that was wrong here.
A window popped up on Craig’s screen. In it, in full color and three
dimensions, was a robot.
“Ready, master,” the robot intoned.
“Ready for what?” he snapped. All his worker robots looked alike. Then he
saw the designation in the status line under the window. “Oh, the jammer!
Then turn it on!”
The robot nodded and winked out while Craig turned his attention back to
the warbot he was designing. But now he was smiling.
He had suspected all along that the dragon riders who flitted around the
edges of his realm had some kind of communications system. It was magic
rather than radio and it had taken a lot of work to discover just how it
worked. Once he knew, he had set his robots to work building jammers. Now
he had just cut his enemies’ communications link.
Maybe that will clear those damn dragons out of my airspace, he thought as
he went back to work on the warbot.
“Now go!”
Major Michael Francis Xavier Gilligan grunted and broke out of the holding
pattern. A quick check of the cockpit panels, a fast glance to the right
to make sure Smitty, his wingman, was still in position and he
concentrated on his descent. Five hundred feet wasn’t a lot of altitude
for a high-performance fighter in this kind of weather. A few seconds
inattention and you’d fly right into the water.
Bitch of a day to go flying, Gilligan thought to himself. Then he turned
his full attention to the job at hand.
Patrol Two looked down at the now-useless communications crystal and swore
luridly. Between the winds and the fog, the rider and dragon were
perilously close to being lost. And now this!
This, thought Patrol Two, is turning into one bitch of a day.
Sharp hunched over the operator’s shoulder, staring at the big screen as
if he was about to dive into it.
“Incoming aircraft!” one of the other operators sang out. Sharp jerked
erect and hurried to the man’s console.
“We got four, heading our way from the East.” The operator looked at the
screen again. “Probably those tricked-up Flankers.” He studied the radar
signature analysis. “Yeah, four Flankers incoming.”
“Are they after us or Eagle Flight?” Sharp demanded.
“They’re heading into the area Eagle Flight is going for. Uh oh!” The
operator spoke quickly into his mike. “The Soviets just lit up their air
intercept radars.”
“Are they after our guys?”
The operator studied the screen intently. “They’re headed in that
direction. No, wait a minute. I don’t think so. They seem to be after the
same targets we are. The IL-76 must have picked them up just after we
did.”
Ozzie Sharp scowled mightily at the screen. All of a sudden the air over
that God-forsaken patch of ocean was getting awfully crowded.
* * *
“Smitty, check your ten,” Gilligan called to his wingman. “Do you see
that?”
Off to their left and slightly below them, something dark was threading
its way through a canyon between two banks of clouds.
“What the hell is it?” Smitty demanded a few seconds later.
“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s doing a hundred knots and it keeps
ducking in and out of those clouds.”
Gilligan touch-keyed his mike to transmit the report, but there was
silence in the earphones.
He tried again. Still nothing. He switched radios. Nothing. He tried
different frequencies, he checked the circuit breakers, he ran the radio
checklist. Still nothing. He could get Smitty but that was all. Meanwhile
the thing appeared out of another cloud.
“Smitty, can you raise anyone?”
“Negative, sir.”
Gilligan considered for a minute. Whatever this jamming was it apparently
wasn’t strong enough to block him from talking to his wingman, but there
was no way to reach anyone else. It had been made crystal clear to him
that one way or another the information he collected had to get back.
“Smitty, have you been getting this on tape?”
“Yessir.”
“Then make sure you’ve got a good image and then split off. I’m going in
for a closer look.”
“The hell you say!”
“As soon as you’re sure you’ve got a good image, split off and get the