by Dale Brown
Standing over the graves, Danny felt the urge to say a prayer. He knelt and bowed his head, wishing the dead men peace.
“I hope you’re here, Mark,” he whispered to himself.
He stopped himself. It felt funny, praying that someone was dead.
17
Brown Lake Test Area, Dreamland
It was a coincidence that Captain Turk Mako’s last name meant shark. But it was a chance occurrence that he liked to play up in casual conversation.
“The Shark flies the shark—gotta happen,” he’d say when telling people what he did.
Not that he told many people. The aircraft wasn’t actually top secret, but most of what it was used for was.
In a sense, Turk’s name wasn’t actually Mako. It had been shortened and Americanized, kind of, from Makolowejeski by his great-great-grandfather, who’d come from Poland in the 1930s, escaping the war. He’d been dead some years when Turk was born, but he’d left a set of taped recordings about his adventures, a revelation and inspiration to the young man when he discovered them in high school.
Most pilots are at least a little superstitious, even if ultimately they know it’s bunk. Turk, who had a lucky coin he kept in his pocket every flight, viewed the name change as something of a good omen. Great-great had been looking after him even before he was born.
The Shark that Turk Mako flew was the F–40 Tigershark II, the experimental aircraft owned by the Pentagon’s Technology Office, now being equipped with the Medusa control unit to work with the Sabre UAVs. It was the latest in a long line of experimental aircraft, a cutting-edge plane that would have looked right at home on the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise.
Technically, two previous aircraft had been called the Tigershark. The first was actually an informal name applied by the British to their versions of the P–40 Warhawk, after squadrons began painting sharks’ mouths on the nose. Fighting against the Japanese in China, Claire Lee Chenault’s Flying Tigers saw how good the paint looked and added teeth to their versions, helping to make the look famous.
Tigershark II’s direct namesake was the F–20, a lightweight, multirole aircraft developed by Northrop in the 1970s and early 1980s from the basic blueprint of the F–5E. It was incredibly nimble, capable of hitting Mach 2 and climbing to over 54,000 feet. It could take off in only 1,600 feet, a relatively short distance for a jet of that era, and the simplicity of its design made it easy to maintain—an important consideration for its intended target consumers, friendly American allies who might not have or want to spend the money for more expensive aircraft.
Though an excellent aircraft, the F–20 eventually succumbed to the realities of international weapons purchasing, where politics often overshadowed other considerations.
Like its predecessor, the new Tigershark was light, small, and fast. Very, very fast.
The airframe had essentially been built around the engine, a combination hypersonic pulse and ramjet that could take the sleek, needle-nosed plane to Mach 5. The engine also allowed it to operate around 135,000 feet. The wings came out in a triangular wedge, with faceted and angled fins on both sides.
The engine’s quad air scoop was located directly under the cabin area of the fuselage; rail guns were mounted on either side. The rail guns were directed energy weapons, firing small bursts of plasma at high speed. The bursts were roughly the equivalent of a 50-millimeter machine-gun bullet. Devastating to another aircraft, the weapon had several advantages over conventional machine guns, starting with the fact that its projectile, though as potent as missiles, were the size of 25mm bullets. Its effective range was just over twenty miles—well before the aircraft would be seen on radar.
The weapon did have some limitations. Only a dozen charges could be fired before it had to cool down and recycle, a process that took two minutes under ideal conditions. And with each firing, the gun literally tried to pull itself apart. Maintaining it in working order was, so far at least, very expensive.
Turk counted another negative to the weapon, though this was never mentioned by its builders. Great precision was needed to target a moving adversary, and the forces created as the weapon was fired made the Tigershark hard to control at all but top speed. These facts combined to dictate that the aircraft be flown entirely by the computer during the combat sequence. In other words, he had to hand the stick over to the silicon to take his shot.
He didn’t particularly like that. No computer was ever going to be as good as he was at flying. Ever.
