Then he realized he was not six years old. Anger sprang from the center of his chest. He would avenge himself against the Muslim bastards. He would have the full revenge he was entitled to.
“Yes,” whispered a voice in his ear. He recognized it as his mother’s.
Jalil turned to see her but found only blackness.
Chapter 12
“They’ve fired,” the weapons operator reported. “Two targets down.”
“Are they still tracking?” Megan asked.
“The radars are all active.”
She pushed her eyes across the instrument panel, forcing her thoughts away from Tom. He’d be out there, thinking about her.
That should have been her, firing the weapon.
She saw him now: the way he looked at her on the access ramp outside the aircraft, puzzled. Why was that what she thought about — not their date rock climbing, or the time she’d had him take her to an opera.
Some opera. It was a traveling company in a gymnasium. He’d hated it — just about fallen asleep — but pretended to be interested when she started talking about it later, nodding in all the right places.
She was right, and she had done the right thing. This proved it, didn’t it?
Others wouldn’t see it that way. Tom wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
“ETA to the target area is now five minutes,” said the weapons operator.
“Yes,” she said, still struggling to focus.
Chapter 13
“Only a partial hit on target two,” reported Cyclops as Howe swung his aircraft toward the shoot-down. Both helicopters had disappeared from the screen seconds after the indicators flashed on Howe’s screen, indicating the weapon had discharged. “They’re definitely down, though.”
“I’m going to take a look,” Howe told them, slapping the throttle into afterburner. The flood of fuel into the rear chamber — tweaked and perfected after literally thousands of man-hours of fuss — ignited with a smooth, incredibly powerful ripple that nearly doubled the aircraft’s speed. The nozzle at the front of the engine was wide open, changing the world’s most efficient-at-speed jet engine into the world’s fastest jet-fueled power plant. The F/A-22V covered over thirty miles a minute, a proud cheetah running down her prey on the Africa savanna.
Howe’s heart beat lackadaisically, keeping time like the bass drum in a band, its cadence lazy enough for the hottest summer day. But his stomach felt the brief burst of acceleration — his stomach and the muscles in his arms, the tendons at his knees, his ribs, his joints, the small fibers of hair below his ear. They felt the acceleration and they thrilled to it. This was flying, moving through the air as fast as a Greek god, the leading edge of sheer thought. The aircraft strapped on his back was one of the best—the best—pieces of machinery ever perfected by man, attached through an electronic umbilical cord to a weapon as powerful as Zeus’s lightning bolts.
And it had just been used to avert World War III.
Thomas Howe, and the nearly thousand men and women connected to the mission, had just saved several million lives.
The idea was as intoxicating as the speed.
“Doesn’t that sound like a worthy thing to do? It’s something I’d die for. Truly.”
Howe pushed Megan’s voice back into the rush of the jet as he eased back on the gas, swooping to give the radar’s ground mode a good look at the wreckage. They needed to make sure the helicopters truly were down.
Timmy checked in, updating him on the attack package that was following the helicopters toward the border. The lead plane was now about twenty minutes from Pakistani airspace; they’d planned the attack very closely, giving the ground people ten minutes to take their targets.
Would they go ahead with the attack if the radars were still working?
No one knew. If they did, Cyclops Two and the Velociraptors would take them out.
“I have the lead plane,” said Timmy.
“Stick to the game plan,” Howe told him. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
He tucked his wing and plunged toward earth, flicking off the holographic HUD projection. The night was dark but clear, and he could see a pinpoint of fire at about ten o’clock in his windscreen, one of the targets burning after it had crashed.
“Splash one, definite,” reported Howe.
He was moving too fast and still too high to see much, even if it had been daytime. He went back to the synthetic view as he slid around the valley. The radar hunted the ground as if it were in its free-form attack mode, developed to help the next-generation attack planes turn up Scud missiles in tinhorn dictators’ palaces. The ground radar that the Indians had been targeting was only a few miles ahead; his RWR noted that it was active and hunting through the sky, though the Velociraptor had not yet been detected.
Push a button, and he could take it out himself.
Howe slapped the side stick, banking away. He hadn’t found the wreckage of the second helicopter, but he also hadn’t found it flying, either.
“Those MiGs are coming hard,” warned Timmy. “Eight of ’em.”
“We have them all,” said the Cyclops pilot.
“Hold on,” said Howe. “Wait until they’re at the border.”
“Hey, Colonel, you see that contact Unk-2?” said Timmy, referring to the computer tag on the large unknown aircraft flying northward near the Indian coast. “What’s his game, you figure?”
“Has to be a spy plane,” suggested Howe, just as he had earlier.
“Not Indian, though. Came off the ocean.”
“Could be the Russians.” They were a bit too far away to get good information about the aircraft, but its size and speed made it fairly obvious that it wasn’t part of the attack package.
Advising them, maybe, though one of Howe’s own ELINT aircraft ought to be picking up signals in that case. Cobra Two reported that the Indian forces were still flying silent com. The Pakistanis, meanwhile, did not seem to know anything was amiss.
“Lead MiG will be in range of the Pak radar in zero three,” said Timmy. “I don’t know…. He’s pretty low; hemight just get through.”
“We wait until he’s committed to crossing the border,” said Howe. He’d begun to climb now, swinging around the coverage area of the radar site. All of the Pakistani flights had returned to their bases; the only thing that the PAF had in the air were two Mirage IIIs back near Lahore. Besides the attack package closing in on the Kashmir border, the Indians had their 767 radar plane and its escorts flying near the border to the west, giving them coverage just about to Afghanistan.
Howe suspected that the Indians had other groups of planes airborne to the south, out of his task force’s detection range; they’d be preparing a follow-on strike once the first group of planes took out the sites. At the moment, though, they were too far off to see or worry about.
“One minute to border,” said Timmy. The two Velociraptors had separated about fifteen miles, Howe to the northeast and Timmy to the southwest of the lead MiG. They could divvy it up between them if they had to.
“Cyclops is tracking. We’re ready anytime, Colonel.”
“Bird One.”
“MiGs are slowing — turning! Shit,” said Timmy.
“Don’t sound too disappointed, my friend,” said Howe. “This just means we did our job.”
“Yeah, well, figures they’d wimp out,” said the wingman.
Howe laughed. His joints cracked; he hadn’t realized how tense he’d become.
“Bird One, be advised the strike force you’ve been tracking has used the word abort,” radioed Cobra Two.