The Complete Mackenzie Collection Read online

  The birds lifted off.

  It went smoothly at first, with the lasers locking on to the drones just the way they were supposed to do. Caroline let out a long sigh of relief. She wasn’t naive enough to think there wouldn’t be any more problems, but at least that particular one seemed to have been solved. They ran through it time after time, at different speeds and ranges. Yates was smiling.

  On their return to base, Mad Cat was on Joe’s wing and Daffy was shadowing Bowie Wade, to provide visual verification during the flights. Caroline was still idly watching the monitor when suddenly Bowie’s target signal lit up. “Did he hit the switch?” she asked aloud.

  Yates and Adrian turned back to the monitor, their brows knit with puzzlement. Cal looked up from his own computer. Almost simultaneously, the computer started flashing the red firing signal and all hell broke loose on the radio and in the control room.

  “I’m hit, I’m hit!” Daffy screamed, and Bowie was yelling, “This goddamn thing just went off! What the hell happened?”

  “What’s the damage?” It was Joe’s voice, deep and cool, the authority in it overriding everything else.

  “No control, my hydraulics are shot to hell. I can’t hold it.” Daffy’s voice was tight.

  “Eject!” Bowie was yelling. “Stop screwing around, Daffy. You can’t make it!”

  The voices were stepping all over each other, and the control room was in an uproar. The pilots there were turned to stone, their faces frozen masks as they waited to see if one of their own made it back or was going to die right in front of them.

  Then Joe’s voice again, roaring. “Eject—eject—eject! Now!”

  The iron authority got through to Daffy as nothing else could have, and the computers registered a pilot ejection.

  “I see a chute!” It was Mad Cat. “He’s too low, he’s too low—”

  Then the radio exploded with noise as the F-22 augered into the desert floor.

  Chapter 9

  Joe was in a rage when he strode into the control room, but his rage was cold, ice-cold. His eyes were blue frost as he fastened them on the laser team. “What the hell happened?” he snapped. “The laser cannon isn’t even supposed to be activated, much less go off by itself.”

  They were all at a loss. The systems had checked out perfectly on Friday afternoon.

  “Well?” The single word was as sharp as the crack of a rifle. “I nearly lost a man because of it. An eighty-million-dollar aircraft is in tiny pieces all over a square mile of desert. Do any of you have any idea what the hell you’re doing?”

  The control room was dead silent as everyone waited for a reply, any reply. Yates said softly, “We don’t know what happened. But we’ll find out.”

  “You’re damn right you will. I want a report on this within thirty-six hours, your analysis of the problem and what you’ve done to fix it. All flights are scrubbed until I know what happened and I’m satisfied it won’t happen again.” He didn’t even glance at Caroline as he turned and walked out, still as furious as he had been when he had entered the room.

  Someone whistled softly through their teeth. Yates’ face was drawn. “We don’t sleep until we know,” he said simply.

  The loss of the aircraft was bad enough, but it was Daffy’s close call that had stretched Joe’s control perilously close to the snapping point. Daffy was lost to him anyway: he’d been too low when he ejected for his chute to adequately deploy, and he had landed too hard and too fast. He was hospitalized now with a concussion and a broken left leg.

  Bowie, badly shaken, swore he hadn’t touched either the lock-on switch or the trigger, and Joe believed him. Bowie was too good, too careful, but the damn laser cannon had somehow locked on and fired by itself, and Daffy had nearly died. The computers would tell them exactly what had happened, but what Joe wanted to know was why. The lasers weren’t supposed to be activated yet, but the one on Bowie’s bird, at least, had been. Had peak energy been used, the F-22 would have been destroyed in the air and Daffy wouldn’t have had any chance at all.

  Joe’s anger was intensified because the misfire was probably linked to the lock-on problem they’d had the Friday before. Caroline had said the problem was a simple break in the electrical signal and that it had been corrected, but obviously the trouble was much worse than that, and, far from being corrected, it had nearly killed a man. His fury included Caroline; she was part of the laser team, and his relationship with her had nothing to do with her responsibility as a team member. It wouldn’t win her any special favors or leniency.

  The laser team wouldn’t be the only one working late. The loss of an F-22 and the injury of a pilot weren’t things the Air Force took lightly. He had to make a report to the base commander and to General Ramey in the Pentagon. Moreover, they couldn’t afford this kind of trouble with the Night Wings, not with the vote for funding coming up shortly in Congress. He had to get the tests completed and the kinks worked out; one of the major pluses the project had going for it was that it was coming in on time and under budget, and delays meant money. If the Night Wings were over budget and not working properly when the vote was taken, the project would be in trouble. Funding depended on how well he did his job and demonstrated both the feasibility and dependability of the birds.

  His call on a secure line to General Ramey only underlined his concern. “You have to find out what happened with that laser cannon and make damn sure it never happens again,” the general said quietly, but those who knew Ramey knew that he meant what he said. “The vote is close, too close for us to afford this kind of snafu. What good is it to have the first feasible X-ray laser cannon if it’s uncontrollable? We have to have it, Joe. The Night Wing project is too important.”

  “Yes, sir,” Joe replied. Having flown the birds, he knew exactly how important they were. An aviator going up in a superior aircraft had a much better chance, all other things being equal, of coming back alive. The Night Wing birds gave a huge advantage to American pilots, and to Joe that meant American lives saved as well as wars won. He had already been in two wars and he was only thirty-five, and the world situation was even more volatile now than it had been when he had entered the Academy back during the Cold War. Brush-fire wars sprang up overnight, and all of them had the potential of dragging the rest of the world into the maw, while technology was exploding. Within five years the F-22s would merely be equal to other countries’ fighters, rather than vastly superior. The Night Wings would get that edge back—in a big way.

  “Is there any indication of sabotage?” the general asked.

  “There haven’t been any alarms triggered, but I’ve asked the security police for an analysis of the work patterns to see if there’s anything suspicious.”

  “What’s your gut feeling?” General Ramey had the utmost respect for Joe’s instincts.

  Joe paused. “A catastrophic situation developed without warning. We don’t know yet if it involves only that one laser cannon or if it’s common to all the aircraft, but it’s either a major problem with the system, or someone deliberately caused it. It’s fifty-fifty, so I can’t ignore the possibility of sabotage. I’ll know more after I get the computer analysis.”

  “Call me immediately when you know something.”

  “Yes, sir, I will.”

  Joe sat back in his chair, his eyes thoughtful. Sabotage. No one ever liked to consider it, but he couldn’t afford to discount it. Technology constantly created new techniques in spying and sabotage. The security police had gone to great lengths to keep Night Wing under wraps, which was why every entrance into every building, both doors and windows, contained sensors linked to a central computer that kept track or who was in each building at any given time, recording both entrance and exit times. Guards were also posted at the hangars at night and no one had approached the planes without proper clearance, but if the problem was sabotage, that meant only that the saboteur had the required security clearance.

  If he were lucky, the laser team would find the problem