Cyclops One af-1 Page 9

  The Velociraptor pilot who’d been bumped from the original test, Timmy “Blaze” Robinson, had come down to the control room to kibitz. He was perched on the back of the seat next to Howe, sipping a cola. In the row in front of them, Firenze — the head of the team that had developed the shared avionics system and its related interfaces, and one of the most important scientists on the F/A-22V project — stood over one of the displays, his finger jabbing at the data flow like an old-West gunman using his revolver.

  “Copacetic,” said Firenze finally. “Perfectly copacetic.”

  “What’s that mean?” asked Timmy.

  Firenze looked up and blinked at him. “Means I can’t find a problem.”

  “Maybe there isn’t one,” said Timmy.

  “Mass hallucination,” said Firenze. The other scientists were knocking off to get some refreshments, soda mostly. “Kinda like the song on that new Weezer.”

  “Haven’t heard it,” said Timmy.

  There were talking about a CD by a rock group. The two men were roughly the same age, and while Howe didn’t see that they had much else in common, they apparently shared the same musical tastes.

  “Mind if I borrow it? You’re going to be tied up, huh?”

  “Go ahead,” said Firenze. “It’s up in the lab.”

  “You’re a guy, Doc.” Timmy turned to Howe. “Hey, boss. Lunch?”

  “Sounds good,” said Howe. “What do you think, Matt?”

  “Very fuggled,” said Firenze. “We’re going to have to get into the bizarre theories next.”

  “How bizarre?”

  “UFOs,” said the scientist, who didn’t appear to be kidding.

  “Hungry?” Howe asked.

  “Nah. Thanks. Thinking to do.”

  Howe caught up with Timmy in the hall. They went up a level to the NADT Lounge, a plush cafeteria that was one of the serious benies of working with a “private” contractor rather than the regular Air Force. Even the best military chow paled in comparison to the offerings at the Lounge.

  Not that the pilots selected from the gourmet side of the menu. Timmy ordered a sausage-and-pepper grinder and insisted on extra garlic. Howe ordered a hamburger with melted blue cheese. It filled the plate, and the spiced fries were sharp and golden.

  Megan used to love them, though she’d only eat a few.

  “Too many make me fart,” she said.

  It seemed impossible that the word had come from her mouth.

  “They’re really grinding on the avionics system,” said Timmy. “They keep running it back and forth.”

  “I don’t think they have a clue.” Howe picked up a fry. He’d been eating one the first time he met Megan; she’d walked in wearing jeans and a pair of T-shirts, looking like one of the kids working the food line.

  He’d give anything for that moment — anything.

  “Hey, boss, what’s your flight level?” said Timmy.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re up in the sky somewhere,” said the other pilot. “Still running through the tests?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I talked to Williams’s dad last night. Nice guy.”

  Howe nodded. He’d spoken to the father as well, making the arrangements.

  “Hell of a looker.”

  Howe jerked his head up, vaguely aware that Timmy had continued talking but unsure of what he had said. Had he been talking about Megan?

  “What?” asked Howe.

  “I said I met Williams’s sister once. She was a hell of a looker.”

  “Oh.”

  The two men continued eating in silence.

  “You liked her, huh?”

  Howe stared at him. The younger pilot wasn’t trying to be insulting, not at all.

  “Megan York,” prompted Timmy.

  “Yeah. I did,” said Howe.

  “Sucks. She was pretty nice.”

  Howe nodded. He didn’t want sympathy; there really wasn’t much call for any.

  “I know you didn’t publicize it,” said Timmy. “But, uh, she, uh, she was pretty nice.”

  Howe smiled, both appreciating the attempted delicacy and amused by it. “She was nice,” he said.

  More than nice, but he’d only known her — slept with her, he meant — for four weeks. He really shouldn’t be feeling like he’d been kicked in the ribs, should he?

  If he’d known it was going to be that short, would he have done things differently?

  Like…

  …talk her out of taking that flight?

  Why had she frowned at him that morning? What was she thinking?

  He’d make sure they gave her a hell of a funeral.

  And then?

  Then he’d feel like shit for the rest of his life, his one real chance at true love blown all to shit in the Canadian Rockies.

  “Yeah, sucks,” said Timmy. He smiled, back to his old self. “You think Firenze really believes in UFOs?”

  Chapter 4

  General Vladimir Luksha stood with his legs spread slightly and his arms straight out, bent at the elbows so that his fingers touched the sides of his head. He twisted slowly at the waist as he exhaled, moving first in one direction, then the other, practicing a yoga routine he had learned years and years ago as a young lieutenant on assignment to India. It was the only thing of value that had come from that brief tour as a foreign advisor; his three months there did not help his army career, and surely the Indians learned nothing of value from him.

  He felt the joints at his neck crack, temporarily releasing the tension there. He went back to the desk in the bunker office he had borrowed for his operation, putting on his sweater as well as his jacket. It was an unusually hot summer day outside; that meant it might be approaching fifty, about as balmy as the Russian Far East ever got.

