“Agreed,” she snapped back. “Let’s try.”
Starship lined up Hawk Four, then told the computer to take the aircraft in for the refuel. The computer balked—its safety protocols would not allow it to refuel while the Megafortress was being targeted by the enemy. Both he and Breanna had to authorize the override. The extra step took only a few seconds, but by the time he got back into Hawk Three, the computer had missed its shot. Rather than breaking and going for the other aircraft in the pack—a human’s natural choice, since there were no less than four targets within spitting distance—C3 had stubbornly stayed on the SATAN’S TAIL
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lead MiG. It led it to the very edge of the connection range with Baker-Baker Two. The computer backed off and banked around, taking itself out of the fight even though it had been ordered to stay with the other plane.
It was the first tactical flaw Starship had found in the programming. It disappointed him somehow, as if the computer should have known better.
He’d figure out how to use it in the next exercise to try and beat Zen, something no one had ever done.
Kick would have loved that. He was always talking about beating the master.
Starship pushed the memory of his friend away as he took control of the Flighthawk. The sky before him was studded with fighters. The MiGs stoked their engines, trying to close on the Megafortress—apparently they were all carrying short-range heat-seekers and needed to get up close to take a shot. He pulled to a half mile of the nearest aircraft and lit his cannon, tearing a long, jagged line through the fuselage and back into the tail plane. He kept moving forward, barely letting up on the trigger before finding his second target, another MiG-21. Before he could fire, a missile sprang from beneath the enemy’s wing. Cursing, Starship waited for the target cue to blink then go solid red.
“You better not hit me, you son of a bitch,” he said, dialing the enemy into oblivion.
“BREAK RIGHT, YOU HAVE TO TURN RIGHT!” SPIDERMAN YELLED
to Breanna.
“We need to stay straight for the refuel.”
“Bree! There’s a MiG closing from your left and two heat-seekers coming from behind.”
“Flares and Stinger,” said Breanna calmly.
The decoys shot out from the Megafortress as the air-to-air missiles sped toward it. The cascade of flares were too inviting a target for the antiquated missiles to ignore—both tucked downward, exploding more than a mile away.
Which left the MiG-29 that somehow managed to elude 362
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everything else in the sky and was drawing a bead on their left flank.
“He’s taking a cannon run,” said Spiderman.
“Starship, how’s your fuel?”
“Two more minutes.”
“We don’t have two minutes,” said Breanna as the first slug from the MiG’s 30mm cannon began crashing into the fuselage.
“COMPUTER, MY CONTROL, HAWK FOUR,” SAID STARSHIP, and in a breath he was falling past the Megafortress. He tilted his wing slightly to the left, feeling his way, not seeing, blind in the dark night. Flashes of red sped overhead. He lifted himself and there was the enemy, dead-on in the middle of his screen.
“Now!” he yelled, and the black triangle hurling itself toward him turned golden orange. Starship flew through it, shuddering as debris rained in every direction. He climbed then circled back, looking for the Megafortress. As he turned he was jerked backward, away from his small plane.
Disoriented, he blinked—then saw the flames coming from the top of Baker-Baker Two in the screen.
“RADAR IS OFFLINE,” SPIDERMAN TOLD BREANNA.
“Least of our problems.”
“Thirty percent in engine two. We may lose her.”
“Fire control.”
“Fire control. Sounding warning.”
A klaxon began to sound in the aircraft. “Everybody, make sure your oxygen is on,” shouted Breanna over the automated warning.
The Megafortress had a system that flooded vulnerable areas of the aircraft to extinguish fires. It worked by denying the flames oxygen—which of course meant it would kill the crew as well.
“Do it,” she told the copilot.
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*
*
*
STARSHIP PUT HAWK FOUR INTO A PRESET TRAIL MANEUVER, pulled on his oxygen mask, then undid his restraints to check on Delaford.
“You really have to be tied in tight,” Starship told him, snapping and then snugging the restraints on his ejection seat.
“Thanks,” said Delaford. “We’re not going out, are we?”
“Nah, not today,” said Starship. He turned, then flew against the side of the seat as the Megafortress rolled hard on her right side.
The lights began to blink, indicating that the fire-suppression system had been activated. He pulled himself upright and slid in behind his controls as the Megafortress pitched forward. He tumbled against the bulkhead over the panel hard enough to rebound backward into the seat, and he lay there dazed for a moment, temporarily stunned.
Get your gear back on, dude. You’re coming undone. Mask is out and where the hell is your helmet?
“Screw yourself, Kick.”
You undid your mask. You can’t breathe right.
“Screw it.”
Come on.
Something or someone seemed to take hold of the mask and center it on his face. Starship had his helmet and cinched it—when had he put it on?
He fumbled with the restraint buckle on the left side of his seat; when it finally cinched, he went to connect the right and found it already closed. The aircraft pushed back, leveling off—then shot back down, its nose pitched nearly per-pendicular to the earth.
BREANNA SCRAMBLED TO COMPENSATE AS ENGINE FOUR WENT
offline. The radar housing had been smashed all to hell, there were holes in the wing, and at least some of the control surfaces were no longer attached to the aircraft.
“Hang with me, Spiderman,” she yelled.
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“I’m hanging.”
“We have engine one and engine three, that’s all we need,” she told him.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, though he didn’t sound convinced.
“I have the stick, I have the stick,” she told him. “We have to stay calm and straight.”
Not necessarily in that order either. Breanna managed to keep the aircraft from falling into a spin, but still had to struggle to quell the roller-coaster movements up and down, the plane riding the momentum toward the ocean. Each plunge got a little shallower and more controllable, and she finally managed to get the aircraft level. Pushing her shoulders back, she took a deep breath in celebration—then went back to work.
“First thing I want you to do,” she told Spiderman, “is get us a course to an airfield. See what the distance is to that place in India that the Ospreys used. That’s probably our best bet at this point. I’ll take stock of the damage. At some point we’ll see if we can bring engine four back online. Starship?”
“Sorry, Bree.”
“Wasn’t your fault—that MiG ducked our AMRAAM
somehow. But I think next time, we may test the old saying about discretion being the better part of valor.”
Breanna checked with the rest of the crew; no one had been hurt. The MiGs, meanwhile, had returned to Yemen—those that hadn’t been shot down. By their count, they had gunned down seven.
“Eight— Hawk Three got one more before it ran out of fuel. It did the honorable thing and blew itself up when it went dry,” said Starship, reviewing the computer file.
“Ark Royal is asking if we need assistance,” said Spiderman.
“Unless they want to add another four or five thousand feet to their landing deck, tell them thanks but no thanks,”
said Breanna.
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Aboard the Abner Read