commands. His hand sweated beneath the leather of his flying glove. He hit a wrong button and had to clear the set and start over. Damn it. Calmete!
While he fumbled with the navigation set, his memory slid into an unpleasant track. He was seventeen years old and he was driving his first car, a ’71 Ford. In the rear of the car were his mother, father, and Grandmother Matos. His sister was seated next to him. He had gotten off the interstate at the wrong exit. While his cousin Dolores was being married, he steered his angry family through the unfamiliar streets of North Miami. His father had hissed at him through clenched teeth, “ Es tu culpa, Pedro.”
He looked down at the navigation display. It verified his position as correct. To be certain, he went through it again. Correct. He was where he was supposed to be. At least that’s what the equipment said. Then what was that second target?
He looked down at his radar screen. The Phoenix missile was small and ghostly white as it tracked across the green screen, outbound toward its target. Matos was always reminded of one of those video games. A game. That’s all it is, he decided. They had introduced another element into the game to see how he would respond. That big white target on the green field was not an aircraft transporting flesh and blood. It was an electronic decoy. A mirage, sent out by the Hercules or the target drone. He should have reported it. They had tested him, and he had failed. He had compromised himself. He was through.
He kept staring at the screen. It all made sense. It all fit. Except for one thing. The Phoenix was tracking the large target, and the Phoenix would not track an electronic decoy.
The distance between the hunter and the hunted narrowed to less than 200 miles. The missile was traveling at Mach 3, covering nearly one mile every second.
Matos started to press the radio button but took his hand away. He racked his brain for answers. Could the Hercules be off course? Could my navigation equipment be wrong? He knew that if the problem was his equipment, it would still be technically his fault. An error from his craft was equivalent to an error from its captain. It was unfair, but effective. It compelled those in authority to pay close attention to details. The modern Navy was getting away from that concept, but it wasn’t totally gone. Not yet. And this accountability did not discriminate between the captain of the 91,000-ton Nimitz and the captain of a 64,000-pound naval aircraft. Electronics could betray you, but a navigation set would never stand in the dock with you in front of a board of inquiry. If he had fired at the Hercules, a demonstrable mechanical fault in his navigation set might keep him from being court-martialed, but his naval career would be finished. He reminded himself that the naval careers of the crew of the Hercules would be terminated even more abruptly if that missile were headed for them.
The sound of his own breathing filled his helmet and perspiration collected under his pressure suit. His right hand gripped tightly around the control stick. His left arm tensed against the side console, his fingers touching the throttles. He had stopped trying to make any additional adjustments on the radar. The picture that it painted was accurate.
He felt his nerves becoming steadier as he resigned himself to all the worst possible scenarios. He stared distractedly at the radar screen, then, for the first time since he had fired, he looked out of the Plexiglas bubble at the world he flew in. Es tu culpa, Pedro. It is your fault, Peter. He pushed his finger against the thin Plexiglas. Half an inch away was an airless, subzero void.
A glint of hope shook him out of his lassitude. There was one straw he hadn’t grasped at yet. He looked back at his console. Working quickly with the radar controls, he slewed a computer readout to the target on his screen. In a few seconds another entry displayed on his information board. The target was cruising at 62,000 feet. It was making a ground speed of 910 miles per hour.
Matos smiled for the first time since he had catapulted off the deck of the Nimitz. No Hercules turboprop could match even half that performance. Very few aircraft could. High-altitude supersonic flight was the province of missiles, special target drones, and advanced fighters, bombers, and spy planes. He would know of any such friendly craft in his area unless they had gotten off course. Two possibilities remained: The first was that it was an enemy aircraft, in which case he wouldn’t get a medal for shooting it down, but he wouldn’t be court-martialed either. It would be covered up and he would be the secret envy of every flight officer aboard. It had happened before.
