by Dale Brown
If Jeff hadn’t known how expensive the helmet was, he probably would have thrown it through the Boeing’s fuselage.
* * *
DANNY DIDN’T GET AROUND TO CHECKING HIS SECURE e-mail until mid-morning. Hal had gotten back to him—but not with the football prediction he’d expected.
“Danny, won’t be talking to you for a while,” read the message. “Having too much fun. Wish you were here.”
He leaned back on the hard metal chair in his security commander’s office. He wasn’t sure where “here” was, but he had a pretty good guess. CNN that morning had reported that the Iranian Navy had stopped a tanker off the northern African coast. It had also reported that the President had been “in close consultation” with his security advisors and other world leaders all night.
If Danny hadn’t taken the Dreamland assignment, Hal probably would have asked him to join whatever he was putting together. He’d be in the middle of things.
He might still end up there, if Whiplash was called out.
For just a second, the young captain allowed himself the luxury of fantasy. He saw—felt—himself on a big Pave Low, zooming into a firefight, bullets and missiles flying through the air. He saw himself in a Hollywood zoom, dashing into the smoke, a wide grin on his face.
It wasn’t really like that. It was dirty and it was messy and you never knew exactly where the hell you were, or whether you were going to live or die.
But he loved it anyway. Or at least, loved having survived it. Nothing could beat that rush.
Danny jumped to his feet and went to attend to one of the million things that needed attending to.
WITH MACK SMITH GONE, MAJOR RICKI MENDOZA WAS the ranking officer on the F-119 test project. Colonel Bastian found her in the JSF project hangar, an underground complex directly below Hangar Three, an hour after his conference broke up.
“Colonel, glad you could come over,” she said as if she had been hoping he’d come. Her voice echoed off the polished concrete floor. “I was just about to discuss the testing schedule for the new avionics suite with Greg Desitio, the vender rep. Want to join in?”
Bastian grinned at Desitio, who’d told him earlier that the avionics suite had been delayed another six months because of “unspecifiable contingencies.” Then he turned back to Mendoza. “Actually, Major, I wanted to take one of the fighters out for a spin.”
“For a spin, sir?”
“You think you can arrange a test flight?”
Mendoza’s cheery manner vaporized. “Well, we’d have to check for the satellite window and—”
“I looked at the satellite window already,” Dog told her. “It’s clear until three.”
“And then the prep time involved—”
“I understand there were some landing gear issues to be gone over, and you had slotted a test flight.”
“Well, yes, but we’ve already prepped that mission.”
“You don’t think I can handle it?” Dog asked.
Mendoza narrowed her eyes. With Mack’s departure, her stock had skyrocketed; clearly she didn’t want to be bothered by a puny lieutenant colonel.
Bastian struggled to keep his poker face.
“Of course you can handle it, sir,” said Mendoza. “The JSF is a pleasure to fly. It’s just that Captain Jones is already upstairs and ready to go.”
“Jonesy doesn’t mind,” Bastian said, enjoying the sight of the air deflating from her cheeks. “I already had him brief me on the flight. He’s flying chase in my F-16.”
While Dog felt pretty full of himself as he hustled into his flight gear, he hadn’t pulled rank just to annoy Mendoza and upset the flight-test crew. He had decided that if Dreamland’s future was tied to the JSF, he should at least feel how the seat felt beneath his fanny.
It felt fairly good, actually. Stonewall One—one of the three F-119 testers—had a newly modified ejection seat that featured a form-molded back and bottom. It wasn’t possible to make the padding on an ejection seat very thick; the force of the seat as it rocketed out of the craft would bruise a pilot’s butt, if not break his bones. But this was by the far the most comfortable pilot’s chair Dog had ever sat in.
Unfortunately, that was about the only superlative the plane deserved. The sideseat control stick, familiar from the F-16, felt sloppy from the get-go. The plane was supposed to be optimized for short-field takeoffs, but the engines were sluggish. Even with a reduced fuel load and no payload, Dog found himself struggling to get into the air.
