Dale Brown's Dreamland

by Dale Brown

  Mack ran through his instrument checks, working swiftly with the no-nonsense rhythm he’d perfected during his days flying combat air patrol in the Gulf. With the systems at Dash-One spec, he asked for and received clearance from the tower. He tapped the top of his helmet for good luck—a necessary part of his preflight ritual—then began trundling toward Lakebed Runway 34. A black Hummer and a Jimmy, both with blue security lights and yellow “Follow Me” signs, led the way. Off to the east a temporary aboveground control tower and observation deck had been erected to monitor the flight.

  Knife narrowed his attention to the small bubble around him as the vehicles peeled off. He pushed the F-119 to its mark, setting his brakes for one last systems check before takeoff. The right panel of his trio of multi-use displays was entirely given over to flight details. His eyes scanned the graphical readouts deliberately. Satisfied, he turned his eyes toward the left MUD, where he had the GPS system selected. The enhanced God’s-eye-view screen rendered his plane as a blue dot on the color-coded terrain—in this case a brownish topo map overlaid by a gray rectangle signifying the limits of the test range. Groom Mountain’s seven-thousand-foot-high peak lurked at the far end, drawn in sharp black lines. Smith shifted his thumb on the Hostas stick, adding radar input to the display; the shading changed to indicate that it was working, though it couldn’t properly paint anything until he was over four hundred feet above ground, and couldn’t really be trusted until about eight or nine hundred.

  Something for the engineers to work on.

  Ready, Knife thought. His left hand moved the throttle to maximum military power. The plane trembled as the turbines spooled, the brakes straining.

  Temp, RPM, pressures perfect. Good to go. He backed to idle, took another breath, gave himself another good-luck pat.

  Not that he needed it, of course.

  “Tower, Playboy One, I’m ready for one last fling,” he said.

  “Playboy One,” acknowledged the controller stiffly.

  Knife released the brakes and spooled takeoff power, his mount rumbling forward.

  BREANNA BANKED NORTHWARD, HEADING TOWARD Range F where the rendezvous was supposed to take place. The check flight and tests had gone well, but she could feel her stomach pinching her as they got ready for the rendezvous.

  Maybe it was just the ham sandwich she’d managed while they orbited out of the Russian satellite’s view, waiting for Smith and the F-119 to take off. Mustard always gave her indigestion. Everyone else was raving about her father’s decision to spread the expertise of the executive chef among all of the base’s cafeterias, but in her opinion the food at Dreamland still rated among the worst in the world.

  “Optimum, optimum, optimum,” sang her copilot as he ran through his check of the flight systems. Two of Dreamland’s top techies were performing similar checks in the former radar and navigation suite below. The weapons bay was unoccupied, except by the computers.

  Sitting behind Breanna and Chris on the flight deck was Major Cheshire, who was overseeing the refueling exercise. The Megafortress’s synthetic bird’s-eye view, created from radar inputs, was projected on one of her monitors. Another carried the input from a video cam installed at the rear of the plane, roughly where a refueling boom would be. With her corn unit set to Playboy’s frequency, Cheshire would pretend to be a boomer, talking the attack plane in for a tank. It was ad hoc, of course—there was no boom, and Major Smith had no lights to guide him under Fort Two’s belly. But they just needed a rough approximation to make sure the concept was sound.

  Breanna reached Range F at twenty thousand feet, precisely as planned for the first track. It bothered the hell out of her that the world’s most versatile bomber might only survive as a milk cow. But as Cheshire had said when she explained the mission, better a live cow than a dead dream.

  “We’re ready any time you are, Major,” she told her boss.

  KNIFE STOMPED THE RUDDER PEDAL IN A LAST, desperate effort to close in to the target cone below Fort Two. His right wing pulled up, propelled by a nasty eddy of air from the Megafortress’s fuselage. He steadied it for a second, then felt the plane starting to lose speed and got a stall warning.

  “Shit,” he said, out loud and over the open circuit as he ducked the plane off the EB-52’s tail.

  “Okay, let’s take a break,” said Major Cheshire.

  “Roger that,” he snapped.

  They’d been trying for nearly thirty minutes to get the F-119 under the Megafortress’s belly. The vortices and wind sheers coming off the bigger plane’s wings, fuselage, and tail were just too much for the F-119, even with its constantly correcting fly-by-wire controls.

  Knife thought the controls themselves might be the problem. In his opinion, having a computer between him and the plane’s control surfaces dampened the edge he needed to put the plane precisely where he wanted. It was like the difference between driving an automatic-shift and a standard-shift car; being able to flutter the clutch or hold the revs above redline without shifting could make all the difference.

  But it wasn’t like he could turn the system off. Like other inherently unstable craft such as the F-117, the fly-by-wire system was an integral part of the design, not an enhancement like in the EB-52. The JSF couldn’t fly without it.

  What had Bastian called it? A flying bathtub? Have to give Dog his due—he had that nailed.

  “Let’s move on to the drogue routine off the left wing,” Knife radioed. “Stay at twenty thousand feet.”

  “You sure?” asked Cheshire.

  “Look, you guys just follow the script, all right?”

  “You okay, Major?” asked Cheshire.

  Smith reminded himself the project was being monitored down in the tower.

  “Yeah, okay. Let’s go,” said Smith. He began closing in on the Megafortress’s left wing, now nearly a half mile ahead. He came in ever so slowly, drawing even with the tail—then found the plane sheering off to the left into a rapid spin.

  His master warning panel freaked. He fell to nearly fifteen thousand feet before he could manage a recovery.

