The Ultimate Escape Read online

  Ramon touched his wife’s face tenderly as she lifted Juanita in her arms. Julio moved forward too, but suddenly Manuel Arias clutched his arm again.

  “Perhaps the children should ride with me,” the little man suggested.

  When he heard those words, Mateo abruptly froze in his tracks. Then he turned and faced the little man.

  “Let us stick to the plan,” Mateo said with a hint of annoyance. But Manuel Arias still clutched Julio’s arm.

  “The boy could ride with me,” Manuel offered. “I could use the company….”

  Julio saw that his father had already helped his mother and sister into the van, and was climbing in after them. Mateo stared at Manuel Arias for a long moment, and some secret thing passed between the two men. Julio felt the pressure on his arm vanish.

  Mateo approached his nephew. He smiled at Julio and touched his shoulder, pushing him toward the van.

  “I think you should ride with the rest of your family,” Uncle Mateo said. “It is for your own safety and security.”

  Julio suddenly felt a wave of suspicion flood his senses. He swung around and looked at Manuel Arias, but the little man would not meet his gaze.

  Then Julio noticed that the other men who met them at the airport were lined up in military fashion, waiting for Julio to enter the vehicle. They were staring at him strangely.

  “Wait, I—” But before Julio could finish, his uncle pushed him into the van so forcibly that he stumbled.

  “Careful, Julio,” his mother said, startled.

  Julio looked up just in time to see his father’s face turn pale as he gazed past his son. Julio turned and saw Mateo blocking the door, a look of cruel triumph on his face.

  Behind his uncle, Manuel Arias stood, clutching his hat.

  Then the van door slammed shut, and the lock clicked. The windowless interior was plunged into total darkness. Julio heard his father’s body slam against the door, his fists pounding on the metal.

  The van lurched forward and the tires squealed as the vehicle pulled rapidly away from the curb. Julio heard his mother’s gasp of shock and fear and his little sister’s cries of panic.

  Poor Juanita is still afraid of the dark, Julio thought. Then, in the darkness, he heard his father whispering.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry… .” he said.

  A hissing sound followed, and a strange odor filled the van. Julio sniffed the air once. Then he knew no more… . old Matt, his brown hair flying wildly as his best friend finally slipped into place on his right wing.

  Matt couldn’t help but laugh with satisfaction as he remembered Mark’s clumsy takeoff. It was a wonderful change of pace to have finally beaten the whiz-kid at something. Though only thirteen, the Squirt seemed to be a pure genius at all things electronic.

  Clearly that genius did not extend to handling century-old aircraft technology.

  Not that flying virtual reality, or veeyar, biplanes was all that easy, Matt reminded himself. He himself had crashed and burned on his very first flight—and his mother was a Navy aviator, for pity’s sake.

  Not that she’d ever given him any pointers or anything. Her career had left her little time for the let’s-sit-down-to-dinner-now kind of family life you saw on the holos. But Matt got the definite impression she was betting on her aviation skills being genetic. He certainly was.

  Matt loved to fly any flight simulator he had access to in the virtual world, and he was taking real-life hang glider lessons in his spare time. Matt was planning on becoming a real, in-the-flesh pilot, as soon as the law and family finances allowed it.

  Matt looked over at Mark Gridley’s Sopwith Camel, just to see how things were going. That was when Matt noticed that his friend was making some of the same mistakes he’d made when he first started out in this plane.

  “Get your nose up, Squirt,” Matt said, calling Mark, for the second time, by his least favorite nickname. “And watch out for that engine pull to the right, or you’ll be leading with your wing!”

  “Roger, Snoopy,” Mark replied tersely to his know-it-all squadron leader. It was no wonder Mark was a little upset— he was absolutely not used to being second best at anything. But while he might be upset, he wasn’t a fool.

  Mark trimmed his aircraft just as Matt suggested.

