Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 (17 page)

 
          
ANTARES
immediately suggested a data link with Dreamland’s powerful ground-based
surveillance radar, but James squelched that idea. Although DreamStar could
integrate data from a variety of outside sources, he’d been ordered not to use
them—and McLanahan could detect the link with his equipment on Cheetah. Never
mind, he wouldn’t need outside help to find Cheetah.

 
          
A
pause as ANTARES weighed alternatives to an outside data-link, then suggested a
ground-map scan.

 
          
Nothing.
The Shoshone Mountain range was bright and prominent directly below, surrounded
by dry lakebeds and non-reflecting sand. DreamStar’s high-resolution radar
picked out power lines, roads and tiny buildings scattered all across the
desert floor. Nothing moving faster than sixty miles an hour anywhere within
range.

 
          
James
shut down the scan. Cheetah was obviously hiding in the
Shoshone
Mountains
somewhere, probably ridge hopping among the
rocks, staying in the radar clutter as much as possible. But this was supposed
to be an air-to-air attack. Powell was screwing up big-time.

 
          
James
mentally ordered another spherical radar sweep of the skies. McLanahan would
probably direct Powell to climb out of the low-level regime, and then he’d—

 
          
ANTARES broke in with its warning: “Radar
contact, directly below and climbing. ”

           
ANTARES suggested a roll and a ten-G
push-over to an emergency descent. But just as James ordered the maneuver he
heard on the interplane channel, “Fox four, Zero-One, three-niner thousand.
Underneath you, Ken.” Powell had already started shooting . . .”

 
          
What
was happening? Why didn’t he see Cheetah coming? The questions brought spikes
of pain that shot through his head and reverberated through his body. For the
first time that James could remember, DreamStar had no options. The pain
intensified as he continued polling the database, hunting for answers—

 
          
Abruptly
the confusion that had lasted only a few seconds ended as DreamStar’s sensors
continued to track Cheetah. Suddenly the pain in James’ head disappeared and he
found himself presented with a series of maneuvers.

 
          
DreamStar
inverted and began a tight descending vertical roll. If Cheetah was in a
high-speed climb underneath him, J.C. would be out of airspeed at the top of
the climb and would have to go inverted and begin a descent to regain lost
airspeed. Now DreamStar had the power advantage. All it had to do was complete
the roll and Cheetah should be dead ahead and directly in his gun sights.

 
          
But
as James hit the bottom of the roll the G-forces reached their peak. Air
tubules in the legs of James’ flight suit inflated, which helped force blood
back into the upper part of his body, but it wasn’t fast enough. James’ vision
went to a gray-out as blood was forced out of his brain, then darkened
completely as he lost consciousness.

 
          
ANTARES
detected the elevated blood pressure and the interruption of theta-alpha. The
computer immediately lowered the back of James’ ejection seat so that his head
was below heart level to improve blood flow back to the brain. Oxygen shot into
his face mask as he fought to regain theta-alpha. With his face mask flooded
with oxygen, his breathing was slowed, making him feel light-headed.

 
          
It
took a few seconds more for James to take control of ANTARES again. He
countermanded the computer’s suggestion to raise the seat upright—he would need
several more hard turns before he could get within firing range of his
adversary and he’d be in less danger of blacking out if the seat-back stayed
down. He began a hard seven-G turn back toward Cheetah, but by then he had lost
his advantage. Cheetah was in a dive at nearly Mach one.

 
          
DreamStar
pulled in six miles behind Cheetah and James tried for a radar lock, but
Cheetah executed a vertical scissors and darted away—even though Cheetah did
not have DreamStar’s sophisticated high-maneuverabilities her large foreplanes
and temporary speed advantage allowed her to execute such a move. DreamStar
easily performed the same inverted vertical scissors to pursue. Cheetah had
moved out to nine miles by then, and James ordered the throttles into
min-afterburner in the descent to catch up. With the throttles up in the steep
descent, the lighter, aerodynamically cleaner DreamStar fighter quickly
regained the speed advantage.

 
          
Closure rate five hundred knots, ANTARES
reported. James “heard” the stream of computer-generated reports as if he was
listening to the sound of his own breathing. Range seven miles. Action:
High-maneuverability configuration, maintain speed advantage, ANTARES infrared
pursuit, deactivate attack radar, laser lock, attack, close to gun range,
attack, constant AO A wing mode, maintain gun range, attack. The messages began
to repeat, informing him of altitude, closure rate, weapons status, external
heating, stress factors, power demands, air-conditioning faults. James accepted
ANTARES’ engagement suggestions—the computer had already decided how the battle
would be fought several minutes in the future—why not let it go?

           
Using its infrared tracker and laser
rangefinder, ANTARES had predicted the moves Cheetah could make in its present
flight attitude and airspeed and had devised an attack for those maneuvers.
There were also reversals Cheetah could make, and ANTARES had computed how to
defeat them. The final moves of this aerial chess game were now being played.
Cheetah was making a hard left turn, but DreamStar had the cutoff angle and the
power advantage. DreamStar did not need to snap over in a hard bank to make the
kill—her high-maneuverability canards and strake flaps pulled the laser rangefinder
onto target and held it there. Cheetah tried another hard turn, this time to
the right, but the XF-34’s guns were locked on solid now—Cheetah was just
burning up airspeed in each high-G turn. DreamStar was flying “uncoordinated,”
sideways and downward at the same time—

 
          
Suddenly James heard McLanahan over the
interplane channel: “Storm Flight, knock it off, knock it off1 Storm Two, pull
up!”

