Briggs put his car in gear and headed toward Dream Star’s hangar. Somebody was screwing up by the numbers here, it was past time to find out who and what.
Lovyyev was silently screaming at himself. Only a few hours in place, he speaks three words on the radio and is discovered.
Be calm, he told himself. Things were happening out there on the flight line — perhaps there was still time to bluff his way out of this. This Hotel person may get too busy to check on him.
But one glance out the bulletproof windscreen told him that his luck was running out. A staff car was heading his way. It was still three hundred yards off, perhaps more, but it was coming fast.
Lovyyev jumped out of his seat and crawled up into the armored open turret on the roof. He yelled back into the hangar, “Orlov. Skaryehyeh! Etah srochnah! Hurry. They’re coming!”
“Shut up, Crowe!” Orlov was hiding against the inner front wall of the hangar, his M-16/M-203 in his arms and the remote-control detonator around his neck. “Get down!”
But it was too late. In a panic, Lovyyev swiveled the machine gun turret around, released the safety, aimed it at the approaching staff car, pulled and held the trigger.
Hal Briggs was thinking about what he was going to say to Rey Jacinto about his strange behavior when he saw what looked like exhaust smoke rising from the Commando armored car. Just as he was wondering why Jacinto was starting up, he saw a line of explosions and shattering concrete race across the tarmac directly at his car. He slammed on the brakes and dived for the floorboards under the front seat just as his windshield exploded in a shower of glass. Instantly he felt a wall of fire envelop him, and realized that the engine compartment was on fire.
His synthetic fatigue shirt began to melt on his back. He clawed for the door handle, found it, shoved the door open and crawled out of the burning car. He landed only a foot from the flaming remains of the car’s hood, which had been blasted apart by the explosion, and half-crawled, half-stumbled away from the car. Thick black smoke was everywhere. He inhaled a lungful of the gas, gagged, fell to the concrete. Pieces of red-hot metal were all around him. But at least the smoke hid him from the gunner in the V-100. He stayed on his hands and knees and began to crawl to where he thought the security checkpoint was … He guessed right. A few moments later two guards rushed out and hauled him to his feet. He let the guards carry him to the guard shack but resisted when they tried to lay him down on the floor. He picked up the radio, switched the channel selector to one, the base-wide emergency channel, and clicked it on:
“Attention all HAWC security units, this is Hotel on channel one. Execute code echo-seven. Repeat, code echo-seven. Intruder alert, Hangar Five. Repeat, intruder alert, Hangar Five. This is not an exercise. Shots fired in front of Hangar Five by intruders from a V-100 armored vehicle. Number of intruders unknown.”
Briggs paused, rubbing a pain in his right temple. Massaging it, he found a gash in his head- and his hair burned off. “All Foxtrot guard units, secure your posts and stand by to repel. Break. Rover Seven, converge on Hangar Five, secure the V-100 parked there, block the front on the hangar by any means possible. Break. Red Man, notify Colonel Towland and General Elliott in Mission Control of situation, use channel nine, and have them order the flight crew on the airborne B-52 to remain clear of the area and notify the crew of the standby B-52 to prepare to evacuate. Deploy all available personnel in full combat gear to security checkpoint alpha and launch helicopter air security units one and two. Break. Rover Nine, pick me up in front of security checkpoint alpha. I will take control from Rover Nine. All units, execute …”
Orlov knew it was no use berating Lovyyev — he might have even saved them by keeping that sedan away from the hangar until Maraklov, or James, or whatever his name was now, could get ready. They had been out there for hours. Was Maraklov ever going to be ready?
The security forces were moving faster than Orlov ever thought possible. Seconds after Lovyyev opened fire, he was receiving return fire from Hangar Four, although Lovyyev was in no danger except from a lucky shot. M-16 rounds were pinging off the armor surrounding the turret, forcing Lovyyev to shoot from a more protected position inside the cab. But it was working. He was holding down any deadly return fire, keeping the first wave of defenders back. It wouldn’t last long, but he was buying Maraklov time …
As was always the case, the first device to be activated under the Advanced Neural Transfer and Response System was on the radios. Usually they were quiet. This time, there was so much chatter on the area air-traffic control frequency that at first James thought he had dialed in two overlapping Las Vegas AM talk stations. The words were almost unintelligible, which at first confused him. Then he realized that the voices were talking about them — half the military security forces in Nevada were being called on to attack Hangar Five … they had already been discovered by Dreamland’s security forces. If he’d spent two more minutes completing the ANTARES interface they’d all be dead.
A millisecond’s mental inquiry told hire all he needed to know: Sergeant Howard, if he was still alive, had done his job well. External air and power were on and available. DreamStar’s body tanks were full — he had much more fuel than he had hoped for. Apparently they had drained the wing fuel tanks but left the body tanks and their thirty thousand gallons of jet fuel intact.
Both AIM-120 Scorpion missiles were loaded and even responded to a fast connectivity and continuity check — which meant they could be launched or jettisoned at any time. Whether they were armed or capable of defending him was a question that would have to wait. The twenty-millimeter Vulcan cannon was empty — a fully loaded cannon would have been too much to hope for.
Howard had removed the inlet covers, safety pins and landing gear downlocks, and had closed all the maintenance covers except for the external power cover. The man was really efficient. He’d have to thank him someday, if they made it … ANTARES’ automatic flight-data recorder recorded the thought for later retrieval.
DreamStar had the ability to go from complete power off to full military takeoff thrust in moments. Fighters in the twenty-first century would routinely have it — now only DreamStar did. James again placed his life in the hands of a computer — only a machine could control the enormous amount of power that he was about to unleash. It was the ultimate in combat speed and efficiency — but it could just as easily turn the one hundredthousand-pound fighter into a huge bomb.
Power, fuel, air — all engine start systems activated with a single thought. Lights and transmitters off — no use in making it easier for Briggs and the Air Force to find him. A compressed air tank, filled from the external power cart, collected twenty thousand cubic feet of air at five thousand pounds PSI pressure, then emptied it onto the sixteenth-stage compressor in DreamStar’s turbofan engine in less than a second. At the same time fuel was injected into the combustion chamber and the high-voltage ignitors activated. The blast of compressed air spun the engine turbines at three thousand RPMs, mixing air and fuel in the proportions to create a huge explosive ignition equal to the force of a ton of TNT.
In ten seconds DreamStar was ready for flight. With full power available, his only concern now was to get off the ground as fast as possible.
Orlov, as Sergeant Howard, had been briefed on DreamStar’s fast-reaction-start capability, but he never quite believed it. One moment the fighter was silent, cold, without power — the next, the engine was at full power with a hugh shaft of fire burning out the engine exhaust, expelling dangerous unburned gases. It reminded him of watching a tiger being fed at the Moscow Zoo — one moment the tigers were sleeping soundly, but at the first scent of blood they were unstoppable dynamos of motion and energy.