by Dale Brown
James' tall, powerfully built frame was covered-a better term
might have been "encased"-in a stiff flight suit made of nylon
and metallic thread. James had to carry around a small portable
air conditioning unit to stay comfortable, and the suit was so
stiff that James had to be hoisted into his steed on a hydraulic
lift. A small army of "squires"-military and civilian scientists
and technicians, led by Doctor Alan Carmichael, the chief proj-
ect engineer and Patrick's civilian counterpart-followed James
on his lift up toward his incredible steed.
Both McLanahan's and James' aircraft were in a large open-
ended hangar, used more to shield the two fighters from the
ultra-magnified eyes of Soviet reconnaissance satellites than to
protect against the weather. It was only four-thirty in the mom-
ing, but the temperature was already starting to climb; it was
going to be a scorcher in the high Nevada desert test-site north
of Las Vegas known as Dreamland.
But Patrick wasn't thinking about the heat. His eyes were on
the sleek lines of the jet fighter before him.
DreamStar . . .
As McLanahan stood gazing at the fighter the senior noncom-
missioned officer of the DreamStar project, Air Force Master
Sergeant Ray Butler, moved alongside him.
"I know how you feel, sir," Butler said in his deep, gravelly
52 DALE BROWN
voice, running a hand across his shaved head. "I get a shiver
every time I see her."
She was a child of the first X-29 advanced technology dem-
onstrator aircraft built in the early and mid-1980s. Long, low,
sleek and deadly, DreamStar was the only fighter aircraft any-
where with forward-swept wings, which spread gracefully from
nearly abeam the cockpit back all the way to the tail. The
forward-swept wings allowed air to stick to the aircrafts control
surfaces better, making it possible for the aircraft to make faster
and wilder maneuvers than ever thought possible. She was so
agile and so fast that it took three independent high-speed com-
puters to control her.
"Chief," Patrick said as they began a walkaround inspection
of the fighter, "there's no question she's one sexy piece of hard-
ware. Very sexy."
Butler nodded. "Couldn't put it better myself."
The cockpit seemed suspended in mid-air on the long, pointed
forward fuselage high above the polished concrete floor of the
satellite-bluff hangar. Beside the cockpit on each side of the fu-
selage were two auxiliary fins, canards, integral parts of the
DreamStar's advanced flight controls. When horizontal, the ca-
nards provided extra lift and allowed the fighter to fly at previ-
ously unbelievable flight attitudes; when moved nearly to the
vertical, the canards let the fighter move in any direction without
changing its flight path. DreamStar could climb or descend with-
out moving its nose up or down, turn without banking, dart
sideways in, literally, the blink of an eye.
The one large engine inlet for the single afterburning jet en-
gine was beneath the fuselage, mounted so that a smooth flow
of air could still be assured even at radical flight attitudes and
fast changes in direction. DreamStar had two sets of rudders,
one pair on top and one on the bottom, which extended and
retracted into the fuselage as needed; the lower stabilizers were
to assure directional control at very high angles-of-attack (when
the nose would be pointed high above the flight path of the
aircraft) and low speed when the upper stabilizers would be in-
effective.
Even at rest she seemed energetic, ready to leap effortlessly
into the sky at any moment. "She looks like a great big cat
ready to pounce, " Patrick said half-aloud.
They continued their walkaround aft. DreamStar's engine ex-
DAY OF THE CHEETAH 53
haust was not the typical round nozzle on other fighters. She
used an oblong vectored-thrust nozzle that could divert the en-
gine exhaust in many different directions. Louvers on the top
and bottoms of the nozzle could change the direction of thrust
instantaneously, giving DreamStar even greater maneuverability.
The vectored thrust from the engine could also act as added
boost to shorten takeoff rolls, or as a thrust-reverser during dog-
fights or on landing to bleed off energy.
She was one hell of a bird, all right, and Patrick McLanahan
figured he had the best job in the world-turning her into the
world's newest and deadliest combat-ready weapon. Patrick
"Mac" McLanahan, an ex-Strategic Air.Command B-52 radar
navigator-bombardier-especially remembered for his role on the
Flight of the Old Dog that knocked out a Soviet laser installa-
tion-was the project officer in charge of development of the
DreamStar advanced technology fighter. Once perfected, the XF-
34A DrearnStar fighter would be the nation's new air-superiority
fighter.
Walking around the engine exhaust they noticed a crew chief
running over to activate an external-power cart. "Looks like
they're ready for power," Butler said. "I'd better go see how
they're doing. Have a good flight, Colonel.
