“More. All the way,” the team leader said into his walkie-talkie.
Beaman broke away from the rest of them and walked unsteadily toward the massive, three-story metal doors. He heard a shouted curse, then the corpsman joined him, steadying him by holding one elbow as they moved as quickly as they could across the open bay. They fell in side by side along the line of men and women straining to move the massive bulk of the hangar doors.
Beaman found a handhold and felt a moment of despair at that massive inertia with which the steel doors resisted the best efforts of the team. The doors inched back achingly slow, grinding and squealing inch by inch over the greased tracks upon which they rode.
Then something gave. Almost imperceptibly, the doors picked up speed, increasing the thin slit window open to the weather outside.
The difference was noticeable almost immediately. The wind picked up, battering at the flames, driving them out of the open doors on the opposite side of the hangar. The fire licked hungrily at the edge of the deck above and the low catwalk that surrounded the flight deck. Beaman saw a canister life raft sway unsteadily as the flames reach it. First one support line gave way, then the second. The canister tumbled down into the fire, and as the plastic seal around it gave way, it gouted forth the eerie shape of an automatically inflating life raft. It seemed to float for a moment on top of the burning hot air, tossed upside down by the draft, and then the tough plastic vaporized in the flames. Beaman saw one small fragment spiraling in the updraft before the wind forced it out the other side of the ship.
“It’s working,” the team leader shouted. “Come on now — put your back into it!” Each person redoubled his efforts, pushing muscle and sinew past the point of pain, welding their flesh with that of the ship they sought to save.
“I see it,” Beaman shouted. “Grissom, I see the boundary of it.” He dropped his hold on the door, now sliding easily along its track, and raced forward to the fire. He stopped just twenty feet away, the hard pounding rain and wind almost driving him forward into the inferno involuntarily. He turned back to the team leader. “We need some shoring timbers, then some flat sheets of metal. And yellow gear.”
“You think it will work?” Grissom asked.
Beaman nodded. “The wind is driving the smoke away from us, the rain’s acting like a fogger, and we got fresh air coming in. Come on, we got to get it off the deck now.”
Within moments, the damage control team had a makeshift tractor rigged on the front of the yellow gear. “I got it,” Beaman said and stepped forward to take the driver’s seat.
“No way.” This time, the corpsman locked his arm around Beaman’s neck and pulled him back. Beaman felt pain flash in his upper arm, then looked up at the corpsman. The man’s features were fuzzy — and there was something about a fire, some reason Beaman had to stay awake, had to, had to get to the — With the urgency beating his brain, Beaman slid to the deck, unconscious.
The corpsman held up the empty syringe. “Morphine. It’ll do it every time,” he said aloud.
But no one was listening.
“That’s the last of them,” Batman said, his voice heavy with relief. Tilly the crane had just unceremoniously released the last burning aircraft over the open water, her steel cable almost at a forty-five degree angle in the gale force winds. “How the hell they pulled this off, I’ll never understand. Get the chief engineer down there. I want to know how bad the deck is.”
“He’s on his way, Admiral,” Coyote answered. “We’ve lost two Hawkeyes and four helos, along with the Tomcat.”
“Then let the small boys know they’re going to have to pick up the slack in SAR,” Batman said. “The Hawkeyes have enough crews on board to do a hot crew swap.”
“If we can launch,” Coyote said.
Batman stared at him, cold fire shining in his eyes. “Those people didn’t just beat that fire for me not to be able to launch aircraft. You tell the chief engineer it’s a question of when and how — not if. One way or another, I want metal in the air in fifteen minutes.”
Pushed along by the giant hand of the wind at their backs, Tombstone and Lobo needed only a minute to find the beginning of the runway. It was marked by a circular turning area and a taxiway extending to the south. Without a word, Tombstone turned in that direction. His entire body felt bruised by the wind and rain; he was grateful that the ground was covered in some kind of crushed black rock rather than slick grass or, worse, mud. As it was he had to lean to the left at almost a thirty-degree angle to keep his balance, and his feet gouged sideways ruts in the rock with every step. He tried to keep the AK-47 protected by his body.
An enormous darkness loomed through the rain ahead. Tombstone found some bushes and crept along beside them, hunched over, until he was able to see that the dark shape was a mountain black and craggy. And at its base were several pairs of enormous sliding doors of what looked like galvanized metal. They were inset beneath a stony shelf in the side of the mountain, fronted by a tarmac apron that led to the taxiway. Hangars. Hangars, hidden from aerial surveillance by the mountain and a fringe of desperate-looking trees.
The hangar doors were all closed. How well-guarded were they? What would happen if he crept up for a little peak at —
He started when a hand tugged at his sleeve. He glanced back at Lobo, who pointed to the east. A pair of headlights was brightening the storm.
Lying flat on his belly beside the bushes with Lobo just behind him, Tombstone watched as a big dark sedan — not a military-style vehicle — approached the hangars. Its horn blasted once, and one of the hangar doors slid open. Bright light poured through the aperture, giving Tombstone a view of what lay within. His heart gave a rapid stutter.
CUAVs. Not like the manta. These were smaller, double-arrowhead-shaped. Like the one that had attacked him in Maryland.
And even in the narrow space he could see, there were dozens of them, stored on tall racks like private boats in a fancy dry dock. Dozens of them, waiting to go.
The sedan pulled just inside the hangar and stopped. An armed guard appeared from somewhere, and opened the back door. Another guard moved into view, escorting a third man. The third man was considerably taller than the others, and dressed in civilian attire. The guards hustled him into the backseat of the sedan. For an instant, just before the door slammed closed, Tombstone had a clear view of the man’s face.
It was Phillip McIntyre.
Do your job, Hot Rock thought, over and over again, the words tumbling through his head like a mantra. Two Tone’s right. Just do your job and nobody can blame you, no matter how things turn out. Do your job, do your job…
And of course, in his case, that meant protecting his lead’s ass. Any actual shooting would be executed only in conjunction with Neanderthal’s efforts, and at his direction; for the most part, Hot Rock was there as defender and nothing more.
The battle was surreal in the gray soup. Attention focused strictly on the video game screen of the HUD, with perhaps an occasional glance at some other instrument. This radar blip was Neanderthal; that one was a Flanker; that other one, an incoming missile. Far more Flanker blips than anything else.
Hot Rock kept his gaze focused on the instruments, and his hearing on Neanderthal’s signals radioed from the lead’s position ahead and below. Now and then, when so directed, Hot Rock triggered a missile. Like all the Vipers, he was carrying only two Sidewinders, because the heat-seekers became notoriously unreliable in extremely wet conditions. But he believed he might have contributed to the shooting down of a Flanker with one of his Sparrows. “Nice shot,” Two Tone said over ICS, “but don’t get wild now; remember your job.” Hot Rock felt relieved. It was good to have someone experienced tell you what to do.