The Ultimate Escape Read online

  He kept telling himself it was all for a good cause, but still

  As Matt struggled with his conscience, Mark Gridley set to work. The youngest member of the Net Force Explorers was a veeyar whiz, and it took him almost no time to set up Matt’s father’s system to load the scrambler and set up a directory for the International Educational Institute’s flight simulator. Now they just had to get that program.

  With a bit of tinkering—and Mark’s scrambler program in place and running—everything was ready.

  Mark accessed the IEI computers over the Net. When he was in contact with them, he used Dr. Lanier’s code to call up and download the Red Baron simulation—accessing the sub-files from that very afternoon and copying them into his father’s machine, along with the program.

  Now all they had to do was decide which one of them was going into virtual reality—as there was only one computer chair with a neural connection in this setup—then plug the lucky winner into the seat.

  The decision was an easy one.

  “You go,” Mark Gridley said. “Julio’s your best friend. I’ll stay here in case something goes wrong—though I’d bet my bank account against a blown datascript that nothing will go wrong.”

  As Matt lined up his neural implant, Mark filled him in on the results of the call to IEI.

  “I just downloaded two and a half minutes of the World War I program,” Mark told him. “I figured we only needed the segment with Julio in it, and if there really is something wrong with the scenario, the less data we transfer, the less chance we have of grabbing the corrupted stuff and crashing your dad’s computer. I’m also going to run a log of this as you go through the replay. That way, if the sim crashes after you get into it, at least we’ve got a record of what went on right up to the crash, and have a good idea of where we need to look to start fixing it. I’ve also programmed the sim to play from your vantage point. You were flying plane number one, right?”

  Matt nodded.

  “You should pop in close to the moment when Julio’s tiger-striped airplane arrived. Everything should be the same as last time—unless the Rift has corrupted the data. Keep a close eye on the sim and see if you spot any differences from the first time you went through it.” Then Mark smiled sheepishly. “You’ll probably get in right at the moment when Dieter’s plane got on my tail. Maybe this time I’ll get lucky and do something right, huh?” They both laughed.

  Matt was ready to go, and so was Mark.

  “Good luck,” Mark said, and activated the program.

  For Matt, the transition from reality to virtual reality was always a little bit disorienting. One second he was in his father’s lab, looking at his friend. The next, Matt was in his Sopwith Camel, flying over a veeyar battlefield in a veeyar sky, with veeyar winds blasting his face and making his eyes water.

  The sensation was doubly odd because, as this was a replay, Matt had no control of his veeyar aircraft whatsoever. The plane, with him in it, followed the pre-ordained computer memory path of the events of the morning. Matt was just a passenger now, as he was when he rode on an autobus.

  And it was a good thing too, because he didn’t exactly have the attention to spare from his search for Julio or signs of a Rift to stay in control of the biplane.

  Suddenly, ahead of him, Matt spotted Mark’s Camel, with Dieter’s Fokker Dr. 1 triplane in hot pursuit. Following its original path, the aircraft banked and turned toward the two airplanes. And as before, a German Albatross fighter crossed his sights, and the guns opened up.

  As the other craft exploded, Matt could see the pilot wave at him once again, and blink out of existence.

  While he gripped the sides of the cockpit, Matt’s Sopwith Camel lifted its nose and turned into the path of the two approaching airplanes until they were facing one another head-on, just like before. When Mark’s airplane raced past him, Matt found himself staring at Dieter’s Fokker.

  Matt’s machine gun fired a single burst, then jammed as before.

  Suddenly, the blue Fokker triplane’s wing came apart, and Dieter Rosengarten’s airplane spun out of control. But there was no sign of the orange, tiger-striped biplane that shot him down—nor was there any sign of Julio.

  The veeyar skies ahead of him were completely empty.

  As Matt’s Sopwith leveled off, and flew parallel to Mark’s airplane, he searched for Julio’s aircraft. But where the tiger-striped plane had flown the first time, there was only blue sky and white clouds.

