Retribution

are in communication with the people in the water. We request that you stand by.”

“As you wish,” replied the Indian captain.

“I appreciate your offer to help,” said Dog. “Thank you.”

Indian Ocean, off the Indian coast

Time unknown

With his arms completely drained of energy, Zen drifted along in the blackness, more flotsam than living being. He’d never been broken down so low, not even after he woke up in the hospital without the use of his legs.

Then all he’d been was angry. It was better than this, far better.

For the longest time he didn’t believe what they told him. Who would? Doctors were always Calamity Janes, telling you about all sorts of diseases and ailments you might have, depending on the outcome of this or that test. He had never liked doctors — not even the handful he was related to.

So his first reaction to the news was to say, flat out, “Get bent. My legs are fine. Just fine.”

He kept fighting. His anger grew. It pushed him, got him through rehab every day.

Rehab sucked. Sucked. But it was the only thing he could do, and he spent hours and hours every day— every day—working and working and working. Pumping iron, swimming, pushing himself in the wheelchair. He hated it. Hated it and loved it, because it sucked so bad it didn’t let his mind wander.

Thinking was dangerous. If he thought too much, he’d remember the crash, and what it meant.

Breanna was with him the whole time, even when he didn’t want her to be. He took a lot of his frustration out on her.

Too much. Even a little would have been too much, but he took much more than that.

The amazing thing was, she’d stayed. She still loved him. Still loved even the gimp he’d become.

Gradually, Zen realized he had two motivations. The first was anger: at his accident; at Mack Smith, who he thought had caused it; at the world in general.

The second was love.

Anger pushed him every day. It got him back on active duty, made him determined to pull every political string his family had — and they had a lot. It made him get up every morning and insist that he was still Major Jeff “Zen” Stockard, fighter ace, hottest match on the patch, a slick zippersuit going places in the world.

Love was more subtle. It wasn’t until he got back, all the way back as head of the Flighthawk program, as a pilot again, as a true ace with five enemy planes shot down, that he understood what love had done for him: It had kept the anger at an almost manageable level.

Zen nudged against something hard in the water. He put his arm up defensively. The only thing he could think of was that he was being attacked by a shark.

It wasn’t a shark, but a barely submerged rock. There were others all around. A few broke the surface, but most were just under the waves.

He stared into the darkness, trying to make the blackness dissolve into shapes. There were rocks all around, as if he were near a shore. He pushed forward, expecting to hit a rise and find land, but didn’t. He dragged himself onward, the water too shallow to swim, expecting that with the next push he would be up on land. But the land seemed never to come, and when it finally did, it was more rock than land, somewhat more solid than the pieces he’d bumped over, but still rock.

He’d expected sand, a real beach. He wasn’t particularly fond of beaches, except that they gave him a chance to swim, which was something he’d liked to do even before it became part of his daily rehab and exercise. They also gave him a chance to watch Breanna come out of the sea, water dripping off her sleek body, caressing it.

He shook off the thought and concentrated on moving away from the water, crawling up a gentle incline about twenty or thirty yards.

Exhausted, he lay on his back and rested. A cloud pack had ridden in on a cold front, and as Zen closed his eyes, the clouds gave up some of their water. The rain fell strongly enough to flush the salt from his face, but the rest of him was already so wet that he barely noticed. The wind kicked up, there was a flash of lightning — and then the air was calm. In a few minutes, the moon peeked out from the edge of the clouds. The stars followed, and what had been an almost pitch-black night turned into a silver-bathed twilight.

Zen sat up and tried to examine the place where he had landed. There were no large trees that he could see, and if there were any bushes, they blended with the boulders in the distance. He groped his way up the hill, maneuvering around loose boulders and outcroppings until he reached the crest. There was another slope beyond, and then the sea, though it was impossible to tell if he was on an island or a peninsula, because another hill rose to his right.

He turned back to the spot where he had come in, perhaps a hundred feet away. The water lapped over rocks, the tops of the waves shining like small bits of tinsel in the moonlight. The sound was a constant tschct-tschct-tschct, an unworldly hum of rock and wave.

One of the rocks near the shoreline seemed larger than the rest, and more curiously shaped. Zen stared at it, unable to parse the shadow from the stone. He scanned the rest of the ocean, then returned, more curious. He moved to his right, then farther down the slope.

It wasn’t a rock, he realized. It was a person.

Breanna, he thought, throwing himself forward.

Indian Ocean, off the Indian coast

0043, 16 January 1998

Danny Freah crouched against the side of the Abner Read’s boat, waiting for the chance to pluck one of the fliers from the water. The boat was a souped-up Zodiac, custom-made for the littoral warcraft that carried her. Special cells in the hull and preloaded filler made the boats difficult to sink, and the engine, propelled by hydrogen fuel cells, was both fast and quiet. Danny decided he would see about getting some for Whiplash when he got home.

Jan Stewart was the first of the Levitow’s crewmen to be picked up. Her teeth chattered as Danny helped her in. One of the sailors wrapped a waterproof “space blanket” around her and gave her a chemical warming pouch. Dork — Lieutenant Dennis Thrall, a Flighthawk pilot — was next. His face was swollen and his lips blue.

Dork’s hands were so swollen that he couldn’t activate the warmer. Danny took it from him and twisted gently, feeling the heat instantly as the chemical reaction began.

“Thanks, Cap,” said Dork in a husky voice. “Where’s Zen?”

“Still looking.”

“He and Bree were going out after us. They had to jump.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Danny.

“They should be south of us,” said Lieutenant Dick “Bullet” Timmons, huddling next to Dork. Bullet had been the Levitow’s second-shift pilot. “We were flying west. They would have bailed only a few seconds later.”

“We’ll find them,” said Danny.

He glanced over his shoulder at the Indian frigate, sitting in an oblong splash of moonlight a mile away. The Indians had volunteered to help with the rescue, but no one knew whether they could be trusted. It had been Indian missiles, after all, that had shot down the Levitow.

“We were jumped by Indian MiGs and Sukhois on our way to deploy the EEMWBs,” Bullet told Danny. His voice was rushed; he seemed to need to tell what had happened to them, to explain why they were down in the water. “They kept nicking us. The Flighthawks were gone because of the T-Rays. Then finally, one of the Sukhois got us with an AMRAAMski. Plane held together but there was too much damage to keep it in the air. Bree did a hell of a job getting us out over the water and just holding it stable enough to jump. Really she did.”

“We’ll debrief back at the ship,” Danny told him gently. “It’s all right.”

But the pilot kept talking.

“She ordered everyone else to jump. She and Zen stayed behind. She was going to jump, though. Definitely. She was going out. Zen too. She knew she couldn’t fly it back. And there was no way she was landing in India. The Levitow was shielded against the T-Rays. She wouldn’t have let them have the plane, even if she could have landed it. No way.”

“Relax,” Danny said, grabbing another warmer for him. “We’ll find them.”