Jim DeFelice - Cyclops One

The bitch. He’d strangle her.

Unless she was already dead. Then he’d simply mourn her forever.

“Cyclops Two to Mission Leader,” said the laser plane’s pilot, contacting Howe. “Permission to engage.”

“Engage,” said Howe.

Captain Jalil checked his watch. They were within five seconds of their schedule — nearly perfect. The operation was moving along as easily as any of the practice runs.

Ideally, he’d find a Pakistani weapon to kill the American with, then take the body back. The story would be easily concocted: They were on a routine patrol, showing the American the dangers, when firing began.

The man would end up being a hero to his people. The irony brought a smile to Jalil’s lips.

Would he feel good when he shot the first Muslim?

Yes. It would feel very, very good.

McIntyre coughed, then worked his tongue toward the back of his mouth. It felt as if something were lodged there, or as if the junction of his throat and mouth had been lined with cardboard — disintegrating cardboard. He coughed again, shook his head.

“Could I have some water?” he asked, looking toward the Indian captain.

He coughed again. The captain hadn’t heard him over the whine of the engines.

“Water?” asked McIntyre, getting up. He had to put his tied hands up against the racks at the top of the cabin area to keep his balance in the helicopter, which danced left and right as it moved through the rugged terrain.

“Water?” he said to Jalil. He tried to clear his throat, holding his Adam’s apple with his fingers.

Jalil looked up at him as if he didn’t understand.

“Water,” said McIntyre. As he let go of the rack to gesture with his hands, he felt his anger building up suddenly. He fought an urge to start pummeling the bastard.

Then he thought to himself: Why not? He’s going to kill me anyway.

“Water,” he said.

Something cracked at the top of the helicopter. McIntyre was thrown sideways as something long and hard smacked the side of his right calf. There was an explosion and a shout behind him, and in the next instant he felt himself tumbling into purgatory.

For one bewildering second, Captain Jalil thought he was six years old again, a child in his village, back on the day when his mother was killed.

Except that this time he was in the house, and the flames were grabbing for his clothes. He tried to beat them back with his hands, fight them off, but they were too fierce.

Escape! he screamed at himself. Escape!

Then he realized he was not six years old. Anger sprang from the center of his chest. He would avenge himself against the Muslim bastards. He would have the full revenge he was entitled to.

“Yes,” whispered a voice in his ear. He recognized it as his mother’s.

Jalil turned to see her but found only blackness.

“They’ve fired,” the weapons operator reported. “Two targets down.”

“Are they still tracking?” Megan asked.

“The radars are all active.”

She pushed her eyes across the instrument panel, forcing her thoughts away from Tom. He’d be out there, thinking about her.

That should have been her, firing the weapon.

She saw him now: the way he looked at her on the access ramp outside the aircraft, puzzled. Why was that what she thought about — not their date rock climbing, or the time she’d had him take her to an opera.

Some opera. It was a traveling company in a gymnasium. He’d hated it — just about fallen asleep — but pretended to be interested when she started talking about it later, nodding in all the right places.

She was right, and she had done the right thing. This proved it, didn’t it?

Others wouldn’t see it that way. Tom wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

“ETA to the target area is now five minutes,” said the weapons operator.

“Yes,” she said, still struggling to focus.

“Only a partial hit on target two,” reported Cyclops as Howe swung his aircraft toward the shoot-down. Both helicopters had disappeared from the screen seconds after the indicators flashed on Howe’s screen, indicating the weapon had discharged. “They’re definitely down, though.”

“I’m going to take a look,” Howe told them, slapping the throttle into afterburner. The flood of fuel into the rear chamber — tweaked and perfected after literally thousands of man-hours of fuss — ignited with a smooth, incredibly powerful ripple that nearly doubled the aircraft’s speed. The nozzle at the front of the engine was wide open, changing the world’s most efficient-at-speed jet engine into the world’s fastest jet-fueled power plant. The F/A-22V covered over thirty miles a minute, a proud cheetah running down her prey on the Africa savanna.

Howe’s heart beat lackadaisically, keeping time like the bass drum in a band, its cadence lazy enough for the hottest summer day. But his stomach felt the brief burst of acceleration — his stomach and the muscles in his arms, the tendons at his knees, his ribs, his joints, the small fibers of hair below his ear. They felt the acceleration and they thrilled to it. This was flying, moving through the air as fast as a Greek god, the leading edge of sheer thought. The aircraft strapped on his back was one of the best— the best —pieces of machinery ever perfected by man, attached through an electronic umbilical cord to a weapon as powerful as Zeus’s lightning bolts.

And it had just been used to avert World War III.

Thomas Howe, and the nearly thousand men and women connected to the mission, had just saved several million lives.

The idea was as intoxicating as the speed.

“Doesn’t that sound like a worthy thing to do? It’s something I’d die for. Truly.”

Howe pushed Megan’s voice back into the rush of the jet as he eased back on the gas, swooping to give the radar’s ground mode a good look at the wreckage. They needed to make sure the helicopters truly were down.

Timmy checked in, updating him on the attack package that was following the helicopters toward the border. The lead plane was now about twenty minutes from Pakistani airspace; they’d planned the attack very closely, giving the ground people ten minutes to take their targets.

Would they go ahead with the attack if the radars were still working?

No one knew. If they did, Cyclops Two and the Velociraptors would take them out.

“I have the lead plane,” said Timmy.

“Stick to the game plan,” Howe told him. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

He tucked his wing and plunged toward earth, flicking off the holographic HUD projection. The night was dark but clear, and he could see a pinpoint of fire at about ten o’clock in his windscreen, one of the targets burning after it had crashed.

“Splash one, definite,” reported Howe.

He was moving too fast and still too high to see much, even if it had been daytime. He went back to the synthetic view as he slid around the valley. The radar hunted the ground as if it were in its free-form attack mode, developed to help the next-generation attack planes turn up Scud missiles in tinhorn dictators’ palaces. The ground radar that the Indians had been targeting was only a few miles ahead; his RWR noted that it was active and hunting through the sky, though the Velociraptor had not yet been detected.

Push a button, and he could take it out himself.

Howe slapped the side stick, banking away. He hadn’t found the wreckage of the second helicopter, but he also hadn’t found it flying, either.

“Those MiGs are coming hard,” warned Timmy. “Eight of ’em.”