Cyclops One af-1 Page 4

  “I was just thinking those planes are worth a hell of a lot of cigarettes,” said Fisher.

  “I don’t have time for this,” said Howe. He pushed past and out the door.

  * * *

  “Quick temper,” Fisher told the sergeant trailing him as he worked his way out of the rat-maze of administrative offices beneath the control-command level of the underground facility. “If this were Perry Mason,” said the FBI agent, “we’d figure he had something to hide.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” said the sergeant.

  “Johnson, if I accused you of taking a bribe, you’d get pissed off.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And if I accused your friend of taking a bribe, you’d probably also get pissed off.”

  “Yes, sir, I would.”

  “Yeah, me too. I can’t see why it changes anything for Perry. But he’s the man. Come on, let’s go see if the search parties have their coffee situation straightened out.”

  Chapter 5

  Captain Timothy “Blaze” Robinson — known as Timmy to his friends — pulled the F-16 through its turn gently, moving his whole body as he pressured the control stick. The Falcon did a graceful bank three thousand feet above the closest peak, tiptoeing around the Canadian Rockies as if afraid to wake them. Timmy nudged the aircraft straight and level, his movements the minimum needed to keep the plane on its course. He leaned his head toward the canopy, staring out at the terrain he’d been given to comb.

  The search force included a half-dozen helicopters, several small propeller-driven craft that could fly low and slow in the mountains, a J-STARS aircraft with a bushel of sensors, and a U-2R providing near-real-time IR imaging. Still, Timmy flew as if finding his downed comrades were entirely on his shoulders. No high-tech sensor, no satellite image, could do a better job than his own eyes as they hunted through the shadowy slopes below. Two other pilots had taken this same workhorse F-16 over this same terrain on earlier shifts, but Timmy tracked over it as if it were virgin territory, sure that he would see something through the haze and persistent, lingering clouds.

  By rights, Timmy should be the guy they were looking for. He was one of the F/A-22V pilots and ordinarily flew as Williams’s wingman; Colonel Howe had bumped him for the test, taking lead and slotting Williams behind him.

  Timmy scanned his instruments, double-checking to make sure all systems were in the green. The F-16 had a smooth, easygoing personality, a can-do attitude that matched its versatility. She wasn’t particularly well suited to the SAR role, however; the propeller-driven and helicopter assets involved in the search could fly lower and slower much more comfortably, and had more eyes available for the search. That fact was reflected in Timmy’s assigned area, well out of the primary search grid. But neither the pilot nor the F-16 herself would have admitted this. Muscling her ailerons against the sharp wind vortices tossed off by the crags, the Falcon stiffened her tail and held off the breeze, sailing across the valley with the calm aplomb of a schooner on a glass lake.

  The shared radio frequency being used to coordinate the search buzzed with voices. Grandpa — the J-STARS control that was coordinating the search — shifted assets around as the clouds slowly made their way off the mountains.

  In a combat zone, a specific protocol governed when an airman would “come up” or broadcast on Guard frequency, the radio channel reserved for such emergencies and monitored by all of the searchers. These special instructions or spins conserved the limited battery power of the radios and made it more difficult for an enemy to detect or home in on the transmissions. But in this situation — and sometimes even in combat — a broadcast might be made at any time, especially if the downed airman heard a search plane overhead.

  Timmy tried willing a broadcast into his ear; he heard only static, and even that was faint.

  This long after a crash, what were the odds that someone had survived?

  Not particularly good. Nor was it likely that one of the crew would be this far north. But it was possible. Moving at a couple of hundred miles an hour, you could travel relatively far in ten minutes, fifteen. There was no radar cover close to the mountains, and it was possible the planes had stayed in the air even longer. Punch out over the clouds, get pushed around a bit by the wind, hit your head somewhere — it was possible, if unlikely.

  The searchers suddenly began chattering. They’d spotted something in a ravine. Metal.

