by Dale Brown
Dreamland
10 October, 1730 local
THE THICK DOOR TO THE HANDHELD WEAPONS LAB opened and Danny Freah found himself staring down at a white-haired woman old enough to be his mother’s mother.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Captain Freah. I have an appointment with one of the engineers, Dr. Klondike. I may be a little late,” he added apologetically.
“You’re two hours late, Captain,” said the old lady, shuffling back to let him in. She wore an ancient gray lab coat that looked a great deal like a housedress on her. “Fortunately, we were told that was your MO unless you were under fire. Come in.”
Danny gave her an embarrassed smile and stepped into the long, narrow hallway as the steel door slid quietly shut on its gliders behind him. He had a tough time forcing himself to go slow enough to keep from running down the old lady.
Over the past few days, Danny had learned that Brad Elliot had run Dreamland with an iron fist, not only recruiting the best of the best but allowing almost no chaff—no political appointments, few “favors” to the contractors. But this old lady was obviously an exception; she had to be somebody’s relative, given a job either to keep her off food stamps or fill out a pension requirement. Captain Freah liked that—it was good to know that even a tough three-star like Elliot had a little compassion.
“This way now, Captain,” said the old lady, showing him into an immense, cement-walled room. There was a long firing range with a target track at the far end. She walked toward a large metal box that looked like an oversized mechanic’s tool chest, with double-keyed pullout drawers.
“Thanks,” said Danny. “When’s Dr. Klondike getting here? Maybe I’ll get some target practice in while I’m waiting for him.”
“I’m Klondike,” said the old lady.
Danny watched in disbelief as she retrieved a set of keys from her pocket, examining each one slowly before finding the right combination to open a thick drawer near the bottom. She pulled out a Marine-issue M40A rifle, sans scope, from the drawer.
“And incidentally, I am not a doctor. My name is Anna.”
“Is this for real?” he asked as she presented the gun to him.
“Whatever you may think of the Marine Corps, Captain, let me assure you that they have no peers when it comes to selecting rifles,” she said, apparently thinking that he had been referring to the weapon, not her. “You will find the Remington Model 700 one of the finest chassis for a precision firearm available. You may indeed quibble with the use of fiberglass instead of wood for the furniture, but remember that the Marines operate in an environment typically humid, if not downright wet.”
Still not sure whether he might be the victim of an elaborate gag cooked up by one of his men—or maybe Hal Briggs—Danny took the rifle in his hands. He had no questions about the gun. At roughly fourteen and a half pounds, with a twenty-four-inch stainless-steel barrel, it was absolutely a Remington, albeit one that had been hand-selected and finished.
“So where’s the scope?” he said.
“You’re impatient for one who keeps his own schedule,” said Klondike, closing the drawer. She toddled over to a second set of cabinets, eventually removing a small, torpedo-shaped sight. At a third cabinet, she produced a visor set with a cord.
“How does this work? Laser?” asked Danny, examining the sight.
“Hardly,” said the old lady, taking it from his hand and mounting it on the gun. She fiddled with a pair of set screws on the side, held the visor out, squinted, frowned, fiddled some more, then smacked the top. “Here,” she said finally. “I’ll get you some cartridges. The range is over there. I assume you can find it on your own.”
Fitted with a Redfield telescopic sight, the sixties-era M40 was at least arguably among the best sniping rifles of all time. Simple yet highly reliable in adverse conditions, it could not turn a mediocre shooter into a marksman. But it could turn a highly trained marksman into a deadly and efficient killer. The sight was perfectly mated to the weapon, allowing the usual adjustments for wind and range and providing a remarkable amount of light to the viewer.
The visor doodad, on the other hand, was dim.
“It can be adjusted to your tastes,” said Klondike, returning as Freah frowned and played with the LED visor screen. “Try it before you dismiss it, Captain. You said you wanted an advanced sniping weapon.”
Still doubtful, Danny steadied the weapon against his shoulder, firing from a standing position. The visor projected an image similar to the view in a scope, though it was spread in an oval rather than a circle. A legend below the firing circle declared the target precisely one hundred meters away. He braced himself and fired.
