On the other hand, the transmissions on the emergency or guard band should have made it clear that the downed airmen were American.

Unless, of course, the captain suspected a trick.

“Now don’t you go screwing things up, Bastian,” added Storm. “Don’t use your weapons on the Chinese, as tempting as it may be. Don’t even power them up.”

“What do you think, I’m going to crank open a window and take potshots at them with my Beretta?”

“I wouldn’t put it past you.”

48

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Dog snorted. All this time fighting together, and Storm was still a jerk.

“I’m going to have to go south real soon if I’m going to make that tanker,” Dog said. “Can you handle the pickup?”

“Go. We have the situation under control.”

Under other circumstances, Dog would have flown over the raft, dipping his wings to wish his men luck and let them know he was still thinking about them. But he didn’t want to press his luck with the plane.

As he found his course southward, he reached into a pocket on the leg of his speed jeans, fishing for a small pillbox he kept there.

He rarely resorted to “go” pills—amphetamines—to keep himself alert. He didn’t like the way they seemed to scratch his skin and eyes from the inside. More than that, he didn’t like the idea of them. But there was just no getting around them now. The long mission and the physical demands of flying the Megafortress without the computer or human assistance had left him drained. He worked up some saliva, then slipped a pill into his mouth and swallowed.

It tasted like acid going down.

“Dreamland Command, I’m heading south,” he told Major Catsman. “See if you can get the tanker to fly a little farther north, would you?”

II

Lost and Not Found

Indian Ocean,

off the Indian coast

Time unknown

IT HAPPENED SO GRADUALLY THAT ZEN DIDN’T NOTICE THE

line he crossed. One unending moment he was drifting in a kaleidoscope of shapes, thoughts, and emotions; the next, he was fully conscious, floating neck high in the Indian Ocean.

And very, very cold.

He glanced around, looking for his wife Breanna. They’d gone out of the plane together, hugging each other as they jumped through the hole left by one of the ejection seats in the Flighthawk bay of the stricken Megafortress. Eight people had been aboard the plane; there were only six ejection seats. As the senior members of the crew, they had the others bail first, then followed the old-fashioned way.

Ejection seats had been invented to get crew members away from the jet as quickly and safely as possible, before they could be smacked by the fuselage or sucked into a jet engine.

While certain aircraft were designed to be good jumping plat-forms, with the parachutists shielded from deadly wind sheers and vortices, the Megafortress was not among them. Though Zen and Breanna had been holding each other as they jumped, the wind had quickly torn them apart.

Zen had smacked his head and back against the fuselage, then rebounded down past Breanna. He’d tried to arc his upper body as a skydiver would. But instead of flying smoothly through the air, he began twisting around, spinning on both axes as if he were a jack tossed up at the start of a child’s 52

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

game. He’d forced his arms apart to slow his spin, then pulled the ripcord for his parachute and felt an incredibly hard tug against his crotch. But the chute had opened and then he fell at a much slower speed.

Sometime later—it could have been seconds or hours—he’d seen Breanna’s parachute unfold about two miles away.

His mind, tossed by the wind and jarred by the collision with the plane, suddenly cleared. He began shifting his weight and steering the chute toward his wife, flying the parachute in her direction.

A skilled parachutist would have had little trouble getting to her. But he had not done a lot of practice jumps before the aircraft accident that left him paralyzed, and in the time since, done only four, all qualifying jumps under much easier conditions.

Still, he had managed to get within a few hundred yards of Breanna before they hit the water.

The water felt like concrete. Zen hit at an angle, not quite sideways but not erect either. There wasn’t much of a wind, and he had no trouble getting out of the harness. As a paraplegic, his everyday existence had come to depend on a great deal of upper body strength, and he was an excellent swimmer, so he had no trouble squaring himself away. The small raft that was part of his survival gear bobbed up nearby, but rather than getting in, he’d let it trail as he swam in the direction of Breanna.

She wasn’t where he’d thought she would be. Her chute had been released but he couldn’t see her. He felt as if he’d been hit in the stomach with an iron bar.

As calmly as he could manage, he had turned around and around, looking, then began swimming against the slight current and wind, figuring the chute would have been pulled toward him quicker than Breanna had.

Finally, he’d seen something bobbing up and down about twenty yards to his right. It was Breanna’s raft. But she wasn’t in it.

She was floating nearby, held upright by her horseshoe 53

RETRIBUTION

lifesaver, upright, breathing, but out of it. He’d gotten her into her raft, but then was so exhausted that he pulled himself up on the narrow rubber gunwale and rested. He heard a thunderous roar that gave way to music—an old song by Spinal Tap, he thought—and then he slipped into a place where time had no meaning. The next thing he knew, he found himself here, alone in the water.

How long ago had that been?

His watch had been crushed during the fall from the plane.

He stared at the digits, stuck on the time he’d hit the airplane: 7:15 a.m.

The sun was now almost directly overhead, which meant it was either a little before or a little after noon—he wasn’t sure which, since he didn’t know which way was east or west.

Five hours in the water. Pretty long, even in the relatively warm Indian Ocean.

He reached to his vest for his emergency radio. It wasn’t there. Had he taken it out earlier? He had the vaguest memory of doing so—but was it a genuine memory or a dream?

A nightmare.

Was this real?

Breanna would have one. Bree—

Where was she? He didn’t see her.

Where was she?

“Bree!”

His voice sounded shallow and hoarse in his ears.

“Yo, Bree! Where are ya, hon?”

He waited, expecting to hear her snap back with something like, Right behind you, wise guy.

But she didn’t.

He thought he heard her behind him and spun around.

Nothing.

Not only was his radio gone—so was his life raft. He didn’t remember detaching it. His head was pounding. He felt dizzy.

Zen turned slowly in the water, positive he’d seen something out of the corner of his eye. He finally spotted something 54

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in the distance: land or a ship, or even a bank of clouds; he was too far off to tell. He began paddling toward it.

After about fifteen minutes he realized it was land. He also realized the current would help him get to it.

“Bree!” he shouted, looking around. “Bree!”

He paddled harder. After an hour or so his arms began to seize. He no longer had the strength to swim, and simply floated with the tide. His voice had become too weak to do more than whisper. He barely had enough strength, in fact, to resist the creeping sense of despair lapping at his shoulders.

Diego Garcia

1600, 15 January 1998

DOG WATCHED THE TANKER SET DOWN ON DIEGO GARCIA’S

long runway, turning slowly in the air above the island as he waited for his turn to land. It had taken his damaged plane just under eight hours to reach Diego Garcia, more than twice what it had taken to fly north.