Jim DeFelice - Cyclops One

“McIntyre is missing,” she said. “We’re not sure yet, but it looks like he was at one of the Indian bases in Kashmir. No one’s heard from him since the exchange.”

Pure oxygen was a tried-and-true hangover cure, and while Howe didn’t have a hangover, the O 2worked wonders, clearing his foggy head and wiping away much of his fatigue as he and Timmy began their search for the downed aircraft believed to be Cyclops One.

A day and a half’s worth of analysis had yielded a five-hundred-square-mile box where Unk-2—still not positively ID’d as Cyclops One — had apparently been hit by an Indian SAM before going down. The area, which Howe and Timmy were just entering, included a small portion of Pakistan and India as well as China and Nepal. The peaks rose over six thousand meters — eighteen thousand feet.

What would he do if he found her — if Megan were down there in the snow or worse, crumpled in the rocks?

Kick her in the face?

No, he couldn’t. He’d bend down, ask her why.

Why?

It wouldn’t be like that. He’d be in the plane, and if there were a body rather than leg or mangled bit of burnt flesh…Howe took a slow, deep breath, forcing himself to concentrate on flying the aircraft. The ground-scanning mode of the radar had been tweaked by one of the engineers, allowing the AI tactics module to assist in the search. In effect, it was like having a backseater with a magnifying glass going over the readout.

“It thinks it’s looking for a squished Scud,” the technical expert had explained.

“You don’t know who T. S. Eliot was?” Meagan asked.

“No.”

“T. S. Eliot was only the most famous poet of the twentieth century. Chr-ist.” She smiled at him.

“What’d he write? ‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright’?”

“Blake. That was Blake. T.S. Eliot wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ The Waste Land, Four Quartets.”

“Big hits.”

“The biggest. You really never, ever heard of them? In school or anywhere?”

He shrugged again now, remembering, reliving the conversation.

“How do you live in an age where death is constant?” she asked.

“Is that a serious question?”

“The Waste Land is about rebirth,” she told him. “You have to find a way beyond the cycle.”

“How?”

“If I knew, the poem would be boring. But I’ll tell you this: Fear death by water.”

“Huh?”

Her laughter dissolved the memory. It was a joke, a reference to a line in the poem, as she’d explained later by reading it to him. It was an interesting, kaleidoscopic poem — not that he knew much about or, to be honest, cared about poems. But they were as real to her as airplanes, and that intrigued him. It was different; it was one of the things that was interesting about her beyond her eyes, beyond the smooth curve of her hips.

Yet, he still hated her for being a traitor.

“What are we doing, Bird One?” asked Timmy, bringing him back to the present.

“Two, we’re going to start the sweeps as we planned,” he told his wingman. “Anything on Guard?”

“Negativo.”

“Let’s do it.”

The two delta-shaped aircraft plunged downward, arrowheads hurled by a god toward the snowy mountains below. There were no clouds today; under other circumstances this might have seemed a purely majestic view.

“Don’t even see any mountain goats down there,” said Timmy in Bird Two.

Howe let his speed bleed off gradually, coming below three hundred knots as he banked into the next search track. He lifted his right wing slightly, concentrating on the view ahead. They took a circuit and then another one, reaching the edge of their search box, then pulled around and began again, retracing their steps backward.

The climate and terrain combined to make this a very difficult place to live, yet settlements dotted the valleys and roads ran around the steepest mountains.

Resourceful species, humans.

“Got a couple of aircraft at long distance,” said Timmy. “Shenyang F-8s, pretty far off — two hundred miles.”

The Chinese F-8MII interceptors were double-engined interceptors that could be viewed as outgrowths of the MiG-21 family. In contrast to their forebears, they were not particularly maneuverable, but they could go relatively fast. Howe thought of them as a poor man’s updated MiG-25; equipped with radar missiles, they could be a severe annoyance.

Not today. The planes soon passed out of range to the east. Howe kept making his tracks, varying his path and trying to keep his memories of Megan at bay.

Something caught his eye when he reached the southeast corner of their search area for the fourth time. The sun had flashed off something a few miles farther into China — or maybe not, because when he stared in that direction he saw nothing.

The tactical screen was clear, and the computer hadn’t said boo to him about seeing anything.

Still, it was worth checking out.

“Two, follow me.”

“Got something?”

“Just hang with me.”

“On your butt, boss. Smells like aftershave — now that’s a story.”

Howe pushed down in the direction of the glint. There was a peak there, a mountain 6,570 meters high — just under twenty-thousand feet above sea level. That was a decent altitude in an airplane, and beyond the rated ceiling of many helicopters — an important factor if a rescue mission was launched.

Forget that. She’s not going to be standing down there waving her arms at you.

“Got something?” asked Timmy as they crisscrossed around the peak and the nearby ridges.

“Negative.” Howe looked at the ground through the canopy and then back at the tactical screen, back and forth.

The AWACS working with them back near the Afghan border reported that an unknown aircraft was taking off from Lop, a small airfield in the Xinjiang Uygur region to the north. The contact, probably a small commercial transport, headed east.

Howe checked his fuel state, deciding that a brief break from the search would help. And it did — sort of. As he looked back at the large display, he saw a double triangle in yellow at the right. Magnification made it look like a rock with a hatchet on it.

He tracked back, practically climbing out of the cockpit to get a better view. It was just a pile of rocks.

But there was something dark about a half-mile away, on the side of the slope facing India.

Dark and gray — the color of Cyclops One.

The computer bleeped a target tone.

“Two, I think I’ve found it,” he said, changing his course.

Special Forces Captain Dale “Duke” Wallace didn’t know exactly what to make of Fisher. The first thing the FBI agent had done on boarding the C-17A in Bahrain was to ask if there was a smoking section. The next thing he’d done was ask if they were jumping out.

He seemed equally disappointed to hear that the answer was no on both counts.

The C-17A Globemaster III had been designed as a combat-area transport, able to move people and gear great distances at a moment’s notice. Its interior measured two inches beyond sixty-eight feet (counting the ramp); six Marine Corps LAVs could be loaded inside with room left over for a company mascot or two. In this case, Duke and his team of SF troopers from the Army’s 56th SFG (A) were the only cargo. They sat along fold-down seats at the side of the aircraft, Alice packs and mission gear nearby, mostly dozing. Two of the men had stretched mats on the steel floor and were sleeping there.

Fisher, on the other hand, was alternating slugs between two massive thermoses of coffee, which he’d somehow managed to obtain on the tarmac as he walked — walked, not ran — from the E-3 that had delivered him from the States.