He nailed the bull’s-eye dead-on.
“Wow,” he said.
“Oh, please.” Klondike went to the panel controlling the target location on the wall. The target piece jerked back another hundred yards. “Go,” she said.
He nailed it again.
She pushed the button and the target sped backward, this time nearly disappearing deep within the tunnel. “Touch the lower edge of the visor,” Klondike told him.
“Here?”
“Captain, please.” She reached up and touched the very edge of the plastic panel near his cheekbone. Instantly, a range-to-target legend appeared next to the crosshatch.
Five hundred yards.
He missed.
By a centimeter.
Klondike frowned. “Perhaps the weapon takes getting used to. Ordinarily, you should get to seven hundred yards before beginning to lose some accuracy. It is, of course, a matter of skill, and choosing the right ammunition. No offense, Captain.”
“How the hell does this work?” Danny asked. “Is it a laser?”
She shook her head. “A focused magnetic pulse, two signals with a Doppler effect. If it were a laser you would have optical problems shooting through glass or water.”
“You can aim through glass?”
“Without manual correction. There are limitations, of course. The device cannot read two-dimensional shapes, and has difficulty with thin surfaces. You could not read a sign with it beyond sixty-two meters. The distance has to do with the harmonics of the different radar waves,” she added. “The sight would also be theoretically vulnerable to a system such as the HARM, which can home in on it. Still, until we perfect smart bullets—if we perfect smart bullets—it’s the most accurate handheld ballistic device available. I’ve done a little work on the barrel,” she added. “And, of course, the bullets are mine.”
“I have six guys on the Whiplash response team,” Danny told her. “I’d like to qualify each one of them on the gun.”
“It is a sniper’s weapon, Captain. At some point in the future, perhaps, we will be able to mass-produce it. For now there is exactly one available for use.”
“All the same, I want them checked out on it, if possible.” Freah’s Whiplash response team was an elite subgroup of his air commandos, cross-trained for a variety of jobs. Organized only in the last six months, they hadn’t been called into action yet, with the exception of one training detail. But it was accepted that each member would be trained and expected to take on any other member’s job at a moment’s notice.
“As you wish. I suppose you’ll be wanting body armor as well,” said Klondike.
“We have flak vests.”
“Captain, please.” She shook her head. “Your vests are made from KM2, correct?”
“Well—”
“They weigh more than twenty-five pounds, and I doubt that half your men wear them half the time, no matter what the standing orders or situation may be. Our armor, on the other hand, is made of boron carbide plates and a thinner, stronger Kevlar derivative. Unfortunately, there’s some loss of flexibility in our version, and we’ve only fashioned vests so far. Nonetheless, you’ll find they weigh less than ten pounds, and can stop a 30mm shell fired from point-blank range.”
“I’m in your hands, Annie,” said Danny.
“Yes, well, do
n’t get fresh,” said Klondike, leading him out of the room.
Dreamland
11 October
COLONEL BASTIAN WALKED AROUND THE CHUNKY airframe that sat in the middle of Development Shed B/3, trying to hide some of his displeasure from Rubeo and the others he had gathered on the tarmac for this impromptu brainstorming session. To him, the F-119 looked like a flying tugboat.
A barely flying one, given its performance specs. Mike Janlock, an aeronautical engineer who specialized in BMI resin airfoils, had just finished saying that a handful of alterations would turn the aircraft into a robust attack weapon. But those changes would make it unusable aboard aircraft carriers, as well as highly unlikely to meet the Marine Corps requirement for vertical landing at forward combat weight.
Janlock and the others had said over and over that there were three pretty good planes locked inside the F-119 airframe. Choose one—hell, even two—and America would have a cutting-edge aircraft capable of filling a wide variety of attack roles for the next two decades.
But Dog’s mandate was clear. He had to proceed with all three. Congress was so high on the project that yesterday afternoon a Congressional committee had voted to increase F-119 funding three hundred percent.
