.

  So his first reaction to the news was to say, flat out, “Get bent. My legs are fine. Just fine.”

  He kept fighting. His anger grew. It pushed him, got him through rehab every day.

  Rehab sucked. Sucked. But it was the only thing he could do, and he spent hours and hours every day—every day—working and working and working. Pumping iron, swimming, pushing himself in the wheelchair. He hated it. Hated it and loved it, because it sucked so bad it didn’t let his mind wander.

  Thinking was dangerous. If he thought too much, he’d remember the crash, and what it meant.

  Breanna was with him the whole time, even when he didn’t want her to be. He took a lot of his frustration out on her.

  Too much. Even a little would have been too much, but he took much more than that.

  The amazing thing was, she’d stayed. She still loved him. Still loved even the gimp he’d become.

  Gradually, Zen realized he had two motivations. The first was anger: at his accident; at Mack Smith, who he thought had caused it; at the world in general.

  The second was love.

  Anger pushed him every day. It got him back on active duty, made him determined to pull every political string his family had—and they had a lot. It made him get up every morning and insist that he was still Major Jeff “Zen” Stockard, fighter ace, hottest match on the patch, a slick zippersuit going places in the world.

  Love was more subtle. It wasn’t until he got back, all the way back as head of the Flighthawk program, as a pilot again, as a true ace with five enemy planes shot down, that he understood what love had done for him: It had kept the anger at an almost manageable level.

  Zen nudged against something hard in the water. He put his arm up defensively. The only thing he could think of was that he was being attacked by a shark.

  It wasn’t a shark, but a barely submerged rock. There were others all around. A few broke the surface, but most were just under the waves.

  He stared into the darkness, trying to make the blackness dissolve into shapes. There were rocks all around, as if he were near a shore. He pushed forward, expecting to hit a rise and find land, but didn’t. He dragged himself onward, the water too shallow to swim, expecting that with the next push he would be up on land. But the land seemed never to come, and when it finally did, it was more rock than land, somewhat more solid than the pieces he’d bumped over, but still rock.

  He’d expected sand, a real beach. He wasn’t particularly fond of beaches, except that they gave him a chance to swim, which was something he’d liked to do even before it became part of his daily rehab and exercise. They also gave him a chance to watch Breanna come out of the sea, water dripping off her sleek body, caressing it.

  He shook off the thought and concentrated on moving away from the water, crawling up a gentle incline about twenty or thirty yards.

  Exhausted, he lay on his back and rested. A cloud pack had ridden in on a cold front, and as Zen closed his eyes, the clouds gave up some of their water. The rain fell strongly enough to flush the salt from his face, but the rest of him was already so wet that he barely noticed. The wind kicked up, there was a flash of lightning—and then the air was calm. In a few minutes, the moon peeked out from the edge of the clouds. The stars followed, and what had been an almost pitch-black night turned into a silver-bathed twilight.

  Zen sat up and tried to examine the place where he had landed. There were no large trees that he could see, and if there were any bushes, they blended with the boulders in the distance. He groped his way up the hill, maneuvering around loose boulders and outcroppings until he reached the crest. There was another slope beyond, and then the sea, though it was impossible to tell if he was on an island or a peninsula, because another hill rose to his right.

  He turned back to the spot where he had come in, perhaps a hundred feet away. The water lapped over rocks, the tops of the waves shining like small bits of tinsel in the moonlight. The sound was a constant tschct-tschct-tschct, an unworldly hum of rock and wave.

  One of the rocks near the shoreline seemed larger than the rest, and more curiously shaped. Zen stared at it, unable to parse the shadow from the stone. He scanned the rest of the ocean, then returned, more curious. He moved to his right, then farther down the slope.

  It wasn’t a rock, he realized. It was a person.

  Breanna, he thought, throwing himself forward.

