Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 (13 page)

 
          
His
conscious mind was now like a big living room that had just had all its
furniture moved to different parts of the house. ANTARES had taken over control
of most conscious activity, keeping only a few essential activities in the
conscious foreground while relegating the rest to higher parts of the brain.
Now ANTARES was ready to start remodeling.

 
          
With
the doors and windows to James’ subconscious mind wide open, his mind was ready
to receive and process vast amounts of information. Normally that information
would come from the five senses, and even with ANTARES some still did, but now
altogether new sources of information were open. ANTARES could collect and
transmit digital data signals to James’ conscious mind, and James could receive
that information as if it came from his own five senses. But James no longer
had five senses—he had hundreds, thousands of them. The radar altimeter was a
sense. The radar was a sense. So was the laser rangefinder. Dozens of
thermometers, aneroids, gallium- arsenide memory chips, limit switches, logic
circuits, photocells, voltmeters, chronometers—the list was endless and ever-
changing.

 
          
But
it was an enormous shock to the system to find that the list of senses had
grown from five to five thousand, and here ANTARES was no help at all; when the
“room” was full it simply began cramming in more input sources. For James the
new impulses weren’t coherent or understandable. They were random flashes of
light or crashes of sound, battering his conscious mind, all fighting for order
and recognition. Put another way, as he once had, it felt like a crushing wall
of water, a wave of unbearable heat, and the swirling center of a thunderstorm
all mixed up at once. And ANTARES was relentless. The instant an image or an
impulse was set aside, a hundred more took its place. The computer only knew
that so much had to be learned. It had no conception of rest, or defeat, or of
insanity.

 
          
Suddenly,
then, the flood of input was gone. The tornado of data subsided, leaving only a
room full of seemingly random bits of information lying scattered about. The
furniture was overturned—but it was all there, all intact. Now, like a
benevolent relative or kindly neighbor, ANTARES began sorting through the
jungle of information, creating boxes to organize the information, placing
boxes into boxes, organizing the mountains of data into neat, cohesive
packages.

 
          
The
random series of images began to coalesce. Undecipherable snaps of sound became
long, staccato clicks; the clicks turned to a low whine; the whine turned into
waves of sounds, rising and falling; the waves became words, the words became
sentences. Flashes of lights became numbers. And then the numbers disappeared,
replaced by numbers that James wanted to “see.”

 
          
The
energy surges generated by ANTARES were still coursing through James’ body, but
now they were acting like amphetamines, energizing and revitalizing his body.
He was aware of DreamStar all around him, aware of its power waiting for
release.

 
          
James’
eyes snapped open, like those of a man awaking from a nightmare. Swiveling his
heavy helmet on its smooth Teflon bearings, he looked across at Cheetah’s open
canopy. Powell was busy in the forward cockpit; McLanahan was watching his
instruments. But he must have read something in the instruments in Cheetah’s
aft cockpit, because just then McLanahan looked over toward him. He could see
the DreamStar project director with his oxygen visor in place, apparently
talking on the radios. Patrick was looking directly at him now—was he talking
to him . . . ?

 
          
.
. . And suddenly the energy was unbearable. It was as if DreamStar was a wild
animal straining on a leash, hot with the scent of prey, demanding to be
released.

 
          
James
looked down at the left MFD, the multi-function display, on the forward
instrument panel. He imagined the index finger of his left hand touching the icon
labeled “VHF-i.” Immediately the icon illuminated. Now, hovering right there in
front of his eyes, was a series of numerals representing the preprogramed VHF
radio channels—the image, transmitted from DreamStar’s computers through
ANTARES to his optic nervous system, was as clear and as real as every other
visual image. He selected the proper ship-to-ship channel on the
computer-generated icon and activated the radio. The whole process, from
deciding to activate the radio to speaking the words, took less than a second.

 
          
“Storm
Two ready for engine start,” James reported. Although the ANTARES interface did
not take away his ability to speak or hear, all traces of inflection or emotion
usually were filtered out. So the voice that Patrick heard on the radio was
eerie, alien.

 
          
“Welcome
back, Captain,” Patrick said. “I saw you come out of theta-alpha. Ready to do
some flying?”

 
          
“Ready
and waiting, Colonel.”

 
          
“Stand
by.” Patrick switched to a secondary radio. “Storm Control, this is Storm One.”

*
 
*
 
*

 
          
In
the underground command post of the
High
Technology
Advanced
Weapons
Center
a four-star Air Force general seated at a
large cherry desk replaced a phone on its cradle, then looked down with disgust
at his right leg. He reached down, took his right calf in both hands,
straightened his leg, then raised himself out of his leather seat using the
stiff right leg as a crutch. Once fully standing he unlocked the graphite and
Teflon bearings in the prosthetic right knee joint, allowing it to move much
like a regular leg.

 
          
An
aide held the office door open for General Bradley Elliott as the director of
HAWC stepped out and down the short hallway to the command post. He used a
keycard to open the outer door to the entrapment area. A bank of floodlights
snapped on, filling the entrapment area with bright light, and the outer door
automatically locked behind him.

 
          
Two
security guards armed with Uzi submachine guns came through the doors on either
side of the area. They slowed when they recognized who it was but didn’t alter
their moves. While one guard quickly pat-searched Elliott and ran a small metal
scanner over his body, the other stood with his Uzi at port arms, finger on the
trigger. The metal detector beeped when passed over Elliott’s right leg.
Elliott tolerated it.

