Authors: Jim DeFelice
Captain Timothy “Blaze” Robinson—known as Timmy to his friends—pulled the F-16 through its turn gently, moving his whole body as he pressured the control stick. The Falcon did a graceful bank three thousand feet above the closest peak, tiptoeing around the Canadian Rockies as if afraid to wake them. Timmy nudged the aircraft straight and level, his movements the minimum needed to keep the plane on its course. He leaned his head toward the canopy, staring out at the terrain he’d been given to comb.
The search force included a half-dozen helicopters, several small propeller-driven craft that could fly low and slow in the mountains, a J-STARS aircraft with a bushel of sensors, and a U-2R providing near-real-time IR imaging. Still, Timmy flew as if finding his downed comrades were entirely on his shoulders. No high-tech sensor, no satellite image, could do a better job than his own eyes as they hunted through the shadowy slopes below. Two other pilots had taken this same workhorse F-16 over this same terrain on earlier shifts, but Timmy tracked over it as if it were virgin territory, sure that he would see something through the haze and persistent, lingering clouds.
By rights, Timmy should be the guy they were looking for. He was one of the F/A-22V pilots and ordinarily flew as Williams’s wingman; Colonel Howe had bumped him for the test, taking lead and slotting Williams behind him.
Timmy scanned his instruments, double-checking to make sure all systems were in the green. The F-16 had a smooth, easygoing personality, a can-do attitude that matched its versatility. She wasn’t particularly well suited to the SAR role, however; the propeller-driven and helicopter assets involved in the search could fly lower and slower much more comfortably, and had more eyes available for the search. That fact was reflected in Timmy’s assigned area, well out of the primary search grid. But neither the pilot nor the F-16 herself would have admitted this. Muscling her ailerons against the sharp wind vortices tossed off by the crags, the Falcon stiffened her tail and held off the breeze, sailing across the valley with the calm aplomb of a schooner on a glass lake.
The shared radio frequency being used to coordinate the search buzzed with voices. Grandpa—the J-STARS control that was coordinating the search—shifted assets around as the clouds slowly made their way off the mountains.
In a combat zone, a specific protocol governed when an airman would “come up” or broadcast on Guard frequency, the radio channel reserved for such emergencies and monitored by all of the searchers. These special instructions or spins conserved the limited battery power of the radios and made it more difficult for an enemy to detect or home in on the transmissions. But in this situation—and sometimes even in combat—a broadcast might be made at any time, especially if the downed airman heard a search plane overhead.
Timmy tried willing a broadcast into his ear; he heard only static, and even that was faint.
This long after a crash, what were the odds that someone had survived?
Not particularly good. Nor was it likely that one of the crew would be this far north. But it was possible. Moving at a couple of hundred miles an hour, you could travel relatively far in ten minutes, fifteen. There was no radar cover close to the mountains, and it was possible the planes had stayed in the air even longer. Punch out over the clouds, get pushed around a bit by the wind, hit your head somewhere—it
was
possible, if unlikely.
The searchers suddenly began chattering. They’d spotted something in a ravine. Metal.
Though the discovery was over a hundred miles to the west, Timmy felt his pulse jump. He slipped into another turn, dipping his wing and throttling back so he was just barely above stall speed, tiptoeing over the rough terrain. Something was there. He slipped around for another look.
The F-16’s General Electric F110-GE-129IPE power plant developed roughly 30,000 pounds of thrust and could move the Fighting Falcon out to Mach 2 in a heartbeat. The power plant had been engineered specifically to increase acceleration and performance at low altitude, allowing a pilot on a bombing run to accelerate quickly after his bombs were dropped. But here he wanted to do the opposite, and the engine grumbled slightly as the pilot dialed its thrust ever lower.
Timmy flew over the spot four times, making sure it was just a rock he’d seen, not a body. On his last pass he flew barely fifty feet from the ground, moving dangerously slow, just over 140 knots. Still, it was difficult to get a good glimpse of the ground, and the interplay of terrain and shadows played tricks on his eyes. Once more he broadcast his location on Guard, asking if Williams or anyone could hear him.