  Indian Ocean,

  off the Indian coast

  0043, 16 January 1998

  DANNY FREAH CROUCHED AGAINST THE SIDE OF THE ABNER Read’s boat, waiting for the chance to pluck one of the fliers from the water. The boat was a souped-up Zodiac, custom-made for the littoral warcraft that carried her. Special cells in the hull and preloaded filler made the boats difficult to sink, and the engine, propelled by hydrogen fuel cells, was both fast and quiet. Danny decided he would see about getting some for Whiplash when he got home.

  Jan Stewart was the first of the Levitow’s crewmen to be picked up. Her teeth chattered as Danny helped her in. One of the sailors wrapped a waterproof “space blanket” around her and gave her a chemical warming pouch. Dork—Lieutenant Dennis Thrall, a Flighthawk pilot—was next. His face was swollen and his lips blue.

  Dork’s hands were so swollen that he couldn’t activate the warmer. Danny took it from him and twisted gently, feeling the heat instantly as the chemical reaction began.

  “Thanks, Cap,” said Dork in a husky voice. “Where’s Zen?”

  “Still looking.”

  “He and Bree were going out after us. They had to jump.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Danny.

  “They should be south of us,” said Lieutenant Dick “Bullet” Timmons, huddling next to Dork. Bullet had been the Levitow’s second-shift pilot. “We were flying west. They would have bailed only a few seconds later.”

  “We’ll find them,” said Danny.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the Indian frigate, sitting in an oblong splash of moonlight a mile away. The Indians had volunteered to help with the rescue, but no one knew whether they could be trusted. It had been Indian missiles, after all, that had shot down the Levitow.

  “We were jumped by Indian MiGs and Sukhois on our way to deploy the EEMWBs,” Bullet told Danny. His voice was rushed; he seemed to need to tell what had happened to them, to explain why they were down in the water. “They kept nicking us. The Flighthawks were gone because of the T-Rays. Then finally, one of the Sukhois got us with an AMRAAMski. Plane held together but there was too much damage to keep it in the air. Bree did a hell of a job getting us out over the water and just holding it stable enough to jump. Really she did.”

  “We’ll debrief back at the ship,” Danny told him gently. “It’s all right.”

  But the pilot kept talking.

  “She ordered everyone else to jump. She and Zen stayed behind. She was going to jump, though. Definitely. She wa
s going out. Zen too. She knew she couldn’t fly it back. And there was no way she was landing in India. The Levitow was shielded against the T-Rays. She wouldn’t have let them have the plane, even if she could have landed it. No way.”

  “Relax,” Danny said, grabbing another warmer for him. “We’ll find them.”

  Indian Ocean,

  off the Indian coast

  Time unknown

  ZEN KNEW BETTER THAN TO FLAIL AGAINST THE WAVES, BUT he did it anyway, throwing himself into the teeth of the tide, pushing and pulling and swimming and dragging himself to his wife.

  It was Breanna. He knew it before he could see her face in the pale light, before he could make out the raft, or the horse-shoelike collar she still wore. He just knew it.

  What he didn’t know was whether she was alive.

  He fought against doubt, battering his arms against the rocks.

  Ten feet.

  But those last ten feet were like miles. The water rushed at him as if the ocean wanted to keep her for its own. Zen clawed and crawled forward, pushing toward her, until finally he touched the back of her helmet.

  His fingers seemed to snap back with electricity. His guard dissolved. If she hadn’t even taken off her helmet, how could she be alive?

  “Bree,” whispered Zen. “Bree.”

  His voice was so soft even he had a hard time hearing it over the surf.

  “Bree, we have to get to land. Come on, honey.”

  Not daring to look at her face, not daring to take off her helmet, he reached into the raft, looped one hand gently around her torso, and began pulling her toward shore.

  Dreamland

  1112, 15 January 1998

  (0043, 16 January, Karachi)

  JENNIFER GLEASON FOLDED HER ARMS AS THE ARGUMENT continued over which weapons to ship to Diego Garcia.

  “Anaconda missiles give the Megafortress pilots a long-range antiaircraft option,” said Terrence Calder, the Air Force major who headed the AIM-154 program. “In addition, they can use them against land targets if necessary. You don’t have to worry about the mix of Harpoons and AMRAAM-pluses. It’s win-win.”