Turk had joined the Air Force to fly. He was good at it—very good, he liked to think. He’d flown everything the service had given him—from F–16s to Flighthawks. In his not too humble opinion, he was the best. It irked him to give up the stick, even if he wasn’t literally standing back out of the way. But that was the way it was.
In a very real sense, he knew he was lucky to have a job where his seat was actually in a cockpit. All of the good young jocks were headed toward UAV programs now, a dramatic switch from just a few years ago. Unmanned planes were the Air Force’s future.
That sucked. There was nothing like the smell of rapidly evaporating jet fuel to get you moving in the morning, he thought. He took one last whiff and plugged up, snugging the Tigershark’s cockpit.
Time to rock and roll.
“Control to Tiger One, Tiger One, you read?” prompted the control tower.
“Copy, Control, strong read.”
“Status?”
Part of Turk wanted to give a real wise guy answer—maybe something like, “I feel like I gotta pee.” But the flight control computer at Dreamland that was talking to him had no sense of humor. In fact, the only thing in the universe that had less of a sense of humor was the flight control computer’s human boss, Major Samantha “Killjoy” Combs, who had promised to write him up if he goofed on the computer again. His joking around had frozen the system, grounding flights for over two hours.
Or so she claimed.
“Write me up?” he’d laughed. “I just discovered a flaw in your stupid computer program.”
“You caused two flight ranges to shut down.”
“Better we found the problem now rather than in battle,” said Turk.
“Captain.”
“Hey, make yourself happy. What are you gonna do, give me a parking ticket?”
Twenty minutes later his boss, Breanna Stockard, had called from D.C., telling him that if the three-star general commanding Dreamland complained about him again, he was going to be reassigned to clean toilets in the coldest part of Alaska.
So Turk was very straight today when dealing with the computer controller.
“Status is green,” said the pilot. “Awaiting clearance to take off.”
“Tiger One you are cleared to proceed on the filed flight plan. You are cleared for takeoff.”
The computer continued, giving him a rundown of the weather conditions. They were basically the same as they always were at Brown Lake: clear skies, unlimited visibility.
“Engines, military power,” said Turk, powering up from soft idle. The power plants—there were actually four of them, though they worked as an integrated unit—came on with a soft thud. The aircraft immediately began to shake. Turk worked his control surfaces quickly, getting green status lights on the right side of his visor. He could choose to use the LED screens on the aircraft—there was no glass canopy—but generally left that as a backup. His smart helmet could do everything the computer-controlled screen could, and was connected directly to the plane.
Turk checked through his instruments for his last takeoff checklist, meticulously looking at each indicator even though the computer would have alerted him if anything was out of spec. Then he took a long, deep breath, slowly emptying his lungs.
“Let’s go,” he told the plane, simultaneously reaching for the throttle.
And they were off.
All airplanes are built to fly. Engines on full and left completely on their own, their wings would gladly propel themselv
es through the air, straight and level, forever. Or at least until their fuel ran out.
The Tigershark didn’t just love to fly. It loved to accelerate. Its engines supplied more lift per pound than any other aircraft in the American inventory, which meant any other aircraft in the world. If the Tigershark were a person, it would be an Olympic-class sprinter—the Carl Lewis of the skies.
Speed is lift. Turk’s job was basically to manage that lift, using it to get from Point A to Point B and back again. To do that in the Tigershark, he had to think not just of Point A and B and all the subpoints in between, but Point C and D, and a little bit of E and F on either side of the wings. Because living at Mach 2.3, the aircraft’s normal cruise speed, entailed certain responsibilities.
Things happened relatively fast at that speed—more than twice as fast as they happened in most fighters. Turk had advanced radar and avionics systems that helped show him what else was around and likely to happen on any given vector, but as good as the computer was, it couldn’t really predict the future.
Not that he could, of course. But he did have a certain feel for it.
