Santana was in here someplace.
Jake Grafton had his thing and he was hard at it. William Henry Chance had his thing, trying to control biological and chemical weapons in Third World countries, and he had died doing it. Tommy Carmellini’s thing was cracking safes. Sure, he was doing it for the CIA now instead of stealing diamonds from rich matrons, but somehow that wasn’t enough. There comes a time in a man’s life when he begins to tally up the score. When Carmellini realized Grafton wasn’t going to take the time to step on the cockroach Santana, he knew he had to.
He stepped forward now, walking the way Hector had indicated that Santana had gone.
Taking his time in the near-total darkness — there was just enough light to see the outline of the corridor — walk — ing, listening, walking, listening again, Tommy Carmellini moved to the end of the corridor and stopped.
He could hear metal on metal, as if someone was trying to open a lock. The sound came from the corridor on the right.
Tommy Carmellini bent as low as he could get, eased his head around the corner.
Yes, the sound was clearer now.
Ever so slowly he edged around the corner, crossed the corridor to the other side, began moving forward into the blackness, toward the sound.
The noise stopped.
Carmellini froze. Closed his eyes to concentrate on the sound.
The pistol was heavy in his hand.
The sound began again.
Forward, ever so stealthily, moving like a glacier, just flowing slowly, silently, effortlessly ….
The man was just ahead. Working on a lock. Probably on one of those steel gates.
Again the sound stopped.
Carmellini froze, not trusting himself to breathe.
The other man was here, he could feel him. But where?
Time seemed to stop. Tommy Carmellini held his breath, stood crouched but frozen, knowing that the slightest sound would give away his position.
Santana was …
Suddenly Carmellini knew. He was right …
There! He pointed the pistol and pulled the trigger.
The muzzle flash strobed the darkness, and revealed Santana swinging the butt of his rifle, swinging it at Carmellini’s head.
He tried to duck but the rifle struck his shoulder and sent him sprawling. He held on to the pistol, triggered two more shots, which came like giant thunderclaps, deafening him with their roar.
The flashlight was gone, lost when he fell. His left shoulder was on fire where the rifle butt struck him, his arm numb. He could hear Santana running, shuffling along, the sound fading.
He felt for the flashlight with his right hand, couldn’t find it, paused and listened and searched some more. There! He picked it up without releasing the pistol. Now he put the pistol between his legs, tried to work the flashlight with his right hand. It was broken. He set it on the floor out of the way.
He listened, heard the faintest of sounds, then nothing.
Tommy Carmellini slowly got to his feet and began moving back the way he had come, after Santana.
“Showtime One Oh Two, Battlestar Strike. You are cleared to engage the bogey with a gun. Weapons free gun only, acknowledge.”
“Weapons free gun only, aye,” sung out Stiff Hardwick, and jammed his throttles forward to the mechanical stop. The engines wound up quickly; Stiff eased the throttles to the left, stroked the afterburners. The big fighter leaped forward and began closing the five-mile gap between the two planes.
Carlos Corrado glanced over his left shoulder, for the hundredth time, expecting to see nothing, but this time he saw the plume of flame that was Hardwick’s burners. The Yanqui must be right behind me.
Enough!
He slammed the throttles to the hilt, dropped the left wing and pulled right up to six Gs. The MiG-29 then showed why it was one of the most maneuverable fighters in the world — it turned on a dime.
As it did, Carlos Corrado fought the G and flipped his radar switch to the transmit position.
Leveling up after a 180-degree turn, the radar scope came alive … and there was the American — close. Too close! Jesus Christ!
Without time to even consider the problem, Carlos Corrado punched off an Aphid missile, which roared off the rail in a blaze of fire straight for the F-14.
Sailor Karnow saw the bogey wind into a left turn, and called it to Stiff, who instinctively lowered his right wing to stay in the MiG’s rear quadrant.
What Stiff wasn’t prepared for was the unbelievable quickness with which the MiG-29. whipped around and pumped off a missile.
The sight of the fiery exhaust of the Aphid missile coming at him from eleven o’clock and the wailing of the ECM in his ears, telling him that he was being painted by a MiG-29 pulse-doppler radar, reached Stiff Hardwick’s brain at the very same instant. Before Stiff could react in any way, the missile shot over his canopy inches above his head. Fortunately for Stiff and Sailor and their progeny yet unborn, the Aphid had not flown far enough to arm, so the missile passed harmlessly.
“Holy shit!” Sailor shouted into her oxygen mask.
Stiff Hardwick hadn’t spent the last four years flying fighters for nothing — his instincts were finely honed too. As the Aphid went over his head, he jerked the nose of his fighter toward the closing MiG, visible only as a bogey symbol on the HUD, and pulled the trigger on the stick. The 20-mm M-61 six-barreled cannon in the nose lit up like a searchlight as a river of fire streaked into the darkness.
Carlos Corrado saw the finger of God reaching for him and slammed his stick back, then sideways. The MiG’s nose came up steeply and the right wing dropped in a violent whifferdill that carried it up and out of the way of the fiery stream of cannon shells.
Completing the roll, Carlos Corrado pushed the nose of his MiG downward, toward the city, and let the plane accelerate without afterburners, the light of which would beacon to the American. Or Americans, if there were more than one, which was probable.
Carlos pulled out just above the rooftops and thundered across the city. He had lost track of the enemy’s location because he could not see him visually or with his radar. He desperately needed his GCI site just now to call the enemy’s position, but of course the GCI people had been knocked off the air and were either dead or drunk.
Still, the contest appealed to his sporting instincts. He decided to try for one in-parameters missile shot before he called it a night and went looking for a bar.
His radar was still on, still looking at nothing.
Without further ado, Carlos pulled the stick back and let the MiG’s nose climb. Up past the vertical, G on hard, the MiG used its fabulous turning rate to fly half of a very tight loop. Upside down with its nose on the horizon, Carlos slammed the stick sideways and rolled upright. The F-14 was out to his left, turning toward him. Corrado flipped his switches to select an infrared missile, turned toward the American until he got a tone in his headset, and squeezed it off.
Then he killed his radar and turned hard ninety degrees right to exit the fight.
“Oh, no,” Stiff Hardwick swore as he saw the missile coming at him from ten o’clock.
He lit his afterburners and dropped the right wing slightly and willed the Tomcat to accelerate, trying to force the missile into an overshoot, while he punched off chaff and flares with a button on his right throttle.
The missile tried to make the turn but couldn’t. Perhaps the IR seeker in the nose locked onto a flare. In any event, as it flew past the tail of the Tomcat its proximity fuse caused the warhead to detonate, spraying shrapnel into empty air.
The MiG-29 was gone. It had disappeared.
“You know, dickwick,” Sailor Karnow told her pilot, “I think God is really trying to tell us something.”