  “Hey, guys,” David Gray said, waving at them from his cockpit. “I think this ‘Red Baron’ stuff is going to be a lot more fun now that we can actually talk about it while we’re doing it!”

  Matt agreed.

  Flying without being able to talk to one another—as they had up until today’s simulation—had made Matt feel isolated and alone. And he was sure that the rest of the Net Force Explorers felt the same way.

  It was more fun, and a lot less harrowing, now that they could actually communicate with each other.

  “Oh, yeah, Dave… this is sooooo much fun/’ Andy Moore said with more than a trace of sarcasm.

  “What’s the matter, Andy?” David asked. “Afraid Baron von Dieter will shoot you down again?”

  Mark, Matt, and Megan O’Malley all laughed. Even David Gray got a chuckle at his wingman’s expense.

  “Laugh if you will,” Andy said with wounded pride. “But I’ve got a score to settle with the Bloody Blue Baron, and I’m going to even it today. Nobody shoots me down three times in a row and lives to brag about it!”

  Everyone continued to laugh as Andy dipped his airplane’s wings and waved his fist above his head.

  “Remember,” Andy said with more conviction than he felt. “Baron von Dieter is mine!”

  The indestructible “Baron von Dieter” was, in reality, a fifteen-year-old German student named Dieter Rosengarten. Dieter flew a sky-blue Fokker Dr. 1 triplane with a battle face painted on the nose. He was the leader of the “Young Berliner” Jasta, or Squadron.

  Matt and his friends were just beginning the first round of the internationally sponsored summer education course called “A Century of Military Aviation,” which Matt Hunter had strong-armed five of his fellow members of the Net Force Explorers into taking with him. The course was set up both as an exploration of aviation and world history, and as a tournament, with teams from all over the United States and the world competing to take the trophy. Matt’s team was running a person short because Julio had had to pull out after they’d registered, and substitutions weren’t allowed.

  In this first round, the Net Force Explorers had been matched up in a pool with several other groups to compete in multiple scenarios based on actual armed conflicts through the history of flight. Because the conflicts were based on real events, the probable results were skewed by things like available equipment, the relative strength of the opposition, and so on. In the interest of fairness, the results for each conflict were multiplied by a difficulty factor. The teams in a particular pool would meet each other several times in battle, and their aggregate scores would determine which team from that pool would advance to the next level.

  There really weren’t any losers in this competition, in Matt’s opinion. Everybody learned a lot, got to fly the best simulators in the world, and had a good time. Though Matt wouldn’t mind taking his team into the next round, where they would be working with simulators of experimental aircraft yet to be produced by the military and fighting in conflicts that had not occurred yet—and hopefully never would.

  In addition to the team trophies given out, the best single pilot in the competition would win the Ace of Aces trophy. The prize, which was awarded to the most talented individual pilot in a given year, was a highly coveted one. Many former Ace of Aces winners went on to successful careers designing or flying high-tech fighter planes for their respective nations.

  In this first week of the first round-competition, the Net Force team had been pitted against the German Jasta in World War I-style dogfights.

  They’d usually lost too.

  Dieter and his men had better, faster, and more maneuver-able airplanes. They also seemed to enjoy their work. Even Matt, who had
a little more experience than his friends, had been shot down by Dieter’s Fokker on the very first day.

  Though the mysterious Baron von Dieter had taken potshots at practically everyone, the German seemed to give Andy Moore personal attention. He’d shot the Net Force team’s resident clown out of the sky the last three days in a row.

  Needless to say, Andy was foaming at the mouth.

  Part of the problem for Matt and his friends was the early twentieth-century technology they had to contend with in these aircraft. He and his friends, though they’d logged a lot of veeyar time as pilots, had spent most of their time in the simulators for current aircraft or those from the end of the twentieth century. They just weren’t used to dealing with pre-computer-age engineering, and it showed in their “combat” performance.

