“Roger. Two good cookers.”
They saw DreamStar dash forward, then saw its forward fuselage jut into the sky and its canard’s trailing edges snap downward . . .
Then DreamStar disappeared.
J.C. cursed. “Hang on.” But try as he did, Powell could not match DreamStar’s spectacular liftoff or climb rate. While DreamStar’s pitch, power, and thrust controls were automatic, Cheetah’s were mostly hand-controlled, relying on reaction time rather than electronics to trim the aircraft. When DreamStar disappeared from view, J.C.’s first reaction was to pull back on the stick to try to follow. But Cheetah had not reached unstick speed, and Cheetah’s computerized canard pushed the nose down to the runway to gain speed.
“Command override, ” the computerized voice suddenly interjected as Cheetah’s nose fell and the nosewheel struts compressed. “Stall warning. ”
“Damn, too much,” J.C. murmured, and let the nose fall a few feet and watched the airspeed rise. “So much for a short takeoff record.” He let the airspeed rebuild to one hundred eighty knots, then eased back on the stick. Cheetah glided gently off the runway. This time, with plenty of “smash,” Cheetah’s canards responded by pulling the nose higher into the air to take advantage of the extra speed.
J.C. touched the computer interactive control on his stick. “Gear up.”
Three red “landing gear unsafe” lights illuminated, and Patrick could feel the rumble as the two main wheels and the nosewheel lifted through the slipstream. “Landing gear unsafe, ” the computerized voice said. Five seconds later: “Landing gear up and locked. ”
“Gear’s up,” Patrick said. “Two hundred knots. Passing six thousand feet.”
J.C. began pulling the engines one by one out of afterburner to conserve fuel. “Left engine to MIL power . . . right engine to MIL . . . Okay, where is he?”
“Four o’clock high, coming down—”
DreamStar had appeared out of nowhere, it was in a full- power descent, nose aimed straight at Cheetah’s canopy.
J.C. jammed both throttles back into max afterburner and began a hard roll to the right.
“Too late, he’s gonna hit . . .”
Cheetah lunged forward but DreamStar kept on coming, Patrick could now see DreamStar’s canards, deployed diagonally underneath the fighter’s belly in their high-maneuverability position. He could even see DreamStar’s thirty millimeter Vulcan cannon muzzle screaming in closer and closer . . .
But DreamStar did not hit. The closer it came, the more the fighter began to flatten its flight path. It resembled a giant eagle swooping in on its prey. The cannon muzzle never strayed off Cheetah’s canopy, even as DreamStar reached its prey’s altitude—it began to fly sideways, keeping the gun dead on target, paralleling Cheetah’s right turn. As Cheetah began to accelerate, DreamStar snapped out of its sideways flight path and maneuvered into a right rear quartering missile- attack aspect.
“He hosed us,” Patrick said. “He’s at our six. He made a gun pass on us on our climbout. He’s in infrared missile-launch position. Roll out and get him back into fingertip formation.”
J.C. rolled wings level, paused, then rocked his wings twice. A few seconds later DreamStar was tucked in on Cheetah’s right wing, so close that they could have had overlapping wingtips. “Only got a glimpse of him,” J.C. said, “but he looked like he was haulin’ ass. Tell him to stay with the ROE.”
It was a J.C. Powell trademark to push the rules of engagement to the limits; now he was complaining about someone else pushing the ROE. “He’s in fingertip,” Patrick reported to Powell. “I’m sending him to the tactical frequency.” Patrick extended both hands in front of him, fists clenched, one on top of the other, the signal to switch to the agreed-on scrambled tactical frequency; hand signals, used as much as possible, prevented eavesdropping. James nodded that he understood.
On the new scrambled VHF frequency, J.C. called, “Storm flight, check in.”
“Two,” a monotone voice immediately replied.
“Nice moves, Ken,” Patrick said. “But remember the ROE. No maneuvering and no closure rate greater than two hundred knots within one mile of your target. I’d say you came close on both.”
“Yes, sir.” The metallic-sounding voice was James’ altered by the computer. It sounded almost sarcastic. Or was Patrick imagining that?
