“Good,” Perkins muttered. “Good so far.”
He had the wings of the plane in their full-out position, trying to grab as much of the thin air as possible. At this altitude he was worried about engine flameout. If either engine got too little oxygen it would quit. Restarting in flight was a tricky proposition, plus it would mean aborting the mission. “Forty miles and closing. Still nothing.”
“Flameout!” Perkins’s wingman called out over the radio.
Perkins looked to his left and watched the F-14 there peel off in a steep dive. He could see that one engine was still providing thrust, so the plane should make it back to the carrier, but they were down to three now.
“Thirty miles and—” Stanton was interrupted by another pilot reporting flameout.
“Both engines down. I’m going to hang with you and try to make it,” the pilot reported. Perkins looked out to his right. The third F-14 was already losing altitude. He knew it wouldn’t make it to the target zone.
“Turn away and get your engines started,” Perkins ordered the pilot.
Perkins felt a trickle of sweat slide down inside his oxygen mask. They were down to his plane and one other. When they reached the target, it was going to be one-on-one.
On board the bouncer Turcotte exchanged a worried look with Duncan. If they lost another F-14, they would have to abort.
“Twenty miles.” Stanton’s voice was calm. “We have two foo fighters heading our direction on an intercept course.”
“All right,” Perkins called to the one surviving plane. “Hold steady. Execute on my command. I have left and lead, you have right and trail.”
“Right and trail,” the other pilot acknowledged.
“They’re closing fast,” Stanton reported. “Fifteen miles. Intercept in thirty seconds.”
“Execute!” Perkins ordered. He pulled the nose of the F-14 up. They had passed through 63,000 feet when a warning light flashed on his console. His left engine had flamed out. Perkins immediately did the opposite of what had been drummed into him throughout years of intensive flight training: he shut down his right engine. Then he continued, fighting his instincts, shutting down every electrical system he had.
In the backseat Lieutenant Stanton did the same, cutting all her navigational and targeting computers, the radio, the SATCOM up and down links, and the missiles that rested under the wings.
She couldn’t even talk to her pilot through the intercom. The F-14 was now a very heavy glider, losing altitude rapidly. Perkins looked out and spotted the one remaining plane to his right, also dropping, all systems dead.
The electronic controls were out, so his eyes fastened on his attitude indicator, making sure he kept the plane as level as possible given that the horizon was a hazy line in the distance. He also watched the hand on the altimeter spin around rapidly, counting off altitude lost.
Sixty thousand feet and dropping.
Fifty-five thousand feet and still going down. Perkins looked around. Where the hell were the foo fighters?
He turned on the plane’s radar for two seconds, then turned it off. “Come to Papa,” he whispered. He again lit up the radar, trying to suck the foo fighters in.
He felt a pounding on the back of his seat. Stanton signaling. Perkins turned off the radar and looked about. There they were! Ahead and to the left, climbing to meet them, two small glowing orbs, rapidly closing in.
Perkins strained with the plane’s hydraulics, turning toward the foo fighters. He had his entire being focused on the left one, no longer able to spare any attention to determine whether the other plane had also spotted them.
Perkins let go with his left hand and flipped up a small plastic aiming circle, an anachronism that had been built into the plane simply on the incredibly small chance that the plane’s computer-driven forward targeting display, which was projected against the Plexiglas of the cockpit, would be down.
Perkins began struggling with the plane, trying to get the center of the aiming circle centered on the foo fighter. He knew he would have only one shot before the fighter was past him. He also knew he had to take into account his own speed and descent ratio while also factoring in the foo fighter’s trajectory. It was a situation to make even the sharpest ace of World War II cringe as the two craft were coming to meet each other at over two thousand miles an hour, one dropping in altitude at the rate of a thousand feet every ten seconds, the other climbing just as fast.
“Come on, baby, come on,” Perkins whispered to himself, his eyes focused. They would pass in less than five seconds.
The foo fighter was passing through the right bottom of the aiming circle as Perkins pushed hard right. His finger was resting lightly on the trigger built into his joystick. It was attached to the only electrical system still on, drawing such little amperage that the foo fighter couldn’t pick it up.
Perkins’s finger pulled back. The M16-A1 20mm cannon was on the left side, just below the cockpit. Perkins could feel the plane shudder as the milk-bottle-sized projectiles roared out of the mouth of the Gatling gun. He’d never fired it before with the engines off. He could hear the gun firing, the whine of the barrels spinning, the explosion of the rounds going off.
His eyes, though, were focused on the line of tracers reaching out from his plane toward the foo fighter. The tracers were high and right, then descended down as the foo fighter came up, right into the path!
Twenty-millimeter rounds smashed into the side of the foo fighter. It was built to project power, not armored to take such an unexpected attack. The uranium-cored rounds tore through, destroying the small Airlia computer on board and ripping apart the magnetic engine.
“Yes!” Perkins screamed as he watched the foo fighter drop out of the sky. His exultation was short lived, though, as he realized he was dropping through 45,000 feet and both his engines were cold. He immediately began the emergency procedures to restart.
On board the bouncer, the F-14 that had lost both engines and tried to stay in formation disappeared off the radar screen.
“Shit,” Turcotte muttered. He hoped the pilot and navigator ejected before the plane went down.
“One foo fighter is going down!” Zandra reported.
They watched the display on the small computer screen, the data relayed to them from Cheyenne Mountain.
“The other is hit too!”
A voice came over the radio. “This is Lieutenant Commander Perkins. We have splashed two foo fighters and are heading home.”
Perkins felt the thrust of the two Pratt & Whitney engines push him through the back of his seat and banked hard right. He could see the other F-14, engines on, pulling in beside him, the pilot holding his left hand thumbs-up so Perkins could see.
“That’s one for the record books,” Perkins said to Stanton.
“Let’s go,” Turcotte said. “We’ve got to get in there and get the ruby sphere.”
The pilot immediately pressed forward on the controls and they were heading for the Rift Valley.
“The foo fighter that hit my headquarters in Antarctica is back at the foo fighter base,” Zandra noted.
“That means they’re all back there now, right?” Turcotte asked.
“Correct,” Zandra said.
“Perfect.”
Turcotte thought it most interesting that a foo fighter had targeted Scorpion Station. Obviously the Easter Island guardian knew something about STAAR and its base; more than he himself knew, Turcotte darkly thought.
“Ready?” Commander Downing asked.
Tennyson’s hands were wrapped around a large red lever on the bottom floor of the Greywolf. “Ready.” He had just removed two bolts that kept the lever locked in place.