“Lock, damn it,” said Dog.
If the computer heard him, it didn’t let on. Dog switched to the manual control, using a small joystick that would let him designate the target the old-fashioned way. He hit the reset, moved to the cursor, and this time got a lock.
“Fire,” he said. “Fire Fox One!”
The missile ripped from the belly of the aircraft.
Kerman fingered the wires on the bomb’s timer as the aircraft jerked up and down. He hadn’t been with his uncle when the timer was explained, and Sattari hadn’t bothered to show him how it worked. Still, it seemed like a simple device; there had to be a way to set it off immediately.
A set of wires had been soldered to contacts at the top of the switch. Kerman decided he had only to cross the contacts for the weapon to be triggered.
He had nothing to cross them with.
He could do it with a pen.
The plane jerked as he reached to his pocket. He fell backward to the deck.
There was no time.
He clawed his way upright, then hunched over the timer.
As his fingers touched the wires, the plane lurched again. Kerman pushed down on the device with one hand and managed to pull the wires off the contact with his other.
The plane suddenly jerked upward and stopped shaking.
He was free! The American had given up!
He started to rise to run back to the cockpit. Then he stopped, realizing there was no sense doing that now. He reached back to the wires to push them together.
As he did, the front of the aircraft turned silver. It looked like a flash of light, but it was pure silver, a brilliant shade that he had never seen before.
Paradise, he thought.
Then silver turned to red, then black, then nothing.
Starship saw the Anaconda missile close in on the Airbus’s cabin just as he was pressing the trigger on the Flighthawk’s gun. He rolled away, escaping most of the explosion. The Anaconda struck at the front cabin, decapitating the aircraft. The cockpit disintegrated, but the rest of the fuselage continued on, flying toward the highest of the Glass Mountains about sixty miles northwest of Dreamland.
By the time he got the Flighthawk turned back around, the headless Airbus was down to 2,000 feet. Its left wingtip hit the ground first, skittering along for a hundred feet or so before collapsing. The rest of the plane spun in toward the missing wing, tumbling into a rising cloud of smoke and dust.
“It’s down! It’s down!” said Starship.
Then he braced himself.
Englehardt closed his eyes, waiting for the inevitable flash of light. He pushed himself against the back of his seat, expecting the air burst that would follow a nuclear explosion.
It didn’t come. After a minute he swung the aircraft back toward the site. Nothing.
They were a little more than twenty miles away, climbing back through 25,000 feet. He moved into a figure eight, intending to climb as high as possible.
“Sully, you with me?”
“With you, Mike.”
“No explosion.”
“Yeah, nothing.”
“Maybe coming. We high enough?”
“Yeah, just about.”
“You got the engines.”
“Yeah, I’m on it, bro,” answered Sullivan.
Dog stared at the image on the screen, waiting for the massive white cloud — the famous mushroom cloud — to rise above the desert mountainside.
But it didn’t. Their missile had prevented it.
“Dreamland is sending a response team,” reported Sullivan.
“I have a helicopter en route,” reported Rager at the airborne radar, “and two Ospreys.”
Dog waited, listening. He knew every man aboard those aircraft, had brought most of them to Dreamland, or had at least approved their assignments.
Somehow, the fact that he was no longer their commander didn’t enter into his thoughts.
Minutes passed that seemed like days. He began to feel numb.
“Neutralized,” said Sullivan finally. “The bomb’s trigger section is off. It’s inert.”
“Take us to Dreamland,” Dog told Englehardt. “Take us home.”
About the Authors
DALE BROWN is a former U.S. Air Force captain and the author of numerous previous bestsellers, including
JIM DEFELICE’S recent thrillers include