“Okay, forget it,” Patrick said, imaging Powell’s face. J.C. didn’t like being upstaged. He wouldn’t be sore because he had been upstaged by a younger pilot but that he had been hosed by a machine called ANTARES. “Ken, ready to start some dogfighting?”
“Affirmative.”
“Roger. Lead will come left, heading three-one-zero to stay inside our airspace. On roll-out, Ken, you are the fox. We’ll give you fifteen seconds, then we’re coming after you. Block is ten to fifty thousand feet, keep it under the Mach, please, or the camera telemetry won’t keep up with you. And stay within the ROE, gents. We’re all on the same team . . . Lead, come left heading three-one-zero. Head’s up.”
“Two’s in.”
J.C. started a hard left turn to Patrick’s assigned heading. The roll was a bit more abrupt than it should have been but it didn’t seem to faze James—he stayed right in there, perhaps a few feet farther out, but still in tight fingertip formation. The instant J.C. rolled out of his turn, DreamStar merely dropped straight down out of sight.
“There he goes,” Patrick said. “Straight down, I can’t see him.”
“Fifteen seconds,” Powell complained dryly. “He could be in the next state in fifteen seconds.”
“That’s why he only gets five seconds. Go get ’em.”
Powell rolled inverted, then pulled hard on the stick. Cheetah did a tight inverted turn, losing five thousand feet. Patrick was straining against the G-forces shoving him deep into his seat, trying to look up through the canopy to where he thought DreamStar would be.
“Tally ho,” J.C. sang out. “Coming up on our twelve o’clock. Right where I thought he’d be.” Patrick fought a wave of vertigo as he searched for DreamStar on radar. Normally the back-seater on an F-15E fighter-bomber would use his radar and process the attack for the pilot, but Patrick was only along as a camera operator and observer—J.C. would have to find and process his own targets. But J.C. already had very unconventional help, and he quickly began working on his kill.
He hit the voice-command button. “Attack radar transmit, target report.” Patrick watched as the attack radar went automatically from “standby” to “transmit” and began a wide- area scan.
“Radar transmit, ” the computer responded. Almost immediately, the computer reported, “Radar contact, range fifteen miles. ”
“Heads up display.”
J.C.’s windscreen was filled with symbols and numbers, seemingly floating in space. Unlike regular HUDs, heads-up displays—pieces of plate glass that reflected up from the instrument console to the pilot—Cheetah’s consisted of large banks of high-resolution laser projectors that created threedimensional images that hung in space. Unlike a reflected HUD system, which relied on the pilot orienting himself directly behind the glass, Cheetah’s laser-projected images were visible no matter how the pilot moved in his seat, and even bright sunlight or glare on the windshield could not wash the images away. The laser images showed an icon of DreamStar with a diamond symbol around it, indicating that Cheetah’s attack radar was locked onto it. Columns of numbers surrounding the icon showed DreamStar’s heading, airspeed, range and closure rate.
“Target designate . . .” Powell said. Instantly micro-wattage laser projectors in his helmet scanned his eyeballs, and a holographic circle and crosshairs was projected up onto the windscreen corresponding to exactly where he was looking. He centered the crosshairs on the icon, “. . . now.”
“Target radar lock, ” the computer reported.
“Laser slave to radar,” J.C. ordered.
“Target laser lock. ” A four-pointed star superimposed itself on DreamStar’s i
con. Unlike Cheetah’s attack radar, the laser rangefinder was undetectable by any of DreamStar’s radardetecting threat-warning receivers. Cheetah could carry a dozen laser-guided ATM-12 Cougar hypervelocity missiles, which were high-speed, nonexplosive, relatively inexpensive guided missiles. Fired from very short to very long ranges—it had no warhead and therefore no minimum-range requirements—the Cougar missile could be used to attack both air and ground targets, destroying its target by sheer force of impact.
DreamStar was still cruising along on the same heading. He hadn’t been detected—yet. As James drove in closer he would eventually pick up Cheetah’s radar emissions. J.C. had to control his excitement and steady his voice to issue more commands to the computer.
“Radar standby.”
“Radar standby. ” The laser rangefinder would now process the entire kill without danger of detection.
J.C. took a deep breath. “Arm laser missile.”
