Dale Brown's Dreamland--Strike Zone

by Dreamland--Strike Zone(Lit)

  Chen stared at the ideograms. He was not sure what weapons his grandfather was talking about, or even where they might be. Silently, he folded the paper and placed it back in his pocket. And then he went to find out.

  Club Lion, Brunei

  1205

  ALL HIS LIFE, Starship had been on top of the wave. He’d ridden it to the State Class A Football Championship in junior year as all-league quarterback; the next year he’d taken the state trophy in wrestling. The Academy—more success in football, of course, where his exploits against Notre Dame were still the talk of the place. Pilot training, F-15 squadron. The assignment to Dreamland was supposed to be another notch in the belt.

  It was. But it wasn’t going precisely as he had planned.

  For one thing, he hadn’t planned on joining the Flighthawk program—he’d been shooting for one of the manned fighter programs but discovered the only open pilot slot was in the Megafortress, and with all due respect to the monster craft, no amount of Dreamland gadgets could turn it into an exciting ride. He’d managed to finesse a slot with the Flighthawks and figured he’d be in a good position to transition eventually—though eventually might be far down the road.

  But what Starship hadn’t counted on was the pressure. Because even though he was good—better than good—he’d felt unbelievable stress ever since the start of the deployment. He wasn’t sure why—was it because he was so far from the plane he was flying? Was it the fact that Kick was looking over his shoulder? Was he intimidated by Zen, a pilot so tough he could lose the use of his legs and still come back for more?

  Or was it fear?

  He slid another ten-dollar bill on the bar of the club.

  Eating at the palace last night with Mack Smith had been a revelation. He’d thought the job proposal was complete BS, but the sultan turned out to be serious. He wanted to take Brunei into the twenty-first century—even beyond. He wanted frontline fighters and Megafortresses. Mack Smith could build an empire here.

  And it looked like he was going to take the job.

  If he did, Starship would be in line to help. Major Smith had said so. More than likely, much of the work at first would be staff BS and PR, but he would have the pull to fly whenever he wanted.

  Those little trainer jobs they flew at first, but eventually, real planes.

  A week ago, he’d have laughed out loud about the whole idea. But now he wasn’t sure.

  Starship took his drink and slid around in his seat to watch the girl dancing on the stage. The girl started to slide her skirt down.

  Someone shook Starship from behind.

  “What’s the story?” he said angrily, turning.

  “So this is where you’re hiding,” said Kick. “I can see why.”

  “Hey, roomie. Pull up a stool. How’d you find me?”

  “Mack Smith suggested I look here.”

  “Yeah, good ol’ Major Smith. Have a drink.”

  “Thanks but no thanks. Zen wants us ASAP.”

  “What for? It’s our day off. Besides, we’re still grounded, right? Because of the Chinese baloney?”

  “Not anymore. Colonel Bastian arranged forPennsylvania to fly up to Taiwan as part of the ASEAN exercises. You’re supposed to leave right away.”

  “Damn,” said Starship.

  Kick stepped back. “I’ll tell him I couldn’t find you.”

  “Screw that,” said Starship, sliding off the barstool.

  “I’m serious, man. You can’t fly.”

  “Better than you.”

  Kick looked at him. “Not at this moment.”

  “I can fly better than you in my sleep, Kick boy.”

  Taipei

  1210

  THE FIRST FACTORYStoner took them to lay about a mile and a half from Sungshan airport, in a crowded district of warehouses and industrial buildings. The roads were so thick with traffic that it took hours to get to the facility itself; when they finally did they found their way blocked by uniformed employees. The men were polite—the driver pretended to be asking for directions and they answered helpfully—but there was no way past them.

  Danny eyed the fence, which was topped with barbed wire; there were also video cameras. Besides the two men at the gate he saw another patrolling down the way.

