“Looking good,” said Ong somewhere behind him.
“Mama!” yelled Jennifer.
“I’m having trouble keeping up,” reported Breanna.
A complaint? A compliment?
The Flighthawk was at nearly top speed, flying at less than a hundred feet over the ground. Zen began his turn, starting to lose speed as the wings dragged through the air. The U/MF’s flight surfaces adapted to minimize some of the loss, the forward canards pushing upward as he made the turn. He was down to 550 knots, pretty damn good, the plane having taken nearly nine g’s. the maneuver would probably have blackened out a ‘real’ pilot.
“We’re still hot,” said Ong. “Okay, Major, Captain – knock it off and return to holding track. series One, Two, and I guess we’ll call Three complete. We need a few minutes to dump the data, but it looked impressive.”
“Full communications gear and functions,” reported Gleason.
“I had some trouble at the end,” said Breanna. “You pulled out to about eight miles.”
“Yeah, well, you just have to keep up,” Zen told her.
“Doing my best, love,” she snapped.
Zen could feel the others in the control area around him bristling. They were used to banter back and forth like this all the time – but then it had been joking fun; now it seemed to stick, to wound.
“Sorry, Captain,” he said. “I guess I was feeling my oats. I’m still getting the kinks out.”
“No apology necessary.”
He couldn’t remember how they’d been. He couldn’t remember the past and didn’t want to – the past was poison now.
“Let’s try the same test, only at twenty-five miles,” suggested Ong. “You think you can work the track out, Zen?”
Twenty-five miles was twice as far as their improvements were supposed to be good for, and beyond the theoretical limit of the communications and control system. But Jeff snapped back, “Copy,” and began pushing the Flighthawk to its starting point.
This time he took the initial dive a little easier, letting his wings sweep out as he found the thicker air. Boeing swept south, widening the distance between itself and Hawk One. Zen concentrated on the virtual windshield, moving with the small plane as it sailed over the mountain slopes at five hundred knots. His altitude over ground level dipped to a bare fifty feet.
He could go lower. He nudged the stick, more brown flooding into the view screen.
He was fifteen miles from the mother ship, forty feet AGL.
Thirty-five.
He felt like he was there. The dirt-alert sounded, warning him of an upcoming ridge.
Zen learned his body with the stick, sliding around the obstruction.
Oh baby.
“Hawk connection lost,” scolded the computer suddenly.
“Hold present course. Override safety procedure. Reacquire,” Zen demanded. He still had live visuals, and in fact thought he was in control.
“Out of range,” said the computer. “Safety Routine Two.”
“Shit. Bree.”
“We’re where you put us,” she said defensively.
“Reacquire,” Zen repeated. He jerked the stick, but nothing happened.
Then the view screen went blank.
Behind him, the engineers were scrambling.
“It went into fail-safe mode,” said Ong. “Sorry, once it’s in Routine Two it’s impossible to override. That was added.”
He stopped short of saying, “After your accident.”
“We did really good, though,” insisted Gleason. “We were at seventeen miles before the signal began degrading.”
“Once it did, it went like shit,” added Ong.
“Com modules are off-line,” reported Jennifer.
“Hawk One is returning to the lake bed,” said Ong. He broadcast a generic ‘Knock it off’ alert over the Dreamland frequencies, even though the skies were clear.
“Well, at least we know the fail-safe is working,” said Breanna.
If Jeff hadn’t known how expensive the helmet was, he probably would have thrown it through the Boeing’s fuselage.
Danny didn’t get around to checking his secure e-mail until mid-morning. Hal had gotten back to him – but not with the football prediction he’d expected.
“Danny, won’t be talking to you for a while,” read the message. “Having too much fun. Wish you were here.”
He leaned back on the hard metal chair in his security commander’s office. He wasn’t sure where ‘here’ was, but he had a pretty good guess. CNN that morning had reported that the Iranian Navy had stopped a tanker off the northern African coast. It had also reported that the President had been ‘in close consultation’ with his security advisors and other world leaders all night.
If Danny hadn’t taken the Dreamland assignment, Hal probably wound have asked him to join whatever he was putting together. He’d be in the middle of things.
He might still end up there, if Whiplash was called out.
For just a second, the young captain allowed himself the luxury of fantasy. He saw – felt – himself on a big Pave Low, zooming into a firefight, bullets and missiles flying through the air. He saw himself in a Hollywood zoom, dashing into the smoke, a wide grin on his face.
It wasn’t really like that. It was dirty and it was messy and you never knew exactly where the hell you were, or whether you were going to live or die.
But he loved it anyway. or at least, loved having survived it. nothing could beat that rush.
Danny jumped to his feet and went to attend to one of the million things that needed attending to.
With Mack Smith gone, Major Rocki Mendoza was the ranking officer on the F-119 test project. Colonel Bastian found her in the JSF project hangar, an underground complex directly below Hangar Three, an hour after his conference broke up.
“Colonel, glad you could cover over,” she said as if she had been hoping he’d come. Her voice echoed off the polished concrete floor. “I was just about to discuss the testing schedule for the new avionics suite with Greg Desitio, the vender rep. Want to join in?”
Bastian grinned at Desitio, who’d told him earlier that the avionics suite had been delayed another six months because of ‘unspecifiable contingencies.’ Then he turned back to back to Mendoza. “Actually, Major, I wanted to take one of the fighters out for a spin.”
“For a spin, sir?”
“You think you can arrange a test flight?”
Mendoza’s cheery manned vaporized. “Well, we’d have to check for the satellite window and –”
“I looked at the satellite window already,” Dog told her. “It’s clear until three.”
“And then the prep time involved –”
“I understand there were some landing gear issues to be gone over, and you had slotted a test flight.”
“Well, yes, but we’ve already prepped that mission.”
“You don’t think I can handle it?” Dog asked.
Mendoza narrowed her eyes. With Mack’s departure, her stock had skyrocketed; clearly she didn’t want to be bothered by a puny lieutenant colonel.
Bastian struggled to keep his poker face.
“Of course you can handle it, sir,” said Mendoza. “The JSF is a pleasure to fly. It’s just that Captain Jones is already upstairs and ready to go.”
“Jonesy doesn’t mind,” Bastian said, enjoying the sigh of the air deflating from her cheeks. “I already had him brief me on the flight. He’s flying chase in my F-16.”
While Dog felt pretty full of himself as he hustled into this flight gear, he hadn’t pulled rank just to annoy Mendoza and upset the flight-test crew. He had decided that if Dreamland’s future was tied to the JSF, he should at least feel how the seat beneath his fanny.
It felt fairly good, actually. Stonewall One – one of the three F-119 testers – had a newly modified ejection seat that featured a form-molded back and bottom. It wasn’t possible to make the padding on an ejection seat very thick; the force of the seat as it rocketed out of the craft would bruise a pilot’s butt, if not break his bones. But this was by far the most comfortable pilot’s chair Dog had ever sat in.