OPERATION SPOILED SPORT SOMEWHERE OVER BRAZIL

The converted 747–400 was cruising at twenty-eight thousand feet in clear skies. The pilot had been on the radio for the past hour talking with the Brazilian civil authorities and explaining that they had rudder difficulties and were circling while their flight engineer checked out their hydraulic systems. They were screaming bloody murder but what else could they do, allow an air cargo plane for an influential international company like Federal Express to crash because they couldn’t allow some extra time over their airspace?

Inside technicians were cursing and shouting at one another as they furiously worked on the system that wasn’t supposed to be fully operational for three more years. The megawatt-class, high-energy chemical oxygen iodine laser system had malfunctioned four different times that day, causing fires in two of those incidents.

Ryan was watching the fiasco develop alongside two of his six-man Delta team when an air force major tapped him on the shoulder.

“We have Conquistador on the horn; he’s asking for Night Rider One,” the major said over the noise in the cargo bay.

Ryan nodded and followed him. “Tell those monkeys they’re on,” he said to the Delta sergeant, indicating the laser technicians. “And remind them that American lives are at stake.”

Ryan entered a separate area that was closed off and quiet. He leaned over the radio operator’s ejection seat, careful to avoid the ejection handle looped at the top. He picked up a headset and pushed the button on the long cord.

“Conquistador, this is Night Rider actual, over.”

“Night Rider, we have bandits approaching our pos, are you tracking, over.”

Ryan leaned over and whispered to the satellite officer, a lieutenant colonel who was looking at a real-time infrared image downloaded from Boris and Natasha.

“We currently count fifty-four targets and ten craft. The information has already been fed to the targeting computer,” the lieutenant colonel said.

“Roger, Conquistador, we are tracking, over.”

“Start the music, Night Rider, they are in our laps. Operation Spoiled Sport is on! Execute, execute, execute!”

Ryan knew it was Will Mendenhall on the radio so he decided to chance it. “Conquistador, you find a safe location. I don’t trust this thing. Over.”

“Been warned already, Night Rider, just get the bad guys. Conquistador is beating feet. Out.”

Ryan nodded to the lieutenant colonel who was in charge of the operation and also that of targeting. His system relied on Boris and Natasha, whose infrared cameras locked onto the ring of balloon-carried heat emitters that circled the lagoon. Once that location and exact coordinates were fed into the targeting data, the KH-11 locked in on the individual heat sources of the men inside that target area or, more precisely, their body heat. The chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL) would use the reaction of chlorine gas with liquid basic hydrogen peroxide to produce electronically excited gas-phase oxygen molecules. The oxygen would then transfer its energy to iodine atoms, which would emit radiation at 1.315 microns, producing a beam that would cleanly slice through solid steel. Assuming it worked.

The lieutenant colonel alerted the laser technicians—who actually worked for Northrop-Grumman—to activate in thirty seconds. Then he casually adjusted the mirror based inside the open barrel to disperse fifty-four separate high-energy beams that would target even moving objects—the mirror would separate and bounce the one main beam and split it into the individual killing lasers—all in theory, of course.

“Stand by to initiate,” he said into his headset.

Ryan frowned as he watched the targets getting closer to the falls. “Stand by to initiate” usually meant “stand by with the fire extinguishers,” he thought, as he closed his eyes in silent prayer for his friends.

Outside of the command center, the power grid went to maximum as the main generators kicked in. They reached 100 percent power without exploding, at least this time. At the same time on the targeting screen, ten illuminated circles centered around each individual target on the surface of the lagoon.

Outside the 747, a large port spiraled open fifteen feet below the cockpit. The pilot closed a specially made blind that would protect them from the intense light that would escape the port just feet from where he and his copilot sat.

“Stand by, system at one hundred three percent power and targets are acquired. FIRE COIL!”

Jason Ryan flinched as nothing happened.

“Wasn’t there supposed to be a power surge about right now?” he shouted angrily.

