Jim DeFelice - Cyclops One

“Well, like I said, a ninety-five percent—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know: If this were a baseball game, five times out of a hundred you’d lose. Otherwise, it’s a team of Babe Ruths at every position.”

“Yup,” said Peters. He’d used the baseball metaphor earlier. “See, the satellite isn’t really designed to track contrails per se. What we’re doing is throwing the data through a program analyzing aerosols and—”

“Gotcha,” Fisher told the scientist. “Go back to the event, okay?”

The scientist clicked his keys and then popped up the test area. The lines here were all dotted.

“Storm. We had to extrapolate,” said Peters.

“So the storm screws it all up. Technically speaking.”

“You could put it that way.”

“Would other people know that?”

“What other people?”

Fisher shrugged. “You totally lose the airplanes?”

“Well, we know where they end up.”

“We know where two of them end up,” said Fisher. He pointed to the dotted line showing Cyclops heading north over the point where the plane part was found. “Do we know this?”

“Well, within—”

“Hang loose a second, Doc. Stay in the batter’s box, okay? The thing is, your dotted line could go anywhere.”

“No. It could only go in areas where the atmospheric conditions match the proper parameters, and of course it’s starting with a certain vector, course, thrust—”

“Which can give the wrong results, as the location of crashed Velociraptor showed.” Fisher folded his arms. “Where’s the five percent?”

“The likely place for the error?”

“Yeah.”

Peters scratched the top of his head. “Well, first of all, you have to think of this as three-dimensional, not a straight line. It’s following a certain — It would have to be under a kind of river in the sky, if you want to think of it that way.”

Peters’s voice trailed into wolflike growling noises.

“Problem, Doc?” asked Fisher.

“Thinking.” Peters began pounding the keyboard, his growls escalating. “Yeah, okay, here.”

The screen showed a wide ridge of thick clouds running roughly north to south, about seventy-miles wide and then widening as it followed the storm.

“If we didn’t know where it had started from, you could guess anywhere in here,” said Peters. “More or less. I mean, if you want the real analysis—”

“This’ll do,” said Fisher. “This kind of an unusual weather pattern?”

“I’m an atmospheric scientist, not a meteorologist,” said Peters.

“Yeah, but you can do that weatherman stuff with your eyes closed, right?” said Fisher, realizing the Ph.D. had been offended.

“Very common,” said Peters. “I can tell you we deal with this pattern all the time. And anytime you’d have the tests they set up for here, to get this sort of heavy weather. You’d have it. See, the cold front—”

“Thanks, Doc. Listen, if you come up with a formula on who’s going to win the World Series, let me know.”

He had very big hands. They folded over hers the way her father’s had, and that memory made her vulnerable. Memory was a weakness, just as emotions were.

She longed for him now, even though she knew he’d been a mistake, a last-minute indulgence.

Not an indulgence. A temptation, a suggestion of what might have been had her fate been different.

Megan York spun her head around the cockpit quickly, checking on the crew.

“IP in two miles,” warned the copilot. The IP was the initial point for their run, similar to the point an attack plane would use when calculating a bombing mission. It signaled the ingress into the actual target area, generally the most dangerous part of the mission and necessitating a series of precise maneuvers so the bomb or missile could be launched. In this case, the IP was 309 nautical miles from the actual target, and the maneuvers were mind-numbingly simple: The plane had to fly around a three-mile track at precisely 34,322 feet.

“We’re there,” said the copilot.

“Starting turn,” said Megan, tugging gently on the controls. She executed a very shallow bank, coming south about twenty degrees.

“Two F/A-18s,” said the weapons officer, whose screen interpreted passive intercepts from the radar warning receiver or RWR as it compiled target data.

“They have us?”

“Negative. Well out of range; they’re headed east.”

“Gun up,” said Megan.

“Gun up,” he said.

I’m ready now, she thought to herself. We’re ready. The delays had caused considerable complications, but they weren’t a factor now. Others would deal with them; she wouldn’t. Her job was here.

“We have target data,” said the laser operator. He exchanged a few words with his assistant, who was sitting next to him.

“On course,” said the copilot.

Megan took one last look at her instrument readings. She had to turn the aircraft over to the computer while the weapon was fired.

“Engines are in the green,” said the copilot. “We’re on beam.”

“Turning control over to the computer in zero-five,” said Megan. “Counting down.”

If it weren’t for the tone in her headset, she wouldn’t even have known that the computer had taken the plane. Megan leaned back, a spectator now on the most important flight of her life.

Second most important, maybe. The first had been the one when she’d stolen Cyclops One.

“Tracking target…. Calculated firing time is ten seconds,” said the laser operator.

Megan looked at the target screen as the seconds drained off. When the timer hit zero, a tone sounded in her earphones. It cut off about half a second later, replaced by a tinny static and then utter silence.

“We have a hit,” said the laser operator jubilantly.

“Yeah!” shouted the copilot.

“My control,” said Megan calmly, taking the helm back from the computer.

“Target destroyed!” The laser operator’s voice had gone up two octaves.

“Oh yeah,” said the copilot.

“Coming to course,” said Megan. “We have a long way to fly, gentlemen, and considerably more to do. I suggest you postpone your celebrations until we land.”

Blitz put his head back on the couch, jostling the headset as the conference call continued. He’d been on the phone since boarding the 747 in Hawaii two hours ago, discussing the Indian-Pakistan situation with various analysts. Things had moved so fast, he wasn’t completely confident the two countries wouldn’t be at war by the time he touched down.

He was fairly certain of one thing, however: If they did go to war, it would be extremely nasty.

If the CIA and NSA were interpreting the most recent Orion Elint intercepts correctly, a unit of Indian paratroopers had just practiced blowing up a mock radar site several hours ago. The exercise had included live ammunition, helicopters, and aircraft.

In and of itself, the exercise wasn’t particularly interesting; everybody conducted live-fire exercises now and again to keep the snake-eaters tuned up. Nor was it more than simply alarming that the site had been set up to look like a specific Pakistani early-warning radar — one that the analysts said covered a key alley or path to Pakistan’s two suspected nuclear-missile launching sites in the far northeastern corner of the country.

What was truly ominous was the fact that the unit conducting the exercises could not be identified within the Indian chain of command. And that several Indian Air Force units had “disappeared” from their normal bases in the south and were believed to be in Kashmir.