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Hawk Three hit a patch of clear air and shot forward as if her engine had ingested pure oxygen. Zen steadied his left joystick, glancing at the vital signs projected at the lower edge of the visor. Everything was in the green.
His attention back on the main screen, he saw a dull shadow at the edge of the approaching valley, below a triple-dagger peak. It wasn’t warm enough to be a body, but since it was the first non-rock he’d seen, he switched from the IR to the optical feed.
“Computer, zoom in the dark object at the bottom of Hawk Three’s visual feed,” Zen directed.
The computer formed a box around the image, which seemed to burst into the middle of his view screen.
Ejection seat.
“Mark location,” said Jeff.
“What do you have?” Je
“Excuse me. Are you ma
“Raven, I have a piece of the seat, I think, from the Boeing,” Jeff said, technically speaking to Cheshire though they could all hear him. “I’ve marked it. I’ll continue to sweep the sector. Hawk Four is going to stay in the pattern we pla
“Raven Leader acknowledges,” said the pilot. Although Jeff was actually sitting a few feet below Cheshire on Raven’s lower deck, they had found it easier to communicate as if flying separate planes—which, of course, they were.
Zen pushed Hawk Three to the south, dropping her lower to scan close to a W-shaped ravine at the edge of a shallow mountain plateau. The severe storm shortened the IR’s range considerably, though from a technical viewpoint the fact that he was even receiving an image was impressive. Even light rain played havoc with conventional FUR systems.
As he neared the end of the ravine, a small shadow flickered into the upper right-hand corner of the view screen. He was by it before he could ask for a magnification; he pulled back on the Flighthawk’s joystick, then felt the plane fluttering in the heavy wind.
“Disco
“Raven, I need you closer to Three,” snapped Jeff. He started to pull up, but saw something in the IR screen at the right-hand corner. He pushed toward it, despite the disco
“Disco
Zen managed to nudge the U/MF upward at the last second, retaining the data flow. But the storm whipped hard against the small plane’s wings. It pushed up and then down, yawing like a gum wrapper tossed from a car. Even with the assistance of the computer and the vectoring nozzles, Zen couldn’t get it where he wanted.
“Raven, lower,” he demanded.
“You want me to park on Mount Whitney?” snapped Cheshire.
“That’s too high.” He just missed a ravine wall as he tried to slide Hawk Three back toward the ridge where he’d seen the image. Hawk Three hugged the hillside, her altimeter nudging six thousand feet—half the altitude Raven needed to clear the surrounding peaks. This was too damn low for comfort, and even C3 began doing a Bitchin’ Betty routine, warning that he was going too low and too slow. Still, the only way to get a good view was to practically crawl across the terrain. Hawk Three’s forward airspeed nudged below ninety knots.
Stall warning. But something hot, real hot, filled the screen. Above—up. Jeff throttled and pushed the stick, climbing the side of the ridge.
“Disco
“Nancy! Closer!”
“We’re trying, Zen!”
A red bar appeared at the bottom of his view screen as the computer continued counting down the disco
But there was a man there. Definitely a man—two men, huddled.
As Zen went to push the GPS marker, the screen blanked into gray fuzz. The default sequence knocked the view screen back to the optical view from Hawk Four, which had just begun knifing east.
A magenta disc filled the screen; Jeff felt suddenly weightless, sliding backward. The right side of his head imploded, pain shooting everywhere—he closed his eyes as he spun back, caught by some trick of fatigue or exertion or merely disorientation. He couldn’t see, couldn’t think. Streaks of rain and lightning flashed by him, close enough to feel but not see. The world split beneath him, the fault line ru
Then he felt his toes. He could actually feel his toes.
The sun turned mercury red, then steamed off, evaporating in a hiss that filled his helmet.
An ANTARES flashback because he’d been thinking of Kevin?
Or because he’d taken the first dose of drugs as soon as Bastian gave the okay to rejoin the program?
That was less than two hours ago. The screen was back to normal—it had to have been a weird anomaly caused by the lightning.
And fatigue. He was getting damn tired.
“Sorry, shit, I’m sorry. The storm is too fierce here,” said Cheshire somewhere outside of his helmet. She apologized for the wicked, disorienting turbulence shaking the plane.
Raven shuddered, trying desperately to fight off a wind shear that dropped her nearly two hundred feet in the blink of an eye. The plane pitched onto her side, just barely staying airborne.
“Zen, I can’t get any lower than this.”
“Hawk Leader acknowledges,” he snapped. “C3, reestablish contact with Hawk Three.”
“Attempting,” answered the voice module.
“Try harder,” he said, even though he realized the voice command would merely confuse the computer. He altered Hawk Four’s course to close on the area Three had been surveying, and was within ten miles when the computer finally managed to restore full bandwidth with the U/MF.
Fail-safe mode during disco
A fire burned at the left-hand side of his screen. Above to the right loomed a large object.
The Pave Low. Men nearby.
Jeff quickly marked the location.
“I have them,” he told Nancy. “Get me the SAR commander.”
“Coast Guard asset Colgate is already en route to our position, Hawk Commander,” answered Brea
“I have a flare on the ground. Two figures near a rock, three figures. Something else in the helicopter,” said Zen, nudging Hawk Four to get as close as possible in the storm. “Looks like the helicopter’s moving, sliding or something.”
“Opening Colgate cha
The helicopter seemed to hop in the screen.
“Colgate better get a move on,” said Zen. “And Bree, if you can get the crew on Guard, tell them to get the hell off that ice. The whole side of that hill is heading for the ravine.”
Sierra Nevada Mountains
19 February, 2018
POWDER SHOULDERED AGAINST THE HELICOPTER SPAR, then felt something shove down behind him. Metal crunched and crackled—he pushed around what had been a flight engineer’s seat, kneeling and then crawling into the cabin opening. Dalton lay beneath some blankets just a few feet away, his legs exposed.
They were moving. The earth rumbled beneath them.
“Yo, Captain, I’m go
Dalton groaned, or at least Powder thought he groaned. Powder pulled his combat knife against the belts, slashing and hacking as the back end of the helo slid around. His hand Hew free as he reached the last strap. He lost the knife but grabbed Dalton, pulling him backward as he pushed upward to get out of the fuselage. Dalton dragged behind, still attached somehow.