“I hope to hell that’s one of theirs,” David said.
“We’ll soon know if the Talon doesn’t reappear.”
“How will we know in this dust storm? Lord, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Huh,” Aussie said, “locals tell me this is only a bit of a whirly. In the Gobi they say you can’t see your hand in front of your face during a dust storm.”
“All very educational, Aussie, but how the hell can we tell where the Talon is?”
“Keep your bloody head in position. Don’t want a case of whiplash on top of—”
Suddenly Brentwood was being dragged along the ground, swearing, bumping on pebbles, then he too suddenly disappeared into the whirling dust storm.
Next Aussie, already in harness, pulled two helium tanks to fill the balloon, and within minutes could hear the Talon off to the north, making its circle, his balloon now ascending. The old herdsman shook his hand, and around them, like shadows in the darkness of the dust, he could see the various odds and ends of the herdsmen’s life, as the canvas-and-felt homes came down to be loaded onto a wagon, a small TV being wrapped carefully in a carpet, and camels laden with bedding and harness, the Mongolians wishing him well with their Eskimo-like smiles and golden teeth.
There was a crash like thunder, either a Siberian or American jet hitting the desert floor, then in less than a second, Aussie, his arms now crossed tightly in against his chest, was airborne, the spring in the nylon cord making the initial ascent smoother, faster than he’d anticipated. But then the spring was at its end, and this was followed by a sudden jolt, so fierce that Aussie felt his head was about to come off.
Once above the two-hundred-foot-high dust storm that had invaded the ghers, Aussie could see far above him the three, now small, balloons that had been severed free once the V-shaped scissor clamp had got hold of the previous three lines. Now from the tail of the aircraft another vertical line descended that would hook onto the rescue line and haul it up and into the belly of the plane. The Talon was flying higher than usual because of the loss of visibility due to the dust storm. They liked to see their man as quickly as possible before engaging the winch.
With wind and dust screaming about his ears, Aussie could hear the staccato of machine gun fire off to the west where the American and Siberian fighters were engaging, and now and then he caught a glimpse of tracer as one of the Siberian fighters would try to break out of the American fighter’s box to try to bring down the Talon. A Fishbed-J MiG-21 was visible for a moment when Aussie, dangling like a toy at the end of the enormous rope, was six hundred feet above ground, but as soon as he’d seen the Fishbed-J with its green khaki camouflage pattern he saw an F-15 Eagle on its tail and the spitting of fire from its 20mm, six-barrel rotary cannon. The Fishbed immediately started making smoke, rolling into evasive action, its twin barrel GSh 23mm cannon firing from its belly pack. Suddenly Aussie knew he was in free fall, the line severed.
He had less than a second to make the decision that was no decision at alclass="underline" either pull the key ring release on his chute or smash into the ground. His right hand grabbed the key ring and jerked hard. There was a flurry of air about him like a hundred pigeons being released, and suddenly his downward thrust was slowed as the chute filled and he descended back into the dust storm. The Talon, already having overstayed its welcome, was forced to turn back northeastward across the Mongolian border into Second Army territory before the Siberian MiGs got lucky again.
Aussie used swearwords on the way down he thought he’d forgotten. Whether the line had somehow fouled in one of the props despite the safety wire rigged in front of them or whether it had been a lucky tracer bullet didn’t really matter. Whatever severed the line, he wasn’t going back with his three buddies. But, like all members of the elite SAS and Delta Force commandos, he was trained in how to turn a losing situation into a winning one.
Cold reason also told him, though, as he entered the gritty dust storm and hit the ground harder than he had wanted, that the Spets helicopters and patrols would soon head out from Nalayh and possibly Ulan Bator looking for him. And right now he had four hundred miles of grassland and desert between him and the safety of Second Army. It seemed impossible, yet the only thing he could think of was the motto of his unit: “Who dares wins,” or, as General Freeman, echoing Frederick the Great, would have said, “L’audace, I’audace, toujours l’audace!” But meantime Aussie was stunned by another realization: that he had just lost fifteen bucks cold.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Next afternoon, a Friday, when Mike Ricardo walked into Con Ed’s eight-story-high fossil-fuel Astoria Station for his four-to-midnight shift, he paused for a moment to look up at the five sets of high twin stacks belching their white smoke, in sharply etched columns, against the cerulean blue. He’d been working at the Astoria fourteen years, his job a member of one of the maintenance crews for the six giant white log-cake-shaped turbines that sat on an immaculately kept rust-red-painted boiler-room floor over a hundred and twenty feet below the 217 miles of piping that bent and curved like the exposed innards of some enormous refrigerator. But here it was far from cold, temperatures soaring to 120 degrees Fahrenheit as the fossil fuels, coal mainly, burned twenty-four hours a day to drive the turbines that helped feed the enormous appetite of the New York grid.
At the same time that Mike was beginning his shift, at Indian Point in upstate New York, thirty miles north of Central Park, Stefan, the third member of the cell, was donning a blue surgical cap. Slipping his ID/lock card into the slot, he passed first through the turnstile and the blue-green protective door, on through the second shielding door, and into what the men at the two plants at Indian Point called the “blue room.” Here the fuel rods lay in an innocuous honeycomb arrangement twenty-five feet beneath the blue water shield.
In Albany the computer monitoring the flow of electricity was showing above average power being consumed in Manhattan and Queens, so that up to half of it had to be drawn from the grid fed by the enormous hydropower complex at La Grande in Quebec, the “juice” coming down on the 345,000-volt lines from the roaring spillways of La Grande One and Two. Manhattan’s eight substations’ transformers, like those throughout the rest of the city, downstepped the voltage so that David’s father, Admiral John Brentwood, in the World Trade Center’s offices of the New York Port Authority, could keep track of the highly complex business of coordinating convoy loading, departure, and arrivals, and, when he had time, brew the coffee that kept him and millions of other New Yorkers, from brokerage houses to subway drivers, working the extended war hours.
Northeast of the Bronx, on the calm waters of Croton Reservoir, the water-police helicopter was carrying out its normal patrol to insure that no powerboats were churning up the bottom. If left undisturbed, the water would be aerated through the action of the sun’s ultraviolet light, and, once rid of impurities, would pass through the aqueducts and tunnels built a hundred years before and become part of those one-and-a-half billion gallons of water that New Yorkers consumed every day. The chopper came down as it spotted the quality-control men on the only powerboat allowed in the lake lowering the seki disk — which they saw was visible down about three and a quarter meters, much deeper than the two meters required by law.
In New York, the fourth Spets who was replacing the “floater” Gregory walked as casually as he had for the past ten years into Con Ed’s orange-carpeted ECC — energy control center. The controller glanced about at the twelve-foot-high, half-moon-shaped wall beaded by quarter-size lights that traced the lines on the hundreds of flowcharts, making it all look like the massive circuit board of a railway network rather than that of New York’s electric flow.