Jim DeFelice - Cyclops One

Timmy oriented himself, tucking down toward the cliff side. He took the first pass too fast and too high, streaking by the mountain so quickly, he couldn’t spot anything. His heart had started to pound; he realized as he pulled the nose of his plane back away from the ground that his hand was shaking.

He cut his orbit, pushing his wing down and falling back toward the target area. He backed his speed off and even considered putting down his landing gear to help slow down.

He didn’t see the grayish object until the third pass. From the air, it looked like the bottom half of an old ball-point pen buried under some loose gravel. It seemed too small to be an airplane and had no wings. Timmy banked to his right, circling around to get another view. He leaned forward from the canted seat of the F-16, pushing around, slowing the aircraft down to a walk. This pass was a tiptoe so close that his left wingtip nearly clipped the side of the hill.

There was definitely something in the crevice of the ravine. The bodies of both missing planes were covered with a dull gray next-generation radar-resistant skin — not the black coating of B-2s but something considered more durable and nearly as slippery. It was extremely difficult to see against the gray rocks and shadows.

But it was there. Or something was there.

Timmy spun back over it, this time going so slow that the aircraft bleated out a stall warning.

He could see a wing farther along, an almost perfect isosceles triangle sheered from an aircraft.

The Velociraptor.

He clicked his microphone to call the airborne search coordinator.

Clayton T. Bonham waited impatiently as the MH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter he’d commandeered pitched through the mountains toward the area where the piece of metal had been found. He was just twenty minutes behind the initial-response team, which itself had arrived barely a half hour after the call from the flight that had made the find, but to Bonham it was too damn late already. When he gave an order, he expected it filled immediately, if not sooner. The Pave Hawk was moving close to its top speed, but that was hardly fast enough for him.

Bonham had been retired from the Air Force for nearly five years. Nonetheless, he still thought and acted like a two-star general; he even insisted on his subordinates calling him General.

Not insisted, exactly. Encouraged.

After all, as head of NADT, he was owed a certain amount of respect. He was responsible for developing the most important weapons the United States had developed since the hydrogen bomb.

An exaggeration, surely, and yet, one with some justification. When fully implemented, a Cyclops battle element could destroy anything from a hardened ballistic-missile complex to a terrorist one-man basement bomb factory, with minimal collateral damage. The possibilities were endless and, without exaggeration, revolutionary.

One of the crewmen standing in the rear of the helicopter with Bonham tugged at him slightly as a reminder that he was leaning across open space. Bonham glared at the young man, though the crewman had only been concerned about his safety. The helicopter settled into a hover; Bonham was out on the ground before the wheels hit dirt. He trotted across the road to where an Air Force major from the first team in waited to make his report. The major was flanked by a Special Tactics sergeant with an M16, as well as a civilian whom Bonham didn’t recognize.

“General,” said the major, bobbing his head in an unofficial salute.

“What do we have?”

“Piece of fairing from a large aircraft, very possibly a 767 type, though we’re still not sure.”

“Definitely a 767,” said the civilian.

Bonham glanced at the man, who had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The general liked definite opinions, and so gave the civilian only half the scowl he normally would have for interrupting. Obviously the man was one of the experts brought in by the Air Force to help with the operation.

“We’re going to airlift it out, get the technical people to take a look at it,” said the major.

“Waste of time,” said the civilian.

“This way, General,” said the major. He walked up the road about twenty yards, then began hiking up a short embankment. Bonham and the others followed. The metal had definitely come from an aircraft; it appeared to be one of the underside flap track housings that ran front to back on both winds beyond the engines on the 767. While it was certainly possible for an aircraft to lose one and remain airborne, as a practical matter, finding something that had been part of a wing meant the rest of the aircraft was somewhere nearby.

In a lot of pieces.

The civilian walked to one end of the metal and kicked it. “Dropped just about flat,” he said after a long drag on his cigarette.

“I can’t recall your name,” said Bonham, turning to him.

“Probably ’cause you don’t know it.” He blew a wad of smoke in Bonham’s direction.

“Well, let’s share it.” Bonham put his hands on his hips.

“Andy Fisher.” He waved the hand with his cigarette. “You’re going to find this piece of aircraft was dropped here. It didn’t come from a crash. It’s proof there wasn’t a crash.”

“Andy Fisher is with who?” said Bonham. “What company do you work for?”

“I’m with the FBI,” said Fisher. “And it’s with whom . Nuns were sticklers for grammar.”

“What are you doing here, Mr. Fisher?”

“At the moment I’m looking for a cup of coffee.”

“I don’t have time for bullshit, Mr. Fisher.”

“Yeah, neither do I,” said Fisher. “I’m kind of interested in that plane part, though. Figure out how it got here and we figure out who stole your plane.”

Bonham suddenly felt a cold chill on the back of his neck. Stole?

He jerked his thumb to the side and the FBI agent followed him a few feet away.

“Why do you think the plane was stolen?” Bonham asked.

“Well, where is it?”

“Obviously it crashed further north than the, uh, experts thought it did. In these mountains, with the weather we’ve had and are having, it can take quite a while to locate. We have a vector now; the search can take shape.”

“Yeah.” Fisher took a long pull on his cigarette. “You think your guys ran into each other?” asked Fisher.

“Of course not.”

“So what else could’ve happened?”

“Crashes happen for a lot of reasons.”

Fisher shrugged. Bonham couldn’t tell whether he was blowing smoke — literally — about the accident not being an accident or not.

“How do you know the metal piece isn’t from the plane?” asked Bonham.

“Oh, it is. It definitely is,” said Fisher. “I just think somebody put it out here for you to find.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Look at it: It’s not banged up enough to have fallen from, what, thirty thousand feet? Forty?”

“Try three or four hundred over the mountain,” said Bonham, now fairly sure the FBI agent was an idiot. “And you can’t go by how banged up something is in a crash.”

“True. I’ve seen weird things.” Fisher shrugged. “I think it’s bullshit.”

“How many crashes have you investigated?”

“A couple.” The agent took a very long drag on his cigarette, bringing it down to his fingertips. “Maybe a few more than that. I don’t really like crashes, though. Pretty much the technical people run the show.”

“Well, we have plenty of technical people,” said Bonham. “Why aren’t you back at the base?”

“This is more interesting than staring at Jemma Gorman’s tight ass all day.” Fisher took a long draw and then threw away the cigarette.