Jim DeFelice - Cyclops One

He hadn’t thought of Carmen in quite a while. She was a bona fide nutcase, manic-depressive with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders: She had the diagnosis from not one but two different shrinks, their agreement apparently some sort of milestone of psychoanalysis.

The relationship had quickly disintegrated into a cycle of wild verbal fights, heartfelt apologies, and great sex — followed by weird accusations, wild verbal fights, heartfelt apologies, and even better sex. Howe had stuck it out sixteen months, but the marriage lasted that long only because he’d been overseas for much of the time.

He started to laugh, remembering her another morning sitting at their tiny kitchen table, hungover, breasts falling out of a gauzy, see-through nightshirt, arranging her tarot cards while the coffee poured through the machine next to the sink. She was beautiful in moments like that, unconsciously beautiful.

Very different from Megan.

Howe’s hands were so wet with sweat he pulled off his flight gloves, even though he habitually wore them when he flew.

He’d miss them if he had to eject. Involuntarily, his eyes hunted the yellow handle near the seat.

His marriage hadn’t thrown him off women completely. Sexwise, he’d had his share. He was far from a stud. Some guys could just walk into a bar and they’d be knee-deep in women. Howe wasn’t like that; he’d never been like that. But he had seen women since Carmen — plenty of women — gone to bed with them, made love.

No one like Megan, though. She was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. Her breasts a little small, if you were unbiased about it, as she herself used to say.

She talked about different things. She told him about a painting by Matisse; who the hell was Matisse? he’d wondered, and had to find out so he didn’t look like a total schmuck.

What card had Carmen used to tell his fortune? King of Swords?

“Telemetry is ready on our side,” said Firenze.

Howe had to punch a two-button combination on the right side of his instrument panel to change the HUD mode and initiate the test. He checked his speed and altitude first, gave the other flight instruments a quick read — went back over them more slowly, comprehending the numbers this time — and reached for the buttons.

The King of Swords wasn’t a good fit. Too airy, she said, too flighty. Fiery. Prone to crash.

Prone to crash.

Carmen’s eyes as she said that — accusing him of betrayal.

“I see a confused future,” she said.

“We’re ready for you, Colonel,” prompted the ground controller. Howe’s fingers still hovered over the buttons. His muscles had suddenly tightened to the point it hurt to move his fingers.

Jesus, what’s happening to me? he thought. I’m freaking.

He saw Megan’s body on the bed, then pushed the buttons.

Matt Firenze watched the numbers pop onto the second screen, raw assembler code blossoming before him. The functions were being translated in the first screen, and an array of monitors to his right were actually summarizing the data and its effect (or noneffect) on the aircraft. But Matt’s job was there on the twenty-one-inch cathode ray tube. Hexadecimals — the computer used a base-16 integer number system, corresponding to the physical registers — sloshed across the screen. Firenze had preprogrammed the computer to alert him to a difference from the expected sequence: The green numbers would turn red.

Green. Green. Green.

He kept staring.

Howe’s breath physically lifted the mask off his face. His arms and legs were moving — he was still flying the plane — but his head felt as if it were beneath a heavy blanket. His tongue sat dry at the bottom of his mouth.

This was the point where she’d gone out. She’d been flying to his left; it was his left, wasn’t it? If he looked in that direction now, if he dared it, would he see her vanishing into the clouds again?

Her perfume lingered in his head.

As he regained control he’d come up there — and the plane loomed right before him.

How was that possible?

Its engines were working. Definitely working.

He’d trade places if he could. Surely he’d trade with her; let her live.

Carmen held the card out. Death: the grim reaper in a boat.

“Not death — change,” she said. “Big change, but not death in a literal sense. Psychic change. Like love.”

“Looking very good down here,” said Firenze. “Can we run over it again? Just the way you did it originally, turning the HUD back to standard setting at the right point.”

“Roger that,” Howe told them. “Coming around for take two.”

When he was six, Amma Jalil had seen his mother set on fire by a Muslim madman.

He had been playing at the other end of the dirt-strewn street in the small northern India town where he lived. He happened to look down the block as the man ran into the neighbor’s house where his mother was visiting. A second later something billowed from the window; at first it seemed to be an oversized red sheet inflated by the wind. As he stared, the edges of the sheet turned yellow and climbed upward along the roof.

A figure encircled by a red robe, ran from the house. By the time he realized it was a person, she was rolling on the street. Even before he started to run toward her, he knew it was his mother. She jerked upright, then fell back like a sack of rice collapsing.

In the twenty years since that day, Amma Jalil had run the thirty meters to his mother many times in his imagination. Never had he managed to arrive in time to hear her last words or receive her blessings.

The Muslim died in the house, as did the neighbor and her two babies. Supposedly the terrorist had set it on fire because the land had once been in the shadow of a now long-gone Islamic temple, but such reasons were often given to justify groundless murder.

The next day Amma Jalil’s father and many neighbors burned down a block of Muslim houses. Amma Jalil watched them burn. He was puzzled afterward. He thought from something that he had heard that his mother would reappear after these new houses were burned, but she did not.

Several times since her death, he tried to feel the joy of revenge; perhaps it would come today.

Captain Jalil sat on a web bench a few feet from the rear door of the Mil Mi-26 assault helicopter, hurtling through the mountains near India’s Kashmir border. The helicopter and its sister ship ran six or seven feet over the ground at nearly 290 kilometers an hour, rushing toward a concentration of vans and radar dishes parked beyond a mountain rift on a narrow plain about ten kilometers ahead.

Each Russian-made helicopter carried seventy-three men armed with an array of weapons. But from Jalil’s point of view, the only important ones were Euromissile MILANs, man-carried antitank and bunker missiles that could take out a hardened target at three thousand meters. Six two-man teams carried the large, updated bazookas in each helicopter. The rest were simply there to make sure they found their targets.

“Five klicks from LZ,” the pilot told Jalil, communicating through a wired headset with the assault team leader. They were a minute from touchdown. “I have the pathfinders.”

“Yes,” said Jalil. He nodded almost imperceptibly to his senior NCO, sitting across from him. In the next ten seconds everyone in the helicopter seemed to catch on. The nervous rustling that had begun shortly after they boarded the helicopter at the base north of Srinagar ended. As the helicopter began to slow, every member of the assault team leaned forward in his seat.

This was the most difficult moment of the mission. The eight massive blades that propelled the helicopters kicked up an enormous amount of dust, even at a hard-packed landing strip. Their LZ was a camel trail in the middle of a narrow wasteland filled with grit and pebbles. Send too much debris into the Lotarev D-136 engines and the mission would have to be scrubbed. Jalil’s instructions were very clear: If he could not take the target precisely on time, he must send word that he had failed. Even though he did not like that particular order, he would dutifully follow it.