Armageddon

And then the plane sagged left. Something popped in Starship’s ear. A red emergency light blinked, and as Starship reached his hand to the screen control, a cold curtain of darkness descended around him and he fell unconscious.

ZEN SHUT DOWN THE FLIGHTHAWK ENGINES AND BEGAN cycling fuel into Hawk One, replacing what they had used to get off the runway.

“Indy was hit,” Brea

Zen felt his throat tighten. Trying to take off had been foolhardy, a ridiculous gamble. He was responsible for the men who’d been in that plane.

He glanced at the instrument screen on his left—he was using the auxiliary controls, since there hadn’t been time even to get his helmet—double-checking that he had enough fuel to launch.

“Ready to launch Hawk One in sixty seconds,” he told Brea

WHEN STARSHIP OPENED HIS EYES, HE WAS AT THE STICK of an F-15E. The altimeter ladder in his heads-up display showed that he had just notched up over forty thousand feet, and he was still climbing, winging upward like an angel called to heaven. The blue void of the atmosphere thi

“I can’t go this high,” said Starship. “Not in a Strike Eagle.”

With that thought, the blackness turned red and he felt his body twisting hard against his restraints. His arm smacked against something hard and he heard a scream coming from the middle of his chest.

“I got to get the hell out of here,” said Starship, and by instinct he reached for the ejection handle, but he couldn’t find it. He managed to get his head down and look, then realized he couldn’t eject—they were too low, too low—

No, they were on the ground, and the seats hadn’t been properly prepared besides.

He saw one of the emergency lights blinking on a panel and realized they had crash-landed at the end of the runway.

“Out, out, out!” he yelled, and started to jump from his station. He couldn’t move and for a moment he despaired, thought he’d been crippled like Zen.

He’d kill himself before he lived like that, as much as he admired the older pilot.

And then he realized he was still buckled into his seat. A wave of relief powered into his legs and arms as he threw off the restraints, bolted upright, and started for the exit. He remembered Kick, turned and saw that he was still back in his seat. Starship shook him, then when he didn’t respond reached down and unsnapped the buckles, helped him up—more like picked him up—and dragged him behind him to the hatchway. The motor that worked the ladder growled as the lower door started to open. Something in the mechanism snapped and it stopped after moving only an inch or so. Starship pounded on the control, but it didn’t move. He swung around and tried kicking at the hatchway, first gently and then with all his weight, but nothing budged.

“Upstairs,” he told Kick, who was crouched over where he’d left him.

Starship grabbed his friend and tried pushing him up the ladder which led to the flight deck, but Kick was so out of it that he finally draped him over his side and back and pulled him up with him, crawling onto the rear of the long cockpit area. “Major Alou! Merce! Merce!” he yelled to Alou.

The pilot sat at his station, head slumped over, hand on the throttle slide. As Starship came close, he saw that the front wind panel and some of the aircraft structure around it had been shattered. A piece of metal twice the size of Starship’s hand had embedded itself in the side of Alou’s head. Blood covered everything around the pilot.

“We got to get the hell out of here,” he told Kick. He started to go back down, thinking they could use the emergency hatchways at the forward part of the Flighthawk compartment. But then he realized it would be quicker to use the emergency roof hatches above the ejection seats, which could be blown out by the computer or by hand.

He squeezed past the center console, trying not to look at Alou. The consoles were still lit.

Starship got up on the seat, balancing awkwardly as he struggled with the hatchway. He fumbled with the large red bar that had to be pushed back to override the computer’s emergency system and access the controls directly. Once that was out of the way, he hit the thick, square button at the top of the panel, which blew all of the upper hatchways off at once.

“Up we go, up we go!” he yelled to Kick.

He put his head out of the hatchway, breathing a whiff of the hot, humid jungle air. A machine-gun started to fire in the distance.

Starship ducked back down. Maybe it would be better to stay in the plane, where at least there was a modicum of cover. But the Megafortress would be a target for whomever was attacking; he turned and yelled at Kick, who still hadn’t moved off the deck.

“Yo, Kick boy, time to get the hell out of here,” he yelled to his companion. Once again he draped the other pilot across his back, wobbling as he snaked around and then up through the hatchway. A green arm appeared over the black skin of the Megafortress as Starship pulled upward. His heart nearly leapt from his chest before he realized it was one of the Special Forces soldiers.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Starship yelled, more to himself than the soldier or Kick. More arms appeared around him. He resisted as they started to push him toward the ground, then realized they had him; he slipped into the arms of a burly Special Forces sergeant, who immediately pushed him down and in the same motion whirled and began firing at something in the jungle fifty yards away.

Southeastern Brunei

Exact location and time unknown

Every bone in his body felt as if it had been broken, and every muscle felt as if it had been twisted and bent and rearranged. But for Mack, the worst thing was the horrible taste in his mouth, which for some reason just wouldn’t leave him, not even after he gulped water from the nearby stream. He spit, he dunked his head, he stuffed the top of his flightsuit into his mouth—it stubbornly remained.

Mack started walking downstream, along the side of the stream opposite the one he had fallen down on. Within a few minutes he heard the rush of a waterfall. He climbed hand over hand down a scramble of rocks and dirt, descending nearly fifty feet before the ground leveled out in a bog. The only way through was over a jumble of felled trees. As he reached a run of boulders he finally caught sight of the waterfall, a spectacular spray that cascaded over a nearly sheer cliff. Mack, never much of a nature admirer, stared at the spray as it came off the flow, awed by it.

The bugs prompted him to move on. He threaded his way through jungle fronds, the stalks and leaves getting thicker and thicker. Finally he thought he might have to turn back and tried rushing ahead like a bull, crashing and struggling until he hit a clearing. Mack collapsed, resting for a few minutes; when he got up he saw that he had come out on a path.

He took it to the left, and within ten minutes heard voices in the distance. He froze, then moved off the trail, hiding as he tried to make out the sounds. They seemed to be kids, which meant he must be near a village; his best bet would be to go there and ask to be taken to the police station, where he could explain who he was.

As he took a step back on the trail, something crashed behind him; Mack spun just in time to see the back of some sort of animal disappearing into the vegetation.

When he turned around again, he found his way blocked by a short, squat man holding a large machine-gun in his beefy hands.