Mayday by Nelson DeMille, Thomas H. Block Read Free Book Online Page A

he would be the secret envy of every flight officer aboard. It had happened before.
    The second possibility was the more likely. The profile being flown by the target on his screen was very close to the predicted
     performance of the drone.
The Hercules must have released two drones, either by mistake or by design.
That must be it. Matos felt better. His naval career had a fair chance now. He had to call the
Nimitz
immediately. Explain. He could still relocate the other target, fire the missile, do a turnaround, and get the hell out of
     there. He looked down again at the radar screen. The distance between the Phoenix and its target lessened rapidly. Thirty
     miles, twenty miles, ten miles. Then the missile and the target merged, became one. Matos nodded. The missile worked. That
     much they now knew. But he was left wondering what he had hit.

    John Berry pushed the stopper valve halfway and turned on the water until the basin filled, then adjusted the taps until the
     inflowing water equaled the draining water. He took off his wristwatch and laid it on the aluminum shelf. 11:02. It was still
     set to California time. Jet lag was not nearly so bad with the Straton as it was on the conventional jets, but it still caused
     his body clock to become disoriented. Time
was
relative. His body was on New York time, his watch was on California time, but he was actually in an obscure time zone called
     Samoan-Aleutian, and he would soon land in Tokyo at a different time altogether. Yet at home, time dragged, almost stood still,
     hourly, daily, weekly. But that hadn’t stopped him from getting older—in fact, it speeded up his aging process.
Relative. No doubt about it.
He bent over the basin and began splashing water on his face.

    The Phoenix missile, with its updated maneuverability, made one small correction and aimed itself so that it would strike
     the broad port side of the midfuselage slightly above the leading edge of the wing. Somewhere in the circuitry, the sensors,
     the microcomputer of the Phoenix—the place that was the seat of its incomplete powers of judgment and reason—there might have
     been a sense or an awareness that it had succeeded in its purpose. And having no fear, no hesitation, no instinct for survival,
     it accelerated headlong into its prey, consigning it, and itself, into oblivion.

    A middle-aged man sitting in aisle 15, seat A, glanced out the window. He noticed a silvery spot at least a mile away. He
     blinked. The spot was now as large as a basketball and a few inches outside the window. Before his brain could transmit even
     the most primitive response of ducking or screaming, the silver orb was through the window, taking a section of the fuselage
     and his head and torso with it. The Phoenix plowed across the remaining two seats in the section, B and C, disintegrating
     the passenger’s wife and mother. It crossed the aisle to the middle section, pushing some of its grisly harvest with it, and
     swept away the four center seats, D, E, F, and G, and the passengers in them, then crossed the starboard aisle. It then pushed
     seats H, J, and K, with three more passengers, through the fuselage and, along with other collected debris, out into the void.
    Everything in the Phoenix’s path, its wake, and a yard on either side of it, was pulverized by the high-speed disintegration
     of the fuselage wall. Seats and people were turned into unrecognizable forms and their high-speed disintegration in turn reduced
     people and objects near them to smashed and torn remnants of what they had been. With no warhead on the missile there was,
     of course, no explosion—but the impact forces had the same effect on everything in its path.
    The deceleration had caused the Phoenix to begin to tumble as it reached the third gang of seats. Its tail rose up and it
     hit the starboard sidewall broadside, cutting, as it exited, an elongated swath nearly eight feet high and six feet across.
     It tumbled out into space,