Outside the soundproof cabin and in the cockpit, the pilot saw thirteen alarms all start flashing at once. The red blinking lights showed power loss in the 747’s main power systems. The four massive engines were powering down as if the pilot had slid the throttles back, and the nose of the giant 747–400 started dipping. The pilot immediately announced an emergency.

Ryan held onto one of the computer consoles and threw off his headset.

“Goddammit! We’re going to lose people down there!”

The lieutenant colonel in charge of the COIL called, “We’re about to lose the aircraft, Mr. Ryan!”

“This piece of shit needs to be lost! Goddamned technology, we can make fantastic video games but we can’t get one piece of military hardware to work as fucking designed!”

Ryan’s words were drowned out by the whine as the giant Boeing aircraft started to fall out of the sky.

Mendenhall was about to try the radio to raise Ryan again when suddenly the night around him lit up with large-caliber tracer fire from the lagoon. Someone in one of the Zodiacs had caught him on night-vision. Fifty-caliber rounds struck the rocks and bushes around him as he raised his nine-millimeter with one hand and tried the radio with the other. He fired down into the lagoon as he attempted to raise Night Rider.

Ryan was holding onto the same console, only now it was at an angle that clearly said the 747 was heading for the deck. He was calm as he had been though a similar situation before during his last days in the navy. You just had to know how to handle it, he thought.

One of the Northrop-Grumman technicians in the bay knew what had happened. He suspected it during the last test and was prepared for it. The main command console was patched into the Boeing power grid and when the targeting computer sent the command electronically to the COIL itself, the entire system shorted out. He pulled open the panel and found the wires he needed, and jerked on them. They came free and then he pulled the command wire and routed it through another power circuit. He quickly reattached the cockpit throttle input cable. Immediately, he was rewarded with the increasing whine of the four General Electric engines as they sparked back up to full power. The technician leaned over and struck the intercom.

“Power restored to aircraft systems. Power restored to COIL targeting!” The tech slid down along one of the interior bulkheads. Man, are heads going to roll when they find out they had routed one of the weapons systems through the platform power systems. Shit!

Ryan felt the nose come up as the power from the engines clearly indicated they were once again climbing.

“Rider, we’re taking heavy fire, over!” Ryan finally heard Mendenhall’s firm but harried call.

He was about to initiate the order to fire once again when the radar intercept officer at the front of the 747 called over the headsets: “We have two inbound bogies at fifty miles and closing fast. They snuck up on us. They’re squawking Brazilian Air Force and they are ordering us out of their airspace or they will open fire.”

“Time to firing sequence on Proteus?” Ryan asked loudly into the radio.

“Five minutes to bring up power,” the lieutenant colonel said as he quickly retargeted the scattered boats.

“Damn it, we’ll be a fireball in two minutes!”

The two Mirage 2000 fighters finally saw the anticollision lights of the 747 after the giant plane made a sudden dive for the jungle below. They adjusted their pattern to take up station one mile behind the large jet. The lead fighter armed his weapons. His orders were clear: down the Americans.

He used his thumb to select his weapon, two South African–made MAA-1 Piranhas, a short-range air-to-air missile relying on infrared passive guidance, which seeks the target’s heat emissions coming primarily from the engines. He immediately received guidance lock from the seeker heads of the two missiles themselves, which were poised on the launch rails beneath both wings just waiting for the electrical signal that would send them on their deadly way.

“Goddammit, they have missile lock on us, Ryan!” the pilot called over the radio.

“I don’t give a damn, we have our orders! Now get us back into position and fire the damned weapon before we lose those people down there!”

The Brazilian fighter pilots were relieved to see the giant aircraft start a slow turn back to the east. Then they watched and followed the 747, hoping they were about to leave the area from the direction they had come. They didn’t know it was only starting to make a long and slow circle as their targets were reacquired. When the lead pilot saw they were commencing another attack run, he became angered at the perceived deception and quickly spurred the French-built fighter back into its optimum firing position. He knew the 747 was ten minutes away from a sure death as it slowly turned.