Dale Brown - Dreamland

“Reacquire,” Zen repeated. He jerked the stick, but nothing happened.

Then the view screen went blank.

Behind him, the engineers were scrambling.

“It went into fail-safe mode,” said Ong. “Sorry, once it’s in Routine Two it’s impossible to override. That was added.”

He stopped short of saying, “After your accident.”

“We did really good, though,” insisted Gleason. “We were at seventeen miles before the signal began degrading.”

“Once it did, it went like shit,” added Ong.

“Com modules are off-line,” reported Jennifer.

“Hawk One is returning to the lake bed,” said Ong. He broadcast a generic ‘Knock it off’ alert over the Dreamland frequencies, even though the skies were clear.

“Well, at least we know the fail-safe is working,” said Breanna.

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 wound 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 Rocki 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 cover 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 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 manned 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 sigh 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 this 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 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 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-got. The plane as 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 seem 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 uprated 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 made do.

Did they, though? And what would those politicians say when 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.”