With These Eyes (39 page)

As soon as she reached the cockpit, the
former commander of Gene's special forces took her seat in the
pilot's spot. The heavy bird was equipped with a modern
glass
cockpit
in which every one of the plane's function was
controlled digitally. As a result of this
fly-by-wire
system, the signals for the craft's rudder, engines and all other
functions could come from a location other than its own controls.
As was common in passenger air-travel since the 1900s, take-off and
landing required no pilot input other than the command to execute
the maneuver.

The plane was still being supplied with
ground power. Tasha initiated a short pre-flight check. Screens and
controls booted up as the experienced aeronaut activated the main
power switch. With a few taps on the interactive display, Tasha
raised the aft stairs - the plane was locked and it would have been
difficult to interrupt her. The increasing whining of the turbine
blades confirmed the start of each of the four enormous
jet-engines. Next, she keyed in one of her secret codes that would
unlock any Apophis product's covert means.

The details of this code's function became
apparent when her screen listed the call letters of the other
planes in the cloud-seeding squadron outside. Tasha swept her hand
down the screen, highlighting all 23 aircraft. She pushed the power
switch in the console above her head again. This time the other
planes powered up and booted their avionics systems in
drone
mode
. This enabled the crafty woman to control the entire
squadron from her cockpit. Without waiting for a few stragglers to
finish their fueling process, Tasha sent the command to the fleet
that started one after another of all the airliners’ engines until
a deafening noise filled the area. The aft stairs on all planes
rose simultaneously, an urgent reason for the ground crews to
disconnect fuel and power supplies.

Tasha set her flaps to maximum. A bit
concerned, the leader of the support team looked up at her from the
concrete with a questioning look on his face. With a stern
demeanor, she gave him a
thumbs-up
, the signal that she was
ready to taxi her plane. Tasha keyed her radio. "A.S.W. control,
this is Squadron Commander Methusa, requesting clearance for taxi
and take-off for X-Ray 101 through 124."

This was all a lot more than Mr. Watson was
used to on the night shift. Rarely was there any runway traffic
when he was alone. On active nights a staff of several traffic
controllers would handle the load for him. His orders were to make
sure the facility stayed quiet and this did not fall into that
category. He decided to play it safe. Tasha didn't care much for
his transmission.

"Negative, Commander. I don't have a flight
plan for the squadron tonight."

She replied, "Affirmative, this is a
black-ops flight."

Watson had more to say she didn't want to
hear. "Furthermore the 2001 moratorium on unmanned flights is still
in effect company-wide. Stand down X-Ray 101 while I authenticate
your orders."

Tasha could hear Watson's phone ringing in
the background. She had had enough and knew the tower would not
come back with permission for take-off. The ground-workers had to
run to get out of the way when Tasha pushed her throttle forward.
The airliner was making its way towards the facility's single
airstrip. As if moved by an invisible hand, the pilotless aircraft
around her followed one by one in the order they had appeared on
Tasha's screen. Lifting off a runway without clearance from the
tower would normally be a very dangerous endeavor. Just like in the
woods of Berlin, Tasha knew there'd be little chance of another
aircraft crossing her path. Of greater concern to her was the
danger the Apophis Aerospace Works security forces would pose to
her. Tasha had gone to boot-camp and special-forces training with
several future members of these elite troops. She had been
presented with the opportunity to join their ranks. Despite the
prospect of working in the jungle, Tasha had declined, citing their
suicidal tendencies. The men who guarded Gene's secrets would
gladly take a bullet for their cause. Not so for Tasha. She was a
hunter. A hunter who wanted to live at the end of the workday.

