It was dark by the time they were finished dinner. The police chief offered to let Danny stay at his house, but it was clear he would be displacing someone, probably the son. Danny begged off, and the chief recommended a small guest house run by a widow on the other side of town. As the town consisted of only six blocks, it was easy to reach, and Danny was sleeping by eight.
He got up before dawn, expecting to run a bit before breakfast. The police chief and his son were already in his squad car outside, waiting.
The chief insisted on running his blue emergency lights as they drove out to the swamp where the helicopter had crashed. It took less than ten minutes, a bumpy ride up and down a medium-sized hill into a narrow valley parted almost exactly in the middle by a meandering creek.
According to the police chief, not much had changed in fifteen years — the trees were bigger and the ground a little drier, but not much. He pointed out the area where the helicopter had lain, at the edge of a pool of water. The general location agreed with what MY-PID had displayed earlier.
“It went straight in, on its belly,” said the son, boiling down the chief’s elaborate description to a few words.
Danny stared at the area. He’d seen a number of helicopter crashes during his stints with Air Force special operations and Dreamland. He saw them all now, flickering through his head like ghosts combining into a single image: a Marine Whiskey Cobra merging with a mangled Blackhawk, half morphed into a Comanche test bed whose rotor was the only surviving part. Beneath them all were the pancaked remains of a flattened Chinook, the wounded passengers still crying for help.
Danny looked at the nearby woods and trees. The helo would have come in low, skimmed down when it was shot — the report said the chopper pilot was trying to attract the interceptors’ attention to help the others get away.
If it lay the way the chief said it did, it must have banked slightly before going in. Maybe that would have lessened the impact, at least for someone on the other side of the fuselage.
Would that make it survivable?
He could stare at the scene all morning and not come to any real conclusions, he thought.
“So where did they take the bodies?” he asked.
The police chief described the process — they’d moved two flatboats in, but the ground proved solid enough to walk on. One body was out of the helicopter, but the others were inside. Three men in the back. And the two pilots.
“Three?” asked Danny, making sure he understood. “Only three people?”
“And the one about there, two meters from the helicopter,” said the chief. “Ejected.”
There had been a full squad of men aboard the helicopter, but Danny didn’t correct the police chief. He said that tents had been set up near the road. They were brought in under the pretense of being an aid station to help the wounded, though it was far too late for that.
“Then what happened?” asked Danny.
“To the cemetery.”
Danny nodded. “Can we go there?”
“Yes,” said the chief somberly. “It is time for you to pay the respects for your friend.”
The cemetery was about three-quarters of a mile away, an old church plot used sporadically as a kind of overflow from the main churchyard in town. The southeastern end was marked by foundation stones overgrown with weeds and moss; according to the police chief, these were the remains of an Orthodox church that had fallen down sometime in the eighteenth century after being replaced by the slightly larger one where the town now sat.
There were three dozen headstones, most pockmarked with centuries of wear. The bodies of the men found in the helicopter were together at the side, three marked by wooden crosses and one by a stone that lay flat against the ground.
“Once they were white,” said the chief, referring to the worn wood. “But given their age, they have done well.”
Standing over the graves, Danny felt the urge to say a prayer. He knelt and bowed his head, wishing the dead men peace.
“I hope you’re here, Mark,” he whispered to himself.
He stopped himself. It felt funny, praying that someone was dead.
17
It was a coincidence that Captain Turk Mako’s last name meant shark. But it was a chance occurrence that he liked to play up in casual conversation.
“The Shark flies the shark — gotta happen,” he’d say when telling people what he did.
Not that he told many people. The aircraft wasn’t actually top secret, but most of what it was used for was.
In a sense, Turk’s name wasn’t actually Mako. It had been shortened and Americanized, kind of, from Makolowejeski by his great-great-grandfather, who’d come from Poland in the 1930s, escaping the war. He’d been dead some years when Turk was born, but he’d left a set of taped recordings about his adventures, a revelation and inspiration to the young man when he discovered them in high school.
Most pilots are at least a little superstitious, even if ultimately they know it’s bunk. Turk, who had a lucky coin he kept in his pocket every flight, viewed the name change as something of a good omen. Great-great had been looking after him even before he was born.
The Shark that Turk Mako flew was the F–40 Tigershark II, the experimental aircraft owned by the Pentagon’s Technology Office, now being equipped with the Medusa control unit to work with the Sabre UAVs. It was the latest in a long line of experimental aircraft, a cutting-edge plane that would have looked right at home on the flight deck of the Starship
Technically, two previous aircraft had been called the Tigershark. The first was actually an informal name applied by the British to their versions of the P–40 Warhawk, after squadrons began painting sharks’ mouths on the nose. Fighting against the Japanese in China, Claire Lee Chenault’s Flying Tigers saw how good the paint looked and added teeth to their versions, helping to make the look famous.
Tigershark II’s direct namesake was the F–20, a lightweight, multirole aircraft developed by Northrop in the 1970s and early 1980s from the basic blueprint of the F–5E. It was incredibly nimble, capable of hitting Mach 2 and climbing to over 54,000 feet. It could take off in only 1,600 feet, a relatively short distance for a jet of that era, and the simplicity of its design made it easy to maintain — an important consideration for its intended target consumers, friendly American allies who might not have or want to spend the money for more expensive aircraft.
Though an excellent aircraft, the F–20 eventually succumbed to the realities of international weapons purchasing, where politics often overshadowed other considerations.
Like its predecessor, the new Tigershark was light, small, and fast. Very, very fast.
The airframe had essentially been built around the engine, a combination hypersonic pulse and ramjet that could take the sleek, needle-nosed plane to Mach 5. The engine also allowed it to operate around 135,000 feet. The wings came out in a triangular wedge, with faceted and angled fins on both sides.
The engine’s quad air scoop was located directly under the cabin area of the fuselage; rail guns were mounted on either side. The rail guns were directed energy weapons, firing small bursts of plasma at high speed. The bursts were roughly the equivalent of a 50-millimeter machine-gun bullet. Devastating to another aircraft, the weapon had several advantages over conventional machine guns, starting with the fact that its projectile, though as potent as missiles, were the size of 25mm bullets. Its effective range was just over twenty miles — well before the aircraft would be seen on radar.
The weapon did have some limitations. Only a dozen charges could be fired before it had to cool down and
