Chapter 7
Howe couldn’t stand or sit still, could hardly walk instead of run. He couldn’t go anywhere, or couldn’t decide: He had to do something, had to what?
Punch something.
It was bad enough when he thought Megan was dead. He wandered through the underground complex, jogging up the stairs rather than taking the elevator, going to the hangar bunkers and lab areas. He moved quickly, warding off conversation, pausing only for the card checks and retina scans. He wanted to be alone, and yet, he walked nowhere that he could be alone. His mind spun like the turbine in an engine cut loose from its controls. He couldn’t believe she was a traitor; he couldn’t believe she’d used him.
Was this what that look on the runway had meant? Had she been laughing at him all along?
He’d kill her himself.
Maybe it was Rogers, the copilot. Maybe he’d gotten up from his seat, strangled her or poisoned them all somehow, killed them and taken the plane himself.
Gorman was wrong, wrong, wrong.
But that look — what had it meant?
Howe found himself standing in the hallway near Bonham’s office, waiting for Bonham to get off the phone. As soon as he heard him hang up, he walked in, knocking on the doorframe.
“Whatever it takes, I want to help track them down,” he said as he walked in.
Bonham squinted, as if there were words on Howe’s face he couldn’t read.
“We’re all involved,” said Bonham finally. “There’s no question about that.”
“No — I want to be on the front lines. Every asset we have, including the Velociraptors, ought to be involved. I want to be there. I deserve to be.”
Bonham got up abruptly and went to his outer office door, closing it as well as the inside one. When he came back, the expression on his face was even more pained than before. He seemed to have to push the words from his mouth.
“Your concern’s going to be appreciated. It’s understandable. Totally. Completely,” Bonham said. “But…well, I’m not in the chain of command, so what I say…it’s just based on my…my experience and sense of things. Careerwise, your best bet — the thing you should do right now…I’d hang back. Let events take their course. No one’s going to blame you if the plane was…if it turns up somewhere else.”
The lie seemed to embarrass Bonham, and he stopped speaking. If the plane had been stolen, Bonham’s head would be the first chopped off — God knew what would happen to NADT itself — but Howe’s would surely tumble soon afterward. If the accident hadn’t already killed his career, this had.
“I want to be on the front lines,” insisted Howe.
“It’s not my call.”
“I ought to be involved in recovering the aircraft,” said Howe. “It’s my project. I want to stick with it to the end.”
“It’sour project, Tom.Ours. We are involved. Whether we like it or not. But we can’t do every single thing. You know that. Besides, recovering the plane, if there were an operation…it wouldn’t really be our assignment. You know?”
“I want to be. You have the pull.”
Bonham pursed his lips together but said nothing. Howe’s energy had finally run out. He nodded, then rose and left the office.
Chapter 8
Dr. Blitz shifted uneasily in the secure videoconference room. The national security advisor’s private facility in the sub-basement of the Old Executive Office Building was only a few weeks old and the environmental controls still hadn’t been fine-tuned. Given a choice between freezing and sweating, Blitz had opted for freezing. His fingers were now nearly frozen into position.
There were advantages to using this room, however. The conference coordinator sat across from him, separated by the sort of glass window that would be used in a radio DJ booth. Blitz sat in front of a panel that allowed him immediate access to several different secure networks and his own personal computer files. He could talk to his staff, either via secure text IMs or vocally over the phone while the mike was on mute. Two other stations could be occupied, and it was up to him to decide whether to put them on the air or not. The system allowed him to get real work done while pretending to listen.
Not that he needed that capability today. All his attention was directed toward the others on the line as they discussed the disappearance of Cyclops One.
It wasn’t bad enough that India and Pakistan were about to start lobbing nukes at each other. The Air Force colonel assigned to investigate the Cyclops accident had just come up with a bomb of her own: a theory that the Russians had stolen the aircraft and its weapon.
An incredibly plausible theory, as the silence of everyone else on the circuit — the CIA director, the defense secretary, the head of the Air Force, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman — attested.
“We start by surveying the Russian base,” said Colonel Gorman, her square chin firm despite the shaking video feed. “I’ve asked Special Operations Command for input on an attack option.”
“Slow down, Colonel,” said the defense secretary, Myron Pierce. “You’re talking about an act of war in a foreign country — a member of NATO, I might add.”
“Stealing our plane wasn’t an act of war?” snapped Gorman, adding belatedly, “With respect, sir.”
“They’re not going to keep it in the open if they did take it,” said the CIA director, Jack Anthony. “And I doubt they’d have it at that base where the spy planes are. The satellite review hasn’t turned it up.”
“The interpreters are reworking that,” said Gorman. “Obviously we don’t have twenty-four-hour coverage of that base. It’s possible it stopped there, refueled, and moved on.”
“What else would the attack option include, Colonel?” asked General Grant Richards, JCS chairman. It was a softball question with an almost solicitous tone; Blitz realized Gorman had already briefed him.
Smart.
“In the best-case scenario, I’d like to use Cyclops Two,” she said. “It would neutralize anything we came up against.”
“Cyclops Two?” said Blitz. “I thought the aircraft on the project were grounded.”
“That would be unnecessary if Cyclops One were located, proving there was no malfunction,” said Gorman. “I would note that aside from some minor technical points, everyone from the scientists to the maintainers at North Lake has failed to find a problem. This explains why, frankly.”
“What about the Velociraptors?” said Blitz.
“I wasn’t asking for them, sir,” said Gorman. “But I’d certainly take them.”
“They also have a clean bill of health,” said General Richards.
Blitz realized that the Air Force was going to push strongly to get the plane back, not just because it was their asset, but because doing so would put them in an excellent position to get rid of NADT and regain the initiative on their own development programs.
He was sympathetic to that. And there was a certain symmetry to using the weapon that had gotten them into the problem.
Still, this was one of the few times he actually agreed with the defense secretary: They were getting ahead of themselves.
Gorman detailed a preliminary order of battle that involved a good hunk of the forces available to the Pacific Command. Simply mobilizing that large a force would surely tip off the Russians.
Assuming, of course, that they had stolen the plane.
“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” said Blitz. “Far, far ahead.”
“Sir, I was authorized to retrieve the aircraft,” said Gorman. “My orders were explicit. They went beyond investigating the circumstances.”