The lone warrior had to hurry once she would
get the cloud-seeding fleet off the ground. It wouldn't be long
before an armada of supersonic fighters was going to be deployed
from the compound to engage her. A swarm of cumbersome and
relatively sluggish airliners would stand no chance against even
one of the newly developed killing-machines Gene housed in the
hangars across the compound. Suddenly, it occurred to Tasha: She
was taking on her own suicide mission to protect what was dear to
her heart - her family. This was not Tasha's usual way to approach
a problem. There had never been anything in her history worth
losing her own life. Not for Gene, not for her pride and honor. Not
until now. This time, there was no choice. Tasha knew if she shut
down the plane's engines, her parents, her childhood friends, and
the rest of her family in Eritrea would all die. The love for her
parents was winning the battle between her reptilian and her
mammalian brain. Tasha was suddenly no longer acting out of anger
and fear but on her intellect, out of love and compassion. The
young woman had no memory of anything that had ever made her feel
this way.

Tasha’s aircraft had reached the take-off
position at the head of the runway, the fleet behind her like a row
of aluminum ducklings. There was no question left in Tasha's mind,
she had to go through with her plan of creating a lighting storm to
stop Gene's attack. She made a right turn, the plane was pointing
down the length of the stretch of concrete before her. Watson's
voice came in angrily over her headphones.

"Stand-down X-Ray 101 or be prosecuted for
air piracy."

Tasha could hear the Tower’s alarm horn echo
behind his infuriated voice. She knew the facility's forces were on
their way. The daughter of her parents threw the throttle controls
for all four engines forward. The heavily loaded craft shot ahead,
pushing her back in her seat. Tasha could feel the expansion joints
between the slabs of concrete as the carriage rolled across them.
The time in between bumps grew shorter with each strike until she
had reached the speed necessary for lift-off. Tasha pulled the yoke
towards herself and the feel of the irregularities of the runway
had disappeared. She was airborne. Behind her, the first drone in
digital tow had followed suit and was halfway down the runway
during its lift-off sequence. Soon, it was airborne behind her.

One after another, the row of cloud-seeding
planes moved to the head of the weapons maker's airstrip. Several
planes had become airborne when Watson's orders to stop Tasha
manifested a barrage of armored vehicles speeding across the
compound towards the remaining airliners. The first to reach the
tarmac was an armored vehicle driven by one of the men Tasha had
encountered in her training. It was his attitude towards
sacrificing oneself to protect the company that lead to her
decision to become the commander of Gene's undercover forces. The
Trooper was about to prove his philosophy. A plane was lifting off
and another one had just begun to accelerate for take-off. He sped
down the middle of the long concrete lane, directly towards the
bright beam of the nose-gear's landing light. The airliner was
getting closer at breathtaking speed. The Trooper skidded to a halt
on the center strip, in line with the nose gear. There was not
enough time for him to run clear of the impending calamity. The
Trooper jumped out of his vehicle, ready to give his life for the
company when another personnel carrier sped towards him. The truck
slowed just enough so he could grab on to a handle bar on its side.
His feet hit the step board while the truck raced off. Tires spun
fast as the vehicle cleared the concrete and ran onto the adjacent
strip of grass. At the same moment, the airliner's front wheel
collided with the mass of steel left in its path. The undercarriage
snapped like a twig, leaving the enormous jet's nose to scrape
along the reinforced concrete. A rain of sparks lit up the night as
the plane's powerful jet engines pushed it along.

The next airliner was headed directly towards
the crashing plane. Its sensors detected the obstruction and
powered down the engines. The craft had gained too much velocity to
stop in time. The crashed plane's engines were powering down under
its own emergency protocol, leaving it to grind towards a
spark-filled halt. Just before the loaded jet came to a stop, the
plane behind it rammed into its tail. The impact tore the left wing
off the plane in front. The fuselage broke open like a raw egg,
spilling the contents of the fully loaded tanks across the crash
site. Sparks from the scraping airliner ignited the fuel on the
runway and caused the tanks in the torn-off wing to explode. The
blast destroyed both planes and set off a series of secondary
explosions. Their cargo of barium-salt solution spilled and mixed
with the burning jet fuel. The ensuing inferno lit up the facility
with eerie bright-green flames.

