John Barnes - Directive 51

“Roger.”

“We have also been warned that any plume, smoke, or flame from the plane should be considered extremely dangerous, and you are not to fly into it.”

“Roger. I have visual contact,” Redmond said.

Far below, Bad Dreamliner was coasting between two red-brown ridges spattered with deep green; in his head, Redmond was already solving the problem of coming in on it in a steep dive, figuring his pathway, and the old Hog was as familiar as his own body.

He banked, waited for his angle, and pushed the yoke forward to dive.

John Samuelson knew something was happening from the excited gabble. He’d been playing possum again, or just possibly he was actually dying because they had kicked his kidneys hard, over and over, and he might be hemorrhaging. Didn’t matter. He was awake with a chance to see it play out.

He flung himself hard sideways, rolling onto his back, and opened his eyes. Two of his captors jumped at him. He screamed into his gag, and cocked his feet to kick at them.

A row of fist-sized holes appeared in the bulkhead above him.

We won. We did it. He had been so afraid this was the beginning of the dive onto the target.

But the home team had pulled this one out.

The two men approaching Samuelson fell backward, and he seemed to be weightless. The plane was flipping—perhaps it had lost a wing?

Samuelson looked down to see a gushing stump instead of his foot. No matter, he had no more walking to do, anyway. He left the deck and felt as if he were flying, still trying to shout, “We won!” through the gag.

When he hit the forward bulkhead, the pain in the back of his head was nauseating, and his neck felt all wrong. Maybe that was just disorientation from the spinning plane? He wasn’t sure where his tormentors had gone. He saw only carpet, a bolthead, and someone’s cell phone sliding around.

He shut his eyes and tried to take a deep breath. He couldn’t feel whether his lungs responded or not, so he just prayed. God, please take care of things from here on out. Please accept me, forgive all my foolishness and pride, and make sure Kim knows I loved her.

He gave up trying to breathe, and tried to smile, because he’d handed it off to higher authority, and it was all taken care of, but somehow his face wouldn’t—

Shock, heat, darkness.

The image on the big screen was live from a camera on an A-10 flying figure-8s upwind of the wreckage. Air Force Two had shed a wing and rolled when the Warthog’s big nose cannon, designed to pierce Russian tanks, had perforated a diagonal line across its body, down the wing root, and back across one engine. The 787 Dreamliner had corkscrewed against the mountainside like a missed football pass, breaking into a cloud of parts and flame as it bounced uphill. The long streak of blazing metal was now setting fire to the autumn-dry brush; ammunition and fuel cooking off made more bursts and explosions.

But there were also a half dozen hot yellow-white fires, as bright as flares, pouring dense white-gray smoke into the air. The heat of their burning punched wavery updrafts through the red flame and black smoke pouring out of the wreckage. As they watched, another one erupted, first with a burst of orange fire and black smoke, but almost instantly becoming another yellow-white flare pouring out the gray-white smoke.

“No need to repeat the order about staying out of the plume,” Lenny remarked, “if the pilots have half a brain.”

“We’ve got a specialty hazmat chopper from North Island on its way,” one of the controllers said, “and there’s a couple teams in trucks on their way as well. We’ve already started emergency evacuation of Engineer Springs—we were preparing that for the last twenty minutes, just in case. Not too much wind today, so they’ll have a half hour at least to clear people out of Engineer Springs, and they’re doing a reverse 911 to the few people that live out in the desert itself, and trying to backtrack everyone who’s used a cell phone in those areas in the last couple days in case of hikers or backpackers. We shouldn’t have too many people exposed to it.”

“But,” Cam said, “ what the hell is it? ”

A voice said, “Oh, no,” just as Heather looked back at the screen and saw a non-military plane pass right through the plume. It took her only a moment to realize that it had to be that traffic plane from the TV station; during that moment, the plane tumbled, then seemed to regain control. The little jet descended rapidly, lowering his landing flaps, as if trying to make an emergency landing—but there was nowhere good to land on a slope covered with desk-sized boulders and tangled brush. As it touched down, the plane flipped onto its back and burst into flames.

“Marshall, we need the last minute or so of that broadcast up,” Cam said.

“Got it.” The central screen flashed, scrambled, and re-congealed into a view of the burning remains of the 787 from much lower down. The audio feed came on with a feedback squeal—“try for a closer look at this amazing tragedy from—”

The camera angle began to wobble, and the voice screamed “Oh, god, oh, my eyes. My eyes!” Another voice screamed— the pilot, Heather thought. The screams became hideous, barking coughs, the camera wobbled wildly, the plane stabilized. He tried to land it, Heather realized, but he was blind and in horrible pain.

On the screen, a confusion of rocks, sand, and brush slammed up at the camera, the sky rolled through the screen, and the signal went out.

“Did that go out live?” Cam asked.

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

Heather had known him for fifteen years, and today was the first day she’d ever heard Cam use profanity. I guess he was saving it for when it really applied.

Jason and Zach hurried across the dark, cold gravel of the parking lot like a couple of criminals. At least they weren’t conspicuous; half the people in the restaurant were fleeing to their warm safe cars, down the highway, back to the family or the lover.

Zach started the car and, with more obsessive care than ground crew checking out an Orion for liftoff, ran over the lights and controls. “Is your laptop IBIS-capable?”

“Yeah. I was getting broadband Internet just fine till we turned off 90.”

“Then let’s go 90 to 25 all the way to Raton. I’m scared. I want to know my family’s okay, because the country’s under attack and I don’t know what’s going on.” Zach sighed. “Now is that dumb, or what? I mean, we’re attacking the United States, aren’t we?”

“Well, the United States and the whole Big System,” Jason said. “But I know what you mean. I feel it myself—damn foreigners have no right to attack America; only us Americans should attack America.”

“Yeah.” He put the car in gear and turned out of the parking lot. “That—uh, that whole thing with Air Force Two, that couldn’t be—there was no way—”

“That can’t be Daybreak,” Jason said. “We all spent, like, forever talking collectively about what was in bounds and what wasn’t, and I saw a bunch of ideas shot down for being too—you know, terroristic .”

“Yeah, except, why did it happen right on the exact day of Daybreak? Did all of Daybreak get conned?”

Jason balanced a hand. “Maybe. Or maybe somebody infiltrated us and piggybacked onto Daybreak. I can’t imagine how it could all be coincidence.”

“Makes me sick .”