Going from the F/A-22V to the F-16 was a little like trading a BMW M5 for a Honda Civic. Both aircraft were well made, but the ideas behind their designs were very different. The base F/A-22 was a cutting-edge design aimed at creating the world’s best interceptor. All of the political wrangling and bureaucratic BS involved in its procurement—such as what Timmy viewed as the absurd designation change from F-22 to F/A-22—couldn’t gum up what was, at its core, a great fighting machine.
The F/A-22V took that design considerably further—without, he might have added, the political BS, since the work was all handled “off-line” by NADT. Specially designed to work with Cyclops as part of a new-era battle element, the aircraft was arguably the most versatile and capable ever constructed.
The F-16 was a lower-cost (though not cheap) jack-of-all-trades. Depending on its configuration, it could operate as an attack plane, a Wild Weasel or anti-SAM aircraft, a close-air-support mud fighter, or an interceptor. This Block 50/52 aircraft represented a substantial improvement over the original Block 15, the Air Force’s first production model, which nudged off the assembly line in the 1970’s. Even so, its base technology was older than Timmy and even Colonel Howe, and after flying the F/A-22V, the pilot would have felt severely handicapped in the F-16 in a combat situation.
Not overmatched, though. The F-16—which was known as the Viper as well as the Fighting Falcon, its more “official” nickname—had excellent maneuverability and acceleration at near-Mach and Mach-plus speeds, attributes that played well in a knife fight. The original lack of BVR or beyond-visible-range killing ability had been corrected with the fitting of AIM-120 AMRAAMs some years before, and the Block 50/52 aircraft’s APG-68 radar, with a range between thirty and forty-five miles and the ability to track up to ten targets simultaneously, was at least arguably as capable as anything the F-16 was likely to encounter.
Assuming, of course, that it didn’t encounter an American plane.
Timmy came to the end of the area he’d been assigned to patrol and began to track back south. As he did, the controller in the J-STARS coordinating the search effort hailed him.
“Florida Three,” he acknowledged.
“Florida, we have an area for you to check out, possible debris picked up by our Eyes asset.”
Eyes was a U-2 helping with the search.
“Florida Three acknowledges, Grandpa,” answered Timmy. “Feed me a vector.”
He selected military power, climbing quickly and tracking toward the area, which was so far north and east of the test area that he guessed it had to be a false lead. The mission specialist in the J-STARS gave him a detailed description of the terrain as he flew, saying there seemed to be a large piece of metal in or on a rockslide at the base of a sheer cliff in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies about two hundred miles due west of Edmonton. He described it as a broken silver pencil stuck in the side of a thousand-meter rockslide.
As Timmy neared the spot he took the plane down, asking the J-STARS specialist to describe the area again. J-STARS were E-8A or E-8C Boeing 707-type aircraft that had been developed as a joint project by the Air Force and Army. The aircraft had considerable surveillance equipment of their own, including a Norden AN/APY-3 multimode Side-Looking Airborne Radar. The complement of operators—there were a minimum of ten consoles, with room for up to seventeen, depending on the plane and mission—could process and coordinate information from a seemingly infinite variety of sources. They could direct and download targeting information to properly equipped Air Force attack planes as well as provide comprehensive battlefield intelligence to ground commanders. In this case, the operator was using a newly developed variant of the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (or JTIDS) data link to pass an infrared feed directly from the U-2R to his console. Some F-16s were already equipped with gear that would have allowed the specialist to punch a few buttons and relay the image directly to Timmy’s cockpit. Had he been flying one of the F/A-22Vs, the data would have been added to the synthesized three-dimensional rendering of the area on the tactics screen. The plane’s computer would have calculated his best approach and likely time to target, along with a fuel matrix and a suggested wine.
Timmy oriented himself, tucking down toward the cliff side. He took the first pass too fast and too high, streaking by the mountain so quickly, he couldn’t spot anything. His heart had started to pound; he realized as he pulled the nose of his plane back away from the ground that his hand was shaking.
He cut his orbit, pushing his wing down and falling back toward the target area. He backed his speed off and even considered putting down his landing gear to help slow down.
He didn’t see the grayish object until the third pass. From the air, it looked like the bottom half of an old ball-point pen buried under some loose gravel. It seemed too small to be an airplane and had no wings. Timmy banked to his right, circling around to get another view. He leaned forward from the canted seat of the F-16, pushing around, slowing the aircraft down to a walk. This pass was a tiptoe so close that his left wingtip nearly clipped the side of the hill.