The same committee had postponed a decision on Dreamland, per the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs and Ms. O’Day.
If Dreamland survived, it would get a good hunk of the F-119 development money. Bastian’s new “all ranks” mess halls—already a hit—could dish out all the fancy food they wanted for the next ten years.
But damn. The plane was a flying tugboat. Hell, it was one of those five-hundred-dollar hammers the media claimed the Pentagon was always buying.
“Colonel, you were saying?” prompted Rubeo.
“A survivable tanker,” repeated Bastian. “The thinking is to replace KC-10 Extenders and HC-130’s at the same time. It would be connected to the JSF project.”
“So it has to be fast and slow,” said Janlock.
He didn’t mean it as a joke, but everyone laughed. Except Rubeo, of course.
“Seriously, if we did have one aircraft that could refuel helicopters as efficiently as CAP aircraft, in combat situations as well as on ferry flights, it would be a hell of an asset,” said Bastian, reining them in. “I can tell you from experience, a fighter with battle damage can have trouble reaching normal tanking altitude and speed. KC-135 and KC-10 tankers did a hell of a job during the Gulf War, doing things they weren’t technically capable of. I’d say more than a dozen lives were saved. At least. And ten times that number of planes. So what we’re talking about, if you guys could pull it off—the potential would translate into a lot less orphans and widows. I realize it’s not the conventional thinking, but I’ve seen what you guys can do.”
With the exception of Rubeo, who was wearing his customary scowl, the engineers and officers nodded their heads. They hadn’t thought about the problem in those terms before.
“What if we take the C-17 apart?” asked Jeremy Winters, a tall engineer with a hawk’s nose and thick, wire-rimmed glasses. “Good capacity, short takeoff so we can use forward bases.”
“Piffle,” said Rubeo.
“All right, Doc,” snapped Bastian, who’d had enough of the scientist’s chronic pessimism. “What do you suggest?”
“It depends on our goal,” said the scientist. He pursed his lips as if he had just bit into a lemon. “If our goal is simply to sustain funding, I suggest we take any aircraft we’re interested in and claim that it should be studied as a tanker.”
“All right, that’s enough,” said Bastian. “I’ll deal with the politics. I want real ideas here, not fodder for Congress.”
“Colonel, you and I both know that the JSF is our lifeline,” said Rubeo, refusing to back down. “And charitably put, it’s a camel. So the most optimum solution would be another camel. But as for a survivable tanker”—the scientist’s voice rose an octave as he finally made a serious point—”the C-17 is a large and easily hit target. There is no way to change that.”
“Escorts could protect it,” said Smith. “Going to need them for the JSF.”
Uncharacteristically, Smith hadn’t said much at all. Dog suspected that he had decided to say as little as possible about the JSF now that he was leaving; probably he was watching his political backside.
Smart, even though it pissed Bastian off.
“We already have a project study for a survivable, deep-penetration tanker on the shelf,” said Major Nancy Cheshire. “It would need some work for low-speed refueling, but it would certainly meet the requirements for near-Mach speed, high-altitude regimes.”
“What are we talking about?” Bastian asked, still glaring at Rubeo.
“The Megafortress KC.”
Rubeo opened his mouth to object, but Cheshire cut him off.
“Some studies were done two years ago, but they never went anywhere. The idea was that we would need something that could keep up with the flying battleship concept, refueling it in a hostile environment,” she explained. “Survivability was an important consideration and on that score, I know the plane got high marks.”
“Megafortress, back from the dead,” said Rubeo.
“What’s your objection to that idea?” Bastian asked the scientist.
“None as far as the specific plane goes,” said Rubeo, surprising Bastian. “My objection is one of principle. The Megafortress—all manned aircraft are redundant.” He folded his arms in front of his chest. “Colonel, if you’re looking to tie a project to the F-119’s tail, tie the Flighthawks. They’re the future.”
“We’ve been down that road,” said Bastian. “And in any event, the robots can’t even refuel themselves.”