  The temperature in the bunker itself never varied more than two degrees from 72° Fahrenheit; nonetheless, Luksha had felt cold the moment he flew over the Urals from Moscow two months before, and from the moment he arrived at the base ten miles from Petropavlovsk-Kamchakiy on Kamchatka he had worn a sweater as well as his jacket. If any of the others in the borrowed facilities at the former naval base thought this eccentric, they didn’t share their comments with the general.

  Luksha’s long-range spy planes were confined to the far quarter of the facility, guarded and serviced by a special detachment of men who lived behind two rows of barbed-wire fence. Luksha’s intelligence analysts — mostly language and telemetry experts, though he had an assortment of scientists, photo interpreters, and aeronautical engineers — lived in the compound as well. It was a large family with its own rules and entertainments; for the most part, the men got along without problems.

  They had to. Unless one could prove extreme family hardship — and had the proper political connections in Moscow — he knew he would stay behind the barbed wire until the operation was over.

  The buzzer on Luksha’s desk signaled that his appointment had arrived. The general pushed the button to acknowledge the call; he had no secretary, and his visitor knew from experience that the fact the intercom buzzed back meant he could enter.

  Luksha waited as Laci Chapeav came into the room. The former KGB specialist shifted his eyes nervously about, as if looking for a bugging device; he headed Luksha’s analysis division, and so paranoia was nothing but an occupational hazard. Chapeav’s long frame had been thin, almost gaunt when Luksha met him many years before. Now he had a potbelly and large bags beneath his eyes like drooping golf balls, but his mind remained sharp.

  “The Americans have lost their aircraft,” said Chapeav. “It’s the only logical conclusion.”

  “So you said two days ago. Where is it?”

  Chapeav’s right hand began to shake, a by-product of a neurological disorder, not nervousness. Chapeav did not get nervous, at least not when dealing with his area of expertise.

  “The Geofizia data has been reanalyzed,” he told Luksha. “We are confident that the target aircraft crashed in the mou
ntains, roughly where they are looking. All transmissions ceased. It’s the only possible explanation.”

  “Then why can’t they find it? Are they really looking, or is it a ruse?”

  Unlike many of his colleagues, Luksha did not overestimate the Americans’ capabilities. Nonetheless, he felt it almost unthinkable that they would simply lose one of their most valuable weapons systems in a common air accident.

  “There is a coordinate of doubt,” admitted Chapeav. “But the transmissions that the Geofizia picked up and that we have culled from the satellites are consistent with American SAR procedures. If they are merely going through the motions, they are doing an excellent job.”

  Luksha nodded. Their high-altitude spy plane — a Myasishchev M-55 dubbed the Geofizia, because its “cover” mission was as an environmental tester — had been a thousand miles from the actual test area, using its long-range sensor array to gather electric transmissions from the Americans as they tested their aircraft. With the exception of a few rather incidental voice communications, the telemetry from the test craft was coded and essentially indecipherable. Nonetheless, it gave experienced analysts considerable information about the types of systems involved and some of the procedures for using them. Coupled with the spy satellites, Luksha knew enough about the American system to know it represented a turning point in airborne warfare.

  He had suspected from the first that the accident was actually part of a deception campaign, though if so, he couldn’t explain where they might be thinking of using it. Perhaps it was merely a ruse to pretend that the weapon was not ready and thus hide its actual deployment.

  Possible. But why go to the trouble given the secrecy surrounding the project.

  They must know they were being spied upon.

  Of course they did.

  “General?”

  Luksha looked up at Chapeav.

  “We will need more resources,” said the general.

  Chapter 5

  Bonham cocked his head to the side, listening as Colonel Gorman outlined her latest theory on what had happened to the Cyclops 767. She was obviously tired, and her voice barely carried to where he was sitting in the second row of the control room. The bags beneath her eyes seemed to grow as she spoke.

  “It’s incontrovertible that an aircraft was at the Wyoming site,” she said. She nodded to the airman sitting at the computer station near her, who put a screen capture showing a radar plot up on the video projector. She flashed her laser pointer at a small blip in the right corner. “This anomaly is unexplained. We think it was the airplane taking off.”

  “Twelve hours after the event?” asked Colonel Howe, who was sitting in the front row.

  “Yes.”

  Matt Firenze began asking questions about how far the plane would have been able to travel. Gorman turned the questions over to one of the technical people. The Cyclops planes were 300ER versions of the versatile airframe, which gave them a published range of 7,400 miles (with their Pratt & Whitney engines unmodified); the actual range varied according to a large number of factors, starting with how much fuel had been loaded into the plane.

  The discussion segued into the difficulties of using the weather-mapping radar to coordinate with the other flight data. Bonham didn’t feel he should object to the technical points — he saw no point in speaking at all — and so waited impatiently for them to move off the technical points to the real problem: where Gorman and her people thought the plane had gone.

  The FBI agent, Fisher, had taken a seat at the end of the back row, slouching behind a cup of coffee. Bonham watched him from the corner of his eye; it seemed to him that Fisher was studying him as well.

  “What you guys are basically saying is that you have no idea where the plane went, and that it could have gone very far,” said Howe. “But you also don’t have any real evidence that it was at this base.”

