Dreamland: Piranha

by Dale Brown

  “We go up the ramp, Stoner,” Zen told him, pushing his wheelchair toward the ladder that led down from the crew area of the Megafortress. When Zen reached the stairway he swung around quickly, backing into the attachment device the Dreamland engineers had added to all of the Flighthawk-equipped EB-52’s. The Zen Clamp, as they called it, hooked his chair into an elevator they’d rigged to work off electricity or stored compressed air, so no matter what was going on with the plane he had a way in or out. Two small metal panels folded down from the sides of the ladder; Zen backed onto them and then pulled thick U-bolts across the fronts of is read wheels.

  “Gimps going up,” said Zen, hitting the switch. He had to push back in the seat to keep his balance and avoid scraping his head; there wasn’t a particularly huge amount of clearance and, once moving, the elevator didn’t stop.

  His greatest fear was falling out onto the runway. While it might be more embarrassing than painful, it was one bit of ignominy he preferred to avoid.

  At the top, he backed onto the Flighthawk deck. He’d put on his speed-suit already, but Stoner would have to take one of the spares they kept during Whiplash deployment. He unlatched the wardrobe locker at the back of the compartment—an Eb-52 special feature—then wheeled back as Stoner came up.

  “You have to put on a suit,” he told the CIA officer. “We pull serious Gs. Helmet too. I’ll show you how to hook into the gear when you sit down.”

  Stoner selected the suit closest to his six-foot frame, pulling it over his borrowed jumpsuit. Zen stopped him when it was done, inspecting to make sure it was rigged right. It was, and he knew it was since he ‘d watched him suit up, but something about the spook’s presumption ticked him off.

  “Life-support guy will be here by tomorrow,” said Zen, clearing Stoner to pass. “He’ll measure you up for a suit if you’re going to be flying with us.”

  “This is fine.”

  “Your seat’s on the left. Don’t touch anything.” Zen watched Stoner slip into the straight-backed ejection seat and begin to snap up. Ordinarily, he sat first—it was easier to maneuver into his seat if he could lean all the way over into the other station, but he could do it just as well with someone sitting there.

  “Incoming,” he said, backing his wheelchair against his own seat. He set the wheel brake on the left side, then pushed his weight forward, beginning the pirouette into his seat. The techies had tried several modifications, including an experiment with a sliding track that let the ejection seat turn. They’d also played with a wheel-in arrangement that allowed Zen to use a special wheelchair during the mission, but they couldn’t make it ejectable.

  Of course, he wouldn’t stand much chance going out. Unless, ironically enough, it was over water, where he could use his upper body to swim—something he did a lot during rehab.

  He swung into place, curling his chest across and landing slightly off-kilter, but it was close enough. He wedged himself into place and pulled on his straps, then turned to Stoner, who’d already worked out the oxygen and com hook-ins on his own.

  “All right,” Zen told him over the interphone. “Preflight’s going to take a while. You’re just a spectator.”

  “Yes,” said the CIA officer.

  “You see how to adjust your headphones?”

  “Got it.”

  “You can check the oxygen hookup—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Been-there-done-that. Right.

  Zen punched up C³ and went to work.

  Upstairs on the flight deck, Breanna finished going through the main preflight checklist, then stretched her neck back and turned to Chris, who was doing another double check of the mission course they’d programmed earlier.

  “So?” she asked.

  “Ready to rock, Boss. You think we ought to give these atolls names?”

  “Numbers are fine.”

  “I’m thinking rock songs with a common theme. Say all Rolling Stones songs. Get it?”

  “No,” she said.

  “First up, ‘Angie.’ A, Angie. Get it?”

  “Chris, maybe we should do the preflight again.”

  “Your call. Next rock would be ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ ”

  “That’s a Beatles song.”

  “You are into this, huh?”

  “How’s the weather?”

  “Still sucks,” said Chris. “At least it’s not raining here.”

  As he said that, lightening flashed in the distance.

  “Somebody heard me,” said Chris.

  “That or they’re reacting to your song titles.”

  “Hey, I could do puns. Do not ask for whom the a-toll

  tolls. John Donne,” he added, giving the name of the poet for the butchered line of verse.

  They came off the runway swift and smooth, the big plane’s wings catching a ride on the stiff breeze blowing the storm front in. Breanna felt the wheels push up, the engines rumbling easily as they headed over the storm front. They got clear of the clouds and turbulent air, rising swiftly and then tracking toward the atoll.

  “Angie in fifteen,” said Chris as they hit their waymarker.

  “Quicksilver, this is Hawk Leader. Ready to fuel and prepare for launch,” said Zen.

  “Copy that,” she said. “How’s our passenger?”

  “Breathing.”

  Zen’s voice told her Stoner had rubbed him the wrong way. The feeling seemed to be unanimous among the Whiplash people who’d dealt with him. Breanna was trying to withhold judgement. So far the only trait she’d formed an opinion on was his eyes—they were nice.