  Though the discovery was over a hundred miles to the west, Timmy felt his pulse jump. He slipped into another turn, dipping his wing and throttling back so he was just barely above stall speed, tiptoeing over the rough terrain. Something was there. He slipped around for another look.

  The F-16’s General Electric F110-GE-129IPE power plant developed roughly 30,000 pounds of thrust and could move the Fighting Falcon out to Mach 2 in a heartbeat. The power plant had been engineered specifically to increase acceleration and performance at low altitude, allowing a pilot on a bombing run to accelerate quickly after his bombs were dropped. But here he wanted to do the opposite, and the engine grumbled slightly as the pilot dialed its thrust ever lower.

  Timmy flew over the spot four times, making sure it was just a rock he’d seen, not a body. On his last pass he flew barely fifty feet from the ground, moving dangerously slow, just over 140 knots. Still, it was difficult to get a good glimpse of the ground, and the interplay of terrain and shadows played tricks on his eyes. Once more he broadcast his location on Guard, asking if Williams or anyone could hear him.

  Going from the F/A-22V to the F-16 was a little like trading a BMW M5 for a Honda Civic. Both aircraft were well made, but the ideas behind their designs were very different. The base F/A-22 was a cutting-edge design aimed at creating the world’s best interceptor. All of the political wrangling and bureaucratic BS involved in its procurement — such as what Timmy viewed as the absurd designation change from F-22 to F/A-22—couldn’t gum up what was, at its core, a great fighting machine.

  The F/A-22V took that design considerably further — without, he might have added, the political BS, since the work was all handled “off-line” by NADT. Specially designed to work with Cyclops as part of a new-era battle element, the aircraft was arguably the most versatile and capable ever constructed.

  The F-16 was a lower-cost (though not cheap) jack-of-all-trades. Depending on its configuration, it could operate as an attack plane, a Wild Weasel or anti-SAM aircraft, a close-air-support mud fighter, or an interceptor. This Block 50/52 aircraft represented a substantial improvement over the original Block 15, the Air Force’s first production model, which nudged off the assembly line in the 1970’s. Even so, its base technology was older than Timmy and even Colonel Howe, and after flying the F/A-22V, the pilot would have felt severely handicapped in the F-16 in a combat situation.

  Not overmatched, though. The F-16—which was known as the Viper as well as the Fighting Falcon, its more “official” nickname — had excellent maneuverability and acceleration at near-Mach and Mach-plus speeds, attributes that played well in a knife fight. The original lack of BVR or beyond-visible-range killing ability had been corrected with the fitting of AIM-120 AMRAAMs some years before, and the Block 50/52 aircraft’s APG-68 radar, with a range between thirty and forty-five miles and the ability to track up to ten targets simultaneously, was at least arguably as capable as anything the F-16 was likely to encounter.

  Assuming, of course, that it didn’t encounter an American plane.

  Timmy came to the end of the area he’d been assigned to patrol and began to track back south. As he did, the controller in the J-STARS coordinating the search effort hailed him.

  “Florida Three,” he acknowledged.

  “Florida, we have an area for you to check out, possible debris picked up by our Eyes asset.”

  Eyes was a U-2 helping with the search.

  “Florida Three acknowledges, Grandpa,” answered Timmy. “Feed me a vector.”

  He selected military power, climbing qui
ckly and tracking toward the area, which was so far north and east of the test area that he guessed it had to be a false lead. The mission specialist in the J-STARS gave him a detailed description of the terrain as he flew, saying there seemed to be a large piece of metal in or on a rockslide at the base of a sheer cliff in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies about two hundred miles due west of Edmonton. He described it as a broken silver pencil stuck in the side of a thousand-meter rockslide.