“Piffle. We simply haven’t thought about it properly.”
Dog wanted his people to feel that they could speak freely; he didn’t want a group of yes-men and suck-ups around him. And he knew that for a place like Dreamland to succeed, discipline had to be pretty loose.
But Rubeo really pushed the envelope.
“I appreciate your comments, if not your tone,” Dog told him. “The debate about robot planes isn’t relevant at the moment.” He turned back to Cheshire. “How far along was the tanker project?”
“I don’t know that it got beyond one or two proof-of-concept flights,” she said. “But I’ in sure it wouldn’t take much to dust it off.”
“The plane kicks out some fierce vortices,” said Jan-lock. “We barely have them controlled enough for stable flight. We all saw how difficult it was to handle without the flight computer. If anyone other than Rap was at the controls when the gear crashed, we would have lost the plane.”
“Okay,” said Bastian. “Let’s find out.”
“Even though Fort Two and the others have been cleared for operations, we’re not one hundred percent sure the voltage spikes were due to the Army tests,” said Jennifer Gleason, one of the computer scientists. Her main assignment was the Flighthawks, but she had also had a hand in designing the advanced flight-computer components Fort Two was testing. “There are at least three other possibilities. We really ought to work through the test regimes to make sure.”
“I’m confident that was the problem,” said Cheshire. “And with the shielding and the backups, I think we’re fine. Fort Two is due for a check ride this afternoon.”
Bastian glanced at his watch. It was a little past ten o’clock. “I need to know by 1800. Doable?”
“Absolutely, sir,” said Cheshire. “Rap should be getting suited up as we speak.” She turned to Gleason. “We can run through some of your tests—all of them—at the same time.”
Gleason nodded—clearly reluctant, but nonetheless in agreement.
“So this our first choice,” said Bastian. “Choice number two, I take it, would be to study the C-17.”
“Not our project,” hissed Rubeo. The implication was clear—a C-17 tanker wouldn’t help keep Dreamland alive.
“Yes, well, there’s noth
ing we can do about that,” said Dog. “Anyone has any other ideas, let me know ASAP. In the meantime, let’s get this done.”
SEVERAL HOURS LATER, KNIFE SAT IN THE HANGAR where the conference had been, staring down from the F-119 cockpit. He was waiting for the security officer to green-light the plane from the hangar. A Russian optical satellite was just completing its overhead tour. The satellite was an old Kronos model incapable of resolutions greater than a meter in diameter, but Dreamland’s operating protocols strictly prohibited the F-119 from being on the runway while it was overhead.
Ordinarily, Smith would be more than a little impatient to get going. But this afternoon he was feeling almost a little nostalgic. He’d gotten word just before suiting up that he was to expedite reporting to Wing A; an Air Force transport due to take off from Nellis at ten that evening was holding a seat. So this would be his last flight at Dreamland, as well as in the F-119.
The Congressional committee’s decision on the F-119 didn’t particularly surprise him; the project’s various contractors had plants in over 150 Congressional districts, which added up to a hell of a lot of muscle, if not brains. That was the way appropriations went these days.
Smith had decided he was in a no-lose position on the JSF. If the program continued and the F-119 was finally cleared as a production model, his resume would note that he had helped develop it. If it was killed as an ill-conceived project—which, in his opinion, it was—he could point to the fact that he had seen this and gotten out. His final reports on the project would be worded so vaguely that they could be used to support either scenario. In the meantime, he’d be doing some real flying, and probably—though admittedly not definitely—adding good notes to his career folder.
He was learning this political game well.
The lieutenant at the front of the hangar said something into his walkie-talkie, then gave the up-and-at-’em wave to the crew. The tractor sitting in front of the F-119 cranked her engine; Knife let off the brakes and he began to roll out onto the tarmac. The fighter’s engines had to be started from an external power cart or “puffer.” Three crewmen had the cart in place almost as soon as the plane and its tow truck stopped in front of the hangar. They moved quickly; the crew chief pumped his arm in the air and, bam, Knife had his engines up and running.