A chunk of concrete from the destroyed runway
shot directly towards Watson in the control tower, but descended
just short of his window. The lone air traffic controller knew this
had not been a good night-shift for his career with Apophis. With
the deepest sigh of his life, he pushed the fire alarm. As quickly
as the Troopers had swarmed the area, a team of fire fighters in
environmental suits invaded the inferno to fight their battle.
Watson keyed his radio to shout at his Troopers.

"Send everything we've got after her. I want
her back on base now!"

Unable to comply, their leader pointed out to
Watson that the runway had become completely unusable. Wreckage,
fire and its partially destroyed surface had made it impossible to
send fighters after Tasha.

Watson knew the phone call he was about to
make would cause his transfer to the Arctic outpost, or worse.

49 TASHA SOWS HER SEEDS

The computer in Tasha's lead jet showed her
airborne with a total of 12 planes. The other half was left behind,
two of which were burning in the middle of the partially destroyed
runway. This was bad for the reformed warrior. Although the
Aerospace Troopers weren't able to get into the air to shoot her
down, only a dozen aircraft would make it very difficult to create
enough condensation for a lightning storm in the small amount of
time left before the launch. Tasha programmed the flight computer
with the revised data. The results on the voice prompt would have
discouraged most who knew the mechanics of cloud seeding.

Multiple cross-passes required
.

Current wind conditions prohibitive of
successful seeding.

Tasha had come this far, she was not going to
be lead off the trail by a computer prognosis. She programmed the
drones to fly in formation, side by side. Soon after Tasha had
climbed to her operating altitude, she felt tremendously fortunate
when she read the screen with the weather conditions. It had been a
windy night so far, the cooling jungle had pulled in air from the
warm ocean, but morning was only a few hours away and temperatures
had equalized. Tasha had unwittingly timed her attack with the
wind-still moment in the early morning hours. A good time for the
unusual farmer to seed the fields of her personal deluge. Their
course would lead the squadron of ghost ships and their Captain
directly over Gene's lair. At a tap of the screen, Tasha and her
eleven drones were releasing their mixture of condensation seeds
into the atmosphere. High-volume pumps were sending the contents of
the tanks in the cabins to spray-nozzles under the wings. The
nozzles were positioned at either side of the engines. This caused
the force of the jets to aid in the distribution of the chemical
into the air. The fine mist of barium solution was doing the job
for which it had been designed. The microscopic droplets of the
seeding agent began forming bonds with the surrounding water vapor
that filled the atmosphere. Water droplets were growing larger as a
result of the condensation process.

Twelve gigantic airliners were leaving thick
trails of clouds. A look at the radar confirmed that her attempt to
turn Nature against herself was nearing success. With the grace of
black swans, Tasha turned her flock for a cross-pass in the sky.
Before her laid an evenly spaced cloud-field of monumental
proportions. Suddenly, the green stripes on her weather-radar faded
to blue before completely disappearing one after another. Like a
giant squeegee, hot air had swept in from the island's center and
wiped the sky clear as it evaporated the water droplets.

Tasha was back where she had started.

50 GENE SHOOTS BACK

A group of tunnels followed an underground
incline from the powerful hydroelectric generators. One of the
passageways branched off to the missile bay where preparations for
the attack continued. Further along, a bulletproof set of doors
lead to the command center where Gene was unusually agitated. The
lair's view-screens, where his eyes were feasting on the
preparations for his first launch just moments ago, presented a
much less palatable menu.

The eerie-green glow from the chemical
inferno was reflecting on Gene's face as Tasha's airport calamity
filled his wall. Droplets of spit where spewing from him in an
angry furor.

"Get some men on the cliff and shoot the
planes down. I want them gone!"

A spark of fear was in the Trooper's eye when
he hesitantly replied, "But sir, you sealed the shaft."

The veins on Gene's forehead were swelling
through his complexion with his increasing anger over someone
interfering with his plans. He rose from his chair, angrily
shouting at the warrior before him.