“Roger that.” Colonel Zycki dropped down into his padded command chair and relaxed for the first time in hours.
It only lasted a few seconds.
“Sir, we’ve got two foo fighters three minutes out from the lead Black Hawk.” “Are the F-117’s out in front?”
“Yes, sir. One minute to intercept,” the radar operator informed Zycki.
Zycki had received word over the secure scrambler about the fate of the Pasadena. “Tell them to fire as soon as the foo fighters are in range.”
“Great,” the pilot of the lead F-117 muttered as he received that order. He had the two foo fighters on his small radar screen, closing fast. He hit the fire button immediately, launching two air-to-air missiles at the incoming objects. His wingman did the same.
Nabinger’s Black Hawk was ten miles behind them, flying low to the ground. Colonel Zycki could see the four missiles racing toward the foo fighters. They had closed half the gap when the missiles simply disappeared.
“Oh, shit,” Zycki whispered.
Then as the two foo fighters closed on their position the dots representing the four F-117 Stealth fighters blipped out. That left just the foo fighters and the two Black Hawks. The foo fighters closed on the lead one.
“Twenty seconds until intercept!”
“We’ve got foo fighters inbound!” the pilot yelled, startling Nabinger out of his reverie about what was secreted in the lowest level of the imperial tomb of Qian-Ling. “Our escort is down!”
The chopper shook as the pilots began evasive maneuvers. Nabinger reached forward and grabbed one of them on the shoulder. “I need a radio link!”
The pilot threw him a headset. Nabinger put it on and keyed the mike. “Hello! Hello! Is anyone listening?”
Duncan still had the mike in her hand, listening to events forwarded from the AWACS. She recognized the voice on the radio.
“Professor, this is Dr. Duncan!”
Nabinger’s hand was wrapped tight around the small boom mike. He could now see the two foo fighters looping in, small glowing golden orbs in the sky.
He pushed the transmit button. “In the tomb — Qian-Ling — in the very bottom chamber — there’s—” He paused as a rushing noise filled the headset, rising to an ear-piercing screech, forcing him to rip the headset off, trying to stop the agonizing pain that tore through his brain.
The Black Hawk’s engines abruptly stopped functioning along with every other piece of machinery on board the craft. The helicopter nosed over and dropped like a rock.
The last thing Nabinger saw before impact were the two foo fighters hanging overhead, like two small moons illuminating his death.
“Professor!” Duncan yelled into the microphone.
“It’s down,” Colonel Zycki announced over the radio.
In the back of the trail chopper Turcotte had listened to the death of the lead helicopter and Professor Nabinger in stunned silence. He’d had a run-in with foo fighters before and knew they could easily incapacitate a helicopter. There was also no way to outrun the small glowing orbs.
“Cut all your power!” he yelled into the intercom. “Set us down!” O’Callaghan twisted his head to look at Turcotte in disbelief. “What?” “Kill the engine and autorotate,” Turcotte yelled, “or we’re all going to die!”
“Shut down!” O’Callaghan ordered Spence.
O’Callaghan reached up and hit the emergency shutdown, a move that was never supposed to be done while the helicopter was in the air. At the same time Spence disengaged the transmission, freeing the blades to rotate on their own, slowing the chopper’s descent. He then began running his hands down the rows of controls, flipping off every system that had been on.
O’Callaghan glanced down. He spotted a small clearing among the trees. He pushed hard on the cyclic, trying to get the chopper to it.
Two foo fighters appeared, racing past the helicopter and disappearing to the rear.
“Brace for crash!” O’Callaghan yelled as he realized they weren’t quite going to make the open area. The Black Hawk hit the trees and rolled to the left.
The aircraft tore through the thick tree cover and came to a halt on the ground. The combination of the original forward speed and the sudden drop in altitude produced a collision that crumpled the left front of the helicopter.
Shattered glass, twisted metal, and pieces of trees filled the front of the aircraft.
On impact all the occupants of the cargo bay had been thrown forward in a pile. Turcotte shook his head, trying to clear it. He could smell jet fuel leaking. As soon as that fuel touched part of the hot engine, Turcotte knew the helicopter would become an inferno.
Someone got the side door open. He could see Harker silhouetted against the door for a moment, then tumble out. Turcotte turned to the front to help O’Callaghan, who was trying to tear through the wreckage and free his copilot. Turcotte could see the blood seeping from under the man’s helmet. Turcotte reached forward and felt the copilot’s neck.
Turcotte let go and grabbed O’Callaghan, who was fumbling with the copilot’s shoulder harness. “He’s dead!”
O’Callaghan shook his hand off and continued to work to free the body.
“Leave him!” Turcotte yelled. “The chopper’s gonna blow!”
Turcotte simply grabbed the pilot and pulled him between the seats into the cargo bay. Then he shoved O’Callaghan toward the open cargo door.
Fuel reached the hot engine exhausts and burst into flames. Instantly, the helicopter became an inferno. Turcotte staggered away from the flames, pushing O’Callaghan ahead of him.
They were thirty meters away when the helicopter exploded. The impact threw them all to the ground.
“Second Black Hawk is down.” Colonel Zycki’s voice was flat. “All aircraft are down.”
Duncan pushed back from the control console and stared at Zandra. “There! Are you satisfied now? We have nothing!” She pointed at her watch. “Twenty-eight hours until the Airlia arrives and all we’ve managed to do is kill some damn good people.”
CHAPTER 33
The six talons were still crisscrossing each other’s paths as they moved toward Earth. The large open field in Central Park had been cleared and blocked off. UNAOC was busy preparing the format for the reception of the Airlia and determining the pecking order of world leaders who would get to meet Aspasia.
It was the middle of the night, four hours before dawn, the last dawn before the Airlia arrived. The headlines of the early-morning editions currently being printed trumpeted it as the last day the human race would stand alone on the face of the Earth.
Things behind the scenes in the Cube looked very different, though. Major Quinn had finally been brought fully into the loop by the Pentagon, based on the assumption that if anyone knew how to counter the foo fighters, it would be the personnel at Area 51. He also had forwarded intercepts from Zandra in South Korea to STAAR in Antarctica, and that was causing great consternation in the covert world in Washington as the CIA was denying she worked for them and no one could quite figure out who Zandra or her organization, STAAR, was, or how it had managed to gain such power.
Kelly Reynolds watched all this with dismay overlaid with grief over the news that Peter Nabinger and Mike Turcotte were dead. She was in the Cube conference room with Quinn, listening to the latter’s video-conference call with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President in the War Room under the Pentagon.