Nerve Center

There had been rumors before the showdown that Lanzas possessed two atomic weapons. The admirals fortunately did not believe the rumors, or the negotiations might have been considerably more difficult. They considered that the woman colonel was like all women, a contemptible temptress ready to use her tongue in any way possible—something several of them could personally verify. Brazil did not have its own nuclear program, and even her wealth could not purchase a bomb from another country. Besides, who would be so unpatriotic as to bomb their own country?

But in actual fact Minerva Lanzas did possess two devices, though in some ways they were as impotent as the admirals’ personal equipment.

Designed during a joint-service project with a renegade Canadian weapons engineer several years before, the warheads were to have been fired by a massive artillery device. The gun, had the design worked, would have propelled them roughly twenty miles. About as long as a desk, with the diameter of a bloated wastepaper basket, they had small payloads that were only a third as powerful as the primitive weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The design was relatively primitive—a focused detonation of high explosives propelled a seed nugget of fission material into a small bowl shaped of plutonium at a speed and temperature just high enough to start a chain reaction.

The project itself was an utter failure. The artillery piece proved much more likely to shatter than launch even a dummy shell. The computer simulations of the warhead showed its yield would be very “dirty,” with the long-lasting radiation likely to spread precariously close to the firing position. And finally, Brazil had never been able to obtain the plutonium the weapon’s final design called for.

Lanzas had been assigned as a monitor for the project; her reports lambasted it. But when the government abandoned the initiative, she acquired several of the early shells with their high-tech explosives and trigger mechanisms through blackmail, bribery, and in one case, murder.

Her wealth was not so great that she could obtain weapons-grade plutonium. But she could find uranium, which not so coincidentally had been the subject of one of the earlier designs. Shaping the radioactive metal was expensive and dangerous, but in the end the only thing that shocked her was how small the radioactive pellets were.

The Navy adventure had interrupted her efforts to adapt the warheads for practical use as missiles. And while she had arranged for two top weapons engineers to follow her here within the next few days, she now faced an even greater problem—even if she managed to scrounge material for a missile chassis, she lacked a suitable plane to launch the missiles from.

Minerva tucked her hands into her leather jacket and surveyed the packed dirt strip. Ten bulldozers—”borrowed” from a rancher nearly fifty miles away—had carved an additional three hundred meters out of the rocky soil, making the strip just long enough to comfortably land her Hawker Siddeley HS 748, an ancient twin turboprop known to the Brazilian Air Force as a C-91. The sturdy but far from glamorous transport was now the centerpiece of her command. In fact, it was her only plane.

Despair curled around her like a snake, squeezing the breath from her lungs. Her money was nearly gone; she had no influence beyond this small strip. When she had arrived, she had hoped for revenge, but as the days dragged on it became increasingly clear that there would be no opportunity for it. When the strip was finished, she might—might—be lucky to host a visiting KC-130H and an occasional squadron of F-5’s, or Tucanos, as they rotated north to patrol the Venezuelan-Colombia frontier every third or fourth month. Even that would only happen if catastrophe struck Boa Vista, several hundred miles away.

She told herself not to despair. Fate would deliver her an opportunity, just as it had in the past. She would shape her bombs into something useful; she would find a way to use her charms and the last of her money. Fortune would send her a chance, and she would make the most of it.

At worst, she would have revenge.

Aboard Hawkmother

Over Pacific Ocean

19 February, 1302 local

MADRONE PUSHED HIS BACK GENTLY AGAINST THE SEAT, his head rising with the flow of air into his lungs. Slow, slow—he pushed everything into the breath, resisting the temptation to concentrate on the tickling sensation at the corner of his temples. He could hear the rain in the distance. Thick trunks of trees appeared before him, materializing from the fog. His lungs rose to the top of his chest, pushing him against the restraint straps. He had to hold his back perfectly erect, his boots flat on the floor.

In.

The storm drenched him with wet, sticky water. A torrent ran down the back of his hair to his neck to his shoulders, sizzling along the metal of his spine.

They were on the course he had plotted, ru

He needed to find a quiet airfield, a place big enough so he could land Hawkmother, but not quite so big that they would ask a lot of questions.

They would always ask questions. They were after him. They hated him.

Madrone forced himself back to the cockpit of the Boeing. He could land—he saw the procedure on his right, felt the way it would feel in his brain.

Find an airport now. The computer held a list.

They would use the identifier beacon to track him. He could turn it off by cutting its power.

Where was it, though? Beneath his left arm somewhere. The 777 suddenly lurched to the left. Madrone realized he had done that with his inattention. He imagined himself in flight again, felt his brain floating with Hawkmother. The plane leveled out, pushing its wings level.

The rods of the interface that helped him work the controls spread around him, an infinite series of handles co

He looked upward. He could see through the roof, though the rain did not fall here.

What was this metaphor? It had risen entirely unbidden.

The testing tower at Glass Mountain, where he’d been assigned when Christina was born. The place where they’d poisoned him.

Lightning crashed in the distance. Madrone turned his gaze slightly right, remembered his idea of the brain as separate rooms. He closed this one, put himself into the Flighthawks.

Less than an hour’s worth of fuel.

He turned his gaze left, then stepped back into the Boeing’s cockpit.

Two hours more fuel.

Refuel the Flighthawks. Then land, fuel the Boeing, take off feed the robots.

Yes.

Pain shot from one side of his head to the other. His skull snapped upward, shoved up by a tremendous force at the base. Breathe, he reminded himself.

He couldn’t. A panel with his vital signs appeared before his eyes. The green line of an electrocardiogram waved in front of him, flashed into a snake.

Pain enveloped him. The Boeing lurched toward the waves. Warnings sounded—they were very close to the water.

A hundred feet. Fifty.

Kevin. Kevin, I’m here. I believe in you.

The dark woman emerged from the forest. Her eyes were dark brown, the same color as her hair, pulled back from her face and flowing over her shoulders. Her bronze breasts swayed slightly as she walked toward him, naked in the light, misty rain.