“Arm laser missile, warning, practice missile armed.” The weapons multi-function display showed Cheetah’s ten weapons stations, the belly-mounted Cougar missile rack illuminated with the number 12 on it, signifying the number of hypervelocity missiles remaining.
“Launch laser missile.”
“Launch . . . Warning! Collision warning. Collision warning. ”
J.C. barely had time to react. DreamStar had just frozen in mid-air, still on its original heading, and let Cheetah drive right at him, chopping the distance between the two advanced fighters from ten miles to practically zero in the blink of an eye. Powell, with no choice, rolled hard behind DreamStar and dived past him. The computer had processed the launch command, but Powell doubted very much if he’d ever be credited with a “kill” with a closure rate and maneuver like that.
“God ...” McLanahan breathed. He remembered how they had used the same maneuver in the B-52S in the past. Especially one particular B-52, his Old Dog Zero One, on that mission over Russia that seemed like a million years ago. “Now I know what it feels like to get sucked in . . .”
“He knew we’d try that dive on him,” Powell said. “He was waiting for us. The minute he detected our attack radar was off he knew we were committed. He just put DreamStar on max alpha hover and chopped his power.” But J.C. didn’t linger on James’ maneuver. He knew DreamStar could accelerate back to combat speed and pull in right behind him just as fast as he had slowed down. So J.C. selected full afterburner and yanked the nose skyward, throwing Cheetah into a nearvertical climb.
“You mean ANTARES outguessed you?” Patrick taunted as he clung to his handlebars in the steep climb.
J.C. didn’t take the bait. “That was my fault. I performed like any pilot would if he sees a bogey below him. Well, enough of that. No more predictability.”
Fighting in the horizontal, DreamStar, it seemed, was unbeatable—but DreamStar had only one engine and was less powerful when fighting in the vertical. In spite of Cheetah’s weight penalties she was still a powerhouse when it came to dogfighting in two dimensions.
“Laser to standby. Radar to transmit,” Powell spoke into the voice-recognition computer. It acknowledged his commands and gave presentations of his emitter and weapons status on the displays in the cockpit.
Cheetah was nearing the top of the altitude block when J.C. suddenly rolled her into a wild backward loop. “I’m betting he didn’t have time to break out of that hover and follow us up here. I’m betting he’s still right where we left him ...”
J.C. had let the nose just barely fall through the horizon when the holographic diamond again appeared on the windscreen. “Tally ho.” He didn’t wait for the computer to acknowledge the radar lock-on but centered the electronic crosshairs on the icon. “Target, now. Arm missile. Launch missile.” The computer acknowledged. “Radar missile launch.”
“Fox two, fox two for Storm One,” Powell called over the interplane frequency. “Storm One descending through forty thousand. Head’s up, partner.”
“Fox four for Storm Two,” came the reply. “Seven o’clock, one-half mile ...” And then the voice added, “Partner. Heads- up.”
Still inverted, Powell looked to his left, and right off his tail, also inverted, following as if it was Cheetah’s shadow, was DreamStar!
“But I’ve got a lock-on . . .”
“On a cloud of chaff,” Patrick said. “When you made your zoom, he must’ve popped a dozen bundles of chaff and climbed up with you and stayed on your tail. You just shot a Sparrow missile into a bunch of tinsel.”
J.C. rolled wings-level and lowered his oxygen visor with an exasperated snap. “The guy’s right on today.”
Patrick checked the fuel readouts, did a quick check of his equipment and warning lights. “Looks like forty minutes to go, J.C.”
Powell gave Patrick a thumbs-up. “Storm flight station check, lead’s in the green with forty minutes to joker”— “joker” being the code for the minimum fuel reserves necessary on a normal training flight, about fifteen thousand pounds. “Two has twenty minutes, all systems nominal.”
J.C. said: “He’s sucking gas. He’s got a bigger jet, more capacity, only one engine, but half the fuel.”
“And two kills,” Patrick shot back. “We’re not concerned about saving fuel here, J.C. I know you’d give every drop of JP-4 we’ve got left to get one good shot at him.”
“Then turn me loose, let’s get to it.”