Patrick returned his salute and headed toward the plane he
would be flying that morning. If the two aircraft were humans,
the second jet fighter, Cheetah, would be DreamStar's older, less
intelligent cousin. A by-product of the revolutionary SMTD,
Short Takeoff and Landing and Maneuverability Demonstrator
projects of the last decade, Cheetah was a line F- 15E two-set jet
fighter-bomber, heavily modified and enhanced after years of
research and development in the fields of high performance flight
and advanced avionics. It had come to Dreamland, this top-
secret aircraft and weapons research center northwest of Las
Vegas, seven years earlier. It had been at Dreamland for less
than a day before then Lieutenant General Bradley Elliott, the
director of HAWC, had had her taken apart for the first time.
The changes to the airframe had been so extensive that it had
been given a code-name Cheetah instead of keeping its original
nickname, Eagle.
Hard to believe, McLanahan thought, that such a machine like
Cheetah could be outdated in so short a time.
The remarkable enhancements built into DreamStar had been
54 DALE BROWN
tested years earlier on Cheetah, so Cheetah shared DreamStar's
huge movable forward canards, vectored-thrust engines and
computer-commanded flight controls. But even Cheetah was
starting to show its twenty years of age. Modifications to every
component of the fifty-seven-thousand-pound aircraft meant lots
of riveted access panels scarred across its fuselage, performance-
robbing patches that layers of paint could barely hide. With an
eleven-hundred-pound remote-control camera mounted just be-
hind her aft cockpit, her once impressive top speed of Mach two
was now a forgotten statistic-she'd have a tough time, Patrick
thought, of reaching Mach one
without afterburners. DreamStar
could easily cruise at one point five Mach without 'burners.
Where all of the high-tech components had made DreamStar
the fighter of the future, those same enhancements had taken a
severe performance penalty on Cheetah. But there was still one
man who could make Cheetah dance in the sky like a brand-new
bird. Patrick found that extraordinary young pilot asleep under
Cheetah's nose, using the nosewheel as a headrest.
,. C. I I
"Yo," came a sleepy reply.
Patrick went up the crew-boarding ladder, retrieved a set of
ear noise protectors from the cockpit. "On your feet. Time to
go aviating.
For C. Powell that bit of Air Force jargon was raw meat to
a starving wolf-he was up, on his feet and skipping up the crew
entry ladder like a kid.
"Say the word, Colonel."
"I'm stopping by to see how our boy is doing in DreamStar,
McLanahan said, putting on the ear protectors to block out the
noise of the external power cart. "Should be fifteen minutes to
engine start. Get Cheetah ready to fly."
"You got it, boss."
In another life, Captain Roland Q. Powell, the only son of a
very wealthy Virginia family, all five feet five and one hundred
twenty pounds of him, must have been a barnstormer; before
that he might have ridden barrels over Niagara Falls. "Plain
reckless" would have been the wrong term to describe his fly-
ing, but "reckless abandon" was close. He was totally at
home in airplanes, always pushing his machine to the limit but
staying in control at all times. He never flew slow if he could
fly fast, never made a turn at thirty degrees' bank when he could
DAY OF THE CHEETAH 55
do sixty or ninety, never flew up high when he could fly down
in the trees. He earned the nickname " " from his Under-
graduate Pilot Training instructors who would mutter "Jesus
Christ" (usually followed by "help me" or "save me") when
they found out they had been scheduled to fly with Roland Pow-
ell.
He became an FAIP, first assignment instructor pilot, out of
Undergraduate Pilot Training, but the Air Force didn't want an
entire Air Force filled with JC. Powells, so he was assigned to
Edwards Air Force Base. Flight test was the perfect place to
stick Roland Powell. He knevall there was to know about aero-
dynamics but would still agree to do anything the engineers asked
of him, no matter how dangerous or impossible it seemed. As a
result Powell got the hot planes. Every jet builder wanted to see
what magic JC. Powell could conjure up with his airframe. He
was soon enticed to Dreamland by General Elliott with the
promise of flying the hottest fighter of them all-Cheetah. Pow-
ell's expertise both as a pilot and as an engineer helped speed
up the development of DreamStar, but he chose to stay with
Cheetah. From then on, he had been her only pilot.
But JC. Powell had had his time in the spotlight. Now, it
was Kenneth Francis James' turn.
When he got to DreamStar again, Patrick climbed up the lad-
der on the hydraulic lift and watched as James was lowered into
the cockpit. His special flight suit was preformed into a sitting
position, making James look like a plastic doll. Once James was
lowered into place, Patrick moved toward him as close as pos-
sible without interfering with the small army of experts attending
to the pilot's seat configuration.
"Feeling okay, Ken?"
James nodded. "Snug, but okay."
