Piranha

“The techs said Kensit was going to shoot something down. We have to figure out what and how he’s going to do it.”

“Well, it looks like the self-destruct is an independent system,” Eric said. “Maybe we can see what Kensit is doing?” He moved over to where Juan had told him he’d seen Kensit’s remote workstation.

Juan shook his head. “We already tried that. Kensit locked us out.”

“Can you describe what the techs did?”

“I don’t have to,” Juan said, and waved Trono over. “Show him your recording.”

Trono played back the video. Within a minute, Eric stopped him and tapped on the keyboard. The blank screen suddenly came to life, rewinding to show Kensit speaking again, but this time in reverse.

Juan gripped Eric’s shoulder. “Nice work.”

“I noticed in Trono’s recording that the tech seemed to press a PLAY button on the keyboard,” Eric said. “It only stands to reason that there would be other recording commands. Given our assumption that Kensit could watch just one location at a time, it’s logical that he would have built in a feature to record everything he was watching so that he could go back and see it again in case he missed something in real time. We may not be able to see what Sentinel is watching now, but we can see what it has watched in the past.”

“It’s better than nothing. Keep going back until we see something besides us.”

Eric sped up the reverse. It ran through shots of the PIG fighting with the Ratel, Linda and the team up on the hill overlooking the cement plant, the helicopter landing, and so on. Then he slowed when it switched to a shot of a plane framed against a brilliant blue sky.

Juan’s blood went cold. The white and blue 747 was instantly recognizable as soon as he saw UNITED STATES OF AMERICA emblazoned on its fuselage.

He grabbed Trono’s phone and sprinted for the exit tu

He didn’t wait for a response. He was nearly to the other end of the tu

He had a yacht to sink.

Kensit was shaken by the invasion of the cave and his continuing inability to get in touch with anyone at the facility, including Bazin, but he had a mission to complete. At least he’d retaken control of Sentinel—that is, until it self-destructed in less than thirty minutes. But once Brian Washburn was vice president, he would have a powerful ally in the government to protect him while he built Sentinel 2.

Unbeknownst to the ground controllers at Tyndall, he had been commanding the QF-16 drones for an hour, with the two ma

He disabled the video and data feeds from all six drones to Tyndall. He wished he could see the operators’ faces at losing their co

Surely the controllers were contacting the fighter pilots now, who would be telling them that they saw no change in the flight pattern, that it must be a communication malfunction.

Kensit took manual control of Quail 6, the drone closest to the F-15 on the left. Quail 6 suddenly banked left and rolled into the nose of the F-15, which sheared it off. The QF-16 drone exploded in a fireball as its external fuel tank ignited, catching the F-15 in the blast and blowing it apart as well. The pilot inside never had a chance.

Kensit quickly switched control to Quail 5 on the other side of the formation. He attempted the same maneuver, but this F-15 pilot was more alert. He loosed a volley from his M61 Vulcan ca

Quail 5 yawed to the right, catching the tip of the F-15’s wing as it tried to bank away. The wings of both the drone and the F-15 snapped off, and they began to break up as fire streamed from their tanks. The pilot punched out, and his ejection seat disappeared from Kensit’s view.

Kensit breathed a sigh of relief after the most difficult part of the mission was over. If one of the F-15s had gotten away, it could have brought down the rest of the drones with missiles. Now there were no fighters close enough to reach the drones before they intercepted the vice president’s plane.

The three drones left were plenty to do the job. Even one should be enough to destroy the unarmed 747.

Pleased with himself, Kensit took another gulp of Red Bull and set the course for the three autopilots, and, with afterburners lit, sent the drones to their doom at greater than the speed of sound.

—

Thanks to a spare set of fatigues on the helicopter, Juan was out of his wetsuit by the time he, Linda, and Hali reached the Oregon. Juan had briefed Max and Murph during the flight in. The ship was ready to depart as soon as the chopper landed. Then he’d made a call to Langston Overholt to warn him about what he’d seen on Sentinel’s screen.

They dashed to the op center, and Juan had barely taken his place in the Kirk Chair when he ordered Linda to set a course for Kensit’s last-known location, a spot northwest of Haiti that was over a hundred miles from their current position. Based on the coordinates from Trono’s phone recording, it looked like the yacht had been traveling east. But since Kensit knew Sentinel had been compromised and they could see his yacht’s position from its co

Juan glanced back at Max and gri

“She’s champing at the bit,” Max replied.

“Then give me all she’s got.”

“Flank speed, aye,” he replied, and the magnetohydrodynamic engines spun up to full power, gushing jets of water behind them as the Oregon shot out of the Bahia de Grand Pierre.

“Wepps,” he said, calling Murph by the nickname for the weapons station. “How long until we’re in Exocet range?”

“At present speed, it’ll be at least forty minutes. If we can’t get an exact coordinate from Eric, we’ll have to be even closer to make a positive ID on the yacht.”

“Hali, get Eric on the line. I want to know if he has any more intel for us. Then, while we’re talking, call Langston Overholt and let me know when you’ve got him.”

Eric had previously established communications with them through the Oz cave’s landline and his voice issued from the op center’s speakers. “This thing is incredible.”

“Man, you have all the fun,” Murph said.

“I could spend weeks studying the technology.”

Juan looked at the ship’s chronometer. “You’ve actually got twenty-three minutes left, so give us the highlights.”

“Right. Okay, we’ve been able to establish Kensit’s location, but we’ll only have that as long as we’re in here and Sentinel is co

“He turned northwest,” Murph said. “We won’t be there for fifty minutes.”

“That’s a big problem,” Eric said.