  “Begin fuel sequence on Flighthawks,” she said. “Prepare for launch.”

  The gear blew Stoner away. The video being fed from the robot plane onto the large tube in front of him looked remarkably clear and focused, even though the aircraft feeding it was moving at nearly five hundred knots.

  Barclay had been right; the Dreamland people did know what they were doing. Touchy bastards, full of themselves, but at least they were competent. He could live with that.

  Zen had said the large display was infinitely configurable, but it wasn’t clear exactly what that meant. Though it was intended as a second Flighthawk station, its flight-control section had been locked out, and there was no joystick or any switch gear to control the robot. He had figured out how to stop, slow, and replay the main video feed on a second, dedicated screen on his left. A slider and a small panel very similar to standard VCR controls worked the tube; he could also select a bird’s-eye or sitrep view and a map overlay. Undoubtedly the damn thing made coffee too, if you hit the right combination of switches.

  An atoll began to grow in the left-hand corner of the main screen. Stoner heard the pilot grunting and groaning as he flew. He ducked his body with the aircraft, as if he were in the cockpit, not sitting here miles away.

  Stoner wanted to ask him about his nickname, Zen. Practitioners of the way were rare in the military, and it was possible, maybe even likely, it was just a nickname. It seemed an improbably one, unless it had come before the pilot had lost the use of his legs. Jed Barclay was his cousin, but hadn’t said very much about Zen on the way out.

  “Slowing for our run,” reported Zen. “No radar spotted, nothing active.”

  “I have nothing,” said Torbin, whose gear scanned for radar emissions.

  “Negative as well,” said Collins, who was essentially an eavesdropper on radio transmissions.

  “Rain’s moving in pretty fast,” added the copilot. “Wet down there, Zen.”

  “I brought my umbrella.”

  The storm front a few miles to the north covered the rest of the atolls with heavy rain and fog. Even their high-tech gear would have trouble seeing through it.

  “Looks like a lean-to on that northern end,” said Zen. “Stoner?”

  He turned to the smaller screen, rewinding and then magnifying. Three trees had been laid across a large rock near the water.

  “Might shelter a canoe, swimming gear,”
Stoner told him. He worked the slider, getting a wide-angle view. “Don’t see anything else.”

  “Stand by for a second run-through.”

  “Hawk Leader, we have an unidentified flight one hundred-twenty miles southwest of our target atoll, very low to the water,” said Ferris. “Course unclear at the moment. Not getting an identifier.”

  “Hawk Leader.”

  “Hold that—positive ID. U.S. Navy flight. An F/A-18,” said the copilot, who had used special gear designed to “tickle” an unknown plane and find out if it was friend or foe.

  “Hawk Leader. We’re done on Angie. What’s next—Bella?”

  “That would be Atoll Two,” snapped the pilot. “Jeff, I’m going to take it up another five thousand feet over this storm. It’s pretty fierce.”

  “Hawk Leader.”

  Stoner pushed his head toward the main video screen as the robot surveyed the next collection of rocks and coral. He felt the big plane tilt backward, the acceleration pushing him against the seat. If Zen felt it, he gave no indication as the Flighthawk looped twice around the atoll, its cameras covering every inch of ground.

  “Nothing,” said Zen finally.

  “I concur,” said Stoner.

  “On to the next stop,” said Ferris, the copilot. “Should I tell our guests what they’ll win if the prize is behind door number-three?”

  “Go for it,” said the pilot.

  “A goat.”

  “No sex jokes, please.”

  Her voice was so serious it took Stoner a second to realize Captain Breanna Stockard was joking. She was gorgeous, cool, and obviously well-trained. Stoner had never like the idea of women in the military, and as a SEAL had never actually had to deal with any, but Breanna Stockard might make him rethink his attitude.

  Too bad she was married.

  The third target was much larger than the others, more an island than an atoll. It had a U-shaped lagoon and what seemed to be skid marks from a boat on the beach. There was a tarp covering something about twenty yards from the water, half-hidden by the trees.

  “No radar operating,” said Torbin.

  “That tarp is big enough for one,” said Zen.

  “Yeah, interesting,” said Stoner. “Can you get a close-up?”

  “Copy that,” said Zen.

  A severe wind whipped the trees. Zen’s grunts and groans increased. Stoner guessed it was hard to hold the small place on course at low speed, but the video remained steady and in focus. They couldn’t find anything besides the tarp.

  The nearby fourth target proved to be a pile of coral perhaps ten by fifteen meters. There was nothing on the jagged surface.

  By the time they reached the fifth atoll, rain had begun to fall. The computer compensated, but the view on the large screen was still grainy. Oddly, the smaller screen seemed easier to read. Stoner watched the Flighthawk come over the island at just under 180 knots and two thousand feet.

