“I lost Bird Four.”
“Improvise.”
He may have meant to use the remote aircraft’s cannon, but Malachi decided instead he would use the AMRAAMs, which were still loaded in the belly.
Then he decided on something better.
“I’m going to kamikaze the son of a bitch,” he told Whacker. “You can stay with Train.”
“Malachi, you’re being spiked!” warned Riddler.
He rolled the Bird downward, falling into a spin as he plunged from fifteen thousand feet. He recovered and then slid south at about five thousand feet, coming through to four thousand, to three thousand, his heart pounding like the piston of an old steam engine roaring down a Rocky Mountain grade. Riddler tried directing him away from the radar coverage, giving him a graphic on the threat screen that portrayed it as purple blossoms in a 3-D landscape. But he switched it off verbally; it was distracting and the stinking radars were all over the place.
And so were the flak guns. The screen lit up with a thousand water fountains, all spurting toward him. An array of ZSU-23 and larger ZSU-57 antiaircraft guns, radar and optically guided, sprayed lead into the sky before him. Mal-achi was running through a volcanic field, plunging past the gates of hell.
There was definitely a song in this.
The altimeter ladder at the left side of his screen had descended to one hundred feet, and the indicator was still rolling downward. Malachi’s entire body moved backward as he lifted his nose, trying to slip under the radars but not hit the earth. He had an open plain in front of him, strings of tracers and black strings — he was through the guns, past the worst of the antiair. Something grabbed at his right wing; he jerked the stick back, overcorrected, did the wrong thing, cursed, felt himself lose the plane.
“You son of a bitch, hold still,” he said.
The computer blared a warning, insisting that he was going to collide.
Then he had a blank screen in front of him.
“Shit,” said Malachi. He pushed back in the seat, exhausted, humiliated.
No one said anything for a good thirty seconds, maybe more.
“They’re down! They’re down!” shouted Riddler. “I have a visual from one of the satellites. You hit the mother square on.”
A picture appeared in the middle of Malachi’s main screen. In one corner was a building with what looked like a blotchy cloud right over it. It was the laser complex exploding.
“Splash Site One,” said Train as Malachi stared at the laser he had just hit. “Both sites are down. Both sites are down — kick-ass, boys. Mal, help me get Two to a good self-destruct; then let’s break out the beer.”
83
The passage Dean and Lia found extended into a long, dark tunnel. They had to crouch as they ran, but the passage was clear and dry.
Dean heard the faint rumble of machinery ahead. After they had gone a hundred yards, Lia grabbed his arm to stop him; she needed to catch her breath.
“What is this, a sewer?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where does it go?”
“Hey, you’re the one with the magic map,” said Dean. “You tell me.”
“I’m not getting anything,” she said. “The Russian jamming is cutting down on our signal strength, and down here there’s just too much interference.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying about high-tech bullshit,” Dean told her. “It’s useless when you need it most.”
“We wouldn’t have made it this far without it, cowboy.”
A flashlight beam played across the roof from the direction they’d started in. Dean pulled Lia with him, turning off the flashlight at first even though the tunnel was pitch-black. He had to turn it back on; there was no way to see otherwise.
The tunnel began running downhill and angling slightly. After they’d gone another twenty or thirty yards, Dean saw an air shaft or something ahead; light played down it. Lia ran to it, but the shaft was barely a foot square, too narrow for even her to crawl up.
“They’re close,” he hissed. He could hear their pursuers walking into the tunnel behind them.
Ten strides later, Dean nearly collided with the wall as the tunnel took a sharp turn to the right. Twenty yards beyond that, it split in two.
They went left. The machinery noises were very loud now.
Behind them, one of the men cursed. A gun fired twice and the ricochet of the bullet cracked in Dean’s ears.
“Maybe they killed each other,” said Lia.
“Yeah. And maybe we hit the lottery.”
“Door.” Lia pointed ahead. A metal door stood above a cement-block step on the wall ten feet ahead. In the middle of the door was a sign with Cyrillic letters. Lia pulled a small lock pick from her pocket and worked at the lock as two more gunshots echoed through the tunnel. They sounded louder.
“They’re panicking,” said Dean. There was light now back near the V, small flashlight beams.
Lia undid the lock and pulled the door open. Dean nearly fell backward as a rush of steam blew out into the passage.
“Come on,” said Lia, grabbing his hand and pulling him through. They were in a machinery room. The temperature had to be over a hundred degrees. The noise was deafening.
Lia pulled him along to a catwalk, then down a flight of steps. She let go at the bottom, disappearing to the right. Dean followed her into a long tiled hall, turning into an archway as she did, then stopping short on a narrow cement ledge, suddenly in the darkness.
When his eyes adjusted, he saw he was in a subway tunnel. There were lights every fifty feet or so and a flood of white maybe two hundred yards on his right.
“Come on!” yelled Lia.
Dean took two steps, then watched her jump off the ledge. His heart nearly stopped.
“It’ll be faster on the tracks,” she explained. “Come on! Come!”
Dean froze. All he could think of was horror stories about people getting run over after falling onto train tracks or frying when they touched the third rail.
“Charlie Dean, get that lovely butt of yours in gear!” yelled Lia, turning back and seeing him frozen. “Don’t be a sissy wimp.”
“Sexist pig,” he answered — but only in a mutter; he was suddenly out of breath.
Dean crouched.
Shit, if she could do it, so could he.
Unless there was a train coming.
He checked, saw nothing.
Still short of breath, Dean jumped down. He landed in a crouch and tumbled over, his face hitting something hard and cold.
It was the rail. It seemed to be humming.
Sure that a train was coming, he jumped to his feet and ran in Lia’s direction. Bullets whizzed by him — two Russians had just burst out into the tunnel.
Fortunately, they didn’t have a good angle from the ledge. By the time they got down on the tracks, Dean had reached the flood of light — a station on the outskirts of the city.
Lia had already climbed on the platform. She reached down and grabbed Dean’s hand, helping him upward as the Russians fired again.
A half-dozen people stood on the platform, their faces a study in disbelief. Lia and Dean began running
