Hard to believe, McLanahan thought, that such a machine like Cheetah could be outdated in so short a time.
The remarkable enhancements built into DreamStar had been tested years earlier on Cheetah, so Cheetah shared DreamStar’s huge movable forward canards, vectored-thrust engines and computer-commanded flight controls. But even Cheetah was starting to show its twenty years of age. Modifications to every component of the fifty-seven-thousand-pound aircraft meant lots of riveted access panels scarred across its fuselage, performance-robbing patches that layers of paint could barely hide. With an eleven-hundred-pound remote-control camera mounted just behind her aft cockpit, her once impressive top speed of Mach two was now a forgotten statistic — she’d have a tough time, Patrick thought, of reaching Mach one without afterburners. DreamStar could easily cruise at one point five Mach without ‘burners.
Where all of the high-tech components had made DreamStar the fighter of the future, those same enhancements had taken a severe performance penalty on Cheetah. But there was still one man who could make Cheetah dance in the sky like a brand-new bird. Patrick found that extraordinary young pilot asleep under Cheetah’s nose, using the nosewheel as a headrest.
“J.C.”
“Yo,” came a sleepy reply.
Patrick went up the crew-boarding ladder, retrieved a set of ear noise protectors from the cockpit. “On your feet. Time to go aviating.”
For J. C. Powell that bit of Air Force jargon was raw meat to a starving wolf — he was up, on his feet and skipping up the crew entry ladder like a kid.
“Say the word, Colonel.”
“I’m stopping by to see how our boy is doing in DreamStar,” McLanahan said, putting on the ear protectors to block out the noise of the external power cart. “Should be fifteen minutes to engine start. Get Cheetah ready to fly.”
“You got it, boss.”
In another life, Captain Roland Q. Powell, the only son of a very wealthy Virginia family, all five feet five and one hundred twenty pounds of him, must have been a barnstormer; before that he might have ridden barrels over Niagara Falls. “Plain reckless” would have been the wrong term to describe his flying, but “reckless abandon” was close. He was totally at home in airplanes, always pushing his machine to the limit but staying in control at all times. He never flew slow if he could fly fast, never made a turn at thirty degrees’ bank when he could do sixty or ninety, never flew up high when he could fly down in the trees. He earned the nickname “J.C.” from his Undergraduate Pilot Training instructors who would mutter “Jesus Christ” (usually followed by “help me” or “save me”) when they found out they had been scheduled to fly with Roland Powell.
He became an FAIP, first assignment instructor pilot, out of Undergraduate Pilot Training, but the Air Force didn’t want an entire Air Force filled with J. C. Powells, so he was assigned to Edwards Air Force Base. Flight test was the perfect place to stick Roland Powell. He knew all there was to know about aerodynamics but would still agree to do anything the engineers asked of him, no matter how dangerous or impossible it seemed. As a result Powell got the hot planes. Every jet builder wanted to see what magic J. C. Powell could conjure up with his airframe. He was soon enticed to Dreamland by General Elliott with the promise of flying the hottest fighter of them all — Cheetah. Pow-ell’s expertise both as a pilot and as an engineer helped speed up the development of DreamStar, but he chose to stay with Cheetah. From then on, he had been her only pilot.
But J. C. Powell had had his time in the spotlight. Now, it was Kenneth Francis James’ turn.
When he got to DreamStar again, Patrick climbed up the ladder on the hydraulic lift and watched as James was lowered into the cockpit. His special flight suit was preformed into a sitting position, making James look like a plastic doll. Once James was lowered into place, Patrick moved toward him as close as possible without interfering with the small army of experts attending to the pilot’s seat configuration.
“Feeling okay, Ken?”
James nodded. “Snug, but okay.”
Patrick watched as James was set into his specially molded ejection seat, strapped into place, and had his oxygen, environmental and electronic leads connected. The image of a medieval knight being readied for combat flashed in Patrick’s head, topped off when they placed James’ helmet on his head and clipped it into a clavicle ring on his shoulders. The helmet was essentially a holder for a variety of superconducting sensors and terminals that covered the inner surface. Once the helmet was locked into place, the flight suit became one gigantic electronic circuit, one big superconducting transistor. It became the data-transmission circuit between James and the amazing aircraft he was strapped into.
“Self-test in progress,” Carmichael said. The computer, a diagnostic self-test device as well as an electroencephalograph to monitor the human side of the system, checked each of the thousands of sensors, circuits and transmitters within the suit and their connections through the interface to DreamStar. But Carmichael chose not to let the computer do his work, even though he was the one who had designed the interface; the scientist manually ran through the complex maze of readouts, checking for any sign of malfunction or abnormal readings.
He found none; neither did the computer. A few minutes later, Carmichael turned to Patrick, nodded. “He’s ready.”
Patrick walked around the lift’s narrow catwalk and knelt down in front of James. He could barely see a movement of James’ eyes through the helmet’s thick electro-optical lenses.
“Ready to do some flying, buddy?”
They looked at each other. There was no movement at all from James. Patrick waited, watched. James appeared to be trying to decide on something. He didn’t seem fearful or apprehensive or at all nervous. He was just … what?
Patrick glanced at Carmichael. “Alan? How’s he doing?”
“His beta is pinging off the scale,” Carmichael said, rechecking the electroencephalograph readouts. “No alpha or theta activity at all.”
Patrick turned again to James, bent down close to him. “We can reschedule this, buddy. Don’t push it. It’s not worth the grief.”
“No. I’ll be okay. I’m just … trying to get ready …”
“Then relax, let it come to you; don’t chase it. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.”
“Hell of a way to fight a war,” James said — the tension in his voice was obvious. “I can see a fighter pilot telling his squadron commander, ‘I know the enemy is rolling across the base but I can’t fly today — my damn theta isn’t responding …” I’ve got to prove that I can go in and out of theta-alpha in a moment’s notice.”
“Making the system operational is still a few years off, Ken,” Patrick told him. “Don’t worry about all that. Relax; don’t force yourself or the system. Let’s just go up and have some fun. Finish up and buy me a beer at the Club afterward. That’s all.”