A distress call came over the UHF circuit as one of the Sukhois ran out of fuel before he could complete a landing on his storm-shrouded carrier.
“Poor shit,” said somebody over the interphone circuit without thinking.
Yeah, thought Zen to himself. Poor shit. Then he pushed the Flighthawk lower to the ocean.
Flying as a passenger on a civilian airliner was bad enough, but Colonel Bastian had the bad luck to draw an overly talkative seventy-year-old as a seatmate. The woman spent roughly an hour detailing the cruise she had just been on; when that topic was exhausted, she moved on to the wallpaper she was putting in her bathroom, and finally the oranges she had ordered for her daughter’s upcoming birthday. Dog was too polite to tell her to shut up. By the time he got off the plane, his ear had a permanent buzz; he knew if he checked in a mirror it would be red.
He hadn’t decided how to get over to Edwards; thinking he might rent a car and drive, he headed in the direction of the Hertz booth. On the way, his eye caught the fleeting text on a TV screen set to deliver headline news.
“Fighting breaks out between China and India,” said the words.
Dog stopped so abruptly, a short man walking behind him bumped into him with his suitcase. Instead of accepting the man’s apology, he asked where the phones were.
“Major Ascenzio has a jet en route,” said Ax when Dog dialed into Dreamland. “I’ll transfer you down to him for the details.”
“Thanks, Ax.”
“Colonel, one thing — Breanna was aboard the plane.”
“What plane?” Dog asked.
For the first time since he’d known him, Chief Master Sergeant Terrence “Ax” Gibbs was lost for words.
“What plane?” Dog demanded when he didn’t answer.
“Quicksilver is down, sir.”
Twice Zen thought he found something, but the brief flickers from the computer proved to be anomalies. Jennifer Gleason worked the freeze-frames back and forth silently, sometimes calling up the radar and IR scans on her own. But none of the sensors picked up anything substantial in the swirling torrent.
They refueled the small plane three times. Knocking off the refueling probe and diving through the thick storms, Zen felt as if he had plunged back into the underworld, battling the winds of hell. He funneled his eyes into the viewscreen, scanning with the computer, looking, looking, looking. The copilot kept track of the search tracks; his announcements of the approaching turns marked the time like a grandfather clock clanging on the quarter hour.
Zen saw nothing. The radar found nothing. Still he flew, back and forth across the angry ocean, repeating the tracks.
In sickness and in health, she’d said. and she’d meant it.
“Jeff, we’re about three ounces from bingo.” Major Alou’s voice sounded as if he were speaking from the other end of a wide pipe.
“Where’s our tanker?”
“There are no tankers,” said Alou. “The storm’s too much and we’re too far. There’s no choice — we have to get down. I’ve already stretched it out.”
Zen didn’t answer.
“There’s a Navy P-3 out of Japan due in twenty minutes,” he told him. “They’re going to continue the search. As soon as the carrier can launch more planes, they’ll have another search package out. The F-14’s will stay over the area in the meantime. They’ll hear a transmission.”
Who the hell would manage to use a radio in this?
“Jeff, we’ll find her. They will, or we will. But we have to go. We’ll be out of the storm at least, so we can refuel and take off right away. It may be far east. Okay?”
“Yeah, Roger that.”
The flight from LAX to Dreamland was quick — Ax had sent an F-15E, and the pilot, Major Mack Smith, had probably broken the speed barrier twenty feet off the tarmac. Ax met Dog in a Jimmy SUV as the airplane taxied toward the hangar; the truck whipped over to Taj so fast Dog never got his seat belt buckled. Even the notoriously slow elevator seemed to understand this was a real emergency; it started downward three seconds after Dog touched the button for the subbasement level where the command center was located.
Major Ascenzio, Ray Rubeo, and about a half-dozen mission specialist were waiting for hi,
Rubeo stepped up and started to talk, telling the colonel they shared his concern for his daughter and the rest of the crew. The scientist was not only sincere, but actually seemed on the brink of becoming emotional — a development so out of character Dog felt worse than before.
“Thanks, Dog. Thanks, everybody. Let’s get to work. Who’s searching, what have we heard?”
“Iowa’s just knocking off for fuel,” said Gat. Major Ascenzio reached down to his desk and hit a key; a diagram of the search area appeared on the main screen at the front of the room. They had used data from Quicksilver’s transmission to plot its probably flight path after it was hit. Because of the clouds and Quicksilver’s altitude and position, there was no usable information from the Crystal asset — a KH-12 satellite — covering the area, but there was some possibility a satellite used to monitor missiles launches might have picked up explosions aboard the plane; they had a query in to the Natioanal Reconaissance Office to see. That information might help them tweak their search area, though Gat felt they had a decent handle on it.
One thing the major didn’t mention: Like much of the rest of the Air Force, Dreamland’s standard survival equipment included the PRC-90 survival radio. While the radio was a time-tested veteran, it had a limited range and was hardly state-of-the-art equipment. Newer versions utilizing satellite communications were hard to come by — a ridiculous budget constraint that might have proved fatal for Captain Scott O’Grady in Bosnia two years before. O’Grady’s heroism and resourcefulness notwithstanding, a more powerful radio with a locator would have shortened his ordeal considerably.
“We’ll find them,” said Gat. “A P-3 from the Pacific Fleet in en route.”
“That’s it?” said Dog.
“The weather is fierce,” said Gat. “Hurricane winds, hail, the works. Half the Pacific is covered by it. The carriers can’t launch aircraft.”
Dog folded his arms. The storm had even more serious implications for the people who had parachuted — if they parachuted — from the plane. Even if they somehow got into the water without injury, climbing into a life raft in mountainous seas could be an almost impossible task. And once you were in it — hell, you might as well go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
“PacCom has lost at least one plane as well,” said Gat. “The storm is that bad. They feel they’ll be in a better position by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Tomorrow afternoon? Fuck that. Fuck that!”
The words flew from his mouth like meteors, spitting down on everyone in the room.
“We need to organize the search,” said Dog, not apologizing. “We have three planes — two planes.” He caught himself. His breath was racing but he couldn’t corral it. “We’ll run eight-hour missions out of the Philippines.”
“Raven’s not ours,” Gat said. “And besides, the storm there is incredible. Kitty Hawk had to curtail operations, I had Major Alou divert all the way over to Japan.”