candidates to head the Air Force portion of the project.
Except when it came to love, maybe. He just didn’t have that much experience with it, not even in his first marriage.
Megan did love him. He knew it.
“Thirty seconds. What’s Bird Two doing?” snapped Megan.
“Dropping for a better view,” he answered, his tone nearly as sharp as hers.
“That’s not what we briefed.”
Howe didn’t bother answering. They were flying into the worst of the storm. Lightning streaked around him. A wind burst pushed on the wings but the flight computer held the plane perfectly steady, making microadjustments in the control surfaces. Forward airspeed pegged 425 knots — very slow for the Velociraptor, which had been designed to operate best in supercruise mode just under Mach 1.5.
“Fifteen seconds,” said Megan.
More lightning. The only thing he could see in the darkness beyond the glass canopy were the zigs of yellow, heaven cracking open.
“Ten,” said Megan.
An indicator on the RWR panel noted that the I-HAWK radar had locked on the stealthy chase planes as well as Cyclops.
“Five seconds,” she said.
Howe blew a full wad of air into his mask. He felt her legs again, her smallish breasts against his chest.
Blow her away with something special: a week in Venice. They were going to have some downtime once these tests were done.
“Alpha,” said Megan.
His HUD screen flashed white. In the next moment, Howe’s Velociraptor plunged nose-first toward the ground.
He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. Everything Thomas Howe had ever been furled into a bullet at the center of his skull. His head fused to his helmet and for a brief moment his consciousness fled. His heart stopped pumping blood and his body froze.
In the next moment something warm touched the ice.
Megan. Smiling, last night on the bed.
It was only a shard of memory, but it made his heart catch again.
Gravity slammed Howe against the seat as he fought to regain control of the plane. Bile filled his mouth and nose; it stung his eyes, ate through the sinews of his arms. He pulled back on the stick, but the plane didn’t respond.
He wanted to cough but couldn’t. The helmet pounded his skull, twisting at the temples. The F/A-22V threatened to whip into a spin. He pushed the stick to catch it and jammed the pedals.
Nothing worked.
The Velociraptor’s control system had gone off-line. That ought to have been impossible.
Engines gone.
Backup electricity to run the controls should automatically route from the forced-air rams below the fuselage.
Nothing. Too late.
But the engines were still working. He could feel the throb in his spine.
The computer controlled the canopy. If it was gone, if that was the problem, he’d have to go to the backup procedure.
Set it. Pull the handle.
The controls should work. Or the backups. Or the backups to the backups.
Howe hit the fail-safe switch and clicked the circuit open manually.
Nothing.
Howe forced his head downward and forced himself to hunt for the yellow handle of the ejection seat. The blackness that had pushed against his face receded slightly, enough to let him think a full thought. Without control of the plummeting plane, he was no more than a snake caught in the talons of an eagle; the yellow handle was his only escape.
The fingers on his right hand cramped hard around the stick at the right side of the seat. He looked at them, trying to will them open.
They were locked around the molded handle. He looked at them again, uncomprehendingly: Why were they not letting go?
He pulled back on the stick, then pushed hard to each side several times. If the controls worked, the plane would shake back and forth violently, trying to follow the conflicting commands. But it did nothing.
A black cone closed in around his head.
Finally his fingers loosened. He reached for the ejection handle, wondering if the F/A-22V had started to spin. He could no longer tell.
Augering into oblivion.
Something stopped him as his gloved finger touched the handle. He looked up and saw the large hulk of the Boeing bearing down straight at him.
Instinct made him grab the stick again. It was a useless, stupid reaction in an uncontrollable airplane; if he pulled the eject handle, he might at least save himself. The dead controls had no way of stopping the collision.
Except that they did. The F/A-22V responded to his desperate tug, pushing her chin upward and steadying on her left wing. The 767’s tail loomed at the top of the canopy for a long second, the stabilizer an ax head above his eyes. Then it disappeared somewhere behind him.
Two very quick breaths later Howe had full control of the plane. He wrestled it into level flight. He called a range emergency — it was the first thing he could think to say — then tried to hail Cyclops.
Empty fuzz answered.
“Bird One to Cyclops,” he repeated over the frequency they had all shared. Ideas and words blurred together, his mind several steps behind his instincts; he couldn’t sort out what he needed to say, let alone do. “Two? Williams, where are you? Cyclops? Bird Two? No joy! Shit — lost wingman! Break off! Shit.”
Howe sent a long string of curses out over the radio before finally clicking off to listen for a response. He put his nose up, trying to get over the weather. Worried that he would hit either his wingman or the Boeing, he kept his gaze fixed on the sky over the heads-up display until he broke through the clouds. Only then did he look back down at his instruments.
Everything was back, everything. All systems were in the green. The only problem seemed to be the radar: completely blank.
The techies would pull their hair out over this one. He reached for the radar control panel on the dash, manually selecting search and scan mode. The auxiliary screen flashed an error message listing several circuit problems.
Then it cleared. The screen tinged green before flashing a light blue, the color of empty sky. NO CONTACT appeared in the right-hand corner. His position indicator showed he was now over Canada, just north of the intended test area.
Howe keyed the self-test procedure for his radar. As it began, he tried reaching Cyclops again.
“Bird One to Cyclops. Hey, Megan, you hear me or what?”
Howe waited for her to snap back with something funny. He felt ashamed of his anger now.
“Bird One, this is Ground Unit Hawk. What the hell is going on up there?”
“I had a major equipment flakeout,” he told the ground controller at the I-HAWK station. “Controls just disappeared. Looks like I still have a problem with my radar. Until your transmission I thought my radio was gone as