Airborne, things seemed even worse. The plane lumbered rather than zoomed. In a turn, the wings acted as if there were five-thousand-pound bombs strapped below them—and maybe one or two above. Worst of all, the AC wasn’t working properly; Bastian kept glancing around the cockpit to double-check that he wasn’t on fire.
All of these things could and would be fixed. An up-rated engine was under development, though its weight and some maintenance issues made it unattractive to the Navy. The present avionics system—stolen from an F-16—would be replaced eventually by a cutting-edge system that would do everything but fly the mission for the pilot. And on and on.
Still, the plane itself seemed like a tugboat. Dog tried yanking and banking as he completed his first orbit around the test range at six thousand feet. The F-119 moved like a toddler with a load in his pants, waddling through maneuvers that would be essential to avoid heavy flak while egressing a target.
Not good.
It did somewhat better at fifteen thousand feet, but it took him forever to get there. Dog thought back to the complaints of the A-10A pilots during the Gulf War, when standing orders required them to take their heavily laden aircraft well above the effective range of flak as they crossed the border. Those guys hated going over five hundred feet, and they had a point—their airplanes were built like tanks and carried more explosives than the typical World War II bomber.
The JSF, on the other hand …
Dog sighed. The politicians were in love with the idea of a one-size-fits-all-services-and-every-mission airplane. The military had to suck it up and make do.
Did they, though? And what would those politicians say when the people who flew the F-119 were coming back in body bags?
He checked his instruments and position, then radioed in that he was ready to check the landing gear.
“WE WERE NEVER OFF THE BRIEFED COURSE,” BREANNA repeated. She folded her arms and stared across the makeshift conference room. Zen continued to glare at her; she felt sure that if she turned she’d find the plasterboard wall behind her on fire.
“I didn’t say you were off course,” he said.
“Well, you implied it.”
“I think we did fairly well,” said Ong, clearly as uncomfortable as the other techies in the room debriefing the mission. “We have to go through the downloads and everything else, but we were out at seventeen miles before the connection snapped.”
“I think I can tweak the corn module some more,” said Jennifer. “We’re definitely on the right track.”
The scientists continued to talk. To Breanna, it was as if they were speaking in a room down the hall. She could feel Jeff’s anger; it was the only thing that mattered.
But why? The scientists were saying they’d just kicked butt on the test.
That was what they were saying, wasn’t it?
So why was Jeff frowning?
He was pissed at the world because of his legs.
“We keep bumping up against the limits of the bandwidth,” said Jennifer, talking to Bree with what was probably intended as a sympathetic smile. “The degradation of the secure signal is difficult to deal with in real time. If we didn’t have to encode it and make it so redundant, we’d be fine.”
“We are making progress,” said Jeff. “The changes you made worked.”
It seemed to Breanna that his manner changed as he spoke to the computer scientist. He was more like himself.
“We can make it better.” The young scientist twirled her finge
r through one of the long strands of her light hair. Maybe she did it absentmindedly, but the way she leaned against the table at the same time irked Breanna. Her shirt was at least a size too small.
Why didn’t she just yank it off and be obvious?
“What’s the big deal whether it’s ten miles or twenty?” said Breanna.
“Because the mother ship is a sitting duck,” snapped Jeff, turning on the glare again. “A MiG or a Sukhoi at ten miles could crisp Boeing before it even knew it was there. We need to push out to fifty at least.”
“You’re supposed to be flying with combat planes,” said Breanna.
Ong started to explain about the size of the computer equipment, but Breanna cut him off.
“Yes, I know. Right now you need a lot of space in the mother ship for the control computer and the communications equipment,” she said. “What I’m suggesting is, you make the mother ship survivable.”
“A JSF with a trailer,” joked one of the engineers.
No one laughed.
