Fire with Fire(15)
The pilot was still considering Caine’s explanation. “Field research, huh? Well, I hope you find what you’re looking for—before it finds you.” He looked away with a small, tight smile.
Me, too. Hell, I just wish I really knew what I was looking for. “Is that the valley?”
The pilot craned his neck to look further. “Yup. It’s pretty wide here; gets narrower, the further up you go.”
The chop had subsided and the pilot banked to angle onto the valley’s southwest-to-northeast centerline, following a glittering blue ribbon that preceded them. Thick swaths of green hemmed it in its course, worked away from the river and up the sheltering slopes. Which grew steeper as they flew. Caine checked his watch; they were right on time. “Nice country.”
The pilot nodded. “Seems so—but I’ve never had a chance to get out and see for myself.” He glanced at the dense jungle canopy scudding beneath them. “Not too safe on your own, even if you’re well armed. We can digest the flora and fauna here, so it only makes sense that they can return the favor. And from what I hear, some critters are pretty enthusiastic about doing so. The ones here in Shangri-La haven’t learned to fear guns yet, so shoot to kill: they won’t run away.”
“Thanks. That’s good to know.”
“You shoot much?”
Caine shook his head, thought he saw a hint of right angles distressing the landscape up ahead. “Some. Not too often.”
“Well, you might want to get in a little time at the range before you go into the bush. Adjust the sights, get a feel for the—”
“Already did it, before we took off from Downport.”
“Oh. I thought you said you don’t shoot much.”
“I didn’t—until this afternoon.”
The pilot smiled. “Yeah, I heard about your welcoming committee this morning. So now you’re ready to return the sentiments?”
“Something like that.” Caine pointed at the horizon, now clearly sprouting low rectangular silhouettes in the middle of wide, squared clearings. “Is that—what do they call their base anyway?”
“Site One: how’s that for an imaginative name? Typical bureaucrats. Yeah, that’s it up ahead.”
“Looks like they’ve cleared a lot of the forest at that wide point.”
The pilot was stretching to get a better look. “A whole hell of a lot more than I’ve seen—or heard about.”
Well off to the north, nestled up against the skirts of the low hills on that side, were what appeared to be a cluster of towers. “Know anything about those?”
The pilot shook his head. “Not a clue.”
“How long until we land?”
“They’ll be talking me toward a vertipad any second now.”
Caine thought for a moment. Then: “You’ve made a mistake; you need to come around for another pass.”
“Sir, we’re right on—”
“I know what the instruments say. But I’m telling you: we’ve made a mistake; you need to circle around for another landing approach.”
The pilot’s frown became a study in strained patience. “Sir, even if I knew what the hell you’re talking about, please remember that this is a vertibird: we don’t make ‘approach runs,’ so I would never need to circle around for another landing attempt.”
“Today you need to.”
The beginning of the comchatter from Site One’s ground control was on general speaker. “Commonwealth Zero-Tango-Niner; you are correctly vectored for transition to vertical landing at Pad Two, coming to a range of ten kilometers on my mark. And . . . mark.”
“Site One ATC, this is Commonwealth flight 0T9. I roger your telemetry, and am requesting confirmation for—”
Caine made a throat-cutting gesture with his right hand. The pilot sighed, snapped off the transmitter. “Sir, what now?”
“Tell him you don’t trust the gimballing servos on your thrusters; you want to make a runway landing, not vertical.”
“Look, sir—”
Caine pulled out the magic ID card that Downing had given him: this might be the one chance he’d get for close aerial reconnaissance of the site.
The pilot looked over at the card—bored and a little annoyed—and had started to look away when his eyes grew wide, and he looked back. Quickly. As his eyes went through a high-speed back-and-forth scan of the ID and clearance card, his lips slowly dilated and contracted through the cycle of a soundless “Wow.”
“Charlie Whiskey Zero-Tango-Niner: please say again. Your last transmission broke up.”
The pilot turned the transmitter back on. “Site One ATC, I’m having problems reading you. Am also showing orange lights on the thrust vectoring panel: I’ll need to skip transition to vertical. Requesting emergency access to runway one.”