Black Wolf: A Dreamland Thriller

by Dale Brown

  “Jonathon, this is Danny Freah. I found Ms. McEwen.”

  “Is she willing to help?”

  “She’s more than willing. But she’s—old.”

  Reid didn’t answer for a moment. He wasn’t exactly a spring chicken himself. If anything, he was several years—maybe even a whole decade—older than McEwen.

  “Let me ask you a question, Colonel. Why do you want Sally on the mission?”

  “I don’t want her, not her per se,” answered Danny. “I need someone who knows Kiev, who can talk the language like a native, and who can help make arrangements.”

  “And you think she’s too old for that?”

  “Yeah. And she’s a moonshiner.”

  Reid laughed. “I don’t think that disqualifiers her. Assuming, of course, it’s true.”

  “Seriously—”

  “Who you choose is up to you, Colonel. You know that. But I wouldn’t have recommended Sally if I didn’t think she could handle the job. You’re not asking her to jump out of planes, correct?”

  “No.”

  “She could probably do that.” Reid laughed. “I know she’ll pass whatever physical the Agency offers.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Your call.”

  Reid hung up.

  Danny put the sat phone back in his pocket. He thought of himself as pretty old. In fact, he’d questioned himself several times during the last mission, wondering if he was still up to the rigors of an operation.

  But McEwen—she was at least seventy.

  He walked back into the house, not quite decided what to do.

  Hera and McEwen were back by the paintings. Laughing.

  Hera, laughing? That was a first.

  Danny found McEwen pointing to a building in one of the paintings. He hadn’t looked at it very carefully before; now he realized it was a street in Kiev.

  “They had rented the flat out to a prostitute,” said McEwen, continuing her story for Hera. “The prostitute got evicted, and we got it. Of course, we didn’t know about the previous occupant. So here we are, trying to set up a safe house, and men knocking at all hours of the night, asking for Olga. Ulll-ga.”

  “Olga,” repeated Hera, laughing hysterically.

  She must be pretty good with people, thought Danny, to get Hera on her side so quickly. He’d had a lot of trouble winning her over.

  “So what did Johnny say?” asked McEwen.

  Danny had never heard Reid called Johnny by anyone. Reid didn’t seem like a Johnny. He seemed like a… Mr. Reid.

  “He said that you know Kiev better than I know the back of my hand,” Danny told her. “And that you can help me make some arrangements there.”

  “Damn straight. Let me get my bag.”

  “What about your store?” asked Danny.

  “Ah, I don’t get but two customers a year, except for the ones what want some old-fashioned.”

  She disappeared down the hall.

  “That’s the local White Lightning,” said Hera.

  “No shit,” said Danny.

  “She just sells it for her father’s cousin. He lives out in the woods.”

  “She told you that?”

  “We bonded.”

  “You think she can do the job?”

  “What? Rent hotel rooms, find us rental cars? Hell yeah. God, she’s perfect—who’d expect her? Little old lady a spy? No way.”

  McEwen returned with her bag.

  “I’m gonna have to stop at the hardware store on the way out,” she said. “ ’Cause I gotta leave a message for Cuz, but he don’t read.”

  “You’re not going to tell him where you’re going, are you?” asked Danny.

  “Colonel—I’ve been in this business since before you were in diapers. Credit me with a little common sense.”

  “Cuz won’t worry that you’re gone?” asked Hera.

  “He’ll be a little sorry that he’ll have to go back to cookin’ on his own, instead of coming around and mooching off me every night,” said McEwen. “But he’ll be glad that he won’t have to go splits on the profits. And that no one’s yellin’ at him to get his teeth fixed. Don’t worry about him. He’s not a bad cook when he puts his mind to it. Especially if you like barbecue on Christmas.”

  “It shouldn’t be more than two weeks,” said Danny.

  “I hope we’re going for a long time,” said McEwen. “Much as I love this place, I’m done with it for a spell.”

