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  Zen calculated a good merge on two planes coming in on his left figuring to turn and then let the Tomcats’ superior speed bring them to his gunsights. That worked fine for one of the planes, but the other wingman simply accelerated out of range as Zen brought Hawk Two to bear. He twisted off and gave the robot to the computer, telling it to target a new knot of Tomcats aiming for Iowa from the west, the computer handled if fairly well, but with four Scorpion AMRAAMs in the air, and its need to engage the enemy at close range, it was soon over-matched, taken down by a simulated explosion about fifty feet of its wingtip.

  In the meantime, two Tomcats closed on Iowa for Sidewinder shots. As Zen tried to dive on them, his seat spun wildly, moving in the opposite direction—Raven’s pilot, Major Alou, was jerking madly to avoid a fresh missile attack. The movement disoriented Zen, who had an image in his screen more than four miles away. He had to break off his attack after pumping dozen shells at the F-14, doing some damage but not enough to splash it.

  The air was thick with flares, electronic fuzz, and dummy weapons. Zen rolled around and found himself approaching Raven. Making the best of the situation, he slid Hawk One into a gradual turn, figuring to try and catch the planes that were closing on his mother ship. At the same time, he got a warning tone from the computer that his fuel were getting low.

  The Navy fliers stayed just out of reach of Raven’s Stinger as they kicked off their missiles. All but one of the Sidewinders missed their mark; the one that did explode caused “fifty-percent damage” to the right wing control surfaces and some minor damage to the power plants. Enough, claimed the moderator, to rule the Megafortress down.

  “Down?” said Alou. “Down? No way.”

  The other crew members’ reactions were considerably less polite. Zen had one of the Tomcats fat in his pipper—he laid on the trigger, then whipped across the air like a stone slipped on a pond to nail the second.

  Except that, under the engagement rules, he was dead once the Megafortress was.

  The Tomcat jocks were laughing. Zen had considerable trouble restraining himself from riding Hawk One over their canopies.

  “Navy referees,” muttered Alou.

  Iowa

  August 16, 1507

  Dog could feel a curtain of sweat descending down the front of his undershirt, as if he were coming toward the kick lap of a great workout. And in a way, he was—jinking and jiving as a pair of Tomcats, now out of missiles, tried to get close enough to use their guns. He fended them left and right, riding up and down, all the while waiting for Delaford to tell him when they could launch the buoy. They’d temporarily lost contact with Piranha, though its operator was confident it was close to the aircraft carrier.

  “We’re going to lose speed as soon as we open the bay door,” said Chris Ferris. The copilot had a habit of worrying out loud. In Dog’s opinion, not a particularly endearing trait.

  “I’m counting on it,” replied the colonel, flashing left as one of the Tomcats began firing again. The Navy planes couldn’t position themselves effectively because of the air mines spitting out from the back of the plane, but that advantage would soon be lost—the computer warned they were below a hundred rounds.

  Worse, another quarter of fighters were coming from the north.

  “Okay,” said Delaford.

  “Chris, turn off the Stinger as if we’ve run out of shells,” Dog told his copilot. “Then open the bay doors and launch. Everybody hang tough,” added Dog. “This will feel like we’ve hit a brick wall.”

  The Tomcats, seeing the Stinger had stopped firing midburst, closed in tentatively, expecting a trick. Meanwhile, Ferris gave Dog a five count. When he reached one, the colonel did everything but throw the plane into reverse—and he might have tried that had he thought of it. The Megafortress dropped literally straight down in the sky, an elevator whose control cables had suddenly snapped.

  The Tomcats shot overhead.

  “Piranha Buoy Two launched,” reported Ferris, immediately closing up the doors to clear the Megafortress’s sleek belly. Dog banked so close to the water, its right wingtip might have grazed a dolphin.

  “They’re coming back, and they’re mad,” said Ferris. “Whipping around—rear-quarter shot.” He started laughing. “Suckers—Stinger on and firing.”

  Their anger and fatigue took its toll. One of the Navy fliers was mauled; the other backed off—then declared a fuel-emergency and broke off.

