Everyone snapped to attention. The operations group commander entered the room and walked down the center aisle.
“Take your seats, folks,” said Torch, smiling at the pilots’ bewildered expressions. “I guess I’m the last person you expected to see at a briefing from the finance office. I apologize for the subterfuge, but we couldn’t publish the real reason for this meeting on the unclassified net. Lights.”
Someone doused the lights and flipped on a projector. The colonel pushed a button on his remote and a map of the Persian Gulf states flashed up on the screen. The briefing’s true purpose began to register among the pilots. A murmur swept through the room. Tank elbowed Oso and whispered, “Told you.”
“Things are heating up in Iraq,” said Torch, “and it doesn’t look like POTUS is going to take it anymore. CENTCOM has tasked Tucson’s own 354th Bulldogs to join New Orleans in Kuwait and set up for a potential conflict. The 190th from Boise is on the rotation schedule to relieve New Orleans, but when they arrive, New Orleans isn’t really going home. They’ll quietly reposition to King Khalid Air Base in Saudi Arabia. In this way, we hope to keep the true size of the force under wraps.” The colonel flipped to the next slide. It was a list of tail numbers from the two training squadrons, collectively known as the schoolhouse—three jets from the Lobos and three from the Dragons.
Oso could feel the intensity in the room building. They all knew what was coming.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll get right to the point. CENTCOM is worried that the current theater assets won’t be able to cover a full-scale conflict in Iraq. They’re asking for our help. We’ve already committed these six tail numbers from the training squadrons to plus-up the force in Kuwait, but that’s only half the equation. These jets need pilots, three each to maintain an alert schedule. The brass has tasked us to provide eighteen instructors from the schoolhouse.”
Another ripple of excited chatter passed through the crowd. “Ahem.” Torch cleared his throat to quiet the room. “I know that many of you came here because this assignment was supposed to afford you more time at home, but we are warriors first and the call to battle has been raised. For better or worse, I have a week to put together a detachment and get them over to the desert. I’m looking for eighteen volunteers.”
There was no pregnant pause. There was no awkward silence waiting for the first hand to go up. There was no hesitation at all. Thirty-two pilots raised their hands in unison.
Chapter 36
The next morning, Oso stood outside the door to Torch’s office. He hadn’t been told why he was summoned, but he knew it must have something to do with the upcoming deployment. He took a deep breath and knocked.
“Come in.”
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Yeah, I see you volunteered for the Kuwait deployment”—the commander rubbed his eyes wearily—“along with everyone else in the group.”
“Yes, sir.”
Torch did not seem to notice the anticipation in Oso’s reply. “The squadron commanders and I were up all night trying to solve this mess,” he said, stifling a yawn. “Since we have so many volunteers, we finally decided the only fair way to award the slots would be to base it on performance on the strafing and bombing range.” He looked up at Oso with a deadpan expression. “Shockingly, it appears from the numbers that you’re the best shooter we’ve got. You are the number one pick.”
The news sounded good, but Torch did not look happy. After a year at the schoolhouse, Oso still could not read his boss. “Thank you, sir?”
“Don’t thank me yet, Mr. Terminator. You may be good on the range, but I’m not sure you’re ready to be back in the game. Lieutenant Colonel Keys from the Lobos will be the detachment commander, but as the group commander, I get the final say on his crew. And your track record with our students doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling that you won’t freeze up like you did back in Europe.”
Torch sat back in his chair and folded his hands. “You blame yourself for that kid’s death in Germany.”
Oso did not answer. He could not decide whether it was a question, or an accusation.
Torch kept going. “Here’s the thing, though. I flew with Collins, too, as did several of my instructors here at the schoolhouse. Sure, he struggled, but he flew well enough to pass the program. Do you doubt my expert opinion in that matter?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Collins knew his own abilities better than any of us. He knew he was struggling, more than we did. Yet he chose to step into that aircraft one last time.” Torch softened his voice, if only a touch. “You can’t take on the burden of saving every young fighter pilot from themselves, Oso. In the end, it’s their choice, not yours.”
Oso didn’t like being psychoanalyzed, but he nodded and told Torch what he thought he wanted to hear. “I get that now, sir.”
Torch cocked his head to one side and frowned. “Do you?” His voice was hard again. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to look you in the eye and ask you if you’re ready to go to combat—if you can translate your flying skills into a combat victory, even if it means losing another young pilot under your command. I realize right now that you’re already planning to give me some form of an affirmative. But the words you choose won’t really matter. I’ll get my answer from your eyes.”
The commander stood and leaned across his desk, his eyes searching Oso’s. “Well, what’s it going to be, Major? Are you ready for combat?”
“Yes, sir.”
Torch continued to search Oso’s eyes for a moment longer, and seemed to find an answer there. Then he sat down again and silently crossed his arms, leaving Oso to wonder what that answer was.
Finally Torch nodded. “You leave in five days. Don’t make me regret this.”