  “I got a question,” said Hera as McEwen put the Closed sign in place on the front door. “What does it mean that this is a notions shop?”

  “It means I sell anything I have a notion to,” said McEwen, closing the door behind her.

  5

  The Pentagon

  Breanna Stockard was just about to leave her office at the Pentagon when she got an urgent alert on her encrypted messaging system asking her to call Jonathon Reid. She reached for the phone and dialed, knowing that the meeting she was headed to was unlikely to break up much before seven, and she had promised her daughter she’d be home soon after.

  Reid picked up on the first ring, his raspy voice practically croaking in the receiver.

  “That was fast,” he told her.

  “I have a meeting upstairs,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “More data on the Wolves.”

  “And?”

  “There’s a Moldova link,” said Reid. “It may just be a coincidence, but I thought I’d better tell you.”

  “What’s the connection?”

  “Transactions. I’ve forwarded the report to your secure queue,” said Reid.

  Breanna clicked the file open and waited while it was unencrypted. The system used a set of temporary, real-time keys, and occasionally the process of turning it from unreadable hieroglyphics to clear text could take several seconds.

  The file opened. It was a listing of plane tickets that showed transit in and out of Moldova, a small landlocked country between Romania and Russia.

  “Those accounts will be backtracked,” said Reid. “They’ll look for patterns, connections to other accounts. We may have more of a profile in a few days.”

  “Moldova may simply have been chosen because of its banking system,” said Breanna. “The banking system is notoriously opaque to outsiders. Even insiders. And there are plenty of suspect mafia connections.”

  “Always a possibility.”

  Breanna looked at the data. None of the transactions were recent.

  “These are all connected to the Wolves?” she asked.

  “They’re connected to accounts that were associated with the Berlin activity,” answered Reid. “As I say, the Moldova connection is still tenuous.”

  Activity. An interesting way to describe murder.

  “Everything is tenuous,” said Breanna.

  “Not everything,” said Reid. “As for the identity—”

  “The DNA is suggestive, not conclusive,” she said.

  Reid didn’t answer. It was his way of reproaching her—worse, she thought, than if he had argued or even called her a name.

  Not that Reid would do either.

  “At some point we will have to address this with Colonel Freah,” said Reid finally.

  “We’ll keep it where it is for now,” said Breanna. “Until we have more information, I don’t see any point in going down this road with Danny. It’s still… far-fetched.”

  “Admittedly.”

  Breanna looked at her watch. “I’m sorry, I have a meeting.”

  “I’ll keep you up to date.”

  “Thanks.”

  The meeting Breanna was rushing to couldn’t start until she arrived, which meant that a dozen generals and three admirals stared at her as she came in the door. While her civilian position as head of the Office of Technology put her on a higher administrative level than most of the people in the room, she was still a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, and not a few of the people in the room thought of her that way.

  Sometimes she
did, too.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said, rushing in.

  “Well, you’re here now,” said General Timothy “Tiger” Wallace. “Let’s get moving.”

  Wallace gave her a tight grin, but the expression gave nothing away. He was the Air Force’s chief of staff—the top boss—and a difficult man for her to gauge. He’d served with her father, and claimed to be a great admirer of Dreamland and everything associated with it. He and Zen occasionally had lunch together during his visits to Capitol Hill. On the other hand, he frequently butted heads with Breanna’s boss, Deputy Defense Secretary Harold Magnus. The two had clashed when Magnus was in the Air Force some years before, and while they didn’t openly feud—Magnus wasn’t the type, and there was no percentage in it for Wallace—Wallace’s animosity was often subtly displayed, especially toward Magnus’s pet projects.

  One of which Breanna had come to discuss.

  “Thank you, General,” she said, sliding her laptop onto the table. “Everyone is aware of the Sabre UAV program and its present status.”

  She nodded toward Steph Garvey, the two-star Air Force general in charge of the Sabre program. Garvey gave her a smile—genuine and easy to read.

