cleanup team. They would drive the vehicle someplace safe and get rid of the incriminating evidence-weapons and clothing-hidden inside.
He looked to the right, toward the southeast. The warehouse district they’d just escaped from lay just beyond the port’s security fence.
“Can I help with the post-op cleanup?” Akulinin asked. He was still thinking about the equipment he’d left behind.
“We’ll take care of it,” Llewellyn told him. “I need to take you two down to the communications center. They need some data back at the Puzzle Palace.”
“Does it have to be tonight, Lew?” Lia said. “I’m dead on my feet.”
“Tonight, Lia. There’ll be time for rest later.” He turned and led them toward a companionway ladder descending into the ship.
Ghost Blue Approaching Waypoint Tango Bravo 0119 hours
Major Delallo stuffed his nose down and raced toward the surface of the sea. He only had one engine, but he had it wide open and was using gravity all he dared. Down he went into the gloomy night, trying to get against the surface of the sea, where he would find some measure of safety from his pursuers. He just might make it. He allowed himself that much hope, at any rate.
A worrisome thump began sounding from somewhere aft, causing the aircraft to shudder and buck. He’d been supersonic when he took the missile. Now, as the thumping became louder and the instrument panel jiggled and danced, he automatically retared the throttle and let his speed bleed off as he tried to assess the damage to his mount. The missile’s detonation had peppered the Raptor with shrapnel, knocked out one engine, and played merry hell with his avionics. The slipstream might be peeling back a piece of the aircraft’s fuselage, and that might make for a bright, easy target on hostile radars.
He loved the Raptor, an astonishing piece of advanced aircraft engineering. Its one weakness, though, was a variation on the Murphy Effect. When things went wrong with the aircraft,
In February of 2007, Delallo had been one of six pilots ferrying a flight of F-22s from Hickam Air Force Base to Kadena, Okinawa. The moment they’d crossed the international date line at the 180th meridian, the computers on all six aircraft had crashed, taking out all navigational systems and most communications. It had been good weather and broad daylight, thank God, and the flight had managed to form up on their tankers and make it back to Hawaii. Forty-eight hours later, the problem had been fixed and the flight had continued, but the incident had been a nasty reminder of how complicated these systems were. The F-22’s software ran to something like 1.7
Right now, he was getting squat from the radar-both the AN/ALR-94 passive receivers and the AN/APG-77 AESA, or Active Electronically Scanned Array. His navigational systems had crashed as well, leaving him as in the dark as he’d been that afternoon over the central Pacific.
The one electronic system that appeared to be working was his SAS, or Signature Assessment System, which threw up warning indicators when wear and tear on the aircraft had degraded its low radar signature to something the enemy could detect. Of course, the warning indicators might themselves be a glitch in his failing electronics… but he didn’t want to count on that.
The aircraft shuddered, the thump growing savagely more severe. The aircraft was completely fly-by-wire, with three flight-data computers that actually flew the aircraft. All his stick and rudder controls did was make inputs to the computers. They were doing all right just now, but if the structural damage exceeded the computers’ ability to cope, or the control throw available, he was going to tumble out of the night sky.
He was down to four thousand feet now and still descending. Where were those MiGs? His gadgets were silent-which probably meant they were damaged-although it might mean the Russian jocks had headed home for the night.
Delallo searched the darkness behind him as he keyed his radio. “Haunted House, Haunted House, Ghost Blue,” he called.
No response. If a data stream was still going out, it wasn’t registering on his almost nonexistent instrumentation.
Well, at least he was going in the right direction, west. Waypoint Tango Bravo was inside Finnish waters, a few miles south of Kotko. A support vessel was there. If necessary, he could bail out and hope for a pickup.
That, however, was an option he didn’t want to have to use. Those black waters, patchy with streamers of fog, were frigid even in late spring. Not even his flight suit would keep him alive for long, and with his navigation systems out, finding the support vessel would require outrageous luck.
Still looking aft, he saw a flash high and behind him, at four o’clock.
The northern sky flamed and shimmered with the cold glow of aurora. His eyes searched the deep twilight… Now he saw it, a streak of fire in the night.
A missile contrail, a thin white thread arcing around to intercept him.
He grabbed the lanyard for his ejection seat and yanked up hard…
Lia was exhausted. She’d been at it for an hour and a half, with no results yet. She was ready to pack it in.
“Anything, Lia?” Rubens’ voice said in her ear.
She leaned back in her chair and looked around the stateroom, a fairly luxurious suite booked under the name Stevens but occupied by Llewellyn. It was the “communications center” only by virtue of the laptop computer set up on a desk in the corner.
A cable ran from the back of the laptop to a suitcasesized unit beside the desk, the hardware necessary to link Lia’s computer to a satellite dish above the cruise ship’s bridge. A black-box encryption device guaranteed her that her connection to the NSA computer center back at Fort Meade was secure.
The laptop was open. Prominently displayed on the flat 19-inch screen were front and profile views of a bearded, rumpled-looking man with watery eyes. He might have been a thief… or, just possibly, an unshaven accountant. A third photo showed a candid surveillance shot of the same person, taken in a crowd on a city street.
No.
“Nothing so far,” she said. She was alone in the room. Llewellyn was off somewhere with his cleanup team, while Akulinin had gone to his stateroom to get showered and shaved.
She pressed the enter key, and another face came up on the screen. A big man with an ugly scowl.
No.
“I’m not sure we’re going to find him this way,” she told Rubens. “How many mug shots of Russian Mafiya big shots do you have, anyway?”
“About a thousand,” Rubens told her.
Another face, small, thin, and mean. He looked like a school bully Lia once had flattened on the playground.
No.
She’d been through about half of the database already, focusing on those members of the Russian crime syndicates known to be operating in and around St. Petersburg.
No.
“This is getting us absolutely nowhere,” she said.