  As Timmy neared the spot he took the plane down, asking the J-STARS specialist to describe the area again. J-STARS were E-8A or E-8C Boeing 707-type aircraft that had been developed as a joint project by the Air Force and Army. The aircraft had considerable surveillance equipment of their own, including a Norden AN/APY-3 multimode Side-Looking Airborne Radar. The complement of operators — there were a minimum of ten consoles, with room for up to seventeen, depending on the plane and mission — could process and coordinate information from a seemingly infinite variety of sources. They could direct and download targeting information to properly equipped Air Force attack planes as well as provide comprehensive battlefield intelligence to ground commanders. In this case, the operator was using a newly developed variant of the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (or JTIDS) data link to pass an infrared feed directly from the U-2R to his console. Some F-16s were already equipped with gear that would have allowed the specialist to punch a few buttons and relay the image directly to Timmy’s cockpit. Had he been flying one of the F/A-22Vs, the data would have been added to the synthesized three-dimensional rendering of the area on the tactics screen. The plane’s computer would have calculated his best approach and likely time to target, along with a fuel matrix and a suggested wine.

  Timmy oriented himself, tucking down toward the cliff side. He took the first pass too fast and too high, streaking by the mountain so quickly, he couldn’t spot anything. His heart had started to pound; he realized as he pulled the nose of his plane back away from the ground that his hand was shaking.

  He cut his orbit, pushing his wing down and falling back toward the target area. He backed his speed off and even considered putting down his landing gear to help slow down.

  He didn’t see the grayish object until the third pass. From the air, it looked like the bottom half of an old ball-point pen buried under some loose gravel. It seemed too small to be an airplane and had no wings. Timmy banked to his right, circling around to get another view. He leaned forward from the canted seat of the F-16, pushing around, slowing the aircraft down to a walk. This pass was a tiptoe so close that his left wingtip nearly clipped the side of the hill.

  There was definitely something in the crevice of the ravine. The bodies of both missing planes were covered with a dull gray next-generation radar-resistant skin — not the black coating of B-2s but something considered more durable and nearly as slippery. It was extremely difficult to see against the gray rocks and shadows.

  But it was there. Or something was there.

  Timmy spun back over it, this time going so slow that the aircraft bleated out a stall warning.

  He could see a wing farther along, an almost perfect isosceles triangle sheered from an aircraft.

  The Velociraptor.

  He clicked his microphone to call the airborne search coordinator.

  Chapter 6

  Clayton T. Bonham waited impatiently as the MH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter he’d commandeered pitched through the mountains toward the area where the piece of metal had been found. He was just twenty minutes behind the initial-response team, which itself had arrived barely a half hour after the call from the flight that had made the find, but to Bonham it was too damn late already. When he gave an order, he expected it filled immediately, if not sooner. The Pave Hawk was moving close to its top speed, but that was hardly fast enough for him.

  Bonham had been retired from the Air Force for nearly five years. Nonetheless, he still thought and acted like a two-star general; he even insisted on his subordinates calling him General.

  Not insisted, exactly. Encouraged.

  After all, as head of NADT, he was owed a certain amount of respect. He was responsible for developing the most important weapons the United States had developed since the hydrogen bomb.

  An exaggeration, surely, and yet, one with some justification. When fully implemented, a Cyclops battle element could destroy anything from a hardened ballistic-missile complex to a terrorist one-man basement bomb factory, with minimal collateral damage. The possibilities were endless and, without exaggeration, revolutionary.

  One of the crewmen standing in the rear of the helicopter with Bonham tugged at him slightly as a reminder that he was leaning across open space. Bonham glared at the young man, though the crewman had only been concerned about his safety. The helicopter settled into a hover; Bonham was out on the ground before the wheels hit dirt. He trotted across the road to where an Air Force major from the first team in waited to make his report. The major was flanked by a Special Tactics sergeant with an M16, as well as a civilian whom Bonham didn’t recognize.

  “General,” said the major, bobbing his head in an unofficial salute.

  “What do we have?”

  “Piece of fairing from a large aircraft, very possibly a 767 type, though we’re still not sure.”

  “Definitely a 767,” said the civilian.

