Armageddon - Dale Brown

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straightened, then looked around the red-lit command area of his vessel. The space was barely ten by twenty feet, and every inch was utilized. Eight men and the captain worked here; another two were assigned to the rear compartment as weapons handlers to watch over the automated equipment and, if the need arose, to work the thirty-millimeter cannon.

      ‘A job well done,’ he told his men.

      The crew was well disciplined, and not one man looked up from his station or said the slightest word. This pleased Dazhou greatly.

      ‘We will return,’ he announced. ‘To your course, helm.’

      The vessel began picking up speed instantly, slipping into the morning mist that hugged the coastline. Dazhou returned to his station at the center of the deck, mindful that he fired but the opening salvo in a long, long war.

       ‘What Is Going on Here?’

       Off the coast of Brunei 8 October 1997, (local) 0523

      Mack Smith banked hard right, putting the A-37B Dragonfly at a right angle to the Megafortress’s radar. Had the radar been an older unit, he might have succeeded in confusing it. Pulse-Doppler radars had difficulty picking up returns from objects at a ninety-degree angle; many were the pilots who had managed to escape an enemy’s grip because of it. But the Megafortress unit wasn’t about to be fooled; the crewman aboard the EB-52 sang out loud and clear with his bearing and speed.

      Hallelujah, thought Mack to himself.

      It was probably the first time in his life that he actually wanted to be caught. Mack took a hard turn north and did a quick check of his instruments. The Cessna wasn’t a fancy beast, but it was sure and dependable, and the indicators showed she was in prime condition.

      ‘Dragon One, this is Jersey,’ said Breanna Stockard, who was aboard the EB-52. ‘Looks like we’re through with the low-altitude hunts. What’s your pleasure?’

      Mack checked his watch and fuel. ‘Let’s move out to sea and practice some sea surveillance,’ he answered. ‘That okay with Deci?’

      Deci Gordon was a Dreamland radar specialist who was aboard the EB-52 helping train Mack’s men.

      ‘Good for me,’ answered Deci. ‘Your people did very well on the low-altitude stuff. A-pluses all around.’

      He was being kind. The two pilots who had taken stints at the stick had flown decently. But the equipment operators tasked with finding Mack while he flew at low altitude around the nearby mountains had batted only about .300 – great in baseball, fatal in war.

      Mack knew that working the radar involved a heck of a lot more than hitting a few keys and jiggling some toggles, but his people had a long, long way to go before they would be competent enough to find a MiG hell-bent on nailing a real target.

      Two weeks before, Mack would have vented his frustration at the poor score, or at least let the crew aboard the EB-52 know that they had to step it up. He was learning, however, to be more laid back, or at least more selective with his criticism.

      He had to be. The two specialists aboard Jersey were the last two he had. The other two had quit.

      As Mack adjusted his course and started to climb through five thousand feet, he saw something flare in the right side of his windscreen. It took a moment for him to realize he was seeing a fire.

      ‘Jersey, this is Brunei Dragon One. I think I see a ship on fire. Stand by.’

      Mack gave the throttle a shove and turned in the direction of the flames. From this distance, the fire looked more like the sparkle of a gem, glittering red. The ship itself was a gray shadow around it.

      ‘Mack, we see it,’ said Breanna. ‘We’ll have GPS coordinates in a second.’

      ‘You got a Mayday or something?’ Mack asked Breanna.

      ‘Nothing.’

      Mack alerted his ground controller, who staffed a combat center at the International Airport control tower back in the capital. (As in many other smaller countries around the world, the International Airport or IAP handled military as well as civilian flights.) Besides calling out the navy and local harbor patrol, Mack told the controller to contact the Malaysian air force at Labuan. The small air station there – the only other air base besides Brunei IAP on the northern side of Borneo – operated a squadron of French-built Aerospatiale SA 316B Alouette IIIs for search and rescue.

      ‘We’ll stay in the area until rescue is underway, give ’em some hope, anyway,’ Mack added.

      Breanna reported that the ship had not answered any of their hails.

      ‘Roger that,’ said Mack. He was now within two miles of the ship, and could see that the vessel had settled low in the water. ‘I’m going to get close and see what I can see.’

      Low and slow was one thing the A-37B did really well. Mack decided to pop on his landing lights, not so much because it would help him see better, but because it would show survivors he was there and help was on the way. His speed notched down steadily until finally it seemed as if he were going backward.

      As he approached, it looked to him as if there were two ships on fire. He banked, hand gentle on the stick as he slipped around for another look.

      The ship had broken in half somewhere around the superstructure.

      Must’ve been one hell of an accident for it to blow up like that, thought Mack, sliding around for another pass.

      The Megafortress pilot had forgotten to tell the computer that the exercise was over, and so it kept blinking a warning at him that he was outside of the programmed flight area. It was nothing more than an annoyance, since the plane wouldn’t override the pilot’s commands, but the flash was driving Breanna crazy. Still, she avoided the temptation to turn it off herself, or even to bring it to his attention. In a few days she wasn’t going to be here to straighten him out; it was time to take the training wheels off.

      But boy, it bothered her.

      Finally, the pilot turned to her and announced: ‘I have a difficulty with the warning system.’

      ‘It just needs to be acknowledged. Tell the computer the exercise is over. You might check your course, as well,’ she added, noticing that he had allowed his heading to drift well to the west.

      ‘Right. Yes,’ said the pilot. He was in his late thirties, older than Breanna. Even so, he seemed nervous and jumpy; he didn’t have the been-there, done-that, I-remember-one-time-we-had-to-fly-backward-in-a-storm-with-one-engine calm most jocks pushing forty displayed. Not that he was a bad pilot; he just didn’t seem to have the hash marks his age implied.

      Something else bugged her. The crew was, well, quiet.

      In an American plane, certainly on a Dreamland crew, the specialists would be singing out, talking about contacts and the like. But the two men at the mission stations behind her on the flight deck were silent. Breanna’s copilot station allowed her to peek at their contact screens; she did so and saw that the men were refining their equipment and seemed to have a competent handle on things – they just didn’t talk about it.

      By now, Mack had completed a third orbit of the stricken vessel and reported that he saw no boats in the water. He switched to a different frequency and began talking to the harbor patrol, which had been alerted by their ground controller.

      ‘Captain, what do you think of this?’ asked Deci. ‘Hit that two scan, low resolution. I’m feeding it.’

      Enhanced by the computer,

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