It wasn’t that the Tigershark couldn’t fly below the speed of sound. But the high-speed maneuvers it was capable of—the aircraft was designed to withstand over 18 g’s, a force that would crush its pilot in an old-style g-suit—required enormous flight energy.
It was a trade: the Tigershark gave the god of flight velocity and lift, and in return the god of flight let it make a 150-degree turn in the space a Piper would have used at something like a hundredth of the speed.
But the god of flight did not take IOUs—if the Tigershark was a few knots short, she was severely punished. High-speed stalls and spins were a fact of life in the Tigershark. Even after a year’s worth of flying it, Turk was required to practice dealing with them in a flight simulator twice a week.
The sessions were far more grueling than anything he encountered in the air, which was the point. He was good: he could deal with even the most unusual flight blip—his term—nearly as quickly as the plane’s flight command computer. But he still found the workouts taxing.
Today’s flight, by contrast, was a piece of cake. All he had to do was practice a few loops and rolls for the dog and pony show they were hosting in a few days.
Low pass on the runway. Zip-zip. Climb. Turn at the top. Dive and recover.
Enter Sabres, stage right.
Though they looked nothing alike, in many ways the Sabres were smaller versions of the Tigershark, capable of making very sharp maneuvers at high rates of speed. They didn’t have anywhere near the Tigershark’s top end, however; they would accelerate to roughly Mach 3, but used a great deal of fuel getting there. What they could do better than the Tigershark was fly slowly, all the way down to 100 knots at their service ceiling, which was roughly 68,000 feet. The secret was their wings, which could be extended—rolled out was a more descriptive and accurate term—turning them into high-altitude gliders. With solar cells embedded in their skin, the aircraft could power down their engines and loiter over an area for hours.
There were trade-offs. For one, the extended wings made it easy for properly configured radar to spot them. But all things considered, the Sabres were the most capable unmanned air vehicles or UAVs ever produced. They bore the same relationship to the Flighthawks—their immediate predecessors—as their namesake, the F–86 Sabre, bore to the P–38 Lightning.
Turk rocked the Tigershark through the opening maneuvers of his display routine, cranking the plane straight up as four Sabres rocked in from opposite directions. The little planes came up around him, crisscrossing as he climbed. It was very impressive from the ground—the planes looked as if they were a reverse fountain of water. In the cockpit, it was more than a little on the boring side: all Turk did was fly straight up, putting the nose of the aircraft through a blue guide circle on his screen supplied by Medusa, which was interfacing with the Tigershark’s flight computer.
An indicator in the right-hand corner of his screen began counting down his next maneuver. When it hit zero, he pushed right, diving between two of the Sabres. As he sliced downward, the little planes followed, crisscrossing as they flew.
A few more acrobatics and it was on to the simulated missile run. The Sabres dropped precision-guided bombs—small warheads of high explosive. These were 38 and 67- pound bombs, designed to destroy targets without causing a lot of collateral damage. They could blow up anything smaller than a main battle tank without a problem—as they demonstrated on a helpless Bradley.
Mission complete, it was back to the runway for a coordinated landing.
“Ground to Tigershark One, you’re looking very good,” said Colonel Harvey “Rocks” Johnson, coming on the radio just as Turk was about to tell control he was ready to land. “What’s your situation?”
“Tigershark is about to head back to the barn, Colonel.”
“I wonder if you could take that crisscross over the review stand again. The Sabres were a little sluggish.”
The colonel phrased it as a request, but Turk knew that Rocks would make his life difficult if he didn’t burp precisely on command.
“Tigershark weighed fuel out pretty carefully, Colonel.”
“My gauge says you have enough for a pass.”
Turk checked. The Tigershark’s instruments were duplicated on the ground. There was enough for a pass—but only just.
“Yeah, roger that. We’re lining it up.” Turk clicked off the radio mike. “Computer, Sabre Control Section: Sabres, follow-on for prebriefed maneuver A–1. Devolve from that to landing pattern Baker. Acknowledge.”
