Mack didn’t have time to gloat. One of the helicopters’ escorts flashed for his tail. Its pilot — Jeff Stockard — had been caught with his pants down, and now he wanted revenge.
Of course, the fact that he didn’t have time to gloat did not actually mean that Knife wouldn’t gloat. On the contrary — he flicked on his mike and gave a roar of laughter as he took his Viper into a nearly ninety-degree turn, pulling close to thirteen g’s. The “stock” plane would quite possibly have rattled apart; Knife most certainly would have blacked out from the force of gravity pelting his body. But nothing at the Air Force High Technology Advanced Weapons Center — aka “Dreamland” — was stock. The F-16’s forward canards and reshaped delta wings were fashioned from an experimental titanium-carbon combination that made them several times stronger than the ones the factory had first outfitted her with. Mack’s flight suit was designed to keep blood flowing evenly throughout his body at fifteen g’s, negative as well as positive.
It couldn’t keep his heart from double-pumping as he took the turn and managed to get his pursuer in his sights. He got off a half-second slap shot as the enemy zigged downward. The odds against hitting the small, nimble U/MF fighter were at least a hundred to one, but he got close enough to force the SOB to break downward, keeping it an easy target for the F-16. Knife laughed so loud his helmet almost came off — he hadn’t had this much fun in months.
Zen worked hard now. His breath grew short and the muscles in his shoulders hardened into cannonballs as he tried desperately to break his airplane out of the low-energy scissors he’d been tricked into.
Not tricked exactly. He’d blundered into it, failing to use his airplane properly. Failing to use his head — truth was, he’d been surprised twice in the space of ninety seconds. He was stuck now in a three-dimensional game of follow-the-leader where being the leader meant you had a fifty- or sixty-percent chance of landing in the other guy’s gunsight.
The pursuer had to be careful not to be sucked into a turn or even a loop that would send his plane shooting ahead, effectively changing places. This was a real danger since the U/MF could turn tighter than even the high-maneuverability F-16 Knife was flying. Mack was no sucker, nor a fool, hanging back just far enough to stay with him, but still close enough to cut off any fancy stuff with gunfire.
Zen had three other Flighthawks hurrying to his rescue. Eventually, they’d force Mack to break off, turning the tables on the hunter. But eventually seemed to be taking forever.
The problem was, he couldn’t control four of the robot planes at one time, not easily anyway. It was especially hard when they were tasked with different missions in different places. Changing mental gears wasn’t bad enough — the U/ MFs’ control gear took forever to cycle into the right plane. Forever being ten nanoseconds.
Three months ago, Jeff had saved Mack’s sorry butt and oversized ego with a near-impossible foray into Libya. Shot down and captured while taking part in a covert operation, Smith had been headed to Iran to have his head chopped off when Dreamland’s Spec Ops team, “Whiplash,” intervened. Controlling the still-experimental U/MF-3 Flighthawks from a hastily modified weapons bay of an EB-52 Megafortress, Zen had found Smith and his captor in a small plane over the Mediterranean. When Smith was finally rescued, he was more grateful than a groom on his wedding night.
For about thirty seconds. Now they were back in their usual places, clawing each other at the nation’s top center for weapons development. It didn’t matter that this fight was being played out in a massive computer, projected on a series of screens in a high-tech hangar. Both men went at it like boxers competing for a ten-million-dollar winner-take-all purse.
At the end of the day, both men would go home with the knowledge that they’d helped test and perfect the next generation of front-line weapons for the country. More importantly — as far as they were concerned, at least — one would go home the winner, the other the loser.
Or, as Mack would put it if he won, “the peahead loser.”
Tracers flared over Jeff’s Flighthawk, arcing to his left. The burst of red ignited an idea in Zen’s brain — he yanked hard on the stick, pointing his nose straight up, directly into Mack’s path.
Kevin Madrone edged what was left of his thumbnail against his tooth, watching the bird’s-eye view of the dogfight on the large display screen. The Army captain could see that Mack had the advantage, but it wasn’t quite enough to nail Zen. Their dogfight was incidental to the overall exercise, but he couldn’t help watching. They were like old-fashioned gladiators, flailing at each other in the Colosseum, willing to go to any lengths to beat their opponents. There was something irresistible in their single-mindedness, something attractive in the danger they faced.
And frightening as well. Madrone whittled his nail, nervously razoring two sharp V’s on the cartilage. Blood pricked from his finger as he finally broke away from the conflict to glance at the screen on his right, where one of the computers monitoring the encounter was kicking up data.
“Weapons test complete,” declared the computer.
As the test supervisor, Madrone ought to end the encounter. But instead he turned back to it, drawn by the swirling energy and fascinated by his own fear.
The Flighthawk suddenly veered straight up. Mack’s F-16 seemed to stutter in midair, less than two hundred feet from the smaller craft. The planes seemed to collide. Then it became obvious that the F-16 had veered off at the last possible instant, wings spinning violently. The Flighthawk somehow managed to flip its nose downward, lighting its cannon. Three or four slugs ripped through the F-16’s wing, but Mack managed to zip off in the opposite direction, the craft in an invert.
The two pilots cursed at each other.
“You stinking cheater. You used a hole in the programming!” snapped Mack.
“Oh, like you didn’t to nail the helos.”
“Knock it off,” said Kevin, snapping into his role as mission boss. “Exercise over.”
Neither pilot acknowledged.
Chapter 3
“You have to keep your speed up or you won’t get off the ground.”
“I’m not stupid,” snapped Lieutenant Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian, struggling to get the big EB-52 off Dreamland’s Runway Number Two. The big plane was trimmed for takeoff, its four freshly tuned engines humming at maximum takeoff power. He even had a crisp takeoff kind of wind at eighteen and a half knots in his face.
And still he couldn’t coax the plane into the sky. The mountains loomed ahead.
Worse — the computer-pilot-assist droned a stall warning in his ear.
“Daddy. “
“I have it, Breanna,” he snapped to the copilot, Captain Breanna “Rap” Stockard. Bree was not only acting as his mentor on his first flight in the big plane; she also happened to be his daughter. “I have it,” he repeated.
But Colonel Bastian didn’t have it. The Megafortress’s nose stubbornly remained horizontal and its wheels on the pavement. He was nearly out of runway, and nothing he did — nothing — would get his forward speed over seventy-eight knots. Way too slow for anything but disaster.