“James was subjected to the same tests, wasn’t he?” Dog felt all of his reservations toward ANTARES resurfacing. He cursed himself now for not standing up more forcefully, for not refusing to go ahead with it, even if it meant resigning.
He should have followed his instincts.
“We’ve improved the tests as well as the procedures,” said Geraldo. “Or at least we thought we did. Knowing this — knowing how he reacted at a point of great stress in the past would have influenced me. I might have eliminated him from the program. But the fact that he was able to keep such a secret — that is extremely worrisome. I would not have chosen him for ANTARES.”
“All right,” said Dog. “Unfortunately, it may very well be irrelevant now.”
Chapter 56
Madrone’s thoughts twisted around the computer’s, tangles of wires that ran through everything he heard and saw. They pulsed red and black; at times he tried to follow them through the tangles, but got hopelessly lost.
The elation he’d felt at escaping the Mexican airport and refueling the Flighthawks had dissipated. Hungry and tired, he vacillated between wanting this all to end and not wanting to give up.
Bastian and the others would blame him for killing Dalton and Kulpin, not to mention whoever had died at the Mexican airport. They’d charge him with murder, treason, theft of government property — they’d invent charges to persecute him with.
They didn’t need charges, the bastards. They wanted to kill him, the way they had killed his daughter.
Worse. They would keep him alive, hound him every day. They might even be manipulating this now — Geraldo and Bastian and Stockard had set him up, hadn’t they’? Made him join the program, then concocted a series of petty tests, waiting for him to snap. They knew about his daughter. They were probably working with the people who had made him kill her.
The bastards had planned it all. Why did they hate him? What had he done to them?
It couldn’t just be Iraq. It had to be Los Alamos, something there. He’d killed one of the tactical artillery programs, made a few generals look bad by pointing out the obvious.
Madrone needed only a fraction of his attention, a small slice of his ability, to fly the planes. His mind hungered for more, ranging across the universe of possibilities in a feeding frenzy.
What would he do? He would crash the planes into the rain forest, be done with it all, end their plot against him.
He saw Christina lying on the hospital gurney, frowning at him. “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy.”
A cheap shining gurney. The bastards didn’t even have the decency to give her a real bed. She’d spent her final days in treatment, between sessions, dying, dying, dying in the mold-stinking hall as she waited.
By the time they reached the children’s wing, her eyes were closed, and she would never reopen them. Even the doctor admitted it, the bastard doctor who wouldn’t even give her morphine when she began to cry, the son of a bitch.
He wanted to kill them. He would kill them.
Lightning flashed and the plane lurched onto her right wing. Madrone had entered another storm, but it was the chaos of his mind that sent the aircraft reeling. There were so many conflicting emotions and impulses — suicide, revenge, hatred, love. They slammed against each other, physically pushing his head back in the seat, literally tearing at the neurons and other cells of his brain.
The ANTARES circuitry spat back wild arcs of energy into the system, befuddling the Boeing’s control system; the plane began to yaw, threatening to slide into a spin. The Flight-hawks, set by C3 in a basic trail pattern, faithfully mimicked their mother plane, rocking behind her at 25,000 feet.
Madrone knew he had to end this somehow. The pain threatened to overwhelm him. He felt the faint pings at the corner of his temples that meant he was slipping out of Theta-alpha.
If he went out now, he’d never get back in time to prevent himself from crashing.
Part of him wanted exactly that. Part of him wanted to just crash into the jungle below — he was over Colombia now — end it all in a flash of flames.
But other parts of him wanted to live. And those parts won out. He saw the rain forest enveloping him, heard the music Geraldo had played. And he felt the dark woman approaching, the shadow who had come unbidden from the recesses of his desire.
Come to me, she told him. I will show you the way.
Madrone’s rapid pulse eased. He felt his way into the cockpit of the big plane, stared for a moment at the holes the ejection seats had made, then took the controls firmly. The plane leveled off; he checked his systems, made a correction to deal with the fury of the storm.
He had less than an hour’s worth of fuel left in Hawkmother.
Landing at a major airport or military base was out of the question. But where?
The database in the navigational unit covered only the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. He wanted something in Brazil, in the rain forest.
Have the Flighthawks scout for him.
He took a long breath, his head rising as he held it, and saw himself inside Hawk One. Madrone pushed down, gliding toward the earth like a falcon.
He tucked his wings back. The canopy exploded below. The jungle was everywhere, thick with green, howling with the screeches of animals.
A long strip.
No good. Military planes.
A bulldozed runway. Too short; probably a smuggler’s haven.
The long river, winding past the marshes. Smoke curled in the distance, a fire fighting the drizzle.
Madrone shook violently as the skin on his face froze. He was back in the tower in the middle of the storm, pelted by hail. Lightning jagged all around him.
End it, growled the jaguar’s voice.
He turned back.
End it.
The tower. He was on the range at Glass Mountain, siting the artillery, telling them where to fire.
No, it was the church where they’d held the service for Christina.
It was both of them together.
Kevin felt himself starting to fall. Concrete appeared to his right. Bulldozers. The runway was too short.
His temples stung. He held the stick of the 777 in his hand, smelled the incense from Christina’s funeral, saw Jennifer Gleason tearing off her clothes.
“No!” he yelled. “Land! Land! Land!”
Chapter 57
The plane materialized from the darkness, bursting down from the mountains and steadying its wings over the mountains. Lights on, gear down, it was obviously going to land.
An hour before, Minerva had been unable to sleep and had decided to walk around the base in the fading moonlight — an unusual decision, at least so early in the morning. Had she had some sort of unconscious premonition?
If so, of what? Disaster? Other people’s deaths?
She glanced toward the building where the security team she’d summoned on her radio was just now rushing into a jeep. When she turned back, the big jet, a Boeing 777 or something similar, lumbered onto the runway. Whoever was flying it was damn good, but still, he was trying to land in the dark on a concrete and packed-dirt runway. The plane’s nose flared as the engines slammed into reverse thrust. Dirt and gravel shot everywhere as the aircraft funneled toward the jungle at the far end of the runway. It thumped from the concrete onto the dirt, blowing tires as it skidded. There was a shriek and then a boom and then a drawn-out hush. Minerva waited for the explosion and fire, the dust so thick in the air that she couldn’t see.