“Playboy, you have visible damage to the leading-edge aileron on the right wing,” said Cheshire. “Copy? Knife, are you okay? Are you with us?”
“Roger that,” he said. The plane’s high-flying position—the pilot sat in what looked like a glass bulb at the top of the plane—gave him a good view of the wings. Finally sure he had it back under control, he twisted back and forth, doing a visual inspection to confirm Cheshire’s warning and the legion of problem codes on the systems screen. The leading-edge surface was bent, and he could see a piece of metal extending out from behind it. He guessed that was part of one of the motors that worked it, which the screen warned had failed. Now he had to admit that the FBW system was useful—it was compensating so smoothly for the damaged wing that he barely noticed it. Undoubtedly the flight-control system had played a big role in helping him regain control of the craft.
Though serious, the damage wasn’t fatal. But his gauges showed the temperature in his right engine had shot up to the redline; there must be a problem there as well.
Stinking F-119. What a way to go out.
Appropriate, though, considering the plane.
“Dream Tower, this is Playboy One. Emergency declared. I have a slight situation with my wing and engine. Looks like it’s time to land,” Mack said, adding his altitude, position, and heading, though they would already be projected by Dreamland’s powerful sensors. He and Fort Two had the sky to themselves; all he had to do was line up, pop his wheels, and land.
“Tower acknowledges, Playboy. Copy your flying emergency.”
“Mack?”
Brenna’s voice seemed to come at him from the clouds, breaking through the outside fuzz of his consciousness as he pushed toward Runway Two. He felt the kiss again, then returned to the matter at hand.
“I’m okay, beautiful,” he told her. “I can’t even tell there’s a problem. But listen, do I get a kiss if I land in one piece?”
COLONEL BASTIAN STOOD BACK FROM THE MONITOR, nudging next to the air-conditioning unit in the cramped quarters of Dreamland’s mobile test tower. He could see Smith’s plane coasting toward the hangars in the distance. Obviously, the damage to the plane had been minimal.
The damage to the idea of using the Megafortress as a tanker, however, was another story.
But he had decided this morning that he definitely wanted to keep the Megafortress project alive. It wasn’t just the fact that he believed in McLanahan’s Air Battleship scenario. Even as a “simple” bomber, the Megafortress made sense. With a few tweaks, it could be as survivable as an F-15E while carrying several times the payload two or three times as far. Get into a low-intensity war in a hot climate—say, the Middle East, as McLanahan had hinted, or Southeast Asia—and a few Megafortresses might just turn the tide. And it would be cheap; the Air Force had literally hundreds of B-52’s available for conversion.
At the moment, though, that was a drawback. There weren’t enough jobs at stake to easily apply political pressure and keep it alive. But attach it to the F-119 as a survivable tanker, and there’d be plenty of pots. A few months of demonstration flights, maybe some careful work with contractors, and they’d have enough political support to revive the battleship concept.
But it was dead now.
Bastian listened as the controller exchanged information with an aircraft conducting a test near Range F.
“What’s going on?” he asked Mickey Colgan, the flight officer coordinating the day’s tests.
“Oh, that’s just a drone taking off,” said the captain. “Unpiloted Green Phantom doing IR testing. Pretty straightforward. It’s got a JSF suit on. It has to catch another drone.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I’m sorry, Colonel. There are two Phantoms. One’s just a stock drone. The other, Green Phantom, has some wing baffles and a few other mods to simulate the F-119’s flight characteristics. They’re controlled out of the Flighthawk hangar. We’re running checks on the nitrogen-cooling system for the gear in the IR’s eye. It has to be kept at a constant temperature or—”
“You think Green Phantom could rendezvous with Fort Two?”
Colgan blinked. “Well, if the F-119 can’t do it, that old Phantom, I mean, it’s at least as bad a flier as the JSF itself.”
“Who’s the pilot?” asked Bastian.
“That would be Major Stockard, sir.” Colgan seemed to bristle a bit. “They, uh, they’re trying to get him back into the swing of things.”
“How good a pilot is he?”
“Sir?”
“I mean with the drone.”
“Well, before his accident, there was no one near as good as him,” said Colgan. “But …”
“But what?”
“I don’t know if he’s back up to speed, Colonel. And he, uh, he’s in a wheelchair.”
“What’s the frequency to the Flighthawk bunker?” said Bastian, moving back to the corn panel.
* * *
TO SAY HE’D FLOWN THE QF-4 DRONE TEN THOUSAND times wasn’t an exaggeration; Zen had learned to control the Flighthawks with the exact airplanes he was flying. He’d gotten so he could work them with his eyes closed before moving up to the much-more-difficult-to-control Flighthawks.
He closed his eyes now in frustration. The gig was simple—all he had to do was fly Green Phantom behind Phantom One-Zero-Mike at fifteen thousand feet with three miles of separation. Piece of cake.
Except his heart was pounding and there was sweat pouring from his wrists, and if it weren’t for the automated flight computer fail-safe, he would have smacked Green Phantom into the ground on takeoff.
Things had gone badly yesterday, but that at least could be attributed to rust; he’d gotten better as the exercises wore on.
He wasn’t sure what to blame this on. Maybe the F-119 mods. JSF wasn’t exactly the world’s most flyable plane, and Green Phantom was a pig’s pig.
It was easier to handle than two Flighthawks at supersonic speed, though. So why was he sweating like a bull being chased by toreadors?
If he couldn’t make this simple intercept, how could he ever control the U/MFs?
Zen rolled his neck around on his spine, the vertebrae cracking. He’d forgotten how heavy the control helmet was. He could actually take it off, since the console he was sitting at in Hanger B was basically a flight simulator on steroids. Arranged like a cockpit and developed for the Flighthawk, its standard multi-use displays were augmented by dedicated control and sensor displays, along with banks of specific system overrides and data collectors. They’d nicknamed it Frankenstein’s Control Pod.
But if he was going to get back in the program, he had to do it right, and that meant using the helmet and the Flighthawk flight sticks. It meant sucking it up and hanging in there, kinks, sweat, and all.
Zen checked the altitude on Green Phantom, nudging up to 15,500 feet. He was five miles away, closing on One-Zero-Mike’s left wing. Though he had his left hand wrapped around Mike’s control stick, the computer was actually flying the plane in its preprogrammed orbit. Zen nudged his right hand back slightly, gently climbing.
Piece of cake. Two miles to go. He moved his thumb to the center of the stick’s oval top, keying the view screen from optical to FLIR input. The view at the top of his screen changed to a greenish tint, the world shading according to heat sources.
Driven by his preprogrammed flight plan, One-Zero-Mike began to bank. Zen started to follow, jerked his hand too hard, cursed, and then almost lost Green Phantom. The muscles in his fingers froze. He pushed the computer-assist lever at the base of the assembly, too embarrassed to use the voice command and acknowledge that he had blown it. The computer immediately grabbed the plane, putting it onto the preprogrammed course.
“Zen?”
“What?” he snapped over the headset.
“I have Colonel Bastian on the circuit,” replied Fred Remington, one of the civilians helping run the tests. “Something’s up.”
“Yeah, okay.” Zen’s pinkie stretched to click down the lever at the front base of his right stick; it automatically engaged computer control for Green Phantom. “Let me talk to him.”