  He took out the IR device and slowly began scanning the building. A small wire connected to the side; it was an earphone that buzzed as soon as the reading was complete and logged. The data were ferried via a small antenna to the transmitter unit in the trunk, though at the moment they weren’t broadcasting to Dreamland because of the small possibility that it might be detected.

  Every time the machine buzzed in his ear, he pushed the small trigger button on the top between the two barrels; the IR sensors adjusted themselves and took another “bite” at the building. As it moved further inside, the buzzes started to be punctuated by clicks; it was having trouble seeing. Danny tried holding it at different angles and jostling it; finally he decided they had gotten everything they could.

  “So?” asked Stoner as they drove away.

  “We’ll see what the techies say. They can construct a three-D model when they look it over,” said Danny.

  “That thing like a radar?” asked Stoner.

  “No, it uses heat signatures so it can’t be detected. We call in IR or infrared, but the techies say it has a somewhat wider band. The sensors are here.” Danny pointed to the top rim of the glasses. “They have to be kept fairly cool to work right. But they have better range than the viewers on our Smart Helmets, and since there’s no radio waves, there’s nothing to be detected.”

  “I’d still like to get inside.”

  “Fine by me,” said Danny.

  “They make seats for aircraft,” said Stoner. “I have somebody working on getting us in as buyers. But it’s going to take a few days.”

  “Is it big enough?” asked Liu.

  “Could be,” said Danny. “We’ll see what the tech people say.”

  “There’s a rail line that runs from the back over to the airport,” said Stoner. “Chun Sue owns some hangars there. That’s one of the companies Chen Lee owns. As far as I know, only one is occupied. I figure we hit the empties first.”

  They uploaded the data on the way over. The Dreamland techies told Danny that he had only managed to see about eighty feet inside the building; a stock of insulation and fabric for the chairs blocked a deeper view. Everything they had been able to see was consistent with a seat factory—or something trying to look like one.

  They didn’t need the viewer in the airport; all the hangars were open and unguarded. Stoner had prepared a story—they were looking to lease a facility—but no one seemed to even notice they were there.

  Danny took a small scoop and wad of plastic bags from the attaché case he’d brought, sampling some of the dust so the chemicals could be analyzed. He also took out the Geiger counter and took some readings; all were within background norms.

  “Just a hangar,” said Stoner, walking to sit on an old crate in the corner.

  “What’s the crate say?” Danny asked.

  “It’s the name of a fish company. Heavenly Fish, along those lines.”

  “Why would it be here?” Danny asked. He bent down to examine it.

  “Shipped cargo in and out. Lost one of the crates,” said Stoner.

  “The crate wasn’t used to carry fish. It’s too clean.”

  Stoner shrugged.

  Danny took a picture with his digital camera, then took out his knife and took a sample of the wood where it had been worn down. He took his rad meter out again, but found nothing special. Finally, he planted a pair of the video camera bugs near the doorway.

  The cams were about the size and shape of three-quarter-inch bolts, the kind that might be used to secure a part on a child’s bicycle. There were two types, one with a wide-angle lens and the other more narrowly focused but able to work in near darkness. Each sent its signal to a transmitter the size of a nine-volt battery, which could b
e hidden anywhere with fifty feet of the cams. This transmitter in turn linked with a large base station—about the size of a cement block though nowhere near as heavy—that uploaded images either on command or in a random burst pattern that made it difficult to detect. The cameras and transmitters themselves used a similar random pattern with a very weak signal that would generally escape detection.

  “You sure those things work?” asked Stoner as they got back in the car.

  Danny turned to Liu, who gave him a thumbs-up. The sergeant was using his sat phone to talk to Dream Command, where the techies had just finished diagnostics on the gear, confirming there was a signal.

  “Now I am,” said the captain.

  The hangar that housed the airplane was open, and the four Americans managed to walk right in. The building was about twice the size of the others, and the Boeing 767-200ER it housed filled only about a third of the massive space. The wings of the large airliner were covered with large sheets of rolled cardboard, and the place smelled of fresh paint.