  Bonham glanced at the man, who had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The general liked definite opinions, and so gave the civilian only half the scowl he normally would have for interrupting. Obviously the man was one of the experts brought in by the Air Force to help with the operation.

  “We’re going to airlift it out, get the technical people to take a look at it,” said the major.

  “Waste of time,” said the civilian.

  “This way, General,” said the major. He walked up the road about twenty yards, then began hiking up a short embankment. Bonham and the others followed. The metal had definitely come from an aircraft; it appeared to be one of the underside flap track housings that ran front to back on both winds beyond the engines on the 767. While it was certainly possible for an aircraft to lose one and remain airborne, as a practical matter, finding something that had been part of a wing meant the rest of the aircraft was somewhere nearby.

  In a lot of pieces.

  The civilian walked to one end of the metal and kicked it. “Dropped just about flat,” he said after a long drag on his cigarette.

  “I can’t recall your name,” said Bonham, turning to him.

  “Probably ’cause you don’t know it.” He blew a wad of smoke in Bonham’s direction.

  “Well, let’s share it.” Bonham put his hands on his hips.

  “Andy Fisher.” He waved the hand with his cigarette. “You’re going to find this piece of aircraft was dropped here. It didn’t come from a crash. It’s proof there wasn’t a crash.”

  “Andy Fisher is with who?” said Bonham. “What company do you work for?”

  “I’m with the FBI,” said Fisher. “And it’swith whom. Nuns were sticklers for grammar.”

  “What are you doing here, Mr. Fisher?”

  “At the moment I’m looking for a cup of coffee.”

  “I don’t have time for bullshit, Mr. Fisher.”

  “Yeah, neither do I,” said Fisher. “I’m kind of interested in that plane part, though. Figure out how it got here and we figure out who stole your plane.”

  Bonham suddenly felt a cold chill on the back of his neck.Stole?

  He jerked his thumb to the side and the FBI agent followed him a few feet away.

  “Why do you think the plane was stolen?” Bonham asked.

  “Well, where is it?”

  “Obviously it crashed further north than the, uh, experts thought it did. In these mountains, with the weather we’ve had and are having, it can take quite a while to locate. We have a vector now; the search can take shape.”

  “Yeah.” Fisher took a long pull on his cigarette. “You think your guys
ran into each other?” asked Fisher.

  “Of course not.”

  “So what else could’ve happened?”

  “Crashes happen for a lot of reasons.”

  Fisher shrugged. Bonham couldn’t tell whether he was blowing smoke — literally — about the accident not being an accident or not.

  “How do you know the metal piece isn’t from the plane?” asked Bonham.

  “Oh, it is. It definitely is,” said Fisher. “I just think somebody put it out here for you to find.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Look at it: It’s not banged up enough to have fallen from, what, thirty thousand feet? Forty?”

  “Try three or four hundred over the mountain,” said Bonham, now fairly sure the FBI agent was an idiot. “And you can’t go by how banged up something is in a crash.”

  “True. I’ve seen weird things.” Fisher shrugged. “I think it’s bullshit.”

  “How many crashes have you investigated?”

  “A couple.” The agent took a very long drag on his cigarette, bringing it down to his fingertips. “Maybe a few more than that. I don’t really like crashes, though. Pretty much the technical people run the show.”

  “Well, we have plenty of technical people,” said Bonham. “Why aren’t you back at the base?”

  “This is more interesting than staring at Jemma Gorman’s tight ass all day.” Fisher took a long draw and then threw away the cigarette.

  “Thank you for your opinion,” said Bonham sarcastically. Gorman actually wasn’t that bad-looking, but she was definitely a tight-ass.

  “Hey, it’s free,” he said, walking back down the hill.

  “Sir?” asked the sergeant who had been following Fisher.

  “Stick with him,” said Bonham. “Make sure he gets the hell back where he belongs.”

  “Yes, sir.” The sergeant scrambled down to follow.