“Follow him!” Schoen demanded.
“We’ll get stuck.”
“DO IT!”
The driver cut the wheels to the right and moved into the ditch, where the Suburban sank instantly up to the running boards in snow, its wheels spinning uselessly.
Schoen was already out, leaping into knee-high snow and struggling to run in the direction of the accelerating Sno-Cat. It was obvious he couldn’t catch it, but he could stop them with a lucky shot. He made it to the first tree and used it as a platform, taking careful aim with the snub-nosed weapon before squeezing the trigger.
The chilling impact of multiple bullets pinging into the metal in the back of the Sno-Cat was unmistakable. Kat glanced in the rearview mirror, looking for the source of the shots. She jammed the accelerator to the floor and turned to the others. “Stay down!” she yelled, struggling to be heard over the engine. “Everyone okay?”
“Yes,” Robert answered, surveying the others and turning to look out the back. “I think they got stuck in the ditch. I see the headlights, but they’re not moving.”
“Dear Lord,” Dr. Maverick was saying to himself. “I’ve never been shot at.”
“The airport’s ahead, maybe a mile,” Kat said. “I can see the flashers.”
“They’ll know where we’re going, Kat,” Jordan said, his face ashen.
She was nodding. “If they’re in the ditch, it’ll take time to radio for help. Maybe we can scramble the local sheriff.”
Jordan was shaking his head. “No. This group will have covered that angle.”
Kat glanced at him in alarm. “What? Bought off the sheriff?”
“Neutralized him, somehow.”
“Your jet won’t be here for another hour, Jordan. We have to do something.”
Robert was leaning between them from the backseat. “Kat, we’re sitting ducks in this thing. It took those slugs because he was firing low, but this is thin metal around the cab.”
“I know it,” she said, correcting their direction as the vehicle lurched to the left.
“So what do we do?” Robert asked gently, almost in her ear.
“We can hide — or find another plane. Quickly.”
“Hiding won’t work,” Robert said.
She looked around at him, then at Jordan and Dr. Maverick. “You’re right. We commandeer a plane. Hang on. I’m going to run this machine flat-out.”
Arlin Schoen held the radio to his lips and kept his voice under control. “We’ll leave this car and use yours. Just get here. We’ve got them now.”
He pocketed the radio and safetied the Uzi before wading back through the snowdrifts to wait at the side of the road. It would take the other Suburban less than three minutes to reach him, he figured, and perhaps another ten to drive the circuitous route to the airfield. But there would be no place to hide. With the exception of their chartered Caravan, the airport had been all but deserted. He turned to his driver and motioned him over. “Bring the guns. Hurry.”
“Robert, I just remembered something,” Kat said as they bounced violently over a patch of rough ground and stabilized. The airport was less than a mile distant.
He leaned forward. “What, Kat?”
“Don’t ask me why I just thought of this. But in Walter Carnegie’s file that we downloaded?”
“Yes?”
“He said the Air Force had stonewalled his requests for information about a test they were running off Key West with an old F-one-oh-six drone the day and hour the SeaAir MD-eleven went down.”
“I read that. What about it? You think it’s connected?”
She shook her head while looking back at the rearview mirror, half expecting to see headlights bouncing across the field after them.
The landscape was clear behind them, no vehicles or people in sight.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “But that business jet we flew wasn’t stolen until after the MD-eleven went down, so it wasn’t the firing platform. They could have used another airplane, but what’s been bothering me is, Carnegie said the air traffic control tapes around Key West showed no other aircraft in the area. That means not one but two airplanes are missing from the radar tracks. The one that fired at the MD-eleven, and whatever Air Force aircraft was working with the F-one-oh-six drone.”
“I don’t understand,” Robert said, aware that both Dr. Maverick and Jordan James were listening intently.
“Well, they don’t fly a target drone aircraft unless there’s someone up there to shoot at it. So, there should be another radar track from the Air Force craft, and according to Carnegie, there wasn’t. Second, there should be a radar track of some sort on the aircraft that shot the laser at the MD-eleven.”
“Maybe the Air Force craft was a stealth fighter. An F-one-seventeen, or something new,” Robert said.
Kat steered the machine around the end of a gully and accelerated again. “No, I mean — well, yes, that’s possible — but… what if there was another aircraft up there, not a stealth, and it purposefully wasn’t using its transponder? Carnegie said the FAA tapes showed an intermittent target.”
“Kat, that’s the road we came out on. We’ll have to cross it,” Robert said.
She nodded. “I know. If there’s a fence, we’ll just plow through it.”
“Okay.”
“What is a transponder, Kat?” Dr. Maverick asked.
“A little black box,” she said, “that electronically listens for an incoming radar beam from air traffic control. When it senses one, it sends an answering burst radio transmission back to the same radar site with altitude and identification information, so the controller knows who you are and precisely where you are.”
“And without it?”
“Without it, or if you purposefully turn it off, all the controller can do is look for what we call a ‘skin paint’ target. Just the raw radar beam bouncing back to the antenna from the metal of the airplane. That’s what military stealth technology prevents. The skin of the aircraft absorbs the radar beam so nothing bounces back, and, without a transponder, they’re essentially invisible to radar.”
“But a normal airplane without a transponder will still show a skin paint target to the controller?”
She nodded. “Usually. Like a shadowy, intermittent target, which were Carnegie’s words. So why would an Air Force test aircraft turn his transponder off?”
Robert tightened his grip on an overhead handrail as they bounced over a small depression. “Kat, what are you thinking? That the F-one-oh-six was involved?”
She glanced at Robert as they neared the road. There were no signs of cars coming in either direction. A barbed wire fence loomed ahead of them, and she gestured to it. “Hang on.”
The Sno-Cat plowed easily through the wire, and climbed onto the road and off the other side as she steered across the grounds toward a row of hangars.
“What am I thinking? They use F-one-oh-six drones for target practice. So who was shooting at this one, and why were they trying to stay hidden from radar? We know it wasn’t a stealth, because a stealth wouldn’t leave an intermittent target.”
“Wait,” Robert said, shaking his head. “You mean, who was shooting at the drone, or who was shooting at the MD-eleven?”
Kat looked at him. “What if it was one and the same, Robert? What if the test went bad and they got an airliner instead?”
In the growing light of dawn the flight line looked deserted at first. There were rows of light aircraft and a few light twins, all of which had obviously been out all night in the storm. Only a Cessna Caravan on floats at the other end of the field appeared to be free of snow.