  A pair of Chun Sue employees came over and told them that the company airplane was undergoing refurbishment. The men were very polite, and seemed flattered by the praise Danny threw at the airplane, which in fact was a beautiful piece of machinery. The 767 typically cruised between 35,000 and 40,000 feet; this model, optimized for the long-distance flights common in Asia, could clock close to six thousand miles before having to hit the gas pumps.

  The experts back in Dreamland noted one other interesting fact about the airplane as they briefed Danny through the headset connecting to his sat phone—it was a bit large for the airport, which was generally used by smaller jets and turboprops on local hops.

  Danny took several photos with his small camera for them, and planted a pair of video cams near the entrance.

  “Those suckers cost a fortune,” he told Stoner as they left.

  “The company is pretty rich,” said Stoner. “You notice anything funny about the paint?”

  “Besides the fact that the plane doesn’t need painting?”

  “The colors are used by the People’s Xia Airlines.”

  “They own them too?”

  “That’s a Mainland airline,” said Stoner. “They left off the symbols on the tail, but otherwise it’s a ringer.”

  Brunei IAP, Field Seven

  Dreamland Temporary Hangar

  1312

  ZEN TOOK ONElook at Starship and rolled his eyes.

  “Where the hell did you find alcohol in Brunei?”

  “Excuse me, sir?” said Starship.

  If Zen had had any doubts about Starship’s sobriety, the accent he put on “sir” would have dispelled them.

  “Take the rest of the day off,” he told the lieutenant. “You were due rest anyway. I shouldn’t have called you back.”

  “I can fly, Zen. Major—I can fly.”

  “Go take a shower, Starship. That’s an order.”

  Starship’s face turned red. He spun on his heel and retreated from the hangar.

  “You and me, Kick, let’s go,” said Zen, backing his wheelchair away so he could go and get his flight suit and other gear. “Pennsylvaniais taking off in an hour. We’re way behind schedule.”

  THEY LAUNCHED THEFlighthawk as soon as they were over water. Zen took the first leg of the flight, checking on some of the merchant ships that lay in their path. He wanted Kick to take the last half of the flight so he’d have the experience of landing at Tainan Air Base, their destination on Taiwan.

  “See the ship there, Kick?” he asked his nugget assistant, who was monitoring the flight from the second station.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Zero the cursor in, query it, get the registration data.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Relax, Kick, I’m not going to bite your head off. You don’t have to say ‘sir’ every ten seconds.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Zen laughed.

  Both Kick and Starship were excellent pilots and Flighthawk operators, but both men tended to be nervous around him. Was it because he was in charge of the program and therefore had a huge amount to say over their futures?

  Or was it the wheelchair?

  When he first came from his accident, he would have automatically assumed the latter. Lately, though, he’d become more discerning, or at least willing to let the complicated attitudes people had toward him ride.

  Most days, anyway.

  The wheelchair could get in the way. It had with Fentress—but that was Zen’s fault. He’d been jealous of the kid, or rather jealous of the fact that the kid could walk away from a session and he couldn’t. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

  “Got the data,” said Kick.

  “So? What do you think?” Zen asked.

  The information was already on Zen’s screen—the ship was a Malaysian freighter.

  “Looks pretty straightforward. Carrying tea. My thinking is we go over low and slow, find out. No big deal.”

  “No big deal.” Zen nudged the Flighthawk toward the ship. The computer already had a dotted line plotted for the recon run; he authorized the flight and gave control to C3.

  “You know how I got crippled?” he said to Kick.

  “I heard some sort of accident.”

  “Mack Smith and I were having a mock dogfight with the Flighthawks. I got too close to one of them. Sawed me in half. I was below five hundred feet. A lot below, actually. I don’t even remember bailing out.”

  Kick was silent. Finally, he said, “Sucks.”

  “Yeah, it does. But you move on. You have to.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hey, you know, just call me Zen. You take the stick after this run, all right? I’m going to roll back on the deck there and grab myself a soda.”