  Then, as abruptly as the program began, it ended. Matt found himself sitting in his dad’s mockpit, blinking in confusion.

  Mark Gridley was staring back. “Well?” he said. “What did you see?”

  But Matt didn’t answer. He just stared at his friend with a look of profound disappointment. Mark’s face sunk too when he saw the expression on Matt’s face.

  “I saw nothing,” Matt said. “Not Julio, not even the airplane.”

  “Did you see a Rift then?” Mark asked. “A hole, an anomaly, anything at all?”

  Matt shook his head. “My plane was there, so was yours and Dieter’s … but no orange plane, no Rift, and no Julio,” he said bitterly.

  Mark sighed.

  “Set it up again,” Matt said. “This time I’ll run the simulator and you hook up to the chair. Maybe you can see something from the cockpit of your biplane that I missed.”

  An hour later, Matt let Mark out through the basement door and went back upstairs. He and Mark had ridden the simulator three times each, and there was no sign of Julio locked in the memory.

  Matt didn’t know whether to be relieved or depressed by the results of their research, but he knew he was frustrated.

  To Matt’s surprise, his mother and father had come home while he was in the lab with Mark.

  “Hey, Matt,” his dad called from the family room couch. “What have you been up to?”

  Matt shrugged his shoulders and said, “Stuff from my IEI class.” To avoid the questions he was sure his father would ask next, he went into the kitchen to get a glass of milk.

  Funny, Matt thought. A couple of days ago, all I wanted to do was talk to Mom or Dad. Now I feel so guilty about using Dad’s system without his permission that I can’t even face them.

  When Matt arrived in the kitchen, he found his mom there, still in uniform, fixing dinner.

  “If you’re hungry, I made a nice salad,” his mother said. “Fresh romaine lettuce with honey-mustard vinaigrette, and the lentil soup will be ready in a few more minutes.”

  If Matt were hungry, he’d rather have a hamburger and French fries, but before he could say so he heard his father calling him from the family room.

  “Come quick, Matt,” his dad said. “There’s something on the HoloVid you should see.”

  Matt and his mom hurried out in time to catch the Sunday Night International Report on one of the twenty-four hour news networks. To Matt’s surprise, the news anchor was doing a story about Corteguay’s free elections and Ramon Cortez’s bid for the presidency. Matt had missed the beginning of the report, but he knew he could access the whole story later on the Net if he wanted to.

  ”… and in the Dompania district of Corteguay, opposition candidate Ramon Cortez campaigned in several rallies before large crowds. Though there is interest in the election, the greeting this former exile received in this heavily industrial region was less enthusiastic than the candidate might have wished. …”

  On the screen, suddenly two-dee thanks to the stringent government control of the media in Corteguay, crowds of men in dirty overalls listened attentively as Ramon Cortez spoke from a podium. But there was not much enthusiasm on their faces, and no signs or placards proclaiming support for Cortez.

  On the podium, an older man stood at Ramon’s right side, and in the background, Matt spotted Julio standing with his mother, though there was no sign of little Juanita.

  At one point in the broadcast, the camera panned across the faces of the Cortez family. Julio looked happy and excite
d, and Matt noticed that Julio was even wearing the jacket he’d won for taking second place at last year’s Century of Military Aviation competition.

  At one point, Julio turned and waved at a cluster of teenage girls in the front row of the crowd. As he did, Matt could read the glowscript words emblazoned on the back of the jacket. “Ace of Aces.” A lot of people thought that was Julio’s call sign, but they were wrong. It was “Jefe” —the Spanish word for “Chief.” Mark’s and Mart’s call signs—WhizKid and Hunter—were much less imaginative.

  As he watched the news story, a wave of relief rushed over Matt. It was a Rift! A stupid, silly software glitch . .. I can’t believe it. But almost immediately, Mart’s feeling of relief was replaced by the pangs of conscience.

