A red bar appeared at the bottom of his view screen as the computer continued counting down the disconnect.
But there was a man there. Definitely a man — two men, huddled.
As Zen went to push the GPS marker, the screen blanked into gray fuzz. The default sequence knocked the view screen back to the optical view from Hawk Four, which had just begun knifing east.
A magenta disc filled the screen; Jeff felt suddenly weightless, sliding backward. The right side of his head imploded, pain shooting everywhere — he closed his eyes as he spun back, caught by some trick of fatigue or exertion or merely disorientation. He couldn’t see, couldn’t think. Streaks of rain and lightning flashed by him, close enough to feel but not see. The world split beneath him, the fault line running through his spine.
Then he felt his toes. He could actually feel his toes.
The sun turned mercury red, then steamed off, evaporating in a hiss that filled his helmet.
An ANTARES flashback because he’d been thinking of Kevin?
Or because he’d taken the first dose of drugs as soon as Bastian gave the okay to rejoin the program?
That was less than two hours ago. The screen was back to normal — it had to have been a weird anomaly caused by the lightning.
And fatigue. He was getting damn tired.
“Sorry, shit, I’m sorry. The storm is too fierce here,” said Cheshire somewhere outside of his helmet. She apologized for the wicked, disorienting turbulence shaking the plane.
Raven shuddered, trying desperately to fight off a wind shear that dropped her nearly two hundred feet in the blink of an eye. The plane pitched onto her side, just barely staying airborne.
“Zen, I can’t get any lower than this.”
“Hawk Leader acknowledges,” he snapped. “C3, reestablish contact with Hawk Three.”
“Attempting,” answered the voice module.
“Try harder,” he said, even though he realized the voice command would merely confuse the computer. He altered Hawk Four’s course to close on the area Three had been surveying, and was within ten miles when the computer finally managed to restore full bandwidth with the U/MF.
Fail-safe mode during disconnect had caused the robot to fly upward out of the mountains. Because of that, Four was actually closer to the slope where he’d seen what he thought were men — or at least he thought it was closer, since he hadn’t marked it. Zen let the computer put Three into a safe orbit at fifteen thousand feet over Raven, and brought Four into the treacherous peaks. He flew south, then circled back, pushing downward as he came.
A fire burned at the left-hand side of his screen. Above to the right loomed a large object.
The Pave Low. Men nearby.
Jeff quickly marked the location.
“I have them,” he told Nancy. “Get me the SAR commander.”
“Coast Guard asset Colgate is already en route to our position, Hawk Commander,” answered Breanna from the copilot’s station, where she was handling communications. “ETA is ten minutes. They’re requesting you guide them in.”
“I have a flare on the ground. Two figures near a rock, three figures. Something else in the helicopter,” said Zen, nudging Hawk Four to get as close as possible in the storm. “Looks like the helicopter’s moving, sliding or something.”
“Opening Colgate channel. I think I’m getting something on Guard as well.”
The helicopter seemed to hop in the screen.
“Colgate better get a move on,” said Zen. “And Bree, if you can get the crew on Guard, tell them to get the hell off that ice. The whole side of that hill is heading for the ravine.”
Chapter 53
Powder shouldered against the helicopter spar, then felt something shove down behind him. Metal crunched and crackled — he pushed around what had been a flight engineer’s seat, kneeling and then crawling into the cabin opening. Dalton lay beneath some blankets just a few feet away, his legs exposed.
They were moving. The earth rumbled beneath them.
“Yo, Captain, I’m gonna cut you outta this,” said Powder, feeling along the stretcher for the restraints. “I sure hope your back ain’t messed up, ‘cause we gotta go.”
Dalton groaned, or at least Powder thought he groaned. Powder pulled his combat knife against the belts, slashing and hacking as the back end of the helo slid around. His hand Hew free as he reached the last strap. He lost the knife but grabbed Dalton, pulling him backward as he pushed upward to get out of the fuselage. Dalton dragged behind, still attached somehow.
“Come on!” shouted Powder, pulling. Whatever held the pilot down snapped free. Powder got his elbow on the metal side below the open doorway and pushed upward like a swimmer trying to rise from the bottom of a swimming pool. He managed to get out of the fuselage, dragging the pilot with him as they tumbled into the snow and ice and rocks. Powder got to his feet, clawing in the direction of the others as the mountain rumbled beneath him. Something hard hit him in the chest, but he kept moving, churning his legs and struggling to keep Dalton in the grip of his icy fingers. After about five or six yards he fell sideways into a fissure of earth, then lost his balance backward.
Something grabbed his scalp, yanking at it but losing its grip; nonetheless, it helped him regain his momentum, and he threw himself and the injured pilot forward, scrambling as a pair of arms caught his side and hauled him upward.
“Shit fuck,” he said, landing on the ground across the fissure near the rock, helped there by Liu and the copilot.
“You owe me ten bucks,” growled Brautman on the ground.
“Fuck yourself,” Powder said to him, easing Dalton to the ground.
“Want to try double or nothing?”
Despite the storm, they all started laughing.
Chapter 54
Raven had been outfitted as an electronics warfare and electronics intelligence or Elint test bed, and her sleek underbody included several long aerodynamic bulges containing high-tech antennae. Though not trained to squeeze the last ounce of reception out of the equipment, Bree knew enough to pinpoint the strongest areas of the PRC-90 transmission beacon as it bounced out of the rocks. The enhanced gear in Raven gathered different parts of the broadcast, in effect cobbling the full transmission from a series of broken shadows. The problem was making the PRC-90 hear them; the radios were strictly line-of-sight and the surrounding ridges gave only a narrow reception cone.
“I think they’re laughing,” Breanna told the others on the interphone.
“Laughing?” said Cheshire.
“Hang on.” She clicked back into the Guard frequency. “Charlie 7, this is Raven. Can you hear me?”
“Charlie 7. Got you Raven, honey.”
The crewman was definitely giggling.
“Honey?”
“Kind of wet down here,” responded whoever was handling the radio. “Send some umbrellas if you’re not picking us up.” Major Cheshire tapped Breanna’s shoulder.
“What’s up?”
“I think they’re suffering from oxygen depletion or something,” said Breanna, shrugging before giving the Coast Guard rescue helicopter a vector to the crash.
“Colgate acknowledges. Bitchin’ weather, but — we see them, we see them!” said the Coast Guard pilot, his voice suddenly jumping an octave. “We can get them as long as they stay in the clear there. We can get them!”
“Raven acknowledges. We’ll stand by.”
Zen took off his control helmet and leaned back as Jennifer dialed the video feed from Hawk Four into a common channel, allowing the pilot and copilot to view the rescue on one of the multi-configurable screens upstairs. It looked almost — almost — easy from here, as the Dauphin helicopter battled against the wind, rain, and sleet, hovering only a few feet from the downed crew.