There was definitely something in the crevice of the ravine. The bodies of both missing planes were covered with a dull gray next-generation radar-resistant skin—not the black coating of B-2s but something considered more durable and nearly as slippery. It was extremely difficult to see against the gray rocks and shadows.
But it was there. Or something was there.
Timmy spun back over it, this time going so slow that the aircraft bleated out a stall warning.
He could see a wing farther along, an almost perfect isosceles triangle sheered from an aircraft.
The Velociraptor.
He clicked his microphone to call the airborne search coordinator.
Clayton T. Bonham waited impatiently as the MH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter he’d commandeered pitched through the mountains toward the area where the piece of metal had been found. He was just twenty minutes behind the initial-response team, which itself had arrived barely a half hour after the call from the flight that had made the find, but to Bonham it was too damn late already. When he gave an order, he expected it filled immediately, if not sooner. The Pave Hawk was moving close to its top speed, but that was hardly fast enough for him.
Bonham had been retired from the Air Force for nearly five years. Nonetheless, he still thought and acted like a two-star general; he even insisted on his subordinates calling him General.
Not insisted, exactly. Encouraged.
After all, as head of NADT, he was owed a certain amount of respect. He was responsible for developing the most important weapons the United States had developed since the hydrogen bomb.
An exaggeration, surely, and yet, one with some justification. When fully implemented, a Cyclops battle element could destroy anything from a hardened ballistic-missile complex to a terrorist one-man basement bomb factory, with minimal collateral damage. The possibilities were endless and, without exaggeration, revolutionary.
One of the crewmen standing in the rear of the helicopter with Bonham tugged at him slightly as a reminder that he was leaning across open space. Bonham glared at the young man, though the crewman had only been concerned about his safety. The helicopter settled into a hover; Bonham was out on the ground before the wheels hit dirt. He trotted across the road to where an Air Force major from the first team in waited to make his report. The major was flanked by a Special Tactics sergeant with an M16, as well as a civilian whom Bonham didn’t recognize.
“General,” said the major, bobbing his head in an unofficial salute.
“What do we have?”
“Piece of fairing from a large aircraft, very possibly a 767 type, though we’re still not sure.”
“Definitely a 767,” said the civilian.
Bonham glanced at the man, who had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The general liked definite opinions, and so gave the civilian only half the scowl he normally would have for interrupting. Obviously the man was one of the experts brought in by the Air Force to help with the operation.
“We’re going to airlift it out, get the technical people to take a look at it,” said the major.
“Waste of time,” said the civilian.
“This way, General,” said the major. He walked up the road about twenty yards, then began hiking up a short embankment. Bonham and the others followed. The metal had definitely come from an aircraft; it appeared to be one of the underside flap track housings that ran front to back on both winds beyond the engines on the 767. While it was certainly possible for an aircraft to lose one and remain airborne, as a practical matter, finding something that had been part of a wing meant the rest of the aircraft was somewhere nearby.
In a lot of pieces.
The civilian walked to one end of the metal and kicked it. “Dropped just about flat,” he said after a long drag on his cigarette.
“I can’t recall your name,” said Bonham, turning to him.
“Probably ’cause you don’t know it.” He blew a wad of smoke in Bonham’s direction.
“Well, let’s share it.” Bonham put his hands on his hips.
“Andy Fisher.” He waved the hand with his cigarette. “You’re going to find this piece of aircraft was dropped here. It didn’t come from a crash. It’s proof there wasn’t a crash.”
“Andy Fisher is with who?” said Bonham. “What company do you work for?”
“I’m with the FBI,” said Fisher. “And it’s
with whom
. Nuns were sticklers for grammar.”
“What are you doing here, Mr. Fisher?”
“At the moment I’m looking for a cup of coffee.”
“I don’t have time for bullshit, Mr. Fisher.”
“Yeah, neither do I,” said Fisher. “I’m kind of interested in that plane part, though. Figure out how it got here and we figure out who stole your plane.”
Bonham suddenly felt a cold chill on the back of his neck.
Stole?
He jerked his thumb to the side and the FBI agent followed him a few feet away.
“Why do you think the plane was stolen?” Bonham asked.
“Well, where is it?”
“Obviously it crashed further north than the, uh, experts thought it did. In these mountains, with the weather we’ve had and are having, it can take quite a while to locate. We have a vector now; the search can take shape.”