  Even Matt had fallen into that trap—he’d practiced almost exclusively in the modern simulators, because those had the most real-life relevance to him if he wanted to be a pilot. He’d assumed that flying was flying, that the skills learned in one plane would translate to another—something that was usually true in modern aircraft. It was now all too apparent that his assumption was wrong. He made a mental note to change his tactics when he started training for next year’s competition.

  Even though the Institute had computer handicapping—a programming feature that guaranteed that unless someone made a really stupid mistake, or was shot down in a simulated dogfight, their aircraft would remain aloft—flying the canvas-and-wood biplanes of yesteryear was still a daunting task.

  “Flying the Sopwith Camel is like being strapped onto an engine with wings glued to your back,” Mark had complained to Matt that very morning as they prepared for the simulated patrol. “I feel like I’m just holding on, like I don’t really have much control over the aircraft.”

  Matt Hunter had to agree with his friend.

  A few months ago, Matt had gone hang gliding in California with his dad. Though there was a very real risk of injury—or worse—when he was in the hang glider, Matt found virtual biplanes were much scarier to fly than real hang gliders. The biplanes were temperamental, full of quirks, and unreliable. But he’d discovered in the last week that he loved every minute he spent in them. They were a real challenge. He’d never have known what he was missing if he hadn’t taken this summer class. He was glad he’d made his friends sign up for the course.

  There was another reason—one much more to the point than unfamiliarity with the early planes, which was fairly common among the students participating—that the Net Force team kept losing to Dieter’s Berliners. Right before the course began, the Net Force Explorers had lost their very best veeyar pilot.

  Julio Cortez was the true Ace in their group, the only one of them who’d been in this competition before—in fact, he’d come within a point of winning last year’s Ace of Aces trophy.

  Though he’d been looking forward to trying for the title this year, Julio had had to drop out because his parents had moved. Julio’s father was a prominent Latin American human rights activist and intellectual who’d decided to leave Washington, D.C., and return to his native land of Corteguay with his family. The country was about to have its first free election in twenty years, and Ramon Cortez intended to run for office.

  Matt knew Julio’s father was happy to finally be going home, but Matt was equally sure that Julio didn’t want to return to Corteguay, a poor socialist island nation located off the coast of South America, a land with no freedom of assembly or expression. Corteguay also lacked access to the worldwide Net and to state-of-the-art hardware and software.

  In almost any other country in the world, Julio could have joined them today. But not from Corteguay—and losing Julio was very bad luck for the Net Force Explorers. Julio had a knack for turning a disadvantage into an advantage. Take the Sopwith Camel’s tendency to pull to the right. When Julio had flown this plane, he’d turned that into a combat asset, twisting and turning the plane in the sky like an old-time barnstormer.

  Last year, when Matt and Mark had first met Julio at the Smithsonian’s Flight Simulator Museum, there wasn’t an airplane that the young political exile couldn’t make his own. And in the last few months, Julio had only gotten better.

  If Julio were here now, flying his orange tiger-striped Sopwith Camel, Matt doubted that Dieter’s tally of six victories and no defeats would stand for long.

  Matt wished Julio were here—both because he’d save their skins in the simulators and because Matt just plain missed him.

  “Keep a sharp lookout,” David Gray cautioned, his deep voice interrupting Matt’s thoughts. ”We’re getting really near to the front, and close to where Dieter’s Jasta jumped us last time “

  Matt carefully scanned the sky above, squinting into the sun, but he saw nothing. Then he checked the low cloud cover for bandits using the cloud formations for camouflage.

  Finally, Matt looked down at the ravaged landscape under his wings. The brown, blasted earth looked like a desert, with hundreds of parallel trenches and thousands of feet of barbed wire strewn across it. Occasionally, virtual explosions ripped up the ground beneath them as soldiers battled fiercely for every single inch of ground.

  As the line of Sopwith Camels soared over the trenches, a terrible smell assailed Matt’s nose.

  “Phew!” Megan said. “What’s that stink?”

  Matt recognized the smell, but said nothing. He recalled experiencing a similar odor a few years ago.