  “There’s a buoy in the water, a line up the beach,” said Zen.

  Stoner put his face practically on the screen and still couldn’t see it.

  “Here,” said Zen. He did something with his controls and muttered something to the computer that Stoner didn’t quite catch; the large screen flashed with a close-up of a small round circle in the water, boxed in by hash marks drawn by the computer.

  “Could be part of a long-wave device,” Stoner told him.

  “Panel—there’s a radar set. Look at it. Yeah, small. Infrared.”

  The screen blurred.

  “Too much rain,” said Zen. “Torbin, you have anything?”

  “Negative. No transmissions of any type.”

  “Same here,” said Collins.

  They took two more runs over the island, switching back and forth between optical, infrared, and synthetic radar scans. None of them produced a very clear picture as the storm began to kick up fiercely, but there was definitely some sort of installation here.

  “Maybe a long-wave com setup,” suggested Stoner. “Surface radar, sends information out to ships.”

  “That radio mast in the tree?” asked Zen.

  Stoner had trouble seeing the tree, let alone the antenna. “Don’t know,” he said finally.

  “Who’s it working for?”

  “Good question. I’d guess Chinese. Have to see the equipment, thought. Could be the Indians. Early warning, something comes south. Radar might scan a hundred miles, give or take. Like to look at it up close, on foot.”

  “Yeah,” said Zen.

  Zen took Hawk One up off the deck, rising through the clouds to get out of the storm. Even with the computer’s help, it was a hitch flying low and slow in the shifting air currents, their violent downdrafts and rain pounding on his head.

  There were two more atolls nearby, both now covered by heavy fog, clouds, and rain. He took a breath, checked his gear—instruments were all in the green, everything running at spec—then plunged back downward. He ran over both a little faster and higher than he wanted, but saw nothing.

  “We still have some time,” Bree told him as he came off his last pass. “We can check out those islands to the east as we head for the patrol area. Beyond that, though, we’ll have to call it a day.”

  “Hawk Leader.” Zen punched his mission map into the lower left-hand screen, got himself oriented, then checked his fuel panel. It’d be tight, but he could wait to refuel after the flyovers, then launch Hawk Two. He touched base with Ferris to make sure that would be okay, and got an update on some ships they’d seen. Most were civilians, sailing well clear of yesterday’s trouble spot.

  “Two Indian destroyers off to the southwest, in the thick of the storm,” the copilot added over the interphone. “If they stay on their present course, they’ll reach the patrol area about five hours from now, maybe a little sooner. Depends on the weather, though. They may not get anywhere.”

  “Maybe they’re heading for that atoll we saw with the radar,” suggested Stoner.

  Zen grunted. He resented someone else cutting into his conversation. He avoided the temptation to cut him off the circuit, which he could do with the Flighthawk control board.

  “More likely they’re scouting for the carrier group to the south,” injected Ferris. “About a day’s sail behind according to the intel brief.”

  “I wouldn’t rule anything out.”

  Zen took Hawk One back toward the ocean, riding down through the angry carpet of whirling wind and water toward the target, a doublet of coral and rock. The thick drops of precipitation rendered the IR gear useless, and the optic feed was nearly as bad. The synthesized radar did the best, but the Flighthawk’s speed made it nearly impossible to get any details out of the view. The computer assured him there were no “correlations to man-made objects” on the first group of rocks. Approaching the second, he saw a shadow that might be a small boat, or perhaps a large log, or even a series of rocks. He came in higher than he wanted, catching an odd wave of wind. Two more flyovers into the teeth of the storm failed to reveal anything else.

  “I think it was rocks,” said Stoner.

  “We’ll analyze it later,” Zen told him.

  “Hawk Leader, we’re starting to get close to pumpkin time,” Breanna told him.

  “Roger that. I need to refuel,” said Zen, pointing his nose upward.

  Aboard the submarine Shiva, in the South China Sea

  0852

  “Up scope.”

  Admiral Ari Balin waited as Shiva’s periscope rose. His arms were at his chest, his eyes already starting to narrow. He placed his finger deliberately on the handles as the scope stopped climbing, then began his scan with deliberate, easy motion.

  The gods were beneficent; they had lost the noisy Chinese submarine, and were now in the middle of a storm that would further confuse anyone trying to track them. it was the perfect preparation for the next phase of their mission, a sign that theirs was indeed the proper path.

  Satisfied there were no other ships nearby, Admiral Balin stepped
back. Captain Varja, the submarine’s commander, took his turn at the periscope. Where Balin was slow and graceful, the younger man was sharp and quick; it was a good match.

  They had down well so far. The weapon had worked perfectly, and the information that had come to them provided two perfect hits. The real test, however, lay ahead.

  “Clear,” said Varja, turning away from the scope.