“Hey, come back,” said Zen. “Don’t go. Don’t go.”
But the kid had already turned around and was speeding away.
“Well, that worked,” muttered Zen. “Maybe I should have told him Homer was my uncle.”
Ray Rubeo got down on his knees so he could get closer to the computer screen.
“You’re sure this is where they discovered warhead I-17?” he asked.
“That’s the GPS reading from the Flighthawk,” the operator told him. “I verified it off the Megafortress.”
“You look like you’re praying, Ray,” said Major Catsman, coming down the ramp toward him.
“I may be, Major.” Rubeo frowned at the map. “We’ve found one warhead outside of the search parameters.”
“And?”
Rubeo sighed. There was no explaining things to some people.
“It’s not possible for it to be outside of the search area,” he told Catsman, rising.
“Well, obviously it is.”
“Yes. That’s my point,” said Rubeo. “What we have here is all math — Newton’s laws applied. We know exactly where the missiles should have fallen if the T-Rays worked as we think they did. So the only possible conclusion is that the T-Rays did not work in that manner. The T-Rays must not have disabled all the systems on the missing missiles. My guess is that the engines didn’t shut down when we believed they did.”
“Are you sure?”
“It will be useful to examine the missile at I-17,” said Rubeo. “Maybe there is some shielding of some components and not others. Perhaps the T-Rays do not work as we believe they do. There is always a distance between theory and reality, Major. The problem is to measure that distance.”
“What do you suggest?”
“I’d like one of our people to look at it closely.” Rubeo picked at his earlobe.
“Danny Freah will be securing it.”
“With all due respect to Captain Freah, I don’t believe his expertise lies in the area of electronics. I was thinking of Ms. Gleason. She is twiddling her thumbs on Diego Garcia. She would be of more use there.”
“All right.” Catsman folded her arms. “Did you have to piss General Samson off so completely, Ray? Couldn’t you have been just a little more polite?”
“I don’t do polite.”
“You should learn,” said Catsman, turning away.
Jennifer Gleason tapped gently on the small laptop as she rose. Wires snaking from the computer connected to a missile a few feet away. Tom Crest, one of the weapons engineers on the Anaconda team, looked up from one of the circuit boards in the warhead assembly.
“Still?” he asked.
“The anomaly is still there,” said Jennifer. “Even though the circuit checks out at spec on the bench, you’re getting some sort of error that has to be coming from the hardware.”
“I’ll be damned if we can find it. It doesn’t come up more than one time out of a thousand.” Crest got up from the missile. “Jeez, it’s hot. You mind?”
He put his thumbs under the bottom of his T-shirt, gesturing.
“Go ahead and take it off,” said Jennifer. “If you don’t think you’ll get sunburned.”
“Nah.” Crest pulled his shirt off, revealing a surprisingly tan and fit torso. For an engineer, Jennifer thought, he was pretty good-looking.
Not that she was looking.
“I wonder if maybe one of the software revisions on the microcode was done erroneously,” she said. “You’ve checked everything else.”
“That was checked weeks ago.”
“Maybe the check was wrong. You’ve looked at everything else.”
“Looking at it again could take a couple of days.”
Jennifer shrugged. She was about to volunteer to do it when the trill of a bike bell caught her attention. She turned around and saw Sergeant Lee Liu approaching on one of the Dreamland-issue mountain bikes the Whiplashers were using to patrol the area.
“Jen, Major Catsman needs to talk to you right away.”
“Really? OK.” Jennifer shaded her eyes. “Any word on Zen and Breanna?”
Liu shook his head. “Sorry. Hop on and I’ll give you a ride to the Command trailer.”
“Where am I going to get on?”
“You can sit on the handlebars.”
Jennifer eyed the bike dubiously.
“Only take us a few minutes,” said Liu.
“All right. But look out for the bumps.”
Ray Rubeo, not Major Catsman, greeted Jennifer when she arrived at the Dreamland Command trailer.
“I hope you are enjoying your South Pacific sojourn,” said Rubeo testily.
“Fun in the sun, Ray. Wish you were here.”
“We have a real job that needs to be done.”
Rubeo explained what had happened with the warhead located at I-17, and its implications.
“Twenty miles is only a four percent error,” said Jennifer. “That’s not off that much.”
“The search areas are twenty-five percent larger than the formulas calculated,” said Rubeo. “Which means that the missile traveled
“Maybe the formula’s wrong.”
“Don’t you think I considered that possibility?”
It was a sharp response, out of character even for Rubeo.
Jennifer asked what was wrong. The scientist’s frown only deepened. Instead of answering, he changed the subject.
“The Whiplash team is going to recover the weapon in a few hours. It needs to be examined by someone with expertise,” said Rubeo.
“I’ll get up there as soon as I can.”
“When?”
“Soon, Ray. Relax.”
“That does not seem possible,” he said, and the screen blanked.
Jennifer got up from the communications desk and walked over to Sergeant Liu in the trailer’s common area. “How soon will the Whiplash Osprey be back?” she asked.
“Not for several hours,” said Liu. “What’s up?”
“I need to get up to the border area between India and Pakistan to look at a weapon with Captain Freah. I’d like to be up there in a couple of hours.”
“Couple of hours can’t be done,” said Liu. “But I do know how you can get up there just after nightfall. If you’re willing.”
“Tell me.”
“The ride will be a little, er, bumpy.”
“It can’t be as bad as the bike ride,” said Jennifer. “I’m all ears.”
Zen didn’t know what sort of fish lived in this part of the ocean, but he did know that sharks were spread out across the globe. He knew too that they had an incredible sense of smell, and would come from miles away to strike bloodied prey.