Chapter 37
Specter Blue
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
14 March 2003
The Dream Catcher team would receive no awards. They would get no medals. In fact, they would get no recognition at all, save a few pats on the back. Nonetheless, what they had achieved was unbelievable. One of the Comm Twins even claimed that it was some sort of record, though no one could pin down a precedent for comparison.
The group had returned to Wright-Patterson with grim determination after the failure at Romeo Seven. No one slept more than five hours at a time for the first month; they couldn’t even if they’d wanted to. The goal before them loomed too large and the pieces of the solution fit together too easily, one after the other. In ten weeks, not only had they reengineered Dream Catcher, they had remanufactured her. Like a phoenix from the ashes, their new craft rose almost of its own accord.
Danny experienced déjà vu as he led the group across the same hangar floor to the same temporary enclosure. “Once again, sir, may I present Dream Catcher,” he said unceremoniously.
Walker eyed the new product suspiciously, walking around its perimeter and slowly bobbing up and down as he examined it from above and below. “It looks the same.”
“That’s the idea,” Danny replied. “Though she’s a little bigger now. We had to increase the central height by more than a foot to accommodate a pilot. Consequently we had to lengthen and widen her by a few inches as well.”
“Mm-hmm,” grunted Walker, showing little interest in Danny’s reply. “Where’s the hatch?”
“You mean the PEP?”
“The what?”
“The PEP, sir; it stands for ‘pilot entry point.’”
“You can give it whatever fancy acronym you want, Sharp, it’s still the hatch.”
Danny smiled despite the rebuke. Annoying the colonel had become sort of a hobby.
“Well, pop it open, Captain. I want to see inside.”
Danny nodded to Scott, who punched a few keys on a laptop sitting on an equipment cart. There was a sharp hiss and vapor rose from under
neath the small craft. A piece of the lower fuselage slowly dropped down.
Walker ducked between the two cushioned pedestals that supported the aircraft and stuck his crew-cut head into the hole.
“As you can see, it’s a tight fit,” said Danny, “even more for you, sir, since it was designed for someone whose shoulders aren’t quite as broad.”
“Don’t hit on me, Captain. Just tell me what I’m looking at.”
“Yes, sir. The pilot will lie prone. The PEP—I mean, the hatch—is approximately where his thighs will be. In front you’ll see a pad that supports his chest, with molded forearm rests on either side. At the ends of the forearm rests are the controls—throttles on the left and control stick on the right. Additionally there is a data entry panel set into the slope of the interior wall to the left of the throttles. It has a compact keyboard and trackball.”
Walker squeezed himself deeper into the tiny cockpit. “How does the pilot see to fly?”
“Installing windshields presented numerous technical issues, so we simply chose not to,” said Danny. “Instead, you have a one-hundred-and-twenty-degree viewscreen, connected to Dream Catcher’s various cameras and sensors. If you look forward you’ll see me waving at you.”
“Something’s wrong, Sharp. You’re black-and-white.”
“Actually, that is by design,” interjected Scott. “What you see is a grayscale, infrared-enhanced image.” He waved to another engineer. With a loud click, the whole hangar went dark.
“You’ll notice that we cut the lights, sir,” said Danny, “but your image has hardly changed. The beauty of this enhanced display is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re operating in daylight or darkness; the computer optimizes the view for the pilot.”
The hangar lights flickered back on and several awkward moments passed as Walker backed his large frame out of the craft. Finally he stood and straightened his uniform. “Anything else, gentlemen?”
“There’s also a display mode for Dream Catcher’s radio frequency sensors—RF for short,” offered Danny. “It shows the pilot radio wave energy across the spectrum. The color is—”
“I’m good on the displays, Sharp. Is there anything else?” The colonel and his scowl both leaned in to the question.
Danny and Scott looked at one another and then turned back at the colonel with blank expressions.
“The recovery system, Sharp. What changes did you make to the recovery system?”
Danny winced. He and Scott had conspired to avoid mentioning the new recovery system, hoping that the colonel would let it pass. There was nothing the team could do about it anyway.
He took in a deep breath and spoke slowly, treading lightly. “Dream Catcher is bigger now, sir. Consequently, we had to shorten up the recovery arm to make the whole thing fit into the bomb bay. That means we had to give up some of the shock absorption that was built into the original system.”
Walker took a step closer to Danny. “You mean we took a target zone that a computer couldn’t hit and we made it even smaller for the human pilot?”
Danny nodded up at his boss. He felt very small. “Yes, sir.”
“For your sake, and his, I hope our boy is up to the task.”
Chapter 38
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
15 March 2003
Nick impatiently shifted the weight of his duffel bag from one shoulder to the other. He tried to look as inconspicuous as possible, despite the sweat circles forming at the armpits of his blue uniform. The Alabama heat was just reaching its afternoon peak. His instructor had told him to show up on the flight-line side of Base Operations at exactly 5:00 P.M., but he was desperate to get out of there and had arrived ten minutes early. He checked his watch. Two minutes to the hour.
Walker had sent Nick to Alabama to hone his Arabic skills, specifically in the Iraqi dialect. He’d spent the last ten weeks in isolation, living in the neglected Air University overflow dorms, a pair of buildings at the end of the flight line that hadn’t been used since Congress started shrinking the military in the late nineties.