  “I can get it.”

  Pity? Or just a young officer trying to please his superior.

  Zen opted to believe it was the latter. He’d give the kid the benefit of the doubt until proven wrong. Same with Starship.

  “That’s okay, Kick. I want you to get as much practice in the air as possible. Okay?”

  “Great,” said the other pilot. “I appreciate it.”

  Kaohisiung

  1650

  THE ISLAND OFTaiwan measures only 396 by 144 kilometers. While Kaohisiung was on the opposite end of the country from Taipei where Danny and the rest of the team were, the flight south in a rented Sikorsky took less than an hour.

  The first site they had to check was a large office building near the center of the city off Kusshan-1 Road. Danny took out his fancy opera glasses and slowly scanned the interior. Liu, once again acting as the liaison with the Dreamland team, declared the basement nearly empty; the only machinery on the floors above related either to the cooling system or to the elevators. Twenty-something stories filled with office workers and nothing more lethal than a letter opener.

  Even so, Stoner and Danny went inside, going up to the fifteenth floor where a Taiwan magazine had its offices. They played tourist, Stoner claiming to work for a San Francisco publication Danny had never heard of but that somehow impressed the Taiwanese. After a few minutes it was clear to Danny that there was nothing of much interest here, and he practiced smiling and nodding. Stoner passed out a whole parcel of business cards; Danny realized from the looks he was getting that not having any was a serious faux pas.

  “What’s with the cards?” Danny asked as they took the elevator down.

  “Considered polite to exchange them,” said the CIA agent. “I have dozens for every occasion.”

  He showed a few to Danny. They declared he was a magazine editor, electronics equipment buyer, engineer, and American trade representative. The backs of the cards had the information in Chinese characters.

  “You sure you’re not schizophrenic?” said Danny, handing the cards back.

  “Sometimes I wonder.” Stoner pocketed the cards. “Computer system is easy to access. They’re networked with an Ethernet. We can get in if we want.�
��

  “You think it’s worth it?”

  “At the moment, no. But now we can come back and get in easily. Once the system is bugged, the NSA whizzes can get into the printing plant.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Our next stop.”

  NEITHER THE PRINTINGplant nor the warehouse they looked at seemed very promising; the printing plant was in fact used for printing, and the warehouse held vegetables. Stoner pushed on, aware that the last site on his list was the most promising—it had a pier on the harbor front and sprawled over nearly a hundred acres.

  It was also well guarded by fences, men, and dogs.

  “This would be a perfect place,” said Danny, looking at the site through binoculars from a dock diagonally across the bay. “What the hell do they do there?”

  “Recycle everything and anything,” said Stoner. “Electronics mostly. That shed at the far left had car batteries. They strip away the outer casings, reuse the lead and the acid as well. Those drums there are filled with sulfuric acid.”

  “Lovely.”

  “Oh yeah. Real environmental operation.”

  Stoner pointed to two buildings at the right side of the facility, fenced off from the others by a double row of razor wire.

  “That’s where I think the operation might be, if it’s here. There’s a track up from the pier.”

  “Pier looks shaky,” said Danny.

  “Appearances can be deceiving. Can you get a scan?”

  “We’re too far for the viewer. We have to get a lot closer.”

  “Not a problem. We can get on that dock at night, go up to the fence. There’s no guard on the water side.”

  “Not now, maybe,” said Danny. “What about at night?”

  “We’ll have to find out,” said Stoner. “But if they’re not going to watch during the day, they probably won’t at night.”

  “Man, I can smell the acid from here,” said Danny.

  “Yeah. We stay away from the damn battery shed if we can.”

  “I got to scan it.”

  “Your call.” Stoner put down his glasses. “Hungry?”

  “Starving.”

  “Let’s go get some shrimp.”

  “ITHOUGHT WEwere getting something to eat,” said Liu when they stopped in front of the large warehouse building in the city’s southwestern district.