Still, the plane itself seemed like a tugboat. Dog tried yanking and banking as he completed his first orbit around the test range at six thousand feet. The F-119 moved like a toddler with a load in his pants, waddling through maneuvers that would be essential to avoid heavy flak while egressing a target.
Not good.
It did somewhat better at fifteen thousand feet, but it took him forever to get there. Dog thought back to the complaints of the A-10A pilots during the Gulf War, when standing orders required them to take their heavily laden aircraft well above the effective range of flak as they crossed the border. Those guys hated going over five hundred feet, and they had a point—their airplanes were built like tanks and carried more explosives than the typical World War II bomber.
The JSF, on the other hand …
Dog sighed. The politicians were in love with the idea of a one-size-fits-all-services-and-every-mission airplane. The military had to suck it up and make do.
Did they, though? And what would those politicians say when the people who flew the F-119 were coming back in body bags?
He checked his instruments and position, then radioed in that he was ready to check the landing gear.
“WE WERE NEVER OFF THE BRIEFED COURSE,” BREANNA repeated. She folded her arms and stared across the makeshift conference room. Zen continued to glare at her; she felt sure that if she turned she’d find the plasterboard wall behind her on fire.
“I didn’t say you were off course,” he said.
“Well, you implied it.”
“I think we did fairly well,” said Ong, clearly as uncomfortable as the other techies in the room debriefing the mission. “We have to go through the downloads and everything else, but we were out at seventeen miles before the connection snapped.”
“I think I can tweak the corn module some more,” said Jennifer. “We’re definitely on the right track.”
The scientists continued to talk. To Breanna, it was as if they were speaking in a room down the hall. She could feel Jeff’s anger; it was the only thing that mattered.
But why? The scientists were saying they’d just kicked butt on the test.
That was what they were saying, wasn’t it?
So why was Jeff frowning?
He was pissed at the world because of his legs.
“We keep bumping up against the limits of the bandwidth,” said Jennifer, talking to Bree with what was probably intended as a sympathetic smile. “The degradation of the secure signal is difficult to deal with in real time. If we didn’t have to encode it and make it so redundant, we’d be fine.”
“We are making progress,” said Jeff. “The changes you made worked.”
It seemed to Breanna that his manner changed as he spoke to the computer scientist. He was more like himself.
“We can make it better.” The young scientist twirled her finger through one of the long strands of her light hair. Maybe she did it absentmindedly, but the way she leaned against the table at the same time irked Breanna. Her shirt was at least a size too small.
Why didn’t she just yank it off and be obvious?
“What’s the big deal whether it’s ten miles or twenty?” said Breanna.
“Because the mother ship is a sitting duck,” snapped Jeff, turning on the glare again. “A MiG or a Sukhoi at ten miles could crisp Boeing before it even knew it was there. We need to push out to fifty at least.”
“You’re supposed to be flying with combat planes,” said Breanna.
Ong started to explain about the size of the computer equipment, but Breanna cut him off.
“Yes, I know. Right now you need a lot of space in the mother ship for the control computer and the communications equipment,” she said. “What I’m suggesting is, you make the mother ship survivable.”
“A JSF with a trailer,” joked one of the engineers.
No one laughed.
“Megafortress,” said Breanna. “Twenty miles, even ten, would be fine.”
“Yeah, well, get us the flight time,” said Jeff. “We’ve had a total of two hours with Raven in two weeks. And before I got here, there had been two drops in three months.”
“I’ll try “
Zen nodded. For an instant, maybe half an instant, his anger melted away. Breanna thought she saw something in his eyes, something she hadn’t seen in a long time.
She might have imagined it. She knew in that second that she truly loved him, that she wanted to help him past this—past everything. She loved more than his legs. She loved his mind, his spirit, the way he laughed, the way he said everything was bullshit when it was. The way he actually listened to her—listened to anyone, no matter what he felt toward them.
Breanna felt more and more like an outsider as the debriefing session continued, the crew and engineers picking over different possibilities for improving their connection. Jeff was very businesslike, rarely joking; it seemed to her he’d become colder since the accident, and not just to her.
She followed him into the hall as the meeting broke up. “Jeff’ she called as he started into the men’s room.
“I got to pee. It’s full,” he told her. He pointed to the small pouch he carried at the side of the chair—a piddle-pack.
“Tonight?” It was all she could manage as her throat started to close.
“Yeah. No sweat. I’ll be home. Sorry about last night. I was just too beat to deal with getting back. And it was late.”
“Sure,” she said, but by the time she got the word out of her mouth, he’d pushed into the rest room.
* * *
WHEN COLONEL BASTIAN RETURNED TO HIS OFFICE after his test flight, he found himself walking around, rearranging things on his desk that didn’t need to be rearranged. He went through Ax’s two piles of papers that needed attention—left pile, immediate attention; right pile, sooner-than-immediate attention—got up from his chair, sat back down, got up again.
Dreamland had been included as a direct line item in the F-119 program. In the past few days he had received calls from several generals above him, including the three-star Air Force “liaison” for the interservice project. He’d also spoken to two admirals, three DOD budget analysts, no less than five Congressmen, and a Senator. All had congratulated him, assuring him that Dreamland’s future was now set. While other facilities were trying to wrestle some of the JSF tests, it was clear that Dreamland was the best suited for the project.
Part of the reason for this, Bastian knew, was the fact that everyone figured they could keep a puny lieutenant colonel under their thumb. And while there had been hints of a promotion “in the wind,” as one Congressman put it, even a full bird colonel or brigadier general would be a long way down the pecking order.
In the wind. It was a foul wind. By hitching himself and Dreamland to the JSF, he was saddling the Air Force with a turkey.
Worse, he was going against his conscience and his duty.
Was he? Was telling other people what they wanted to hear such a sin?
The JSF wasn’t that bad a design. Hell, the people here knew how to fix it. They could too—though the necessary changes would turn it into two or three different planes, with less than forty percent interchangeable parts. Each plane would be excellent, well suited for its job. The only drawback would be the expense.
No, the only drawback would be the fact that DOD and the Joint Chiefs and Congress and the President wanted a Joint Services airplane, one size fits all.
How many men would die because of that?
None—there’d be excellent CAP and AWACS and the SAMs would be suppressed, and everything would snap together clean and to spec every day. What could go wrong?
“Hey, Colonel, why are you messing up my system?” asked Ax, standing in the doorway. “You’re making one pile out of two.”
“Jeez, Ax, did you knock?”
“Sir, yes, sir,” snapped the sergeant, momentarily coming to full drill-master attention.
“Come on in, Sergeant Ballbuster,” said Bastian. “What the hell are you up to?”
“Just looking after my papers, Colonel,” said Ax, fishing the signed documents from Bastian’s desk. “How was your flight?”