“Yeah.” Fisher took a long pull on his cigarette. “You think your guys ran into each other?” asked Fisher.
“Of course not.”
“So what else could’ve happened?”
“Crashes happen for a lot of reasons.”
Fisher shrugged. Bonham couldn’t tell whether he was blowing smoke—literally—about the accident
not
being an accident or not.
“How do you know the metal piece isn’t from the plane?” asked Bonham.
“Oh, it is. It definitely is,” said Fisher. “I just think somebody put it out here for you to find.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Look at it: It’s not banged up enough to have fallen from, what, thirty thousand feet? Forty?”
“Try three or four hundred over the mountain,” said Bonham, now fairly sure the FBI agent was an idiot. “And you can’t go by how banged up something is in a crash.”
“True. I’ve seen weird things.” Fisher shrugged. “I think it’s bullshit.”
“How many crashes have you investigated?”
“A couple.” The agent took a very long drag on his cigarette, bringing it down to his fingertips. “Maybe a few more than that. I don’t really like crashes, though. Pretty much the technical people run the show.”
“Well, we have plenty of technical people,” said Bonham. “Why aren’t you back at the base?”
“This is more interesting than staring at Jemma Gorman’s tight ass all day.” Fisher took a long draw and then threw away the cigarette.
“Thank you for your opinion,” said Bonham sarcastically. Gorman actually wasn’t that bad-looking, but she was definitely a tight-ass.
“Hey, it’s free,” he said, walking back down the hill.
“Sir?” asked the sergeant who had been following Fisher.
“Stick with him,” said Bonham. “Make sure he gets the hell back where he belongs.”
“Yes, sir.” The sergeant scrambled down to follow.
“Double the search assets in this sector. Use this point as a starting point and assume the plane broke up as it went north,” Bonham told the major when he returned to where he was standing.
“Sir, uh, with respect, Colonel Gorman is in charge.”
Bonham glared at him.
“Yes, sir,” said the major.
One of the crew members from the Pave Hawk came hustling down the hill toward them. “General! Search teams are reporting a find about a hundred and fifty miles from here, due east.”
“A hundred and fifty miles?”
“Yes, sir. They think it’s the F/A-22V.”
“Let’s go,” said Bonham, starting back toward the landing area.
One of the other helicopters had just brought in a small ATV with a plow on it, and a pair of airmen were using it to cut a narrow zigzag trail down to the mountain crevice where the airplane had been found. The trail looked to be about wide enough for a shopping cart, but the two men certainly seemed to be having a hell of a time running the vehicle, and Fisher saw no reason to tell them their effort was probably a waste of time, since a heavy-duty lift helicopter was already en route from the base. Crushing personal initiative was a military job, and besides, one of the airmen had lent him a lighter.
Fisher also saw no need to go down and look at the wreck; it would be fairly jumbled, and his naked eye wasn’t going to tell him anything the technical people couldn’t. Besides, the one person worth talking to about it wasn’t going to answer any more questions in this lifetime.
What was interesting, however, was watching Bonham direct the response teams down toward the wreckage. Though well into his fifties, the ex-general hustled around as if he were in his mid-twenties. He wasn’t a stay-on-the-top administrator: The arms of the denim shirt were covered with grime, and his work shoes were well scuffed. Fisher had had a boss like that once, a real pain in the ass who basically wanted to solve every case himself. Had it ended there, it wouldn’t have been bad, but he was such a control freak that he had informants in every diner in the city, making it difficult to cop a cup and a smoke on Bureau time. And as far as he was concerned, every minute you breathed was Bureau time.
A doctor had gone down to check on the pilot’s body before it was removed. He trudged up the hill now, his green T-shirt soaked with sweat. As soon as he got to the apex of the trail, he collapsed on the pile of rocks there. Fisher slid down from his vantage point and went over to him.
“Hey, Doc. Hot down there?”
The doctor grunted something. It was summer, but it was probably only about sixty degrees.
“So, it was Williams, right?” asked Fisher, taking out his cigarettes. “Still strapped in, right?”
“You’re Fisher.”
“That’s what the cred says,” said Fisher. “Picture kind of looks like me, if you squint.”
The doctor grimaced. “Those things’ll kill you.”
Fisher held out the pack. “Want one?”