           
Ground-map
radar,
James immediately ordered. The phased-array radars snapped on ...
revealing a sheer rock cliff no more than a thousand feet away and straight
ahead. Cheetah had flown directly at two tall buttes, diving and banking away
just before reaching them. ANTARES faithfully computed the deadly
news—DreamStar would impact in exactly eight-tenths of a second.

 
          
Which
was like eight minutes to the ANTARES computer. James canceled
high-maneuverability mode and threw DreamStar into a hard left bank.
DreamStar’s large canards and computer-controlled rudders kept her nose from
pushing in the opposite direction in a hard turn, and she slipped between the
twin towering buttes. ANTARES reported the data from the ground-mapping radars:
DreamStar had missed the right butte by eight feet.

 
          
James
cleared the left butte and rolled to the right, only to find Cheetah directly
in his gunsights less than two miles away. He quickly lined up on him, switched
to his twenty-millimeter cannon to activate the gun camera and called, “Fox
four, Storm Two, your
six-o’clock
.”

 
          
“I said knock it off!”
McLanahan
ordered. “Storm Flight, route formation, station check. Weapons on standby.
Move.”

           
James raised his ejection seat back
out of the reclined anti-G setting and activated the radars that would help
keep DreamStar in formation with Cheetah. “Two has twelve minutes to joker, all
systems nominal.”

           
“Lead’s in the green, nine minutes,”
Powell reported. “Storm Flight, right turn heading zero-four-three, direct
beacon red five at ten thousand feet.” Powell executed the turn, and DreamStar
stayed with him in route formation.

           
“What the hell happened, Ken?”
McLanahan said as they rolled out on the new heading. “You passed out of
theta-alpha for a few seconds but you pressed the attack anyway. We watched you
side-slip behind us right into that butte. You almost got yourself killed and
destroyed—”

 
          
“I
had contact with the ground at all times,” James lied. “I was conscious during
the entire attack, except at the bottom of my loop when ANTARES took over. I
had clearance between the obstructions.” Another lie—James would not soon
forget the rivulets of ice and the lichens he saw growing on the sides of the
rock ... he was that close to it. If Patrick hadn’t yelled out ... “I had the
last shot after passing between the buttes,” he insisted, “and I processed the
shot before you called—”

 
          
“Save
it for the debriefing,” Patrick said, “and the data tapes. Storm Flight,
fingertip formation. Prepare for penetration and approach.”

 
          
DreamStar
and Cheetah were now to demonstrate their landing abilities. Powell redeemed
himself for his poor takeoff. Keeping Cheetah in perfect balance, he guided the
fighter to a pinpoint landing and stop within five hundred feet—he could have
landed Cheetah on an aircraft carrier without the use of a tail hook or
arresting cables. But DreamStar’s landing was even better—it was as if the one
hundred-thousand-pound fighter was a bee alighting on a flower. The combination
of the large canards, mission-adaptive wings in their long-chord, high-lift
configuration and thrust-vectored nozzles, all controlled by the fastest “computer”
extant—the human brain— and James had DreamStar stopped within four hundred
feet of touchdown, a hundred feet better than Cheetah.

*
 
*
 
*

 
          
Hal
Briggs replaced the phone in its cradle and turned to General Elliott, who was
watching the landing through binoculars from on top of the portable control
tower. “Those Russian birds are still several minutes from their flyby,” he
said. “Good thing our guys landed early—”

 
          
“The
hell it is. They even knew when the test was supposed to terminate. If they had
landed on time the satellite would’ve been right there taking pictures and
there’d be nothing we could do about it.” He ran his fingers through silver
hair that, Briggs noted, seemed to grow thinner every year. He turned toward
Briggs. “I want you to pull out all the stops, Major.” The tower controllers as
well as Biggs caught Elliott’s ominous tone. “Do whatever you have to do to
find the leak on this installation. You have an unlimited budget, unlimited
resources, and very little damn time. Search anywhere and everywhere. Go
off-base with federal authorities to investigate—I’ll back up whatever you do.
I want answers, Briggs. Fast.”

 
          
Briggs
knew that at least off-base activities needed huge amounts of cooperation, hard
to come by, from state and federal law enforcement. He needed some
clarification, but now wasn’t the time to ask for it.

 
          
Elliott
thumbed the microphone on the command frequency. “Storm Flight, taxi without
delay to parking. Over.”

           
“Lead.”

           
“Two.”

*
 
*
 
*

 
          
Ken
James had been disconnected from his fighter and hoisted out of DreamStar’s
cockpit. He was wheeled to an air-conditioned transfer van that drove
McLanahan, Powell and him to the project headquarters, where the special flight
suit was removed from James’ sweat-soaked body. The two test pilots went to the
locker room nearby, said not a word to each other. They were dressing when
Patrick McLanahan walked up to them. “Both of you are off flying status as of
right now.” James exploded. “What?” There was panic mixed in with the outrage,
but it belonged to Maraklov the agent, not to Ken James the pilot. Lately
Maraklov had felt his alter ego taking over—this pronouncement jolted him back,
some . . .

 
          
“There’s
a difference between evaluating the aircraft and pushing the limits to the
danger level. You two cross it every time you fly together. I’m grounding you
both until I figure out what to do about it.”

 
          
“Then
give me another chase pilot,” James said quickly. “Canceling all flying isn’t
the answer, Colonel.”