“Bree! There’s a MiG closing from your left and two heat-seekers coming from behind.”

“Flares and Stinger,” said Breanna calmly.

The decoys shot out from the Megafortress as the air-to-air missiles sped toward it. The cascade of flares were too inviting a target for the antiquated missiles to ignore—both tucked downward, exploding more than a mile away.

Which left the MiG-29 that somehow managed to elude 362

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

everything else in the sky and was drawing a bead on their left flank.

“He’s taking a cannon run,” said Spiderman.

“Starship, how’s your fuel?”

“Two more minutes.”

“We don’t have two minutes,” said Breanna as the first slug from the MiG’s 30mm cannon began crashing into the fuselage.

“COMPUTER, MY CONTROL, HAWK FOUR,” SAID STARSHIP, and in a breath he was falling past the Megafortress. He tilted his wing slightly to the left, feeling his way, not seeing, blind in the dark night. Flashes of red sped overhead. He lifted himself and there was the enemy, dead-on in the middle of his screen.

“Now!” he yelled, and the black triangle hurling itself toward him turned golden orange. Starship flew through it, shuddering as debris rained in every direction. He climbed then circled back, looking for the Megafortress. As he turned he was jerked backward, away from his small plane.

Disoriented, he blinked—then saw the flames coming from the top of Baker-Baker Two in the screen.

“RADAR IS OFFLINE,” SPIDERMAN TOLD BREANNA.

“Least of our problems.”

“Thirty percent in engine two. We may lose her.”

“Fire control.”

“Fire control. Sounding warning.”

A klaxon began to sound in the aircraft. “Everybody, make sure your oxygen is on,” shouted Breanna over the automated warning.

The Megafortress had a system that flooded vulnerable areas of the aircraft to extinguish fires. It worked by denying the flames oxygen—which of course meant it would kill the crew as well.

“Do it,” she told the copilot.

SATAN’S TAIL

363

*

*

*

STARSHIP PUT HAWK FOUR INTO A PRESET TRAIL MANEUVER, pulled on his oxygen mask, then undid his restraints to check on Delaford.

“You really have to be tied in tight,” Starship told him, snapping and then snugging the restraints on his ejection seat.

“Thanks,” said Delaford. “We’re not going out, are we?”

“Nah, not today,” said Starship. He turned, then flew against the side of the seat as the Megafortress rolled hard on her right side.

The lights began to blink, indicating that the fire-suppression system had been activated. He pulled himself upright and slid in behind his controls as the Megafortress pitched forward. He tumbled against the bulkhead over the panel hard enough to rebound backward into the seat, and he lay there dazed for a moment, temporarily stunned.

Get your gear back on, dude. You’re coming undone. Mask is out and where the hell is your helmet?

“Screw yourself, Kick.”

You undid your mask. You can’t breathe right.

“Screw it.”

Come on.

Something or someone seemed to take hold of the mask and center it on his face. Starship had his helmet and cinched it—when had he put it on?

He fumbled with the restraint buckle on the left side of his seat; when it finally cinched, he went to connect the right and found it already closed. The aircraft pushed back, leveling off—then shot back down, its nose pitched nearly per-pendicular to the earth.

BREANNA SCRAMBLED TO COMPENSATE AS ENGINE FOUR WENT

offline. The radar housing had been smashed all to hell, there were holes in the wing, and at least some of the control surfaces were no longer attached to the aircraft.

“Hang with me, Spiderman,” she yelled.

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“I’m hanging.”

“We have engine one and engine three, that’s all we need,” she told him.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, though he didn’t sound convinced.

“I have the stick, I have the stick,” she told him. “We have to stay calm and straight.”

Not necessarily in that order either. Breanna managed to keep the aircraft from falling into a spin, but still had to struggle to quell the roller-coaster movements up and down, the plane riding the momentum toward the ocean. Each plunge got a little shallower and more controllable, and she finally managed to get the aircraft level. Pushing her shoulders back, she took a deep breath in celebration—then went back to work.

“First thing I want you to do,” she told Spiderman, “is get us a course to an airfield. See what the distance is to that place in India that the Ospreys used. That’s probably our best bet at this point. I’ll take stock of the damage. At some point we’ll see if we can bring engine four back online. Starship?”

“Sorry, Bree.”

“Wasn’t your fault—that MiG ducked our AMRAAM

somehow. But I think next time, we may test the old saying about discretion being the better part of valor.”

Breanna checked with the rest of the crew; no one had been hurt. The MiGs, meanwhile, had returned to Yemen—those that hadn’t been shot down. By their count, they had gunned down seven.

“Eight— Hawk Three got one more before it ran out of fuel. It did the honorable thing and blew itself up when it went dry,” said Starship, reviewing the computer file.

“Ark Royal is asking if we need assistance,” said Spiderman.

“Unless they want to add another four or five thousand feet to their landing deck, tell them thanks but no thanks,”

said Breanna.

SATAN’S TAIL

365

Aboard the Abner Read

0045

ACCORDING TO THE DREAMLAND PEOPLE, FOUR SURFACE-TO-surface missiles were coming at them. The problem was, the screens in the defensive weapons section said there were thirty.

Even the Abner Read’s gun control system couldn’t take them all out.

“Target the first wave,” said Storm.

“You’re going to have to trust what Wisconsin tells you,”

said Jennifer Gleason, standing up from her station. “They can use the infrared sensors and you can manually override the system to target the missiles one by one.”

“You’re damn sassy for a scientist.”

“And for someone who’s smart, you can be a real asshole.”

Overcome with anger, Storm nearly grabbed her.

“You know I’m right,” she added.

She was, wasn’t she?

“Do it!” Storm said. “Do what Gleason says. Get the Dreamland people to ID each missile as it’s incoming, and manually take it out. Eyes? Weapons? Peanut?”

“Aye, Captain, we’re on it.”

“I was wrong,” he said. “And she’s right.”

Northern Somalia

0050

GOD GUIDED HIS HAND AND THE ENEMY DEVIL FELL TO THE

deck, blood gurgling from his mouth. Ali spun around, following the other man, who was running through the hatch to the left. The man tripped and Ali leaped over him, running forward—there were two other men nearby, one with a gun at his belt. Ali slashed at him, striking so hard that his knife lodged deep in the man’s midsection. They fell together, crumpling against a table.

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The space filled with Ali’s men. Ali saw a sidearm and grabbed for it; the man began to fight back, and his companion came to his aid. But God was on the side of the true believers—Ali felt his strength moving in his arms, and he wrestled the pistol from the holster. Before he could use it, however, the man fell back, limp; the blood he’d lost had robbed him of fight.

“Captain! The bridge is this way!” shouted one of his men.

Ali jumped up. There were now so many of his men aboard that he had trouble squeezing onto the bridge.