Patrick watched as James was set into his specially molded
ejection seat, strapped into place, and had his oxygen, environ-
mental and electronic leads connected. The image of a medieval
knight being readied for combat flashed in Patrick's head, topped
off when they placed James' helmet on his head and clipped it
into a clavicle ring on his shoulders. The helmet was essentially
a holder for a variety of superconducting sensors and terminals
that covered the inner surface. Once the helmet was locked into
place, the flight suit became one gigantic electronic circuit, one
big superconducting transistor. It became the data-transmission
56 DALE BROWN
circuit between James and the amazing aircraft he was strapped
into.
"Self-test in progress," Carmichael said. The computer, a
diagnostic self-test device as well as an electroencephalograph
to monitor the human side of the system, checked each of the
thousands of sensors, circuits and transmitters within the suit
and their connections through the interface to DrearnStar. But
Carmichael chose not to let the computer do his work, even
though he was the one who had designed the interface; the sci-
entist manually ran through the complex maze of readouts,
checking for any sign of malfunction or abnormal readings.
He found none; neither did the computer. A few minutes later,
Carmichael turned to Patrick, nodded. "He's ready."
Patrick walked around the lifts narrow catwalk and knelt down
in front of James. He could barely see a movement of James'
eyes through the helmet's thick electro-optical lenses.
"Ready to do some flying, buddy?"
They looked at each other. There was no movement at all
from James. Patrick waited, watched. James appeared to be
trying to decide on something. He didn't seem fearful or appre-
hensive or at all nervous. He was just . . . what?
Patrick glanced at Carmichael. "Alan? How's he doing?"
"His beta is pinging off the scale," Carmichael said, recheck-
ing the electroencephalograph readouts. "No alpha or theta
activity at all."
Patrick turned again to James, bent down close to him. "We
can reschedule this, buddy. Don't push it. It's not worth the
grief .
"No. I'll be okay. I'm just . . . trying to get ready .
"Then relax, let it come to you, don't chase it. If it doesn't
happen, it doesn't happen.- ,@'
"Hell of a way to fight a war," James said-the tension in
his voice was obvious. "I can see a fighter pilot telling his
squadron commander, 'I know the enemy is rolling across the
base but I can't fly today-my damn theta isn.'t responding . . I
I've got to prove that I can go in and out of theta-alpha in a
moment's notice."
"Making the system operational is still a few years off, Ken,"
Patrick told him. "Don't worry about all that. Relax, don't force
yourself or the system. Let's just go up and have some fun
Finish up and buy me a beer at the Club afterward. That's all.
57
DAY OF THE CHEETAH
Patrick raised a hand in front of the test pilot, and James
slapped a metallic-lined glove into it. "Punch a hole in the sky,
buddy. That's an order, too." He gave James one last thumbs-
up and stepped off the lift.
By the time Patrick had stepped back onto the tarmac Dr.
Carmichael was shaking his head in disbelief.
"He's already under alpha-JC. parameters. I think he's getting
to the
point where he can do it anytime. If we had him hooked
up outside the plane, he could probably go into theta-sine A
before we strap him in."
"He gets nervous every now and then," Patrick added, "es-
pecially before a big test like this one. Back me up on monitor-
ing him, Alan."
An external power cart was running on Cheetah by the time
Patrick returned, climbed into the aft cockpit and strapped in.
Aircraft power was already on, and his crew chief and test-range
officers had already done a fast preflight of the telemetry and
data collection instruments packed into the cockpit. Because
Cheetah was the only jet around that could even try to keep up
with the DreamStar, it was now used to fly photo-chase on train-
ing and test flights. The special high-speed camera Cheetah car-
ried tracked DreamStar as it went through its paces. Patrick
could monitor all of DreamStar's important electronic indica-
tions and if necessary take control of the plane by remote con-
trol.
With all of DreamStar's power off, however, there was only
one readout to monitor-the EEG of Ken James himself. Like
Carmichael, Patrick was amazed as he watched the electronic
traces of James' different brainwave patterns. He clicked open
his interphone.
"He's almost into theta-sine alpha already."
"Does that mean I can go to sleep too?" JC. Powell said.
"How fast could ou go into theta-alpha?" Patrick said,
watching the readouts change. "I know you've flown the
DrearnStar simulator. Could you do any better?"
"Patrick, I'm a pilot, not a robot." 's voice had lost its
sardonic tone. "Seems to me ANTARES turns pilots into near-
robots. But to answer your question: sure, I could go into theta-
sine-alpha quickly. Couple of minutes. Staying in theta-alpha
was another trick. I could never quite get the hang of it. But I
58 DALE BROWN
didn't lose DrearnStar, I gained Cheetah. I figure I got the better
deal.
Which was a long speech for JC. Powell; it underscored his
dislike for ANTARES. ANTARES might be th@'great addition
to DreamStar's already amazing array of avionics, it might be