The second possibility was the more likely. The profile being flown by the target on his screen was very close to the predicted performance of the drone. The Hercules must have released two drones, either by mistake or by design. That must be it. Matos felt better. His naval career had a fair chance now. He had to call the Nimitz immediately. Explain. He could still relocate the other target, fire the missile, do a turnaround, and get the hell out of there. He looked down again at the radar screen. The distance between the Phoenix and its target lessened rapidly. Thirty miles, twenty miles, ten miles. Then the missile and the target merged, became one. Matos nodded. The missile worked. That much they now knew. But he was left wondering what he had hit.
John Berry pushed the stopper valve halfway and turned on the water until the basin filled, then adjusted the taps until the inflowing water equaled the draining water. He took off his wristwatch and laid it on the aluminum shelf. 11:02. It was still set to California time. Jet lag was not nearly so bad with the Straton as it was on the conventional jets, but it still caused his body clock to become disoriented. Time was relative. His body was on New York time, his watch was on California time, but he was actually in an obscure time zone called Samoan-Aleutian, and he would soon land in Tokyo at a different time altogether. Yet at home, time dragged, almost stood still, hourly, daily, weekly. But that hadn’t stopped him from getting older-in fact, it speeded up his aging process. Relative. No doubt about it. He bent over the basin and began splashing water on his face.
The Phoenix missile, with its updated maneuverability, made one small correction and aimed itself so that it would strike the broad port side of the midfuselage slightly above the leading edge of the wing. Somewhere in the circuitry, the sensors, the microcomputer of the Phoenix-the place that was the seat of its incomplete powers of judgment and reason-there might have been a sense or an awareness that it had succeeded in its purpose. And having no fear, no hesitation, no instinct for survival, it accelerated headlong into its prey, consigning it, and itself, into oblivion.
A middle-aged man sitting in aisle 15, seat A, glanced out the window. He noticed a silvery spot at least a mile away. He blinked. The spot was now as large as a basketball and a few inches outside the window. Before his brain could transmit even the most primitive response of ducking or screaming, the silver orb was through the window, taking a section of the fuselage and his head and torso with it. The Phoenix plowed across the remaining two seats in the section, B and C, disintegrating the passenger’s wife and mother. It crossed the aisle to the middle section, pushing some of its grisly harvest with it, and swept away the four center seats, D, E, F, and G, and the passengers in them, then crossed the starboard aisle. It then pushed seats H, J, and K, with three more passengers, through the fuselage and, along with other collected debris, out into the void.
Everything in the Phoenix’s path, its wake, and a yard on either side of it, was pulverized by the high-speed disintegration of the fuselage wall. Seats and people were turned into unrecognizable forms and their high-speed disintegration in turn reduced people and objects near them to smashed and torn remnants of what they had been. With no warhead on the missile there was, of course, no explosion-but the impact forces had the same effect on everything in its path.
The deceleration had caused the Phoenix to begin to tumble as it reached the third gang of seats. Its tail rose up and it hit the starboard sidewall broadside, cutting, as it exited, an elongated swath nearly eight feet high and six feet across. It tumbled out into space, dragging more metal and flesh with it. Its energies spent, the Phoenix continued for only a short distance before it faltered and fell, end over end, twelve miles down into the Pacific Ocean.
The first sound that John Berry heard was an indistinct noise, as if a high shelf stacked with rolls of sheet metal had been knocked over. He felt the aircraft bump slightly. Before he could even raise his head from the basin, he heard a rushing noise, a roar, that sounded like someone had opened the window of a speeding subway train. He straightened up quickly and froze for a second until his senses could take in all the stimuli. The flight was steady, the water was still running in the tap, the lights were on, and the rushing sound was lower now. Everything seemed nearly normal, but something-his pilot’s instincts-told him he was flying in a dying aircraft.
Outside, in the cabin, the enormous quantity of internal pressurized air began to exit through the gaping holes in the Straton’s fuselage. All the small, loose objects onboard-glasses, trays, hats, papers, briefcases-were immediately propelled through the cabin, and were either wedged behind something stationary or sucked out the holes.
The passengers sat quietly for a long second, completely unable to comprehend what had just happened.