“Megafortress,” said Breanna. “Twenty miles, even ten, would be fine.”
“Yeah, well, get us the flight time,” said Jeff. “We’ve had a total of two hours with Raven in two weeks. And before I got here, there had been two drops in three months.”
“I’ll try “
Zen nodded. For an instant, maybe half an instant, his anger melted away. Breanna thought she saw something in his eyes, something she hadn’t seen in a long time.
She might have imagined it. She knew in that second that she truly loved him, that she wanted to help him past this—past everything. She loved more than his legs. She loved his mind, his spirit, the way he laughed, the way he said everything was bullshit when it was. The way he actually listened to her—listened to anyone, no matter what he felt toward them.
Breanna felt more and more like an outsider as the debriefing session continued, the crew and engineers picking over different possibilities for improving their connection. Jeff was very businesslike, rarely joking; it seemed to her he’d become colder since the accident, and not just to her.
She followed him into the hall as the meeting broke up. “Jeff’ she called as he started into the men’s room.
“I got to pee. It’s full,” he told her. He pointed to the small pouch he carried at the side of the chair—a piddle-pack.
“Tonight?” It was all she could manage as her throat started to close.
“Yeah. No sweat. I’ll be home. Sorry about last night. I was just too beat to deal with getting back. And it was late.”
“Sure,” she said, but by the time she got the word out of her mouth, he’d pushed into the rest room.
* * *
WHEN COLONEL BASTIAN RETURNED TO HIS OFFICE after his test flight, he found himself walking around, rearranging things on his desk that didn’t need to be rearranged. He went through Ax’s two piles of papers that needed attention—left pile, immediate attention; right pile, sooner-than-immediate attention—got up from his chair, sat back down, got up again.
Dreamland had been included as a direct line item in the F-119 program. In the past few days he had received calls from several generals above him, including the three-star Air Force “liaison” for the interservice project. He’d also spoken to two admirals, three DOD budget analysts, no less than five Congressmen, and a Senator. All had congratulated him, assuring him that Dreamland’s future was now set. While other facilities were trying to wrestle some of the JSF tests, it was clear that Dreamland was the best suited for the project.
Part of the reason for this, Bastian knew, was the fact that everyone figured they could keep a puny lieutenant colonel under their thumb. And while there had been hints of a promotion “in the wind,” as one Congressman put it, even a full bird colonel or brigadier general would be a long way down the pecking order.
In the wind. It was a foul wind. By hitching himself and Dreamland to the JSF, he was saddling the Air Force with a turkey.
Worse, he was going against his conscience and his duty.
Was he? Was telling other people what they wanted to hear such a sin?
The JSF wasn’t that bad a design. Hell, the people here knew how to fix it. They could too—though the necessary changes would turn it into two or three different planes, with less than forty percent interchangeable parts. Each plane would be excellent, well suited for its job. The only drawback would be the expense.
No, the only drawback would be the fact that DOD and the Joint Chiefs and Congress and the President wanted a Joint Services airplane, one size fits all.
How many men would die because of that?
None—there’d be excellent CAP and AWACS and the SAMs would be suppressed, and everything would snap together clean and to spec every day. What could go wrong?
“Hey, Colonel, why are you messing up my system?” asked Ax, standing in the doorway. “You’re making one pile out of two.”
“Jeez, Ax, did you knock?”
“Sir, yes, sir,” snapped the sergeant, momentarily coming to full drill-master attention.
“Come on in, Sergeant Ballbuster,” said Bastian. “What the hell are you up to?”
“Just looking after my papers, Colonel,” said Ax, fishing the signed documents from Bastian’s desk. “How was your flight?”
“Uneventful, thanks,” said Dog. “Who’s my next appointment?”
“Nothing on your agenda rest of the day.” Gibbs smiled. “I believe there was some sort of scheduling snafu that indicated your test flight was continuing until tomorrow and that you couldn’t be disturbed.”
