Seven miles separated the two aircraft.
Inside the Raven, Harris dodged between trying to interrupt and evade the pinging and maintaining his own lock-on to the GK356a4 at Camp David.
Six miles.
Rocking and rolling, Harris raced onward as the F-16 gained on him. He counted the seconds before he could arm the B61 for his strike against Albert Bacon Fachearon — and all that for which he stood.
Five miles.
When? Troy sweated the decision to shoot.
Four miles.
Okay, this is it.
"Missiles hot," he announced.
Jenna was barely two miles away, also on afterburner and following Troy into battle.
"Roger, Falcon Three, you are a go with missiles hot."
Three miles.
Okay, dammit, this is it.
"Fox Two!" Troy shouted.
Chapter 57
In the cockpit of the Raven, Raymond Harris battled to evade the F-16 lock-on, while also fighting to keep his own weapon homed in on its target.
Each time the pinging stopped, it bounced back a moment later.
When the pinging stopped and stayed stopped, he couldn't believe his luck.
Was there something wrong with the system?
He glanced at his mirror. There was no coiling contrail back there. The F-16's Sidewinder was a dud. Harris couldn't believe his luck.
There was no contrail, but there was the F-16. The bastard must be coming at nearly Mach 2. Suddenly, Harris felt the turbulence of the aircraft roaring past him. The blast of air nearly caused him to lose control.
The bastard was on top of him, then a short distance away.
He was matching his speed to the Raven.
What was the bastard trying to do?
Harris considered evasive action, but he was seconds from the release point.
The F-16 was so close that he could read the specs stenciled on the tail.
The F-16 was so close that he imagined feeling the heat of its engine.
The F-16 was so close that he felt its wing touch the forward fuselage of the Raven.
This was the last thing that Raymond Harris ever felt, for in the next infinitesimal slice of time, the two aircraft became one, an enormous ball of wreckage.
Imagine two dozen tons. Of scrap metal hurtling through the air at several hundred miles per hour, a mile and a half above a verdant, wooded hillside.
Fragments, many fragments, of scrap metal spun off the main ball of wreckage and began plunging earthward.
Within that ball of wreckage, the remnants of what had been a human being were pulverized and shredded by the slicing and dicing of a thousand knifelike shards.
High above, Troy watched the burning wreckage tumble, lose momentum, and fall. He hung from the straps of his parachute, having punched out of that mass of scrap metal at the moment that it had ceased to be two separate airplanes. When his second Sidewinder — his second hand-me-down Virginia Air National Guard Sidewinder — had failed, Troy decided to ram the Raven and hope for the best.
Watching it fall, from his silent perch in the sky, the wreckage seemed so unreal, so far away in both time and space. Yet Troy knew that within it were the remnants of a nuclear weapon whose fireball would very much encompass him in both time and space — if it had been armed.
Had Harris armed the weapon?
He knew that all of this was happening close to Camp David, but he didn't know exactly how near.
Had Harris armed the weapon?
Jenna had watched the collision and had seen the fireball plummet downward.
She had heard Troy call his "Fox Two" and had seen nothing happen. She knew what he had decided to do, and she had breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the single parachute.
She shared Troy's thoughts about the potential nuclear incineration and orbited the scene cautiously.
Like Troy, she knew that if the weapon had been armed, any second could be the end.
Conversely, they both knew that an unarmed weapon was virtually harmless. Like the black boxes on airliners, they were designed to withstand enormous concussions without breaking apart. There had been a whole series of events during the Cold War, known as Broken Arrow incidents, in which aircraft carrying nukes had crashed and the unarmed weapons had not exploded. There is always the danger of a radiation leak, but only remotely of an explosion.
With each passing moment, both Troy and Jenna breathed easier.
As she flew close and saw the dangling figure wave to her, Jenna felt enormous relief.
However, her relief was short-lived.
What next?
Had this been the pivotal closing scene in a movie, she would return to her base, welcomed by the open arms of her compatriots.
This was not a movie. Jenna had no base, and her only comrade was floating to a landing in the Catoctin Mountains.
What could she do?
Where would she land the surviving one of a pair of stolen F-16s? How could she land in a country now ruled by Firehawk after she and her comrade had just killed Raymond Harris?
Landing amid the pines in the dogwood brush was challenging, but Troy managed to avoid getting his parachute snarled in a tree. He was scratched and bleeding, but they were superficial wounds. All his moving parts moved as they were supposed to move. His bad leg ached, but he recalled the old adage stating that any landing you walk away from is a good landing.
He was also reminded of that day so long ago when he and Jenna had both come down in the inhospitable Denakil Desert. The impulse then, as now — as on that mountain back in the Colville National Forest with Hal Coughlin — was to evade.
He sat on the hillside beneath darkening clouds, listening to an impulse.
Today had been a progression of impulsive acts, unencumbered by contemplation. It began in the dark of night with the impulsive need to have Jenna's body and to succumb to her impulsive need for his. That morning — it seemed so long ago now — they had awakened to their mutual impulse to stop Raymond Harris, to fight Raymond Harris, and to kill Raymond Harris.
Troy had landed in these woods, reacting on an impulse born on those Colville woods.
Evade.
Evading capture was an impulse, but with it also came a moment for contemplation.
Who was he evading? What was he evading?
First there was the impending rainstorm that felt as though it could start any moment.
Next, however, Troy contemplated who he was trying to evade.
The man who had tried to kill him, and who had tried to kill Albert Bacon Fachearon, was no more, but this death did not change the fact that Firehawk and Cernavoda still ruled the United States. What had happened here had bought Fachearon some time. It had probably bought him his life, but it had not bought him back his job.
The death of Raymond Harris had not stopped The Transition.
Removing Harris had done no lasting harm to the cabal of Firehawk and Cernavoda, and certainly not to Layton Kynelty, who would now emerge stronger than ever from Harris's shadow. If anything, Troy had saved Firehawk and Cernavoda the embarrassment of having to justify a nuclear strike within the United States.
As the first cold drops of rain began pattering on the dogwood leaves, Troy headed for the cover of some trees. The forest was thicker over there, and he could probably stay relatively dry as he made his way off this mountain.
He had yet to decide where exactly he was headed. The only thing on his mind at this moment was selfpreservation — the impulse to get as far from the crash site as possible.
Chapter 58
State trooper Ralph Overgeist had been following the news all day on his radio as he cruised up State Route 29. He kept the news channel on low — he didn't want it to interfere with his hearing calls on his two-way radio — but he did keep it on.