Читать книгу Forbidden Area - Pat Frank - Страница 9

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The loss of a single jet bomber, and the presumed death of its crew, was front page news for only a day, even though the B-99 was the ultimate in military aircraft. The story dropped from the paper entirely after the search was discontinued. So long as men are born unequipped with wings, nature will occasionally slap them from the skies as a reminder that they were not designed to fly.

The Air Force was more than usually concerned, however. The B-99 was a reliable and sturdy aircraft. It could maintain altitude on four of its eight engines. This was the first operational B-99 to be lost.

There was no conceivable explanation for disaster. The plane had left Hibiscus Base with a flight plan calling for a rendezvous with a jet tanker after 3,500 miles of cruising over the Gulf. Its fuel replenished, it would then swing northwest to Salt Lake City and simulate dropping an H-bomb. The people of Salt Lake would know nothing of this macabre experiment, for the B-99 would be at 65,000 feet, out of sight and out of hearing, and would make its bomb run by radar. The contour of Salt Lake, on the radarscope, resembled that of a certain industrial complex locked in a pocket of peaks in the Urals. The crew and plane had accomplished this identical mission without incident a dozen times before. The procedure taxed plane and men to the same extent as an intercontinental bombing mission, come the day.

More than that, there had been no distress calls or warning of trouble. Nineteen minutes out of Hibiscus Base, which lies between Orlando and Tampa, this B-99 had reported that it was at 20,000 feet, on course, speed 550 knots, climbing towards its most efficient ceiling of 55,000, with everything normal. After that, silence--nothing. It was the mystery that annoyed General Keatton. Once, a long time before, he had led his shattered air division back to England with forty-two B-17's missing from his formations. But he knew what had become of them. He had seen. This way, it was different. Long after it was officially announced that the search had been called off (it would have been cruel to keep the families in suspense because of a million-to-one hope) Keatton kept an air-sea rescue squadron quartering the Gulf. And the Air Force quietly offered a five thousand dollar reward to any fisherman or shrimper who could bring in a bit of wreckage, no matter how minute.

For there was something else, unpublicized.

The B-99 had been rushed into production in a crash program. It had replaced the B-47 and the B-52 on the assembly lines, and on every SAC base, not only because of superior speed, range, and altitude. The difference wasn't that important. The bomb bay of the 99 was no larger than that of the 47. When you can hide a small-city-size atomic bomb under a plug hat the bomb bay doesn't have to be big. The fuselage of the 99 was somewhat longer than that of the B-52. All that extra space was crammed with new and strange electronic defenders. A bomber has deadly enemies, anti-aircraft rockets such as the Nike, launched from the ground, and the Navy's Sparrow, fired from interceptors, and these enemies are smart. They have small inhuman eyes that guide them relentlessly to the bomber. The human brain piloting the bomber cannot outthink or outguess a guided missile. The human brain may decide to dodge, climb, weave, or dive, but the missile's quicker brain will seek him out and destroy him. It takes a machine to outsmart a machine. The electronic machines inside the B-99 could distract a Russian missile's one-track mind. They could take the missile's thoughts off its task, and might even persuade it to turn traitor, and to return to the ramp from whence it was launched.

It was Keatton's belief that the peace of the world, at that moment, rested with the B-99. This had not been true in the era of good feeling a few years before, and it might not be true a few years hence. But in that November, it was the existence of the B-99 and its pulsing metal brains that insured unbearable retaliation. It would be catastrophic if the enemy got hold of a B-99. It would be the end. They could pick its brains, learn its habits, and then build rockets to ignore its electronic tongues.

In his still, carpeted office down the main corridor from the River Gate, Keatton could not tear his mind away from the grotesque possibility that the B-99 had been stolen. As chief of an organization that was planning, among other fantastic things, to create an inhabited artificial satellite of earth, he could never forget that anything can happen. Keatton had no illusions whatsoever concerning his own future in the event of war. Whatever happened, he was through. If the enemy strike succeeded, in all likelihood he would either die very quickly, or be executed later. If he was called upon to strike their cities first, his soul could not survive the trauma of being an instrument of death for twenty or thirty or fifty million human beings. The worst of it was that ninety-nine percent of them were plain, ordinary people with no voice or choice in the schemes and ambitions of the leaders. Just people who wanted to work a little, play a little, love someone, and eat plenty. He couldn't even be sure his strike would get the men in the Kremlin. When it happened, the bastards would be somewhere else. But if it did come, he would like to be certain that he could win it. For a protégé of Hap Arnold and Tooey Spaatz, it was a professional matter.

He called in Colonel Lundstrom, the Chief of OSI, and ordered him to Florida, just in case. OSI meant Office of Special Investigations, Air Force. He told Lundstrom to dig into the background of every crew member of the lost B-99.