But no one was listening.
“That’s the last of them,” Batman said, his voice heavy with relief. Tilly the crane had just unceremoniously released the last burning aircraft over the open water, her steel cable almost at a forty-five degree angle in the gale force winds. “How the hell they pulled this off, I’ll never understand. Get the chief engineer down there. I want to know how bad the deck is.”
“He’s on his way, Admiral,” Coyote answered. “We’ve lost two Hawkeyes and four helos, along with the Tomcat.”
“Then let the small boys know they’re going to have to pick up the slack in SAR,” Batman said. “The Hawkeyes have enough crews on board to do a hot crew swap.”
“If we can launch,” Coyote said.
Batman stared at him, cold fire shining in his eyes. “Those people didn’t just beat that fire for me not to be able to launch aircraft. You tell the chief engineer it’s a question of when and how — not if. One way or another, I want metal in the air in fifteen minutes.”
Pushed along by the giant hand of the wind at their backs, Tombstone and Lobo needed only a minute to find the beginning of the runway. It was marked by a circular turning area and a taxiway extending to the south. Without a word, Tombstone turned in that direction. His entire body felt bruised by the wind and rain; he was grateful that the ground was covered in some kind of crushed black rock rather than slick grass or, worse, mud. As it was he had to lean to the left at almost a thirty-degree angle to keep his balance, and his feet gouged sideways ruts in the rock with every step. He tried to keep the AK-47 protected by his body.
An enormous darkness loomed through the rain ahead. Tombstone found some bushes and crept along beside them, hunched over, until he was able to see that the dark shape was a mountain black and craggy. And at its base were several pairs of enormous sliding doors of what looked like galvanized metal. They were inset beneath a stony shelf in the side of the mountain, fronted by a tarmac apron that led to the taxiway. Hangars. Hangars, hidden from aerial surveillance by the mountain and a fringe of desperate-looking trees.
The hangar doors were all closed. How well-guarded were they? What would happen if he crept up for a little peak at —
He started when a hand tugged at his sleeve. He glanced back at Lobo, who pointed to the east. A pair of headlights was brightening the storm.
Lying flat on his belly beside the bushes with Lobo just behind him, Tombstone watched as a big dark sedan — not a military-style vehicle — approached the hangars. Its horn blasted once, and one of the hangar doors slid open. Bright light poured through the aperture, giving Tombstone a view of what lay within. His heart gave a rapid stutter.
CUAVs. Not like the manta. These were smaller, double-arrowhead-shaped. Like the one that had attacked him in Maryland.
And even in the narrow space he could see, there were dozens of them, stored on tall racks like private boats in a fancy dry dock. Dozens of them, waiting to go.
The sedan pulled just inside the hangar and stopped. An armed guard appeared from somewhere, and opened the back door. Another guard moved into view, escorting a third man. The third man was considerably taller than the others, and dressed in civilian attire. The guards hustled him into the backseat of the sedan. For an instant, just before the door slammed closed, Tombstone had a clear view of the man’s face.
It was Phillip McIntyre.
And of course, in his case, that meant protecting his lead’s ass. Any actual shooting would be executed only in conjunction with Neanderthal’s efforts, and at his direction; for the most part, Hot Rock was there as defender and nothing more.
The battle was surreal in the gray soup. Attention focused strictly on the video game screen of the HUD, with perhaps an occasional glance at some other instrument. This radar blip was Neanderthal; that one was a Flanker; that other one, an incoming missile. Far more Flanker blips than anything else.
Hot Rock kept his gaze focused on the instruments, and his hearing on Neanderthal’s signals radioed from the lead’s position ahead and below. Now and then, when so directed, Hot Rock triggered a missile. Like all the Vipers, he was carrying only two Sidewinders, because the heat-seekers became notoriously unreliable in extremely wet conditions. But he believed he might have contributed to the shooting down of a Flanker with one of his Sparrows. “Nice shot,” Two Tone said over ICS, “but don’t get wild now; remember your job.” Hot Rock felt relieved. It was good to have someone experienced tell you what to do.
With another part of his head Hot Rock kept track of other reports flashing over the air. Splash one, splash two, splash three Flankers. Then a Mayday. One American down. Another. Mayday. Mayday. Unimaginable to bail out in these weather conditions; what hope of surviving the trip down, far less being in the water?
Don’t think about that. Do your job. Fly, watch, fire. Follow the leader.
Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. Missile blips appearing unexpectedly on the radar screen, other blips disappearing. Vipers disappearing.
“The stealth bogey,” Hot Rock blurted over ICS. “Two Tone, that UAV they briefed us about, it’s here. It’s taking people out left and — ”
“Do your job, goddammit!” Two Tone snarled. “Stop trying to figure out — ”
The blip appeared and vanished from his HUD almost before it registered on his eye. At the same time, Neanderthal’s blip disappeared, too. There was a throbbing glow in the clouds, swiftly consumed by darkness.
“Neanderthal!” Hot Rock shouted. No response.
Then came Two Tone’s cry from the backseat: “Shit, Hot Rock, get us out of here! That thing’s gonna be after us next!”
But Hot Rock had noticed something. A pattern in the vanished Vipers. The UAV was cutting straight across the Americans, from east to west. Nothing fancy. Locating American aircraft and firing at them from very close range.
Hot Rock saw this, and once he did, it was his responsibility. He owned it. He had to do something about it.
“Shut up, Two Tone,” he said, and banked hard to the right. Now, instead of staring
And he saw it. Briefly, almost hallucinogenically, the UAV was there, swimming like a great sea creature through the sky. And Hot Rock remembered something from the briefing: Like American stealth aircraft, the UAVs had their engine exhausts located on top, where they could not be easily spotted by ground-based infrared detectors. But airborne sensors were a different matter….
“Fox One!” he cried, and triggered a Sidewinder. The missile hurtled off his left wingtip, unraveling a garland of smoke behind it as it went, and curved toward the bogey. Instantly, the bogey nosed over in a maneuver so abrupt it formed almost a right angle. Hot Rock couldn’t conceive of the G-forces involved… then realized the UAV was indifferent to G-forces. As long as its wings didn’t snap off, it was fine.
And it was turning toward him. That was the next thing Hot Rock saw before a raft of fast-moving clouds swept across his sight, and the manta disappeared.
Two Tone was howling from the backseat. Hot Rock felt an unnerving moment of doubt, of fear that once again he was screwing up, but of course it was too late to back out now. The manta was after him.
His mind skipped through bits of information the red-headed woman, Tomboy, had fed to the Vipers concerning this bogey. He already knew one thing: She’d been wrong that it depended on visual targeting data. Not in this weather. It had radar, too.