“I want you to be the fox this time, J.C.,” Patrick said. “I want him on the pursuit.”
“Fine, but open ’em up this time. Let’s see what the boy wonder over there can really do.”
J.C. had a point. They had really not pushed DreamStar to the edge of the envelope. And if there was anybody who could really force DreamStar to perform, it was J. C. Powell.
“All right, J.C., you got it. But don’t break the bubble . . .” Patrick lined it out. “This time lead will be the fox. We’re coming up on the southeast corner of the area. Lead will come left heading three-zero-zero toward the center. Two, give us fifteen full seconds—then start your pursuit. Stay heads-up. Lead’s coming left ...”
J. C. Powell turned hard left. Patrick had time to grab hold of his handlebars before being squashed into his seat by the turn. J.C. stayed on the northwesterly heading for five seconds, then rolled inverted and pulled the nose earthward, pushing the throttles to full power, aiming the nose directly for Lookout Peak twenty thousand feet below.
Patrick watched as the altimeter readout clicked down faster than he’d ever seen it before. “I swear, Powell, you have got to have some kind of death wish”—Patrick’s attention was drawn to a blinking red warning light near the radar altimeter, which read the distance between the ground and the belly of the jet. “Watch it!”
Powell checked his threat receivers—no signals from anywhere. He began to level off, pointing Cheetah toward a wide cleft in the jagged peaks below. “Colonel, if I stay at high altitude with DreamStar he’ll hose me again. Let’s see how he does in the rocks.” He hit the voice-recognition computer switch—“attack radar standby,” and threw his jet into a screeching right turn, arcing around the rugged peaks. “Fifteen seconds—he should be in his turn toward the northwest by now.” Powell selected a flat valley in the desert, staying as close to the rocks as possible. Patrick stared out the top of the canopy expecting the tops of Cheetah’s twin tails to scrape along the face of those rocks any second.
J.C. rolled out of his steep turn, passing only a few hundred yards from a lone craggy butte. “You’re going to wait down here for him to come after you?”
“Not exactly, sir.” He steered Cheetah into the narrow valley he had selected, set the autopilot, then began searching the skies far overhead. “Wondering why I selected thirty-nine thousand feet back there?”
“It’s a higher altitude . . . better fuel economy—”
“Contrails.”
Patrick followed J.C.’s pointing finger out the top of the canopy. Far above, they saw a thin white line against the dark
blue sky, heading northwest. “You think I never listen to the morning weather briefings?”
“You’re always asleep.”
“I always manage to catch the contrail forecasts. The center of the vapor level was thirty-nine thousand feet. That’s where we left him and that’s where he is.”
Patrick took a firm grip on the handlebars. J.C. had aimed Cheetah for the center of the southern ridge of the Shoshone Mountains, in the center of Dreamland’s southern restricted area, and now was moving the throttles up to full afterburner. Ten seconds later they were at Mach one and building . . .
* * *
Attack radar on . . . spherical scan . . . radar off. . .
James checked in seconds over a half-million cubic miles of airspace for Cheetah. His superconductor technology allowed the power of a standard fighter’s nose radar to be transmitted into an antenna the size and thickness of a playing card so that the antennae could be spread out all around DreamStar’s skin instead of located only in the nose cone. A thousand of such micro-miniature radar arrays made a complete spherical sweep of the sky within two hundred miles of the aircraft. But except for commercial and civilian aircraft outside Dreamland’s restricted airspace, the radar scan came up negative. Cheetah had disappeared!
ANTARES immediately suggested a data link with Dreamland’s powerful ground-based surveillance radar, but James squelched that idea. Although DreamStar could integrate data from a variety of outside sources, he’d been ordered not to use them—and McLanahan could detect the link with his equipment on Cheetah. Never mind, he wouldn’t need outside help to find Cheetah.
A pause as ANTARES weighed alternatives to an outside data-link, then suggested a ground-map scan.
Nothing. The Shoshone Mountain range was bright and prominent directly below, surrounded by dry lakebeds and non-reflecting sand. DreamStar’s high-resolution radar picked out power lines, roads and tiny buildings scattered all across the desert floor. Nothing moving faster than sixty miles an hour anywhere within range.
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