Nick checked his watch again. Less than a minute had passed. Where was his ride? “My room didn’t even have cable,” he grumbled to himself. “What are we, the U.S. Army?”
Ten weeks.
He’d been allowed no human contact, except for his language coach, who refused to speak anything but Iraqi Arabic. For all Nick knew, the man didn’t speak English at all. The only other voice he’d heard was Katy’s during his allotted phone calls—one per week—and those felt cold and distant because he was lying to her about the purpose of his absence.
Two nights after the accident at Romeo Seven, Walker had put Nick on the Learjet. “Walk in like you own the place and nobody will question your presence,” the colonel had said, “but talk to no one. Don’t go to the gym and for goodness’ sake don’t leave the base. Get groceries at the commissary. This is Covert Ops 101. You have to be seen as little as possible and never noticed at all, part of the background.”
“And how does this relate to Cerberus?” Nick had asked. “How do I fit in?”
“You’re the stone that kills two birds. That’s why you were singled out for this assignment. The Arabic language note in your personnel file got you noticed—along with a solid flying record as a night vision qualified pilot—and your little report on Al-Majid’s relationship with Baghdad shifted you to the top of the candidate pile. All we had to do was line you up to gain proficiency as a T-38 chase pilot.”
“You set me up for this. You trained me for a year without even telling me. And all this time I thought Drag had just recognized my superior skills as a covert operative.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Baron. Uncle Sam doesn’t single out renegade supermen to do his dirty work like he does in the movies. It’s all a numbers game. Your skill sets lined up with most of our search criteria. We gave you a boost in the chase department, set you up with an Arabic refresher to complete the qualifications, and here you are.”
At the time, Nick had wondered at the randomness of it all. His association with Cerberus and Dream Catcher was the result of computer number crunching. He was nothing but the output of a top secret Google search.
“Anyway, like I said, you were originally brought on board to kill two birds. You were supposed to fly chase during the test phase and then sit in the engineer’s position during the operation, while Captain Sharp sat copilot. You were always slated to go to Alabama to bone up on your Arabic skills. Your job in the actual mission was, and still is, to listen to cell phone calls and radio signals that will help us zero in on a target’s position. The only difference now is that you’ll be listening from inside Dream Catcher while you fly her.”
Nick’s watch read 5:00 P.M. Looking to the north, he saw his rescuer on final approach, right on time. The gray Learjet rolled to a stop right in front of him and the entry stairs immediately lowered. A no-nonsense face poked out. “You Baron?”
Nick nodded. “You ever arrive early, just for the fun of it?”
The Learjet pilot just frowned at him. “Get in.”
Chapter 39
Nick stepped off the Learjet and surveyed the dark apron at the north end of Wright-Patterson’s runway. Unsure of what to do next, he turned and glanced up at the pilot, who pointed emphatically at the nearest hangar, then ran up one engine and taxied away.
As his eyes adjusted, Nick found the crew door set into one of two huge sliding doors of the hangar. As was normal for this kind of door, there was no knob on the outside. He knew that simply knocking would be futile; the interior acoustics would mute the small sound into a feeble tap. Instead, he reared back with his boot and kicked the door three times. Then he waited.
Presently, the door cracked open. Someone in the shadows took stock of the intruder. After a moment’s pause, Danny Sharp swung the door wide and vigorously pumped Nick’s hand.
“Good to see you again, Nick. How’ve you been?”
“Busy.”
Danny rolled his eyes. “Me, too. Boy, have I been busy. We all have. I can’t wait to show you your new ride.”
“And I can’t wait to see it.” Nick felt exhausted, but he was beginning to catch a second wind. Maybe Danny’s enthusiasm was contagious, or maybe it was enough just to have an English-speaking human being to talk to face-to-face after all this time. “Can I take it for a spin?” he asked.
“Not quite yet, but you can do the next best thing.”
Scott was waiting inside the enclosure with a couple of other team members. “Hello again, Lieutenant. How was class?”
“Long and painful, but I’ve never been more confident in my Arabic skills.”
“That’s good,” Scott replied, “because the colonel seems to think you may get the chance to use them sooner than we expected.”
Without elaborating, Danny and Scott took Nick through a demonstration similar to the one they’d given Walker, spending a little more time on the operation of the systems.
Inside Dream Catcher, Nick found a Velcro seam in the vinyl padding. He peeled back a corner just to get a look at the structure and was surprised to see lines of orange and silver twine snaking back and forth, set into the composite surface. “Hey, guys,” he called from the belly of the jet, “what’s this ropelike stuff on the interior structure?”
“Oh, that,” said Scott lightly. “That would be the explosive-incendiary cord.”
“The what?”
“It was part of the original design. If for some reason the drone was lost in hostile territory and had to be remotely destroyed, that cord would violently reduce the craft to a lot of dust and a few unrecognizable chunks. Considering some of the alloys in the structure, my guess is that it would actually be a dazzling display.”
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