  “Four bandits still coming at us. In AMRAAM range,” warned Ferris.

  “How we doing down there, Delaford?” asked Dog, cutting back north to stay near the buoy, though this meant closing the gap on the approaching F-14’s.

  “Got it! Ten seconds to surface!”

  Dog jinked back, hit chaff as one of the Tomcats launched from long range.

  “Were did they get the Scorpion missiles codes?” asked Ferris. “They’re only supposed to use operational missiles.”

  “Take them over,” said Dog.

  “Huh?”

  “Overrise their guidance. Use our circuits.”

  “I don’t know if I can, Colonel. And even if I could, that would be cheating.”

  “Weren’t you just complaining about them using missiles that aren’t in their armament lockers?” inquired Dog. “Issue the universal self-destruct. See what happens.”

  The Scorpions—still some months from production—had been designed at Dreamland. The test missiles contained what the programmers called off-line paragraphs—telemetry code useful for testing but not intended for the final product. Among them were instructions allowing the testbed aircraft to override onboard guidance and detonate the missiles—useful in case one veered off course. Dog wasn’t sure the code had been included in the simulated version, but it was worth a try.

  Ferris dutifully hit the commands, and got an extra bonus—not only did the two dummies “explode,” but so did the four simulated ones that hadn’t been launched yet.

  Fortunately for the Naval aviators carrying them, the self-destruct merely killed the programming.

  Ferris laughed so hard and loud he drowned out Delaford’s report that they were spitting at the carrier’s bridge.

  “Almost,” said Delaford. “We’re twelve feet off their starboard side, bobbing up and down. I hope some of those sailors have cameras.”

  “Gentlemen, and Miss English, job well done,” said Dog, who, despite his best effort to sound professional, was chuckling a bit as well. “Let’s go home.”

  South China Sea

  August 17, 1997, 1900 local (August 17, 0100 Hawaii)

  Stoner steadied himself against the rail of his boat as he drifted toward the piece of torn gray fabric bulky piece of flotsam bobbed a few yards beyond it; Stoner suspected it was the tip of something large enough to damage his boat. But he wanted the fabric, and decided the approach was worth the risk. There were words on the cloth, or at least something that looked like words.

  He reached out with his long pole, sticking it in the middle of the material. Like a jellyfish prodded from above, it slipped downward and drifted away. Stoner reached again, nearly losing his balance grabbing the cloth.

  He pulled the stick up quickly. The characters were definitely chinese, though he couldn’t make them out. He’d have to use his digital camera to take a picture, then transmit the image back.

  Enough to go on.

  Stoner looked back at the water. The flotsam was only a few feet away. It was smaller than he though, and not connected to anything. Even so, he put his pole out, trying to fend it off.

  It rolled upward, revealing a face and torso. There were no legs, and only half-stumps where the arms had been.

  In his career, Stoner had seen many unpretty things. He went back over the rail and reached down to a fabric-covered pocket at the top of the hull. Opening the compartment, he took out his camera, examining it quickly to make sure the settings were correct before slipping the thick strap over his neck. He went back and photographed the dead man’s f
ace, recording it in case it might prove useful in the future. Then he out the long stick in the body’s chest and pushed it away, leaving it for the sharks.

  Back at the helm, Stoner took the engines out of neutral, and steered the boat eastward. As he started below, he heard the drone of an aircraft in the distance.

  The transmission would have to wait. He continued forward past the paneled area to the compartment at the bow. He threw the camera and media card inside, then stepped back and slammed the hatch shut. He struggled with the three long bolts at either side of the wall until his fingers were raw, finally taking off his sneakers to push at the end of the last bolt. By then, the aircraft was overhead.

  He waited until he heard it pass, then pushed his head up to look. He knew of course, that it would be a Chinese patrol plane, though there was always hope he’d be wrong.

  He wasn’t. And now a pair of delta-shaped blurs approached from the west—Shenyang F-811Ms, long-distance attack jets.

  While he knew enough about the Chinese military to identify the planes’ units and air bases if he cared to, Stoner was much too busy to do so. With an immense leap, he threw himself overboard and into the water, just as the aircraft began firing.

