Then Ross came back, moving quickly down the aisle, her face tense. She unpacked cardboard boxes, withdrawing several basketball-sized spheres of tightly wrapped metal foil.
The foil reminded him of Christmas-tree tinsel. “What’s that for?” Elliot asked.
And then he heard the first explosion, and the Fokker shuddered in the air.
Running to the window, he saw a straight thin white vapor trail terminating in a black smoke cloud off to their right. The Fokker was banking, tilting toward the jungle. As he watched, a second trail streaked up toward them from the green forest below.
It was a missile, he realized. A guided missile.
“Ross!” Munro shouted.
“Ready!” Ross shouted back.
There was a bursting red explosion, and his view through the windows was obscured by dense smoke, The airplane shook with the blast, but continued the turn. Elliot couldn’t believe it: someone was shooting missiles at them.
“Radar!” Munro shouted. “Not optical! Radar!”
Ross gathered up the silver basketballs in her arms and moved back down the aisle. Kahega was opening the rear door, the wind whipping through the compartment.
“What the hell’s happening?” Elliot said.
“Don’t worry,” Ross said over her shoulder. “We’ll make up the time.” There was a loud whoosh, followed by a third explosion. With the airplane still banked steeply, Ross tore the wrappings from the basketballs and threw them out into the open sky.
Engines roaring, the Fokker swung eight miles to the south and climbed to twelve thousand feet, then circled the forest in a holding pattern. With each revolution, Elliot could see the foil strips hanging in the air like a glinting metallic cloud. Two more rockets exploded within the cloud. Even from a distance, the noise and the shock waves disturbed Amy; she was rocking back and forth in her seat, grunting softly.
“That’s chaff,” Ross explained, sitting in front of her portable computer console, pushing keys. “It confuses radar weapons systems. Those radar-guided SAMs read us as somewhere in the cloud.”
Elliot heard her words slowly, as if in a dream. It made no sense to him. “But who’s shooting at us?”
“Probably the FZA,” Munro said. “Forces Zairoises Armoises-the Zaire army.”
“The Zaire army? Why?”
“It’s a mistake,” Ross said, still punching buttons, not looking up.
“A mistake? They’re shooting surface-to-air missiles at us and it’s a mistake? Don’t you think you’d better call them and tell them it’s a mistake?”
“Can’t,” Ross said.
“Why not?”
“Because,” Munro said, “we didn’t want to file a flight plan in Rawamagena. That means we are technically in violation of Zaire airspace.”
“Jesus Christ,” Elliot said.
Ross said nothing. She continued to work at the computer console, trying to get the static to resolve on the screen, pressing one key after another.
“When I agreed to join this expedition,” Elliot said, beginning to shout, “I didn’t expect to get into a shooting war.”
“Neither did I,” Ross said. “It looks as if we both got more than we bargained for.”
Before Elliot could reply, Munro put an arm around his shoulder and took him aside. “It’s going to be all right,” he told Elliot. “They’re outdated sixties SAMs and most of them are blowing up because the solid propellant’s cracked with age. We’re in no danger. Just look after Amy, she needs your help now. Let me work with Ross.”
Ross was under intense pressure. With the airplane circling eight miles from the chaff cloud, she had to make a decision quickly. But she had just been dealt a devastating- and wholly unexpected-setback.
The Euro-Japanese consortium had been ahead of them from the very start, by approximately eighteen hours and twenty minutes. On the ground in Nairobi, Munro had worked out a plan with Ross which would erase that difference and put the ERTS expedition on-site forty hours ahead of the consortium team. This plan-which for obvious reasons she had not told Elliot-called for them to parachute onto the barren southern slopes of Mount Mukenko.
From Mukenko, Munro estimated it was thirty-six hours to the ruined city; Ross expected to jump at two o’clock that afternoon. Depending on cloud cover over Mukenko and the specific drop zone, they might reach the city as early as noon on June 19.
The plan was extremely hazardous. They would be jumping untrained personnel into a wilderness area, more than three days’ walk from the nearest large town. If anyone suffered a serious injury, the chances of survival were slight. There was also a question about the equipment: at altitudes of 8,000-10,000 feet on the volcanic slopes, air resistance was reduced, and the Crosslin packets might not provide enough protection.
Initially Ross had rejected Munro’s plan as too risky, but he convinced her it was feasible. He pointed out that the parafoils were equipped with automated altimeter-release devices; that the upper volcanic scree was as yielding as a sandy beach; that the Crosslin containers could be over-packed; and that he could carry Amy down himself.
Ross had double-checked outcome probabilities from the Houston computer, and the results were unequivocal. The probability of a successful jump was.7980, meaning there was one chance in five that someone would be badly hurt. However, given a successful jump, the probability of expedition success was.9934, making it virtually certain they would beat the consortium to the site.
No alternate plan scored so high. She had looked at the data and said, “I guess we jump.”
“I think we do,” Munro had said.
The jump solved many problems, for the geopolitical updates were increasingly unfavorable. The Kigani were now in full rebellion; the pygmies were unstable; the Zaire army had sent armored units into the eastern border area to put down the Kigani-and African field armies were notoriously trigger-happy. By jumping onto Mukenko, they expected to bypass all these hazards.
But that was before the Zaire army SAMs began exploding all around them. They were still eighty miles south of the intended drop zone, circling over Kigani territory, wasting time and fuel. It looked as if their daring plan, so carefully worked out and confirmed by computer, was suddenly irrelevant.
And to add to her difficulties, she could not confer with Houston; the computer refused to link up by satellite. She spent fifteen minutes working with the portable unit, boosting power and switching scrambler codes, until she finally realized that her transmission was being electronically jammed.
For the first time in her memory, Karen Ross wanted to cry.
“Easy now,” Munro said quietly, lifting her hand away from the keyboard. “One thing at a time, no point in getting upset.” Ross had been pressing the keys over and over again, unaware of what she was doing.
Munro was conscious of the deteriorating situation with both Elliot and Ross. He had seen it happen on expeditions before, particularly when scientists and technical people were involved. Scientists worked all day in laboratories where conditions could be rigorously regulated and monitored. Sooner or later, scientists came to believe that the outside world was just as controllable as their laboratories. Even though they knew better, the shock of discovering that the natural world followed its own rules and was indifferent to them represented a harsh psychic blow. Munro could read the signs.
“But this,” Ross said, “is obviously a non-military aircraft, how can they do it?”
Munro stared at her. In the Congolese civil war, civilian aircraft had been routinely shot down by all sides. “These things happen,” he said.
“And the jamming? Those bastards haven’t got the capability to jam us. We’re being jammed between our transmitter and our satellite transponder. To do that requires another satellite somewhere, and-” She broke off, frowning.