 
          
The
guards watched as Elliott signed in on a security roster and double-checked the
new signature against other signature samples and the signature on Elliott’s
restricted-area badge pinned to his shirt. Satisfied, the guards slipped away
as quickly as they had appeared.

 
          
A
tall black security officer wearing a nine-millimeter Beretta automatic pistol
on his waist walked quickly to the general officer as he emerged from the
entrapment area.

 
          
“Sorry,
sir,” Major Hal Briggs said, handing Elliott a cup of coffee. “New guy on the
security console. Buzzed the sky cops when the metal detector in the entrapment
area went crazy. He’s been briefed again on your . . . special circumstances.”

 
          
“He
did right. You should have commended him. The response guards too.”

 
          
“Yes,
sir,” was all Briggs had time to mutter as Elliott pushed on past him and
entered the communications center. One of the controllers handed him a
telephone.

 
          
“Storm
Control Alpha, go ahead.”

 
          
“Alpha,
this is Storm One. Flight of two in the green and ready to taxi.”

 
          
“Stand
by,” Elliott said. As he lowered the phone Briggs handed him a computer
printout.

 
          
“Latest
from
Lassen
Mountain
Space
Tracking
Center
,” Briggs said. “Three Russian satellites
will be in the area during, the test-window: Cosmos 713 infrared surveillance
satellite still on station over
North America
in geostationary orbit, but it’s the other two we’re concerned with. Cosmos
1145 and 1289 are the kickers. Cosmos 1145 is a low-altitude, high-resolution
film- return photo-intelligence satellite. Cosmos 1289 is a radarimaging
film-return bird. We believe they’re mainly groundmapping satellites with
limited ability to photograph aircraft in flight, but obviously they can be
damaging. Both will be over the exercise area during the test throughout the
day. Do you want to reschedule, sir?”

 
          
“No,”
Elliott said. “I don’t want to give the Russians the pleasure of thinking they
can disrupt my schedule with a couple of old Brownies. Just make sure DreamStar
and Cheetah stay in the bluff while they’re overhead.”

 
          
He
took a sip of coffee, scowled at it, then set the cup down with an exasperated
thump.
“Besides, it seems like they have
all the information they need on DreamStar anyway. I could have dropped my
teeth when I saw that DIA photo of the Ramenskoye Flight Test Facility in
Moscow
with the exact same
short-takeoff-and-landing runway-test devices as ours here at Dreamland.
The exact same ones.
In precisely the
same position right down to the inch.”

 
          
“We’ve
known the Russians have been working on high- performance STOL fighter-aircraft
for years, sir ...”

 
          
“Right.
Exactly as long as we’ve been working on them here at Dreamland. We launch
Cheetah, they launch an STOL fighter. We develop a supercockpit for DreamStar,
and four months later we intercept plans for nearly the same design being
smuggled into
East Germany
. The Joint Chiefs will close down Dreamland
if we don’t stop the leaks around here.” ‘Tm rechecking the backgrounds of
every person remotely connected with the project,” Briggs said. “DIA is
rechecking the civilian contractors. But that adds up to over five thousand
people and more than a hundred and fifty thousand man-years’ worth of personal
histories to examine. And we do this every year for key personnel. We’re just
overloaded—”

 
          
“I
know, I know,” Elliott said, picking up the phone again. “But we’re running out
of time. For every success we have on the flight line we have one defeat with
intelligence leaks. We can’t afford it.” He keyed the switch on the telephone
handset. “Storm Flight, this is Alpha. Clear for engine start. Call for
clearance when ready for taxi.”

 
          
“Roger,”
McLanahan replied.

 
          
Elliott
turned to Briggs. “Join me in the tower when you’ve gotten the overflight
update on those two Russian satellites. Before I have you work your tail off to
find our security leaks, the least you can do is watch a little of our
success.”

 
          
“Wouldn’t
miss it for all the stolen STOL plans in Ramenskoye,” Briggs said, and
immediately regretted it as Elliott gave him a look and limped out of the
command post.

*
 
*
 
*

 
          
“Storm
Two starting engines,” James reported to Powell. The pilot of the F-15 Cheetah
barely had time to acknowledge when the whine of engine turbines pierced the
early morning stillness.

 
          
Engine
start was triggered by a thought impulse that selected the “engine start”
routine from the “home” menu transmitted to James by ANTARES. Computers
instantly energized the engine-start circuits and determined their status;
since no external air or power was available, an “alert” status would be
performed.

 
          
Less
than a second later the ignition-circuits were activated and a blast of
supercompressed nitrogen gas shot into the sixteenth-stage compressor of
DreamStar’s left engine. Unlike conventional jet engines, it was not necessary
for one compressor stage at a time to spin up to full speed—all compressor
stages of these engines were activated at once, allowing much faster starts.
Less than twenty seconds later the left engine was at idle power, where it
began supplying bleed air-power to the right engine for compressor spin-up and
ignition. In one minute both engines were started and full generator power on
line. Once the engine-start choice had been activated, the computer knew what
had to be done next—James just allowed the results of each preprogrammed check
to scroll past his eyes as the on-board computers completed them.