  It took approximately ten minutes for Samsara to sink. It would have taken considerably longer had Stoner not began flooding it by removing the bolts. He spent much of the time well below the surface of the water; what he lacked in negative buoyancy, he more than made up for in motivation.

  When the aircraft were gone, Stoner bobbed to the surface, floating with as little effort as possible. It was at least an hour before sunset; if he were to survive the night he had to conserve his energy. And of course he knew he would survive. It was his job. It was what he always did.

  Samsara’s life raft had been shot to pieces by the attack. Nothing else came off the boat after it went down—a matter of design, not accident. And so it was inevitable that Stoner resorted to the wreckage of the Chinese freighter—or what he strongly suspected was a Chinese freighter—to stay afloat. It was inevitable that the half-man he had poked before would float toward him. Stoner wrapped his arm’s around the torso without emotion. He kicked slowly, just enough to stay afloat and awake: Despite the warm day, the water cramped his muscles with its cold, and maybe made his teeth chatter.

  The sun turned the sky pink as it set. Stoner waited in the water with his dead companion. Night crept up with an immense, bright moon. In the distance, he thought he saw the shadow of a shark’s fin. The wreckage of the freighter was drifting closer; paper with Chinese characters drifted near his nose. He moved to grab it, but found his arms frozen in place. He let go of the man’s head and sunk down in the water, trying to shake his limbs back to flexibility. When he reached the surface, the paper was gone and so was the head.

  For the next hour he treaded slowly, faceup in the brine, cold and salt sandpapering his lips and nose. Then, suddenly, the water began to churn. He felt it coming for him now, the shark, drawn by his fatigue like a radio beacon in the night. It broke water fifty yards to his right, a massive thing of blackness.

  Stoner waited. He had no weapon.

  There was a sound behind him, an eerie cry not unlike the death rattle of a man at the end.

  “Here!” Stoner yelled. “Here!”

  A Seachlight played across the surface of the water. Two SEALs in diving gear paddled a rubber boat toward him.

  “Here!” he yelled again.

  “Mr. Stoner?” said one of the men.

  “You’re not expecting someone else, I hope,” said Stoner as the raft crept up. His muscles were so stiff he had to be helped into the boat. But he managed to climb onto the deck of the waiting submarine and go below without further assistance.

  “Stoner, I’m Captain Waldum,” said the skipper. “Glad we found you. Your signal’s getting weak.”

  “Yeah,” said Stoner. “Let’s retrieve the bow pod from my boat and get back. About a dozen people are trying to have their underwater in knots about now.”

  Chapter 2

  An excellent coffin

  Dreamland

  August 21, 1997, 0700 local

  Captain Breanna Stockard shifted her left leg for the five hundredth time since getting into the cockpit, trying to make herself comfortable. Her seat, which canted back at a twenty-degree angle, had ostensibly been form-fitted to her anatomy and designed for a maximum comfort on a long mission. Its inventor joked it would be so comfortable the pilot would be in constant danger of falling asleep; Breanna thought that a remote possibility at best. While the chair adjusted in several dimensions, it was impossible to find a setting that didn’t put a kink in her back—or somewhere else.

  Captain Stockard was surrounded by four large panels, one in front, one overhead, and one on each side. Constructed of a plasma “Film,” each panel provided, at her command, a full instrument suite, optical view from all four compass points, or synthesized views composed from radar or infrared sensors. The stick at the side of her seat and the pedals at her feet did not actually move, instead sensing the pressure exerted on them and translating it as commands to the flight computer that took care of the actual details involved in trimming the large craft. The throttle was the closest to a “normal” airplane control in the cockpit—assuming, of course, such a control could select a standard turbofan, a scramjet, and a restartable rocket motor or some combination of all three depending on the flight regime. All of the controls could be discarded if Breanna preferred; the computer stood ready to translate her words into commands as quickly as she could utter them into the small microphone at the end of her headset.

