Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
- Flashback -
One hundred kilometers below and nearly two hundred away, the shore of the
Beaufort Sea didn't look much like the common image of the arctic: Summer was
far advanced in the Northern Hemisphere, and a pale green spread across the
land, shading here and there to the darker tones of grass. Life had a tenacious
hold, leaving only an occasional peninsula or mountain range gray and bone.
Captain Allison Parker, USAF, shifted as far as the restraint harness would
permit, trying to get the best view she could over the pilot's shoulder. During
the greater part of a mission, she had a much better view than any of the
"truck-drivers," but she never tired of looking out, and when the view was the
hardest to obtain, it became the most desirable. Angus Quiller, the pilot,
leaned forward, all his attention on the retrofire readout. Angus was a nice
guy, but he didn't waste time looking out. Like many pilots ч and some mission
specialists ч he had accepted his environment without much continuing wonder.
But Allison had always been the type to look out windows. When she was very
young, her father had taken her flying. She could never decide what would be the
most fun: to look out the windows at the ground-or to learn to fly. Until she
was old enough to get her own license she had settled for looking at the ground.
Later she discovered that without combat aircraft experience she would never
pilot the machines that went as high as she wanted to go. So again she had
settled for a job that would let her look out the windows. Sometimes she thought
the electronics, the geography, the espionage angles of her job were all
unimportant compared to the pleasure that came from simply looking down at the
world as it really is.
"My compliments to your autopilot, Fred. That burn puts us right down the slot."
Angus never gave Fred Torres, the command pilot, any credit. It was always the
autopilot or ground control that was responsible for anything good that happened
when Fred was in charge. Torres grunted something similarly insulting, then said
to Allison, "Hope you're enjoying this. It's not often we fly this thing around
the block just for a pretty girl."
Allison grinned but didn't reply. What Fred said was true. Ordinarily a mission
was planned several weeks in advance and carried multiple tasks that kept it up
for three or four days. But this one had dragged the two-man crew off a weekend
leave and stuck them on the end of a flight that was an unscheduled quick look,
just fifteen orbits and back to Vandenberg. This was clearly a deep range,
global reconnaissance ч though Fred and Angus probably knew little more. Except
that the newspapers had been pretty grim the last few weeks.
The Beaufort Sea slid out of sight to the north. The sortie craft was in an
inverted, nose-down attitude that gave some specialists a sick stomach but that
just made Allison feel she was looking at the world pass by overhead. She hoped
that when the Air Force got its permanent recon platform, she would be stationed
there.
Fred Tomes ч or his autopilot, depending on your point of view ч slowly pitched