The doctor hesitated, then reached for the pack.
“Pretty gruesome, huh?”
“Let’s just say
severe trauma,”
said the doctor. He took a long breath on the cigarette, held it nearly thirty seconds, then exhaled. “Autopsy’ll have the details.”
“You think he was dead before the crash?” asked Fisher.
The doctor’s hand shook as he brought the cigarette to his mouth and took a drag.
“Was his body bruised?” Fisher prompted. “I’m kind of wondering, because if he was dead, well, then obviously that’s one line of expectations, and if he was alive, well, that’s another. It’d be pretty obvious on the face—”
The physician turned abruptly and began to vomit. Fisher had never met a weak-stomached doctor before, and looked on with scientific interest.
“You all right?” Fisher asked when the doctor finally stopped retching. He appeared to have had some sort of meat dish for lunch.
“Ugh,” muttered the man. Fisher took out a handkerchief and gave it to him.
“Not much left of the face,” managed the doctor.
“Warm?”
“I think he was alive at impact, yes,” said the doctor. “My g-guess would be unconscious. I’ve never seen such, such—The impact tore—”
He turned away and began to retch again.
“Fisher, what the hell are you doing? Why are you bothering my people?” demanded Bonham. “Why are you even here?”
“You commandeered my helicopter, remember?”
“
Your
helicopter?”
“I’m a taxpayer. When I remember to file.”
“There’s a time and place for everything. Show some respect.”
Fisher put his cigarette into his mouth, considering Bonham’s words. They seemed almost biblical.
Psalm-like, actually.
“So how do you figure the plane got so far north?” he asked Bonham.
The general gave him as exasperated look.
“Blacks out like Colonel Howe’s did, but then keeps flying?” asked Fisher. “Two hundred miles?”
“It’s probably less than one-fifty,” said Bonham. “I’m sure the crash experts will be able to compute it.”
“Yeah, they’re whizzes at this stuff. God bless ’em.” Fisher heard a helicopter arriving at the LZ and decided to see if he could hitch a ride back. “Keep the handkerchief,” he told the doctor. He looked up the hill for his bodyguard. “Come on, Johnson. Time for us to head home. I’m down to my last pack of cigarettes.”
Flying back on the helicopter, Fisher got involved in a philosophical discussion with the crew chief about whether the inventor of lite beer ought to be hanged or simply jailed for life. Because of that, he wasn’t prepared for the attack that met him on the tarmac.
“Fisher, who the hell do you think you are, screwing up a rescue operation?”
“Hey, Jemma. You’re looking particularly pallid today. Wanna cigarette?” said Fisher, walking toward the pillbox that housed the elevator into the bunker complex.
“You can’t smoke on this base,” said Jemma. “There’s all sorts of jet fuel and flammable materials.”
“Write me up.” Fisher poked out a Camel and lit up. He had a hankering for a Marlboro, but his Indian suppliers didn’t go for the image, so they were hard to get. “How come you’re outside during the day? Aren’t you afraid of melting?”
“Fisher, what the hell were you doing?” She placed herself in front of him in a pose that convinced Fisher she had been a linebacker in a previous life.
“Looking at a piece of metal from our plane,” he said. “Then Bonham decided to have me tag along to the F/A-22V crash. Damn far north, don’t you think?”
“They have the course already computed.”
“Sure,
now
they do: Why the hell didn’t they figure that out before? Would’ve saved a lot of trouble. You’re going to have to get all your little men on the situation board to shift north, right? What are the Canadians saying about this?”
“Computing crash sites isn’t as easy as you think.”
“Which is why Cyclops is still missing, right?”
Gorman pulled the bottom of her uniform jacket down, smoothing it.
“Better off pressing it,” said Fisher. “That’s what you get for sleeping in it.”
“I don’t sleep in my uniform.”
“Pink jammies with fuzzy feet?”
“What did you see up there? Was the pilot alive when the plane hit, or what?”
Fisher studied his cigarette a moment. It seemed to him that the burn tilted slightly to the west, no matter how he held it. Maybe it was a magnetic thing.
Figure it out and he could use it as a compass.
“Well?” asked Gorman.
“Doc thought so. I don’t think he has much experience, though. Make sure they check the blood for carbon dioxide levels, but I’d almost for sure rule that out. Say, tell me about Bonham. How old is he?”