“Bird One, Bird One! We have a positive fire! Positive fire!”
Howe’s heartbeat jumped, chasing away the fatigue that just a few moments ago had been pushing him low in the seat.
“Location?” he said, consciously trying to slow his tongue down.
“Working on that.”
Howe hailed the AWACS controller, who was reporting a contact to the northwest, maybe 350 miles from the track the ABM target had taken. Meanwhile the mission boss reported the ABM missile had struck home.
“Monitor, you have that vector?” Howe asked the RC-135.
“Definitely north of you,” said the crewman. “He should have been out of range, though.”
“I’m going north.”
“Screw that,” said someone over the circuit. “Head toward the Kurils. Got to be.”
Howe clicked his mike to ask who had said that, then realized it was Fisher.
“The UAV was a deke, a fakeout,” said Fisher. “Don’t worry about where they were: Worry about where they’re going.”
“How do you know where they’re going?”
“I don’t. We just take our best guess and see what happens.”
“Fisher—”
“Don’t give up on me now, Colonel.”
Howe hesitated for a second, then banked into a turn that would take him in the islands’ general direction off the coast of Russia.
Fisher gripped the map and folder in his hand as he worked his way down the ladder to Tyler.
“Has to be one of these three places,” he told the Special Forces captain, pointing at the map. He had the satellite pictures at the top of the folder and took them out. Only two of the islands looked as though they had landing strips, but the photo interpreter had assured Fisher that the third had a long, flat surface as well. In fact, he seemed to feel that what looked like a rock line and hills at the northeast were in fact painted shadows. Like the other two sites, the reconnaissance satellites did not cover the island 24/7, and their schedule could be pinpointed by someone in the know.
“My guess is it’s this one with the phony oil rig and the Escher painting in the middle that looks like hills,” Fisher told Tyler, pointing at the third and explaining the camouflage. “But they’re all long enough. We can land anywhere they can.”
“How long will it take?”
“Pilot says a little over an hour,” said Fisher.
“I have to talk to Colonel Gorman,” said Tyler.
“Tell her I said hello. Hey, are there smoke detectors down here?”
The Velociraptors’ long-range scan remained clean. Howe was now roughly three hundred miles from the nearest of the small islands Fisher had claimed the laser plane would be heading toward; he should have it in sight in less than twenty minutes.
Had the laser plane escaped? Or had Fisher simply been wrong?
He checked his course. The Kurils stretched in a semicircle toward the Russian coast, a scythe pointing toward the northernmost island of Japan. Many of the islands were uninhabitable atolls, but a few were large enough for small fishing villages and settlements. Perhaps a dozen or more were somewhere in between and at various times had been used for military installations. Fisher had ID’d three as possible targets, including two that had been used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Howe would sweep over the northernmost target and arc south with Timmy on his tail. He had a search pattern laid out, and they’d already worked out a rendezvous with one of the tankers, which would take up a station to the west.
A flight of F-15s were heading north from Japan to join in the search. They hadn’t contacted Howe yet; at last report they would be near the target area about fifteen minutes after he got there, and would probably be too low on fuel to hang around for very long.
The radar kicked up a contact at extreme range, flying at roughly thirty thousand feet; after a few seconds the contact disappeared, their courses taking them in diverging directions.
“Think that was our boy?” asked Timmy.
It was possible, but if so, the plane was heading over Russia. Howe told him to ignore it, and a few minutes later they fell onto the course he’d plotted to overfly the first island. The AWACS plane accompanying the task force was a good distance behind them, and even the nearest Navy aircraft was well outside radar range. They would have little warning if the Russians managed to spot them and decided to jump them.
Chapter 9
It took Blitz a few seconds to understand exactly what was going on as the transmissions from the augmented-ABM test barraged into the small secure videoconferencing booth. He turned to McIntyre, who seemed to be in a daze.
“Mac, Fisher was right.”
“Yes,” said the NSC aide, his voice still far away — probably on the ground in Kashmir, where it had been since his return. Blitz was going to insist on a long rest — and possibly psychological counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder — as soon as this was over.
“Get on the line to the FBI director and tell him to proceed with the shutdown of NADT. We want everything,” he added, though the command was superfluous.
“Fisher was right,” said McIntyre.
“As incredible as it seems,” said Blitz, turning back to the communications board and punching up Colonel Gorman’s circuit. “You have full authority to proceed,” he told her. “You’re answering to the President on this.”
Chapter 10
Just as the island started to grow in her windscreen, Megan’s radar warning receiver flashed to life, picking up transmissions from two planes approaching at high speed. The direction surprised her: They were coming out of Russia.
Her weapons officer ID’d them as Su-35s, afterburners blazing. But at just under a hundred nautical miles away, they weren’t going to catch her, not today.
“Prepare for landing,” she told Rogers. As she cut her speed and settled into the landing pattern, the wings of the big jet swung outward. The extension increased the radar profile exponentially, but it was immaterial now: They had the lead needed. In less than fifteen minutes the plane and the weapon would be smoldering, and she and the others would be in the water.
“I have something else.” The radar operator’s voice was practically a yelp.
Megan, lined up and descending toward the runway, glanced at her own radar display and saw the helicopters that were just coming over the edge of the island from the water. But it was too late: She was nearly out of fuel and committed to landing.
“Shit,” she said. “Rogers, what is this?”
“Damned if I know,” said the copilot. “Russians?”
“Just hang tight,” Megan told him, pushing the wheels onto the hardened-lava runway.
