A second later the trailer caught fire. Jalil put down his night device and watched as a pair of tiny flames emerged from the larger ones, spit falling from a mouth. They ran a few feet and then collapsed. He thought again of his mother and remained unsatisfied.
“Send the word to the planes,” he told his communications man. “Destroyer has struck. The path is clear.”
“Done,” said the como specialist.
Jalil relaxed. The live-fire simulation was over. They could rest now. The next time they did this, it would be for real.
Chapter 12
Fisher watched the video again, studying the white lines. The lines were virtual contrails — computer-generated plots of changes in the atmospheric temperature and composition of the air due to aircraft engines. Below each was a green data log indicating what aircraft had made the track.
There were a few dotted lines — places where the radar had temporarily lost the input or, more likely, the expert explained, places where the records had gotten blurred for various reasons. The storm system had greatly complicated the process; the team responsible for the data — Air Force personnel and two satellite-radar experts from Raytheon — kept cautioning that they had only a 95 percent degree of certainty that they had everything. But everything they had was accounted for.
Fisher scrolled the display upward to the area covering the territory where the Russian spy plane had been tracked. “He’s there before the test?”
“Absolutely,” said the scientist at the keyboard, Tom Peters. He’d brought his CD-ROMs to one of the ancillary labs to go over the data with Fisher; they were the only ones there. “Flying those loops.”
Fisher nodded. The NSA data showed that the spy plane flights had been going on for several weeks on an irregular pattern, not always coinciding with the tests at North Lake.
The techies told him there was no way the Russians could have caused the malfunction. Fisher was inclined to believe them, except that they couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for the malfunction.
But one conundrum at a time. He scrolled back to the area where the accident had occurred.
“So, if there was another plane here, like really close to these guys while they’re in the test area, we’d see it?” Fisher asked Peters.
“Well, like I said, a ninety-five percent—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know: If this were a baseball game, five times out of a hundred you’d lose. Otherwise, it’s a team of Babe Ruths at every position.”
“Yup,” said Peters. He’d used the baseball metaphor earlier. “See, the satellite isn’t really designed to track contrails per se. What we’re doing is throwing the data through a program analyzing aerosols and—”
“Gotcha,” Fisher told the scientist. “Go back to the event, okay?”
The scientist clicked his keys and then popped up the test area. The lines here were all dotted.
“Storm. We had to extrapolate,” said Peters.
“So the storm screws it all up. Technically speaking.”
“You could put it that way.”
“Would other people know that?”
“What other people?”
Fisher shrugged. “You totally lose the airplanes?”
“Well, we know where they end up.”
“We know where two of them end up,” said Fisher. He pointed to the dotted line showing Cyclops heading north over the point where the plane part was found. “Do we know this?”
“Well, within—”
“Hang loose a second, Doc. Stay in the batter’s box, okay? The thing is, your dotted line could go anywhere.”
“No. It could only go in areas where the atmospheric conditions match the proper parameters, and of course it’s starting with a certain vector, course, thrust—”
“Which can give the wrong results, as the location of crashed Velociraptor showed.” Fisher folded his arms. “Where’s the five percent?”
“The likely place for the error?”
“Yeah.”
Peters scratched the top of his head. “Well, first of all, you have to think of this as three-dimensional, not a straight line. It’s following a certain — It would have to be under a kind of river in the sky, if you want to think of it that way.”
Peters’s voice trailed into wolflike growling noises.
“Problem, Doc?” asked Fisher.
“Thinking.” Peters began pounding the keyboard, his growls escalating. “Yeah, okay, here.”
The screen showed a wide ridge of thick clouds running roughly north to south, about seventy-miles wide and then widening as it followed the storm.
“If we didn’t know where it had started from, you could guess anywhere in here,” said Peters. “More or less. I mean, if you want the real analysis—”
“This’ll do,” said Fisher. “This kind of an unusual weather pattern?”
“I’m an atmospheric scientist, not a meteorologist,” said Peters.
“Yeah, but you can do that weatherman stuff with your eyes closed, right?” said Fisher, realizing the Ph.D. had been offended.
“Very common,” said Peters. “I can tell you we deal with this pattern all the time. And anytime you’d have the tests they set up for here, to get this sort of heavy weather. You’d have it. See, the cold front—”
“Thanks, Doc. Listen, if you come up with a formula on who’s going to win the World Series, let me know.”
Chapter 13
He had very big hands. They folded over hers the way her father’s had, and that memory made her vulnerable. Memory was a weakness, just as emotions were.
She longed for him now, even though she knew he’d been a mistake, a last-minute indulgence.
Not an indulgence. A temptation, a suggestion of what might have been had her fate been different.
Megan York spun her head around the cockpit quickly, checking on the crew.
“IP in two miles,” warned the copilot. The IP was the initial point for their run, similar to the point an attack plane would use when calculating a bombing mission. It signaled the ingress into the actual target area, generally the most dangerous part of the mission and necessitating a series of precise maneuvers so the bomb or missile could be launched. In this case, the IP was 309 nautical miles from the actual target, and the maneuvers were mind-numbingly simple: The plane had to fly around a three-mile track at precisely 34,322 feet.
“We’re there,” said the copilot.
“Starting turn,” said Megan, tugging gently on the controls. She executed a very shallow bank, coming south about twenty degrees.
“Two F/A-18s,” said the weapons officer, whose screen interpreted passive intercepts from the radar warning receiver or RWR as it compiled target data.
“They have us?”
“Negative. Well out of range; they’re headed east.”
“Gun up,” said Megan.
“Gun up,” he said.
I’m ready now,she thought to herself.We’re ready. The delays had caused considerable complications, but they weren’t a factor now. Others would deal with them; she wouldn’t. Her job was here.
“We have target data,” said the laser operator. He exchanged a few words with his assistant, who was sitting next to him.
“On course,” said the copilot.
Megan took one last look at her instrument readings. She had to turn the aircraft over to the computer while the weapon was fired.
“Engines are in the green,” said the copilot. “We’re on beam.”
“Turning control over to the computer in zero-five,” said Megan. “Counting down.”
If it weren’t for the tone in her headset, she wouldn’t even have known that the computer had taken the plane. Megan leaned back, a spectator now on the most important flight of her life.