“You’re a piece of work, Ax.”
“Thank you, sir.” The sergeant smiled again. “I do actually have a question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking. I have this friend who has this problem. He’s an executor for a trust. All the people connected with the trust, they want him to buy some stock. He thinks the stock is lousy, but he knows that if he doesn’t buy it, they’ll can his sorry ass and hire someone who will. He kinda needs the job, and he figures if they fire him he’ll be bagging groceries. On the other hand, he likes to look himself in the mirror every morning when he’s shaving.”
Bastian shook his head. “Thanks, Ax.”
Gibbs’s face was the very model of innocence. “Sir?”
“Tell your friend to do what he thinks is right, and damn what everyone else wants,” said Bastian, getting up. “I’ll check in with you later.”
“Thank you, sir,” snapped the sergeant as Bastian snuck out the side door.
BREANNA HAD TIMED IT ALL OUT WITH THE PRECISION of a deep-strike mission against a well-fortified enemy city. The five-disc CD player had been armed with Earl Klugh and Keiko Matsui jazz artists admittedly more to her taste than his, but definitely capable of establishing a preemptive romantic mood. Two long tapers of pure beeswax sat in candleholders in the middle of the freshly polished dinette table, ready to cast their flickering soft light over the borrowed china place settings with their elegant flower patterns. A bottle of Clos Du Bois merlot sat nearby, with a six-pack of Anchor Steam Beer on standby in the refrigerator. Two salad plates—with fancy baby lettuce and fresh tomatoes from a helpful neighbor’s garden—were lined up for the initial assault. A light carrot soup would follow, with waves of seafood crepes and lamb chops to administer the coup de grâce. The lamb was running a little behind, but otherwise everything was perfect, including the long, silky dress Breanna hadn’t worn in more than a year. She glanced at herself in the hall mirror, bending and twisting to make sure she’d gotten rid of the flour that had spilled on the side. The dress was very loose now on the top and in the back; she’d lost a bit of weight since Zen’s accident, but figured that was better than the opposite.
So where was he? He had boarded the Dolphin helicopter shuttle from Dreamland for Nellis precisely an hour and a half before; she had promised dibs on the leftovers to the pilot so he’d call with the heads-up. At Nellis, Jeff
would have boarded the public bus—it was a “kneeler,” dipping down to ground level to allow wheelchairs to access an onboard elevator—and ought to have arrived at the end of their condo development’s cul-de-sac ten minutes ago.
If he blows me off tonight, I’ll kill him, Breanna thought to herself.
And just on cue, she heard his key in the door.
She jumped into action, lighting the candles with the small Bic lighter, hitting the stereo, killing the lights, relighting the burner under the asparagus. Rap made it out to the foyer just as Jeff closed the door behind him.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“I thought you’d like some dinner,” she said, reaching toward him. He held his briefcase out in front of him; she took it from him and then leaned forward and gave him a peck on the cheek.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“Well, kinda.”
“Come on,” Breanna said, backing away. “Dinner is served.”
“I guess I can’t suggest we send out for pizza,” said Jeff.
“Not if you want to live.”
He rolled forward to the table in the seating area between the kitchen and living room. Breanna rushed to unfurl his napkin, placing it gently on his lap. She let her cheek brush against his as she did.
In her fantasy about how this would go, Jeff turned his mouth toward hers and they began a long and passionate kiss, interrupted only by the buzzer announcing that dinner was ready.
In reality, the buzzer rang as soon as their cheeks met. She pecked his cheek, cursed to herself, and went and got the soup.
“Wow,” said Jeff.
“We had this at the first restaurant you took me to. Remember?”
“The first restaurant I took you to was Cafeteria Four at Dreamland.”
“Restaurant,” she said, sitting down. “Cafe Auberge.”
“Oui, oui,” he said.
“Oh, God, wine. You want wine? I have merlot. Or beer—I found a six-pack of Anchor Steam.”