Read Online Arctic Gold by Stephen Coonts - Free Book Online Page B

he asked Lia. A simple extortion? Or something more?
I don’t know, Lia said. She looked at Llewellyn as he joined them. How about it, Lew? Was that random, or were they after us?
Hard to tell, Llewellyn replied. Probably
random
But you never can tell in this game, Lia said, completing the thought. Thanks for coming to our rescue.
Llewellyn grinned at them. The new kid here was doing pretty well on his own. You did exactly right, son. The Russkies respect authority. Step on their toes until they apologize. If you throw your weight around, chances are they’ll cave.
Yeah, Lia said. Either they cave or they’ll shoot you. She seemed to sag a bit. Where are our staterooms?
I’ll show you. But don’t get too comfortable. The word from the Art Room is you’ll be on the move again soon.
Akulinin leaned against the ship railing and studied the vista ashore. A more depressing location for a cruise ship dock would be difficult to imagine. The facility was brightly lit, but hemmed in by ancient apartment buildings, close huddled and clotted with shadows, and industrial complexes, rusted, decrepit, and cloaked in night.
In the parking lot, two men approached the rental car Akulinin had acquired that afternoonpart of Mercutio cleanup team. They would drive the vehicle someplace safe and get rid of the incriminating evidenceweapons and clothinghidden inside.
He looked to the right, toward the southeast. The warehouse district they’d just escaped from lay just beyond the port security fence.
Can I help with the post- op cleanup? Akulinin asked. He was still thinking about the equipment he’d left behind. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
We’ll take care of it, Llewellyn told him. I need to
take you two down to the communications center. They need some data back at the Puzzle Palace.
Does it have to be tonight, Lew? Lia said. I’m dead on my feet.
Tonight, Lia. There’ll be time for rest later. He turned and led them toward a companionway ladder descending into the ship.
Ghost Blue
Approaching Waypoint Tango Bravo
0119 hours
Major Delallo stuffed his nose down and raced toward the surface of the sea. He only had one engine, but he had it wide open and was using gravity all he dared. Down he went into the gloomy night, trying to get against the surface of the sea, where he would find some measure of safety from his pursuers. He just might make it. He allowed himself that much hope, at any rate.
A worrisome thump began sounding from somewhere aft, causing the aircraft to shudder and buck. He’d been supersonic when he took the missile. Now, as the thumping became louder and the instrument panel jiggled and danced, he automatically retared the throttle and let his speed bleed off as he tried to assess the damage to his mount. The missile detonation had peppered the Raptor with shrapnel, knocked out one engine, and played merry hell with his avionics. The slipstream might be peeling back a piece of the aircraft fuselage, and that might make for a bright, easy target on hostile radars.
He loved the Raptor, an astonishing piece of advanced aircraft engineering. Its one weakness, though, was a variation on the Murphy Effect. When things went wrong with the aircraft, everything
went wrong, and in the worst possible way.
In February of 2007, Delallo had been one of six pilots ferrying a flight of F-22s from Hickam Air Force Base to Kadena, Okinawa. The moment they’d crossed the international date line at the 180th meridian, the computers on all six aircraft had crashed, taking out all navigational systems and most communications. It had been good weather and broad daylight, thank God, and the flight had managed to form up on their tankers and make it back to Hawaii. Forty- eight hours later, the problem had been fixed and the flight had continued, but the incident had been a nasty reminder of how complicated these systems were. The F-22 software ran to something like 1.7 million
lines of code, most of it concerned with data processing for the