  “We have made good progress with the UM/F program in general,” continued Breanna. “Including the Navy variant.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion,” grumbled Admiral David Chafetz. There was no mistaking Chafetz’s attitude—he didn’t like anything even remotely connected to the Air Force, and was a skeptic of unmanned aircraft as well. That was two big strikes against the Sabre program.

  Officially designated UM/F–9s, the unmanned aircraft had been developed as replacements for the Flighthawks, the robot aircraft that helped revolutionize aerial combat in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

  Though greatly improved over the years, the Flighthawks had a number of limitations, including range and speed. More importantly, their airframes were now well past their design age. Materials fatigue—both their metal skeleton and carbon-fiber skins—was starting to hamper their effectiveness. Internal fasteners had to be inspected before each flight on some of the high-hour aircraft—an onerous procedure that added several hours to the maintainers’ routine chores. It was time for a new generation of remote fighters to take over.

  The Sabres were that fighter.

  Nicknamed after the fighter that had dominated the skies over North Korea during the 1950s, the UM/F–9 was the first UAV capable of sustained Mach speeds. (Though technically the Flighthawks could fly faster than the speed of sound, they could not operate reliably in Mach-plus regimes for several reasons unrelated to their airfoil.) Long and sleek, the aircraft used a hybrid ramjet pulse engine to fly; an array of maneuvering nozzles and high-strength carbon-based alloys made twelve g-plus turns routine. Tests showed that it was more than a match for even the improved F–22C Block–150s that had recently joined the Air Force’s top interceptor squadrons.

  But high speeds and maneuverability meant nothing if the aircraft could not be controlled. And this control system—called Medusa—represented the real breakthrough.

  Like the Flighthawk, the Sabre was capable of “autonomous combat.” In other words, it could figure out on its own how to take down an enemy, then do so. Unlike Flighthawks, Sabres could work together against an enemy, employing section tactics without human intervention. Data from one aircraft was immediately shared with all of the aircraft in the same flight. Spotting a group of four enemy planes, for example, the flight could decide to break into two elements and attack from two different directions.

  While the Flighthawks had small onboard flight computers to handle many of the basic tasks of flight, they relied heavily on a centralized computer and a human controlling them, generally from an EB–52 or modified B–1.

  Medusa did not exist separately from the Sabres. It was, as the man who invented it liked to say with his droll puns, a true “cloud computer.” The interconnection of the units working together created the real intelligence.

  But there had to be a human in the process somewhere. And that was what today’s meeting was about.

  Actually, the man who invented Medusa didn’t agree that there should be any human anywhere in the process. It wasn’t that Ray Rubeo had no use for his fellow man or thought that human intelligence was an oxymoron, though charges along those lines had often been leveled at him. Rubeo simply saw no need for a human “to muck things up.”

  “You don’t steer a Sidewinder to its target,” he had told Breanna on several occasions. “It’s fire and forget. Same with this.”

  But the military was not ready to think about a squadron of aircraft as “fire and forget” weapons. And though Rubeo worked, as a contractor, for her, Breanna wasn’t ready to think that way either.

  So where did the Medusa “control” unit go?

  At a secure base far from harm, like those generally used for the Predator and Global Hawk? Or a plane, like the Flighthawk system?

  A satellite control system with a ground base could be used, but there were problems with bandwidth, and the cost was considerable—much more than Medusa, let alone the Sabres.

  Medusa’s range was roughly two hundred miles, a considerable improvement over the Flighthawks. Still, that was close enough that a savvy enemy could seek to locate and isolate the control aircraft. Simply making the plane run away would mean a cheap victory, as the Sabres would have to follow or lose their connection. That wasn’t much of an issue for a system like the Flighthawks, originally designed to protect a bombing package: their job was to stay close to the mother ship in the first place. But it would be disastrous for interceptors.

