“General McLanahan?”
Startled by the sudden interruption, Patrick swam back up to full awareness of his surroundings. He disengaged his neural link. His racing thoughts abruptly decelerated, returning to the plodding, second-by-second routine of the nondigital world. Clumsily, he swiveled around in his chair. “Yes?”
Nadia Rozek stood framed in the open door. She wore a flight suit and cradled a helmet under one arm. Her expression was somber. “I have come to say good-bye,” she told him. “And to give you my word that we will do our best.”
He glanced at his watch and was shocked to see that several hours had passed while he’d been linked to his computer. Nadia and her team must be ready to depart for the distant airfield she’d chosen as a base for their planned rescue operation.
Quickly, Patrick levered himself up out of the chair, ignoring the whine of protest from his exoskeleton’s servos. “Good hunting, Nadia,” he said quietly. “Fly safe… and bring my son home with you.”
“I will,” she promised. For a brief second, unshed tears glistened in her eyes. Then, choked up by emotion, she threw her arms around him and buried her face against his chest.
Caught by surprise, Patrick stood motionless while Nadia hugged him. It had been many years since he’d felt the warm embrace of another human being, especially a woman. Even he and Brad were still trapped at that awkward father-son handshake stage. And he knew that most other people, Nadia among them, were viscerally unsettled by the sight of his LEAF exoskeleton, clear helmet, and life-support pack. They made him seem alien, a man set apart from his own species.
Awkwardly, he patted her shoulder.
After a moment more, Nadia let go and stepped back. She nodded to him in silence, still unable to speak, and then turned on her heel and left.
Thirty-One
Hunter Noble limped down the cargo ramp of the twin-tailed C-23C Sherpa turboprop and out into the blistering summer temperatures of southwest Utah. Heat waves shimmered across the concrete. He squinted against the brightness, looking out across a landscape of reddish rock. Mountains loomed in the west and to the north, with low ridges and hills in the east. This airport was just a mile north of the Arizona border and on the northeastern edge of the Mojave Desert.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the two hard-faced men following close on his heels. Both wore sunglasses, dark suits, and ties. Slight bulges marked the holstered pistols concealed under their jackets. “You know, guys, this isn’t exactly what I had planned for my day off. I don’t like making threats, but if things don’t improve real soon, I may be forced to cut a couple of stars off your Yelp review.”
“The casinos in Battle Mountain aren’t going anywhere, Dr. Noble,” one of them, a big bruiser with a blond crew cut, said coolly. Everything about the guy said former Marine to Boomer, who’d privately dubbed him Goon Number 1. “You can throw away your paycheck another time. This is more important.”
“This being what exactly?” Boomer demanded.
The big man shrugged. “You’ll see.”
Boomer stopped at the foot of the ramp. He swung around and folded his arms. “Look, I’ve been toddling along like a good little soldier ever since you fellas came knocking on my town-house door a couple of hours ago. But now I think you owe me some straight answers.”
“And you’ll get them, Dr. Noble,” Goon Number 1 said with exaggerated patience. He nodded toward the large aircraft hangar they were parked next to. “In there.”
His partner, shorter and with close-cropped dark hair, said helpfully, “It’s air-conditioned.”
Boomer shot a finger at him. “Okay, you, I like. You’ve got solid motivational skills.” He sighed and started ambling toward a small door visible on the side of the huge building. “Fine… I give up. I might as well get this over with.”
As promised, the enormous hangar was air-conditioned. It was also occupied by a big, black, blended-wing aircraft with five large engines, four mounted beneath its highly swept delta wing and another atop the aft fuselage.
“What… the… hell?” Boomer said slowly, staring up in shock at what was unmistakably an S-29 Shadow spaceplane. He shook his head in sheer disbelief. “No fucking way.”
“I thought you’d appreciate my little surprise,” a smooth, resonant voice said from over his shoulder. Kevin Martindale came out of the shadows to stand next to Boomer.
“I knew we built most of the components for a third S-29 airframe and several extra LPDRS engines,” Boomer said carefully. He turned toward the other man. “But I also know that we never finished the damned thing. Not after the feds shut down our manned spaceplane program.”
“Sky Masters didn’t finish it,” Martindale agreed. He nodded toward the spaceplane. “I did.” He shrugged. “Or more precisely, I contracted with Helen Kaddiri for the discreet services of certain Sky Masters aircraft production specialists and the necessary equipment. They’ve been flying to St. George off and on from California for the past several years.”
Boomer stared at him. “You had our guys put the S-29 together here?” Martindale nodded, pleased that he had put one over on the cocky and sometimes arrogant astronaut-engineer. “In a hangar? Not in an aircraft factory?”
“It was… difficult,” Martindale said with a slight frown. “Not to mention time-consuming and extremely expensive.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Boomer eyed him. “Mind telling me where you picked up the couple of hundred million dollars, minimum, building this bird must have cost?”
Martindale returned his gaze. “For the past four years, I’ve been funneling half the profits from Scion’s international security, intelligence, and military contracts into this project.”
Boomer raised an eyebrow. “Really? I kind of figured you needed all of that money to build a super-secret lair on a deserted volcanic island somewhere.”
“There are only so many laser-armed sharks one can buy,” Martindale said with a thin, dry smile. “After the first dozen or so, the excitement starts to fade.”
“I’ll take your word for that.” Boomer looked back up at the huge spaceplane. “What I don’t get is why you’ve gone to all this time and trouble, Mr. Martindale. We already have two S-29s ready to fly. Sure, a third one is nice to have… but it’s not exactly a game changer.”
The other man’s smile widened. “You might want to look more closely, Dr. Noble,” he said gently. “That isn’t just a standard-model S-29 Shadow. We built this one to your own design specifications for the S-29B.”
Boomer’s eyes widened in amazement. In the aftermath of the destruction of Armstrong Station by Russian missile and Elektron spaceplanes, he’d worked up plans for armed versions of Sky Masters’ spaceplanes — figuring the United States would need them in any future conflict in orbit. When President Barbeau abandoned all manned spaceflight, he’d reluctantly shoved the plans into a drawer, along with a lot of other innovative concepts that had never made it off the drawing board.
He’d designed the S-29B Shadow to mount a two-megawatt gas dynamic laser pod, along with a smaller targeting laser radar, in a retractable turret on top of its fuselage. The laser would be powerful enough to engage targets out to around three hundred miles — firing up to twenty times in five-second bursts before it needed to be refueled. Four microwave emitters in retractable pods — two near the wing tips, one atop the forward fuselage, and one on the underside of the aft fuselage — were intended to defend against incoming missiles, killer satellites, and enemy spacecraft. These defensive emitters operated automatically, either cued by the spaceplane’s own sensors or by data-linked information from other platforms.