  After he and his dad visited his mother aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, they’d gone on a side trip to Egypt. On their way to see the Great Pyramid, they’d ridden an open autobus past a newly constructed meatpacking plant on the banks of the Nile.

  The stench from the slaughterhouse smelled exactly like the odor drifting up from the virtual battlefield below.

  “Sometimes these programs can be a little too realistic,” Matt muttered.

  “Amen to that!” Megan agreed. Usually Megan O’Malley didn’t like to show the least bit of squeamishness in front of the others. She was a tomboy through and through, and took pride in “keeping up with the boys.” But the horrendous smell wafting up from the trenches would gag a Marine.

  Everyone fell silent as they flew over the veeyar battlefield. If they learned nothing else from this virtual history course, Matt knew they would all remember the senseless, wasteful horror of war as it was practiced at the beginning of the last century.

  When the group finally passed over the front lines and away from the smell, antiaircraft artillery was directed at their planes.

  “Let’s go a little higher,” Matt said. Just as the words left his mouth, puffs of smoke and fire erupted in the skies all around them. The rest of the squadron followed his airplane into the clouds.

  That was easy! Matt thought. Yesterday I waved my hands until my arm almost fell off, but none of them noticed I was signaling. The consequence of that bad communication had been the Berliners’ Jasta kicking their collective butts.

  Group communication was one of the few concessions made to modern technology in this veeyar educational program— but only on the last day of this level of the course, when the flying was supposed to be more of a competition than a history lesson.

  All week, they’d flown just like real World War I pilots— without the ability to verbally communicate with each other.

  It was difficult for Matt to understand how pilots could fight an enemy without adequate communications technology. Of course, World War I pilots didn’t have adequate training, ejection seats, reliable planes, or parachutes either. Parachutes had in fact been available then, but the early fighter squadron leaders had resisted making them standard equipment.

  The theory at the time had been that the pilots would fight harder if their lives depended on it. So the military on both sides of the war racked up horrendous casualty rates among their fliers, many of them preventable. All of the nations that fought the air war in the Great War lost more than half of their pilots
to enemy action, equipment failures, and accidents. Most lost nearly eighty percent of their fliers. The Brits of that time referred to the Royal Flying Corps as “The Suicide Club.”

  No similar fate awaited the students in this seminar. Fortunately, another concession by the programmers was the placement of an end program or “Panic Button” on the dashboard of each aircraft.

  If things got too intense, anyone could drop out at any moment by simply pressing the button.

  Real First World War pilots didn’t have that luxury. They went down with their planes.

  As his team’s “squadron leader,” Matt Hunter also got an extra button, one that put a “bookmark” notation in the computer’s vast memory banks, which stored the scenarios they were experiencing as they occurred. After the squadron had finished flying and was back at the Institute in real time, Matt could use his “bookmark” to call up the replay from the particular instant when he’d pushed the button. The function was perfect for settling disputes about who shot down whom.

  As they flew on, deeper and deeper into “enemy” territory, Matt continued to scan the sky, searching for bandits, but the Germans weren’t cooperating.

  Just when it looked like their first flight of the day was going to be uneventful, everything hit the fan.

  It was Megan O’Malley, from her position on the far left of the formation, who alerted the rest of them to the danger.

  “We’ve got company,” she said, pointing to the sky above them. “The Hun is diving out of the sun!”

  Matt looked up, squinting against the veeyar sky’s intense brightness. Then, through half-closed eyes, he saw them. Four dark silhouettes dropping down out of the sun’s glare.

  “Break off!” he said. As their orderly formation disintegrated, Matt veered his aircraft to the left, because he was sure that Mark Gridley would veer to the right.

  Matt didn’t want to lock wings with his own wingman. .. .

  Before it seemed possible, Dieter Rosengarten’s sky-blue Fokker triplane was among them, twin Spandau machine guns spewing virtual hot lead at the Net Force Explorers.