“Green Three, do you have a clear photo of that tail?”
“Several. Yes, and in close, you can clearly see that it used to display a red Lion Airways logo, under that runny, patchy paint. I’m going in close to see if I can see anyone in the cockpit and perhaps photograph them.”
“I’ll follow you in for a look, myself.”
After two passes, and with just thirty kilometers left in authorized airspace, Green One and Three had seen no evidence of life; the 737 continued to fly on a constant heading and altitude. Nothing moved in any window. The recon planes backed off to observe.
“Green Two and Green Four, we’re clear now. You are authorized to close in and fire at will.”
Two and Four accelerated past them, taking up positions at an angle behind the white airliner. R-73s lashed out in long white streaks. Two’s rocket blew the port engine to fiery bits, and the wing fell away; as the airliner tipped, the second R-73 tailpiped the remaining engine, stripping off the starboard wing. The airliner’s fuselage tumbled wildly downward, end over end; the rest of Green Flight circled while Green Three descended for better pictures of the impact.
The fuselage slammed into the gray-white, stony ground and vanished in a great blob of white-hot flame. Green Three peeled away; a collision with wreckage thrown into the sky might have doomed him to crash into the nightmare void of the desert below.
“Did you get spectroscopy, Green Three?” Green Leader asked.
“The instruments say we’ve got everything we’re supposed to get. That was quite an explosion. I wonder what they had on board?”
“They’ll know when they analyze your recordings, but you know they’ll never tell us. All right, let’s head for home, we have a storm coming, and I don’t want to be here when it hits.” They wheeled and headed for home, four contrails tipped with silver spearheads; with nothing but itself to burn, the wreckage burned briefly, smoldered a little longer, and was as bitter cold as everything around it before noon.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. GILLETTE. WYOMING. 5:09 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
When Jason reached to knock on the door of Room 215, it opened. Suburban dad-type, knit polo shirt, cheapie chinos, penny-for-the-love-of-god loafers. “Hi, I’m Zach. I’d rather not be too close to what you have there, so I’m going to prop this door open”—he did—“and walk over to the Denny’s across the street. I’ll be having coffee at the counter. My stuff’s already in the car so here’s the key to the room.” He tossed the card onto the bed. “Are you carrying anything plastic you need to keep?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, my stuff ferments flexible plastic, loves beverage bottles but really any plastic, semiaerobic so you kill it with bleach or peroxide. There’s three gallon jugs of peroxide on the table—pour it over any surface you need to touch before you handle any of your plastic.”
“My stuff makes nitric acid wherever there’s a fluctuating electromagnetic field, and powers off a temperature gradient,” Jason said. “Strong alkali, like lye, shuts it down temporarily and neutralizes the acid.”
“Thanks! Why don’t you walk out, and then I’ll walk in?”
“It’s a deal.” Jason stepped back to let Zach walk past the door and out into the sunlight. He was obviously careful not to step anywhere near where Jason had stood.
Not worrying about the Holiday Inn’s carpets since they’d never have time to bill Zach before Daybreak took hold, Jason poured peroxide over a big patch of the carpet, and followed up by sprinkling Liquid-Plumr there. He set his pack in the center, disinfected it, and gave it some more Liquid-Plumr, splashed more of the nasty chemicals onto his gloved hands and onto the plastic bags that had held his laptop and change of clothes.
With water from the faucet in a glass he had just removed from the hotel paper wrapper (SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION), Jason rinsed his sealed plastic bags, including the one with the laptop. He stripped and threw his clothes and shoes on the bed, helping the maid to scatter more of his nanospawn and Zach’s biotes.
After the long day, he took longer in the hot shower than he’d meant to—might as well enjoy the Big System one last time.
When at last Jason walked across the parking lot to Denny’s, the air tasted sweet and clean. Still an hour of daylight left? He reached for his watch before he remembered it had already died. Good fucking riddance. He was whistling “Natural Mountain Man” as he sprinted across the street.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 7:00 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
“So the Indian Air Force had good remote sensing?” Cameron asked.
The Air Force liaison said, “As good as ours—it’s the same gear, we sold it to them, and they know what to do with it. So yeah, we can count on this result. The spectroscope was consistent with light hydrocarbons—at a guess, that would be a largish tank of propane in the plane’s body, maybe juiced with a few cylinders of aviation oxygen. We think the pilot and crew probably parachuted somewhere over wild country not long after they dropped the bodies in Thailand; jumping into a jungle would be a lot better than riding the plane through the operation.”
“How did they know we’d get it together fast enough to shoot down the 737?”
“They didn’t have to. A big white airliner with two engines crashing anywhere in that part of the world would just have been one more good decoy.” Nancy Telabanian sat back, folding her arms around herself. “Because the Indian pilots are good and know their business, we can be pretty sure about three important facts: It’s almost certainly the Lion Airways plane stolen from Sentani, with its tail repainted; it’s consistent with being the plane that dropped the bodies of Samuelson’s three key liaisons into the market square in Thailand; and it was unmanned by the time we shot it down. And it couldn’t possibly have been a Dreamliner. So Air Force Two is still somewhere, and the blow is going to fall… somewhere.”
Marshall—whoever or whatever his official job and title were, he seemed to be the one in charge of getting useful graphics up in a short period of time—spoke over the loudspeaker. “Per your request, Mr. Nguyen-Peters, we’ve got a graph to show estimated arrival times on the West Coast and other locations. Shall I put it up on the main screen?”
“Yes,” Cam said, “I think you’d better.”
The map of the eastern Pacific, and western North America, could not have been clearer; it showed the ocean as black, areas where the 787 could already have hit as red, and areas still safe as aqua. Hawaii and coastal Alaska from the Bering Sea almost to the panhandle were red. So far the West Coast was aqua. But a tongue of red crept down toward Juneau, inexorably south, like a glacier of fire and blood, widening as it went.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. RAPID CITY. SOUTH DAKOTA. 5:04 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Marshalene still had half a tank and a full charge, but she’d had way too much liquid, and besides, she was bored. She liked truck stops because they always had a lot of silly junk that she could buy, and show to people to show them how she was kind of above it all, but not like being all superior, just she knew this stuff was junk and some people bought it for real.
It was dinner time and the café smelled good with all the white-trash cookin’, and she decided she could stand country music for some good meatloaf and pie. Besides, the lot had been so crowded, she teased herself, that she’d had to walk all the way here from where she’d parked, almost back by the highway.