  He was determined to call Mark Gridley at his first opportunity and tell him about the broadcast. But there was one thing he had to do before that.

  A very important thing.

  Matt looked away from the screen when the story ended. “Dad, Mom,” he said. “I have to tell you something, and I hope you won’t get too angry….”

  “Well, I’m glad you told us,” Gordon Hunter said when Matt was through confessing. His mother sat on the other side of the room, her arms crossed, silent.

  Pondering my punishment, no doubt, Matt thought.

  “You can bet that I’m going to put a security lock on that computer too,” his father added. “If you were playing around with anyone else, I’d be even angrier. As it was, you were probably in better hands with Mark than you’d be with either me or your mother.” Gordon Hunter looked into his son’s eyes. “Which doesn’t excuse what you did, I might add.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry,” Matt said. “I was just so worried about Julio … it will never happen again.”

  “It surely won’t,” his dad said.

  “But do you really think it was a Rift we both saw?” Matt asked. His father rubbed his chin and nodded.

  “I’m pretty sure it was,” he said. “You remember you were talking about Julio before he appeared, and Mark was part of the conversation. The Rift somehow triggered a random memory burst, and you both shared a hallucination—of sorts.”

  “But why did Dieter’s Fokker go down, if we didn’t shoot him down?” Matt said. His father shrugged.

  “The software was defective,” his dad speculated. “Anything can happen in a Rift.”

  Matt wanted to believe his father, and he guessed it sounded plausible, but he wasn’t entirely convinced. But still, there was that news story … I just saw Julio. He looked happy enough.

  As Matt listened to his father, he watched his mother quietly slip out of the room. He sensed that something had disturbed her, but Matt wasn’t sure what. She was so cool under pressure, that fighter pilot’s ability to roll with the punches was such an essential part of her character, that Matt knew it had to be something pretty bad for her discomfort to show.

  While he and his father watched the news, Matt heard his mother bang around in the kitchen, probably ladling up bowls of steaming lentil soup from the autopot. But she never made that much noise unless she was really mad. Matt walked across to the kitchen and watched his mother, wondering just what was bothering her so much. He offered to set the table, and she didn’t even look up.

  Mom has seemed stiff and uncomfortable ever since I mentioned Julio, Matt thought as he put out napkins and silverware.

  Matt’s mother finished filling the bowls, and took them out to the dining room table.

  “Come on, Matt, Gordon,” she called into the family room. “Dinner’s ready.”

  Matt and his father exchanged meaningful glances as they walked toward the table laden with vegetarian health food. Matt made a face.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll sneak out for burgers later,” his dad whispered.

  As they all ate together, Matt continued to observe his mother. She seemed nervous and out of sorts, and didn’t speak throughout the meal. His father noticed it too. And though she moved the food back and forth across her plate, Matt could see that his mother hardly ate a thing.

  What’s bothering her? Matt wondered.

  On the other side of town, Megan O’Malley watched the same news story from the floor of her dojo. Some of the other students liked to spar on the sidelines with holo-dummies while they waited for their turn on the mat with the instructor, but Megan preferred to catch up with current events while she practiced her katas.

  Today, she was working up a sweat running through some moves from one of her favorite martial arts disciplines, Puk-ulan Pentjak Silat Bukti Negara Serak, when the story came on the monitor above the practice floor.

  Megan halted in the middle of a quick flurry of parries and ripostes to watch the news piece on the elections in Corteguay. But as she stared at the image of Julio at the rally, the tiny hairs on the back of her head began to prickle.

  What’s wrong with this picture? she wondered, confident about her own instincts for deception. She studied the image with a critical eye, looking for abnormalities of any kind.

  Finally, she thought she spotted one, but the image passed too quickly for her to be sure.