  The Air Force was pushing for a new version of the F–35 to act as the Sabres’ controller. This would be a stretched, two-seat version of the stealthy lightweight fighter. There were considerable problems with such an approach, starting with the fact that the stretched F–35 couldn’t carry enough fuel to stay in a combat area for more than an hour, far less than the Sabre. There was also a matter of cost, which would be considerable for a plane not even off the drawing board yet.

  The Navy had gone along with the plan, grudgingly, because it would allow the Sabres to operate from carriers for the first time. But as Chafetz’s demeanor made clear, their support was less than enthusiastic.

  Breanna had come today to offer a different solution entirely.

  “I should start by giving you all a bit of good news about the intelligent command system that flies the planes,” she said, flipping open her laptop. “We call it Medusa. It’s—”

  “A Greek monster,” quipped Chafetz.

  Breanna smiled indulgently. Her solution would actually help the Navy, but she didn’t expect to be thanked for it.

  “The admiral knows his myths,” she said. “Medusa is six months ahead of schedule. In fact, as you’ll see at the demonstration next week—those of you who are going out to Dreamland—it’s completely operational. Or would be, if we had more Sabres.”

  “We will have a dozen by the end of the year,” said General Garvey.

  “And that program is on schedule and on budget,” Breanna offered quickly, not wanting to seem as if she was criticizing Garvey. “Along the way, we’ve made some improvements to Medusa’s human input unit. It’s now as compact as the units in Sabres. Which gave us an idea.”

  While talking, she had booted up her laptop. The computer found the secure local network, signing itself on automatically. Breanna glanced down and double-clicked on a PowerPoint icon. A pair of video screens began to rise from the center of the conference room tables.

  “We’d like to propose a new aircraft as part of the control solution. Some of you will be familiar with it.”

  A jet came on the screen. It looked like a cousin of the F–22, perhaps by way of the YF–23 and a Bird of Prey. Black, with an oval double wing at the tail and stubby fins at its side, it was two-thirds the size of a Raptor, as the next slide demonstrated.

  “The Tigershark?
” asked Chafetz. “A Navy plane?”

  Wallace cleared his throat.

  “Actually, that began as an Air Force project,” he said. “But it’s dead. The company’s bankrupt. No more aircraft can be built.”

  “At the moment, we have all we need,” said Breanna. “There are three aircraft. They could all be given over to the program. That’s one more than you need, at least for the next two years.”

  Three Tigersharks had been built and tested three years before. The aircraft was seen first as a replacement for the F–22, and as a possible fifth generation fighter for the Navy.

  One had even appeared at a pair of air shows, as its maker—a small company formed by former Boeing and Lockheed engineers—tried to convince the military and Congress to award a contract for its development. Unfortunately, the wheels of government moved very slowly. While everyone agreed the plane was a winner, it couldn’t win funding for production in the tight budget. While Congress promised to consider it the next fiscal year, the debt-ridden company had folded. Its assets were put up for sale to pay creditors.

  At that point the Office of Technology had stepped in, purchasing the aircraft, some spare parts, and all of the design work. The Tigershark now belonged to the Office of Technology.

  “How the hell do you see in that thing?” asked one of the admirals.

  “Screens,” said Garvey. “They provide a better view than your eyes would.”

  Breanna pressed the button on her pointer. A close-up of the body appeared, revealing lines for the cockpit access panel. The next slide showed a breakaway of the body, revealing the cockpit itself. The pilot’s seat was pitched as if it were a recliner.

  “We needed a high-performance aircraft to help us test Medusa,” explained Breanna. “The Sabres weren’t ready, and of course there are always questions about unmanned airplanes in test regimes. In any event, one of the aircraft had been disassembled for some tests, and adding Medusa to the rebuild was not very difficult. We decided we would use it. The results have been so spectacular that it makes sense to show you what we have. You’re scheduled to view the system tests with us in Dreamland next week—this is just an added bonus.”