  “Something was there. We’re positive of that.” Gorman glanced up in Fisher’s direction — he’d been the one who found the plane — as if she were expecting him to say something, but he didn’t.

  “I can’t believe that Megan York would have stolen it,” said Howe. “That’s treason. She wouldn’t do that.”

  “Maybe she didn’t,” offered Fisher.

  Everyone turned around and looked at him, but he didn’t add anything.

  “Anyone aboard that plane who objected to what was going on could have used the radio,” said Gorman. “The pilot especially. Flying the big plane through those mountains would have taken two people.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Howe. He felt his cheeks burning. Why wasn’t anyone else standing up for Megan?

  “At this point we have to work on the assumption that everyone aboard was in on it,” said Gorman.

  Howe turned to the FBI agent. “What do you think happened?”

  Fisher shrugged, then looked over at Bonham as he spoke. “I don’t know. I’d like to look at some of those lakes in the Canadian Rockies.”

  “Which lakes?” asked Howe.

  “The ones General Bonham suggested.”

  Bonham cleared his throat. “I don’t believe I suggested that.”

  “My mistake,” said Fisher.

  “I may have said something that maybe we should search in that area,” said Bonham, retreating under the agent’s stare. “Obviously I was wrong.”

  “Our best theory is that the plane was here,” said Gorman, retaking the initiative with a sharp tone. “And, coupled with the NSA data regarding the Russian spy operation—”

  Bonham saw his chance. “What Russian spy operation?”

  “We briefed that the other day,” said Gorman.

  “Maybe you could go over it again,” he said.

  Gorman began talking about transmission intercepts and a high-level Russian operation based in the Far East.

  “We want to get a close-up look at that operation as well as other bases they may have in the interior of the country. I’m asking for more people,” she added. “I may set up a new option; I have to talk with my superiors.”

  “What kind of option?” Howe asked.

  Gorman hemmed a bit. Bonham realized that her original orders had included not merely investigating the incident but recovering the plane. She was thinking about a logical extension: an operation in Russia, if she could find it there.

  Logical?

  Good God, what a cowboy. What was it about women officers, anyway? Why did they always try to out-macho the men.

  Bonham looked at Howe, who was fidgeting in his seat, obviously agitated by the possibility that Megan York and the others aboard Cyclops One were traitors. Poor dumb bastard.

  Gorman asked for questions.

  “I want to volunteer,” said Howe.

  “Volunteer for what?” Gorman asked him.

  “I want to make sure I’m involved,” said Howe.

  Gorman looked over at Bonham, as if to suggest he say something, but Bonham realized there was little use: Howe wouldn’t listen to logic right now. This was one of those times when a manager did best by doing nothing; Gorman eventually realized it and wrapped up the meeting.

  “I’d still like to look at those lakes,” said Fisher as Bonham passed him on his way to the door. “What do you think, General?”

  Bonham shrugged. “I guess that’s up to you. Your boss lady seems to think the plane’s not there.”

  “Do you?”

  Bonham looked at him a second, unsure whether the FBI agent thought he was being sly or suspected Bonham was just psychotic. Unable to decide, he finally shrugged and left the room without saying anything else.

  Chapter 6

  The copilot, Abe Rogers, had been the most problematic choice for the project from the start. He was the only one of the three who was active Air Force, as opposed to an NADT hire, and yet he was by far the most greedy. Megan didn’t mind greed as a motivator: It was powerful and relatively predictable. But the blatant money lust annoyed her, if only because it reminded her that other
s involved with Jolice, Ferrone, El-Def, and all the related companies were also primarily interested in money, not the ideals that motivated her.

  Her uncle would have pointed out that it didn’t matter. Greed and corruption were always there; even some of the people around Washington and the other Founding Fathers were greedy and corrupt. What mattered was the end goal, and your own purity.

  “We were supposed to be done,” he said, standing beneath the overhang that led to the hangar facilities.

  “I’m not in charge of the test schedule,” she told him.

  “What are you in charge of?” Rogers’s tone was close to a taunt; he pushed his chest forward as if he were an ape trying to intimidate her.

  Let the bastard try something,she thought to herself.I’d only like the chance to cut him down.

  She didn’t need a copilot.

  “I want more money,” he demanded.

  “I’ll pass the request along.”

  “Do that.”

  He spun and walked toward the access door. Megan was angry enough to go out from under the artificial rock outcropping and walk up the path toward the shore. Technically she shouldn’t; the satellite would be in range relatively soon.

  They’d been cooped up here too long. The last-minute changes in the ABM testing schedule had made everything more difficult. She could only guess what was going on at North Lake.

  The complications had begun with the Velociraptors. She knew that Williams had died. The blackout should have lasted only a few seconds — a blip, really — just enough to sever the connections and let Cyclops One get away.

  But events always took their own course.

  Like Howe. He was an accident.

  Worse: confusion. Still, if he’d been the one killed and not Williams, what would she have felt now?

  The waves lapped at the rocks below. Megan listened for a while, then, mindful of the approaching satellite, went back below.