“Sabre Commander: Sabres Acknowledge,” said the computer. The commands appeared in his HUD.
Turk slid back to the starting point for the fly-by. The Sabres came around and executed their part of the show perfectly—just as they had earlier. Turk banked, called in to the tower to land, and got into position without any more interference from Rocks Johnson. The Sabres lined up behind him, aiming to fly over and then land.
He was less than 1,000 meters from touchdown when a proximity warning sounded in the cockpit. One of the Sabres was moving toward his tail at 500 knots.
“Sabres, knock it off, knock it off,” said Turk. In that same second he pulled the throttle down, killing his speed. The aircraft flattened, losing altitude precipitously. But the unending runway was created just for such emergencies. He came in hard and fast, but had acres in front of him; the Sabres jetted harmlessly overhead.
“What the hell just happened?” he yelled.
“Tigershark, abort landing,” said the computer controller, belatedly catching up to the emergency. “Abort. Abort.”
“Thanks,” muttered Turk, checking his instruments.
The knock-it-off command should have sent the Sabres into a predesignated safe orbit at 5,000 feet, southwest of the runway in a clear range. But the radar showed them circling above and approaching for a landing.
“Ground, what’s going on?” said Turk. On the ground the Tigershark was as vulnerable as a soccer mom minivan, slow and not very maneuverable. He moved off the marked runway toward the taxi area, unsure of where the Sabres were going—a very dangerous position.
“Ground, what the hell is going on?”
“We have control, we have control,” sputtered Johnson. “Get off the runway.”
“Yeah, no shit,” grumbled Turk over the open mike.
“The engineers think there was an error in one of the subroutines when they were landing,” Johnson told Turk when he reached him at the prep area. The crew had taken over the Tigershark and were giving her a postflight exam. “They think Medusa defaulted into the wrong pattern.”
“ ‘Think’ is not a reassuring word,” said Turk.
“That’s why we test this shit out, Captain. Your job is to help us work things out.”
“Maybe if I controlled the planes from Medusa, rather than handing them off to you—”
“The test protocol i
s set,” said Johnson, practically shouting.
“You don’t have to get angry with me, Colonel,” snapped Turk. “I’m not the one that fucked up.”
“Nobody fucked up here.”
“Bullshit—the Sabre flight computer almost killed me. It’s supposed to be hands-off to landing.”
“You should have watched where the hell you were.”
“What? What?”
“Hey, hey, hey, what’s going on?” said Al “Greasy Hands” Parsons, stepping in between them.
Johnson ignored Greasy Hands, pointing at Turk. “You remember you’re in the Air Force, mister,” he told him. “I don’t care who your boss is. At the end of the day, your butt is mine.”
Johnson stalked away.
“I swear to God, if you weren’t here, I woulda hit him,” said Turk.
“Then you’re lucky I was here,” said Greasy Hands. He laughed.
“Blaming me for that? What a bunch of bullshit.” Turk was still mad. His ears felt hot because of the blood rushing to them. “He almost killed me. He’s supposed to override manually immediately if there’s a problem. Not wait for me to call knock it off. Not then. Shit. I get hit on landing, that’s it.”
Greasy Hands was silent.
“Damn,” said Turk. He shook his head. It was typical Johnson: bluster and blame on everyone except for himself.
“Come on,” said Greasy Hands. “I’ll buy you a beer at Hole 19.”
Hole 19 was a club at Dreamland.
“I gotta finish the postflight brief,” said Turk.
“I’ll finish it with you.”
Turk smiled. Greasy Hands was old-school, a former chief master sergeant now working for the Office of Technology. He’d served at Dreamland for years. Now he was Breanna Stockard’s assistant, a kind of chief cook and bottle washer who solved high-priority problems. He was a grease monkey at heart, a tinkerer’s tinkerer who could probably have built the Tigershark in his garage if he wanted.
“I’m OK, Chief,” said Turk.
“I’d like to tag along.”
“All right, come on. Boring stuff, though.”