  Megan O’Malley already knew what she wanted to do when she was a grown-up. She wanted to enter the field of strategic operations, either for Net Force, the CIA, or the State Department. As the fifth and youngest child in a family with four boys, Megan knew the importance of planning ahead. It was the only way she could keep up with her sometimes-overbearing siblings.

  Megan, a voracious reader, also knew enough about information management to know when someone was trying to manage her; and as she watched the rally in Corteguay, she got the distinct feeling that she and the rest of America were being had.

  Megan promised herself that she would download the story and images from the Net when she got home that night.

  When the news report ended, Megan returned to her practice. But her concentration was broken by the nagging feeling that there was something rotten in the state of Corteguay.

  With a series of quick stabs, jabs, and blocks, Megan defeated her imaginary foe, pushed sweaty strands of brown hair off her forehead, and bowed deeply to her invisible nemesis.

  First a shower, then Vm going home to watch that news story again. And maybe again and again after that.

  The scenario was called “Pearl Harbor,” and perhaps understandably, things did not go well for the Net Force Explorers.

  On December 7, 1941, as waves of Japanese carrier-based fighters and bombers streaked out of the sky to bomb the U.S. Navy base in Hawaii in a surprise attack that led to America’s involvement in the Second World War, five young lieutenants had managed to take off in outmoded P-36’s and P-40’s from a small auxiliary field and carry the fight to the enemy.

  Together, those five men inflicted more damage against the Japanese attackers that day than just about anyone else. And though the attack was a victory for the Japanese aggressors, the brave lieutenants who took to the air against impossible odds provided a much-needed morale boost for the U.S. military after the stunning defeat at Pearl Harbor.

  Though the ten Japanese planes they downed were a paltry number, considering the size of the force they were up against, Matt and the Net Force Explorers would have loved to have done as well against Masahara and the Osakans.

  Only one member of Net Force even got off the ground. In the first few minutes of the simulation, Matt, Mark, Andy, and David Gray were all shot to pieces as their P-40’s lumbered down the runway in a futile attempt to get at the enemy.

  Megan at least got her Tomahawk fighter airborne, but she was immediately attacked by a Japanese Zero. As Megan was going down in flames, she managed to swerve her stricken aircraft into the path of a Japanese dive bomber that had gotten too close.

  It was the Americans’ only kill that day.

  Though their performance was terrible, word got out that Megan’s suicidal retaliation had really impressed the Japanese team.

  At the “debriefing”
Dr. Lanier asked Megan why she’d rammed the Japanese airplane instead of bailing out.

  “I got so mad when I saw the American ships burning in the harbor below that I just snapped,” was her reply.

  Even Andy Moore was impressed by that.

  Later that day, things got even more intense as Dr. Lanier guided them through carrier takeoffs and landings in veeyar.

  First they took off at the controls of single-seat Grumman

  F4F Wildcat fighters, and then later in bomb-laden Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers.

  The Dauntless was a two-seater aircraft, so the Net Force Explorers were paired up in teams: Matt as pilot in one plane, with Mark as his gunner; and Megan in a second aircraft, with Andy Moore as rear gunner.

  David Gray was the lone man out, flying escort in a single-seat Hellcat. That was just the way he liked it.

  The carrier takeoffs and landings had been intense, but the bombing runs were, in their own way, even more stressful. Matt couldn’t believe how hard it was to fly a Dauntless and try to lob a bomb onto the target at the same time.

  Matt concluded that flying one of these early World War II bombers was even harder than piloting a Sopwith Camel. Not one of the Net Force Explorers hit their target in four tries.

  Things like that did not bode well for their next competition, and the classes ended early—without meeting the “enemy” in combat. The big day was Tuesday anyway, when the Net Force Explorers were scheduled to meet Masahara Ito’s Osak-ans at a reenactment of the decisive Battle of Midway.

  On Tuesday morning, after they watched some two-dee films of the actual battle, the Net Force Explorers were briefed by Dr. Lanier.