“Acknowledged, Hawk Commander,” she said. “Hell of a speech, Jeff. Everybody appreciated it.”
“Uh-huh.”
The jerk of the aircraft as it moved toward the main runway always took him by surprise; he was so absorbed by the Flighthawk’s stationary view that the sensation was momentarily disorienting.
“Fly the prebriefed orbit,” he told Breanna as they waited for the tower to give them final takeoff clearance. “I wouldn’t do otherwise,” said his wife.
“Anything else you want to say?”
“No,” replied Bree.
“I stayed in the officers’ guest suite. I was too tired to come home.”
“I wasn’t asking,” said Bree.
Zen waited silently as Boeing lifted off and began to circle across the range. Hawk One continued to idle, waiting for its mother ship to hit its first way marker before coming up.
“Point Alpha reached,” said Breanna finally.
“We’re good, Jeff,” said Jennifer, monitoring the systems a few feet away from him. “It’s your show.”
“Flighthawk Control to Dream Tower, request Clearance B for Hawk One, takeoff on Lake Runway D, per filed plans,” he snapped.
“Tower confirms, Hawk Control. Hawk One, you are clear for takeoff,” said the controller. “Unlimited skies, we have no wind at the present time. Not a bad day for a picnic. Good aviating, Major.”
“Thanks, Straw,” Zen told the controller. He brought the Flighthawk to takeoff power and let off the brake. The slope graph indicating speed galloped upward as the ground flew by in Jeff’s visor view. By 120 knots the Flighthawk was already starting to strain upward. Zen pulled back on the joystick and the aircraft darted into the sky, eager to fly.
How could they kill this plane? he thought. It needs less room to take off than a Piper, is harder to find than a Raptor, and can turn twists around an F/A-18.
Hawk One’s speed and altitude built exponentially as the P&W powering it reached its operating norms. Zen flew to five thousand feet, steadying his speed at five hundred knots. He began banking into an orbit approximately three miles south of the mother ship, Boeing’s tail appearing in the top of his screen. The techies would run through a series of signal tests here before proceeding with more difficult maneuvers.
“Data flow is good,” reported Ong. “Ninety seconds more,” said the engineer. Physically, he was somewhere to Zen’s left, but he seemed a thousand miles away, back on the ground.
God, to be flying again, Jeff thought. To feel the g’s hitting you in the face as you yanked and banked, to hear the roar of the engines as you went for the afterburners and shot straight upward, to gag on the kerosene as the smell of jet fuel somehow managed to permeate the cockpit.
Okay, some things he could do without.
“We’re ready to push it,” said Gleason.
“Pilot, proceed to second stage,” Zen told his wife. “Proceeding,” said Breanna.
Smith was gone. Jeff hadn’t said anything to her about the SOB that night—what was there to say? Who could blame her for going somewhere else?
He would have preferred anyone else in the world. But you didn’t get to choose who your wife had an affair with.
“Major, we’re ready. If you can bring your altitude up to ten thousand—”
“I’m on it,” he told Ong, pulling back on the flight stick and nudging the throttle slide.
They were going to simulate an air launch with a roll and tumble beneath the mother ship—not the preferred, smooth method, but a necessary test to make sure the improvements to the communications system held. Jeff pushed away the extraneous thoughts, pushed his head into the cockpit, into the unlimited sky around Hawk One. He was flying again, and if he didn’t smell the kerosene in his face or maybe feel the g’s kicking against his chest, his head was there, his mind rolling with the wings as his eyes fought for some sort of reference, his sense of balance shifting and almost coming undone as the small plane inverted beneath Boeing to kick off the test pattern.
“Good, good, good,” sang Jennifer. “Oh, Mama, we’re good.”
“Yes!” said Ong. “Solid.”
“Hawk One copies,” said Jeff, swinging around and heading into a trail pattern behind Boeing as briefed.
“Drop simulation was perfect,” added Ong.
“I got that impression.”
“You want to push it? We can try that penetration test we put off yesterday,” added the engineer. “I think our game plan was way too conservative.”
“Copy. Bree?”
“I’m game, if you tell me what you want.”
“Circle back and just begin again. I’ll take it from there.”
“Roger that,” she said.
Jeff took the Flighthawk off toward the west end of the range, zooming near Groom Mountain before heading back on a high-speed intercept with the mother ship. As he came around, the search-and-scan radar bleeped out a big, fat target for him, painting Boeing as if she were an enemy bomber trying to sneak in for an attack.
Fit this sucker with some decent missiles and it would be a front-line interceptor.
“Beginning Test Phase,” Jeff told the others as he closed behind the Boeing at a rate of roughly fifty miles an hour. “Ten seconds.”
“Go for it,” said Ong.
“Copy,” said Bree.
Why was he avoiding her? It was more than Smith. Hell, Smith had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with it.
Zen pushed the Flighthawk into a dive as it flew under the tail area of the mother ship. He mashed the throttle and rolled inverted, swooping down and around in the direction of the mountains. The plane swooped through a thousand feet before he leveled off at five hundred feet, cranking at just over five hundred knots.
“Computer, ground terrain plot in left MUD,” he said. Immediately a radar image appeared. Zen pushed the Flighthawk lower, running toward the mountain range.
Attack planes often flew at low altitude to avoid radar. The reflected ground clutter made it difficult to detect planes when they were close to the ground. Something as small and stealthy as the Flighthawk would be invisible.
Zen flew Hawk One into a long canyon at the far end of the test range, gradually lowering his altitude to three hundred feet above ground level. The floor of the canyon was irregular; he went through one pass with only fifty feet between the UM/F and the side of narrow ridge.
The image in the main viewfinder was breathtaking. He could see the sides of the mountains towering above him as he raced down the long corridor. He flicked his wrist right, pulling the small plane on its wing as he took a turn into a pass. The radar plot in the lower quadrant flashed with a warning of an upcoming plateau, but Zen was on it, gently pulling back and then nailing the throttle for more speed. The exercise didn’t call for him to break the sound barrier, but what the hell. He felt the shudder, then eased back as the image steadied—there was no longer a line between him and the robot plane; the distance had been erased.
“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 UM/F’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 blacked out a “real” pilot.
“We’re still hot,” said Ong. “Okay, Major, Captain—knock 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.