  That, Breanna felt, was a big part of the problem. The aircraft had been designed to be flown entirely by the computer; the cockpit was really just an afterthought, which explained why it was so stinking uncomfortable. Had it actually been in the plane, however, it would have been even worse. There, it would have had to squeeze into a thick, double-layer ceramic-titanium airfoil whose sinewy, weblike skin slid back from a needle nose into a shape described by its designers as an “aerodynamic triangle.” Its midsection looked something like a stretched B-1 bomber with engine inlets top and bottom, and wings capable of canting about ten degrees up and down as well as swinging out and it. It had a shallow tailfin on both the top and bottom of the fuselage. In order to keep the tailfin clear when landing or taking off, it sat on a set of landing gear that undoubtedly broke all previous records for height. Even so, when the aircraft was fully loaded, less than eighteen inches separated the wingtips from the runway, making it necessary to physically sweep the runway clean before taking off so any mishap might be avoided.

  This tedious process added considerably to the pilot’s consternation as she waited for clearance to begin her test flight.

  Known as the UMB—Unmanned Bomber Platform—or B-5, the plane was among Dreamland’s most ambitious projects to date. Once fully operational, it would fly at somewhere over six times the speed of sound, yet have the turning radius at Mach 3 of an F/A-18 just pushing five hundred knots. The UMB was designed to fly in near-earth orbit for extended deployments; there it could serve as an observation platform and launch-point for a suite of smart weapons still under study. Its engine, which were powered by hydrogen fuel, were not yet ready for such lofty flights, though today’s test would take it to a very respectable 200,000 feet. Similarly, the configurable leading and trailing portions of the wings—inflated by pressurized hydrogen to microcontrol the airfoil—had not yet replaced the more conventional leading- and trailing-edge control surfaces, thus limiting its maneuverability to a more conventional range.

  Assuming taking ten Gs could be called conventional.

  “Ground is clear. How are we looking, Captain?” asked Sam Fichera, who led the team developing the controls and was today’s mission boss.

  “I think we’re ready to rock,” Bree answered.

  “Ready for an engine start. Everything by the book.”

  “Ready when y
ou are.” Breanna looked at the left corner of her front screen, where the engine data had been preprogrammed to appear. “Computer. Takeoff engine start. Proceed.”

  “Computer. Takeoff engine start,” acknowledged the electronic copilot.

  The two GE-built turbofans used for takeoff and low speed flight regimes whipped to life. A detailed checklist appeared at the right side of Breanna’s screen, laid over the endless vista of the cleared runway and the surrounding dry lake beds that encircled Dreamland. Breanna and the computer moved through the long checklist slowly, making sure everything was good to go. The computer could facilitate quick takeoffs by color-coding the items—those it knew were “in the green” or good to go were shown in green letters, problems were in red. No caution (yellow) was permitted on takeoff; the items would be marked red instead, and the takeoff held until the trouble was corrected.

  With the systems checked and rechecked, everything from fuel flow to air temperature recorded, parsed, and fretted over, Breanna glanced at the static camera from the runway to make sure her path was clean. Cleared, she loosened the brakes and took a long, slow breath.

  And then she was off. The B-5’s engines cycled up to takeoff power and she trundled down the runway, speed building slowly. Relatively heavy for its airfoil even with the wings horizontal, the plane needed more distance than a B-52 to get airborne. That would change with the new wings. Even then, the rocket engine would probably be selected for a brief burn to make the takeoff easier, and more comfortable for Breanna.

  Though she’d flown it several times now, Breanna’s feel for the UMB remained distorted and distant. As he indicated speed climbed above one hundred knots, the plane began to lift on its own. She held the stick a second too long, but came off the ground smoothly. The slight hitch bothered her; she was still slightly disoriented as he altitude began to climb.

  Maybe if they added some sound feedback, she thought, making a mental note to bring it up at the post-flight briefing.

  Captain Breanna Stockard had headed the UMB project for three weeks now. It was supposed to be a permanent job; the previous UMB director had been posted to the Pentagon months before. But Breanna had stubbornly insisted the duty be officially “temporary,” so she could decide if she wanted the assignment.