'Warning-'
'Override all warnings and attack,' she ordered.
'Lindsey-'
'Attack commit Dragon, stop attack,' the computer warned.
The vibration was getting worse-finally, Lindsey was starting to notice it. 'What is that?' she asked.
'Eject,' Franken said flatly.
'What?'
'I said eject!' Franken shouted.
'I'm getting this second MiG,' Lindsey said.
'No!' Franken shouted. But at that moment the laser fired, and the second MiG-25 bearing down on the MV- 22 disappeared in a cloud of fire.
The vibration was louder and harder now, so hard that Franken had trouble taking a normal breath. He had to force the air out of his lungs to scream, 'Eject! Eject! Eject!'
All aircrew personnel at Sky Masters Inc. had extensive training in aircrew survival, including twice-a-year ejection seat qualification. Lindsey Reeves was not prior military, like John Franken, but she had been so thoroughly indoctrinated by Patrick McLanahan and his staff that every flying scientist was as thoroughly familiar with aircrew survival procedures as their military counterparts.
She did hesitate when he said it once-every crew member has a moment of disbelief when they hear that word. But the real command to eject was the word 'Eject' three times. So when Franken gave the proper command to eject, Lindsey Reeves didn't hesitate again. She sat back in her seat, pressed her head, back, and butt as deeply into the seat as she could, jammed her heels back, kept her elbows in tight, tucked her chin down, rotated the ejection handles upward, and squeezed the exposed triggers. Her overhead hatch ripped away, and the seat disappeared in a cloud of gray-blue smoke that disappeared in the sudden vacuum as quickly as it appeared, replaced by a cold fog and an impossibly loud roar of wind.
'Hope you make it okay, kiddo,' Franken said into his oxygen mask. He entered some commands into the attack computer-a complete system data dump, sending the entire mission's worth of stored system information to a satellite, where the engineers at Sky Masters Inc. could retrieve and analyze it. That was something Lindsey would do, if he had given her a chance to do it. She turned out to be a pretty good crewdog, Franken decided-she overcame her fear and nearly debilitating airsickness enough to take an untested warplane into combat halfway around the world. Amazing. The least he could do for her is to make sure that everything she worked and sacrificed so long and hard to build survived.
There were dozens of warning and caution indications on the instrument panel, but Franken no longer cared. He turned the AL-52 Megafortress north, toward the-pncoming MiG-29 fighters. At this closure rate-the MiGs were flying at almost twice the speed of sound to catch the MV-22-he would catch them in no time.
Sure enough, Franken could actually see two bright flashes of light, then two more, as the lead MiGs fired airto-air missiles. He saw the four streaks of fire arc across the sky-but suddenly the sky seemed to brighten, as if dawn was approaching, but at ten times the normal speed. The dawn then seemed to turn silvery and warm.
The Dragon, the four missiles, and then all four MiG-29 interceptors disappeared in an uncontrolled plasma field that had formed, expanded to nearly ten miles in diameter, engulfed its prey in a cloud of free electrons and ions, and then disappeared without a trace-all in the space of a few millionths of a second.
Bud, this is Zero. Is our tail clear? We're losing our electronic countermeasures system. What's your status?' No reply. 'Where are they, Gonzo?'
'No sign of 'em,' Wickland replied.
'What?' Tanaka switched one of his multifunction displays to the LADAR tactical view. There were no aircraft at all within fifty miles. 'Oh shit, they're gone. All of them-the fighters and the Dragon. They must've taken each other out.'
'They're deadT Both men fell silent. Then Wickland checked his display again. 'Holy shit-a target in the air, but almost hovering. I'm getting another LADAR shot.' Wickland activated the laser radar again, then magnified the new target. Neither of them could believe their eyes-it was the first time they had ever seen something like this on a laser radar display. 'My God, it's a parachute! Someone in a parachute! I can't believe it! What do we do? What can we do?'
'We turn around and follow it down, then hope there are some friendlies we can send into the area in case it's one of ours,' Tanaka said. 'I have a feeling it's one of our guysjudging by how slow it's going down, I'll bet it's Lindsey Reeves. At this rate, she'll be falling all night. My God, I wonder what went wrong….'
'Twenty right,' Hal Briggs said. The pilot of the MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor assault aircraft banked in response. Briggs was studying the data display on the electronic visor of his Tin Man battle armor's helmet, watching the range and bearing of his objective countdown as they flew closer. They had followed the clear path of destruction created by the second Megafortress and had zoomed in at treetop level right to the Presidential Palace, virtually unmolested. 'Five more right… hold it. Range point four hundred meters… three hundred… steady at three hundred… steady at three hundred.'
'Matches range to the rooftop,' the copilot reported, checking the range straight ahead displayed on his targeting visor. After checking the range, he switched his targeting visor to slave the chin turret and infrared sensor and used the twenty-millimeter Galling gun in the turret to force down any small-arms fire from security units on the roof he could see.
'Make a couple holes,' Briggs said. 'Night Stalkers, stand by.'
The pilot activated his weapons panel and selected 'HELLFIRE.' Two weapons pods unstowed themselves from the left and right landing gear sponsons. He activated the missiles and squeezed a trigger. One Hellfire laserguided missile from each weapon pod shot out from its canister, and together the missiles and their twenty- pound penetrating warheads blew a large hole in the roof of the Presidential Palace. The pilot swung the MV-22's nose to the right, and he made a second hole about fifty feet from the first with two more missiles. -
The MV-22 came in fast, then swung quickly to a low hover over the first smoking hole they had just created. Door gunners suppressed machine-gun fire from more rooftop security guards while the rear cargo ramp of the tilt- rotor motored down, and eight men in dark gray electronic battle armor, composite microhydraulic exoskeletons, and electromagnetic rail guns marched from the belly of the tilt-rotor aircraft.
One of the commandos felt bullets ricochet off his armor and instinctively dropped down and tried to take cover. 'Don't try to cover from small-arms fire unless your power drops below twenty percent,' Hal Briggs radioed over their secure commlink. 'And don't waste projectiles on infantry, or doors and walls your sensors can see through. We do different tactics here, gents: You work alone, you work quickly, and you let the armor defend you and feed you information. Follow the position signals, check every room. Let's move out.'
'I'm getting a power-level warning,' one of the commandos said. 'It's reading twenty percent already.'
'You have a bad power pack,' Briggs said. 'Withdraw, change packs, follow us down once it checks out. Move out.' The one commando went back inside the MV-22, where technicians in protective armor quickly helped the commando out of his exoskeleton. Meanwhile, the other Tin Man commandos split up into two groups and dropped through the holes in the roof to the floors below.
Hal Briggs led the first group of four. Holding his rail gun on his left hip, anchored to his exoskeleton, he walked quickly without running through the corridors of the Libyan Presidential Palace; the others split up, taking different corridors. Terrified workers and other persons, presumably relatives or other staffers, ran past him, some running headlong into him. He ignored everyone he didn't recognize. Hal used his ultrawide bandwidth sensor to peer through walls and doors, and anytime he saw someone inside, he kicked the door open to see who it was. But he kept on moving, sometimes simply walking right through a wall or door to get inside an adjacent room.
'It's hard to take stairs with this exoskeleton,' one of the commandos radioed.
'Don't bother with stairs,' Hal responded. When he reached the end of the hallway, he simply turned, tossed an explosive charge onto the floor, blew a hole in the floor, and jumped through.
Once they finished the top floor, the other floors went more quickly. On the ground floor, Hal had to contend with massed Republican Guard soldiers, now with heavier machine guns and grenade launchers. The battle armor's electric shock system took care of any close-in security he encountered; he had to fire one hypersonic projectile at
