Navy controller replied somewhat sharply that he already had a plane en route.
The seaman at the display of the Aegis air defense system aboard the cruiser started throwing a series of numbers and acronyms out over the air. It sounded almost as if he were speaking in tongues.
“Five minutes to test,” said the mission controller, who was aboard a Navy ship just off the Aleutians. Though presented as a simple statement, the words were actually a command:
Howe felt himself starting to relax. Maybe Fisher was wrong about everything — maybe the wreckage had contained the laser after all.
Had he said that?
He couldn’t remember now. He must have said it; he must have told her. But he couldn’t remember.
She was starting to fade away.
“Asset Mike-Charlie is off the air.”
The words seemed to break through a fog, rays of sun separating the clouds.
“Repeat, Asset Mike-Charlie is off the air.”
Howe fought against the adrenaline that jerked through his veins. “Monitor, do we have a fire?” he asked the RC-135, which was looking for the laser burst.
“Negative, Bird One. No shot, Colonel.”
Voices filled every circuit. Mike-Charlie was a UAV patrolling the southeast quadrant of the test area. Two Navy fighters selected afterburners, hustling in that direction; two others swept around to back them up. The Hawkeye closest to the area reported no contacts. One of the surface ships had a possible visual sighting but then lost it.
The mission boss stopped the ABM launch at T-minus 2:31 as the patrol vessels and aircraft scoured the area where the UAV had been. After a few minutes with no fresh contacts and the covering aircraft now mustered around the area, he let it proceed.
“Still clean,” Monitor told Howe as the countdown returned.
“Bird One,” acknowledged Howe, starting a bank as he reached the southernmost point of his patrol area.
Chapter 7
Megan was now much too far away from the drone to know if the Amos/X missile she’d launched scored a hit or not. She could tell from her passive radar receiver that at least one of the aircraft over the test area was reacting; she took that as a hopeful sign.
She was already too committed to turn back. Following the precisely computed flight plan, she selected afterburner and began to rise from her track fifty feet over the waves. The weapons officer meanwhile acknowledged that the weapon was operational and prepared to fire.
“We have a launch,” said the weapons officer. “Their target is airborne.”
“Radar’s clean,” said Rogers.
Megan didn’t reply, concentrating on flying her aircraft. The more they climbed on this course, the closer they got to the AWACS radar. She suspected that they would be detected before the ABM missile was fired; she just hoped it was close enough so the launch couldn’t be aborted.
Her hand steadied against the stick. Megan thought of her uncle and his last mission over Tokyo. The way he described it, he’d been an automaton, more mechanical than a flight computer.
She was that way now.
“ABM launch,” said the weapons officer. “I need ten miles.”
He gave her more directions, asking her to take a hard turn to the east and continue climbing. There was no doubt now they would be detected. Megan pushed the stick, making the correction. The maneuver bled speed off the wings, but the plane moved precisely as she wanted, still rising in the air.
“Preparing to fire. I’m locked,” said the weapons officer.
Megan reached forward, her thumb edging toward the button that turned control of the plane over to the automatic pilot circuit, allowing the weapon to fly the aircraft on a very straight and predictable path as it fired. She hesitated — it felt almost like a surrender — but there was no way for the laser to fire without pushing that button.
A thick bar flashed at the top of her HUD and an icon appeared in the lower part of the screen. Megan leaned back, a passenger in her own jet.
“Firing!” reported the weapons officer. His excitement seemed to shake the aircraft, though it was actually the discharge of the weapon, ramping through the system and unleashing through the clear glass at the tail end.
To fly through that smoke over Tokyo, to kill all those people — you could justify their deaths in the end, add them up in the awful calculus of human survival. But if you didn’t resolve to get beyond those grim equations — if you didn’t work to end all war — weren’t you as guilty as the butchers who had started it all?
That had been her uncle’s and her father’s arguments. It was her birthright, her debt.
Paid now.
“The missile hit,” said the weapons officer.
He said something else but the words garbled in her ears, too far from her thoughts to penetrate. Megan took back control of the aircraft from the computer, rolling her wings and tucking back to the west in a twisting dive that put nearly 9 g’s of stress across the frame, overloading even the overengineered Russian design. The Blackjack groaned but held, possibly unaware of the fate that awaited her a little over an hour and a half from now — assuming, of course, they made it back to the base.
Megan pushed the engines into afterburner. Fuel gushed into the engines, taking the semistealthy Blackjack from just under three hundred knots to over nine hundred. Megan had to assume she’d been spotted, and so she needed every second’s worth of acceleration to get away. But she could sustain her burst for merely a minute; otherwise she’d consume too much fuel and risk ditching. Megan punched her watch’s preset; her arms moved like levers as the time drained to zero.
“Looking good,” she told Rogers as she backed off power. “We’re on the home stretch.”
Chapter 8