  “Playboy, you have visible damage to the leading-edge aileron on the right wing,” said Cheshire. “Copy? Knife, are you okay? Are you with us?”

  “Roger that,” he said. The plane’s high-flying position—the pilot sat in what looked like a glass bulb at the top of the plane—gave him a good view of the wings. Finally sure he had it back under control, he twisted back and forth, doing a visual inspection to confirm Cheshire’s warning and the legion of problem codes on the systems screen. The leading-edge surface was bent, and he could see a piece of metal extending out from behind it. He guessed that was part of one of the motors that worked it, which the screen warned had failed. Now he had to admit that the FBW system was useful—it was compensating so smoothly for the damaged wing that he barely noticed it. Undoubtedly the flight-control system had played a big role in helping him regain control of the craft.

  Though serious, the damage wasn’t fatal. But his gauges showed the temperature in his right engine had shot up to the redline; there must be a problem there as well.

  Stinking F-119. What a way to go out.

  Appropriate, though, considering the plane.

  “Dream Tower, this is Playboy One. Emergency declared. I have a slight situation with my wing and engine. Looks like it’s time to land,” Mack said, adding his altitude, position, and heading, though they would already be projected by Dreamland’s powerful sensors. He and Fort Two had the sky to themselves; all he had to do was line up, pop his wheels, and land.

  “Tower acknowledges, Playboy. Copy your flying emergency.”

  “Mack?”

  Brenna’s voice seemed to come at him from the clouds, breaking through the outside fuzz of his consciousness as he pushed toward Runway Two. He felt the kiss again, then returned to the matter at hand.

  “I’m okay, beautiful,” he told her. “I can’t even tell there’s a problem. But listen, do I get a kiss if I land
in one piece?”

  COLONEL BASTIAN STOOD BACK FROM THE MONITOR, nudging next to the air-conditioning unit in the cramped quarters of Dreamland’s mobile test tower. He could see Smith’s plane coasting toward the hangars in the distance. Obviously, the damage to the plane had been minimal.

  The damage to the idea of using the Megafortress as a tanker, however, was another story.

  But he had decided this morning that he definitely wanted to keep the Megafortress project alive. It wasn’t just the fact that he believed in McLanahan’s Air Battleship scenario. Even as a “simple” bomber, the Megafortress made sense. With a few tweaks, it could be as survivable as an F-15E while carrying several times the payload two or three times as far. Get into a low-intensity war in a hot climate—say, the Middle East, as McLanahan had hinted, or Southeast Asia—and a few Megafortresses might just turn the tide. And it would be cheap; the Air Force had literally hundreds of B-52’s available for conversion.

  At the moment, though, that was a drawback. There weren’t enough jobs at stake to easily apply political pressure and keep it alive. But attach it to the F-119 as a survivable tanker, and there’d be plenty of pots. A few months of demonstration flights, maybe some careful work with contractors, and they’d have enough political support to revive the battleship concept.

  But it was dead now.

  Bastian listened as the controller exchanged information with an aircraft conducting a test near Range F.

  “What’s going on?” he asked Mickey Colgan, the flight officer coordinating the day’s tests.

  “Oh, that’s just a drone taking off,” said the captain. “Unpiloted Green Phantom doing IR testing. Pretty straightforward. It’s got a JSF suit on. It has to catch another drone.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “I’m sorry, Colonel. There are two Phantoms. One’s just a stock drone. The other, Green Phantom, has some wing baffles and a few other mods to simulate the F-119’s flight characteristics. They’re controlled out of the Flighthawk hangar. We’re running checks on the nitrogen-cooling system for the gear in the IR’s eye. It has to be kept at a constant temperature or—”

  “You think Green Phantom could rendezvous with Fort Two?”

  Colgan blinked. “Well, if the F-119 can’t do it, that old Phantom, I mean, it’s at least as bad a flier as the JSF itself.”

  “Who’s the pilot?” asked Bastian.

  “That would be Major Stockard, sir.” Colgan seemed to bristle a bit. “They, uh, they’re trying to get him back into the swing of things.”

  “How good a pilot is he?”

  “Sir?”

  “I mean with the drone.”

  “Well, before his accident, there was no one near as good as him,” said Colgan. “But …”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know if he’s back up to speed, Colonel. And he, uh, he’s in a wheelchair.”

  “What’s the frequency to the Flighthawk bunker?” said Bastian, moving back to the corn panel.

  * * *

  TO SAY HE’D FLOWN THE QF-4 DRONE TEN THOUSAND times wasn’t an exaggeration; Zen had learned to control the Flighthawks with the exact airplanes he was flying. He’d gotten so he could work them with his eyes closed before moving up to the much-more-difficult-to-control Flighthawks.

  He closed his eyes now in frustration. The gig was simple—all he had to do was fly Green Phantom behind Phantom One-Zero-Mike at fifteen thousand feet with three miles of separation. Piece of cake.

  Except his heart was pounding and there was sweat pouring from his wrists, and if it weren’t for the automated flight computer fail-safe, he would have smacked Green Phantom into the ground on takeoff.

  Things had gone badly yesterday, but that at least could be attributed to rust; he’d gotten better as the exercises wore on.

  He wasn’t sure what to blame this on. Maybe the F-119 mods. JSF wasn’t exactly the world’s most flyable plane, and Green Phantom was a pig’s pig.

  It was easier to handle than two Flighthawks at supersonic speed, though. So why was he sweating like a bull being chased by toreadors?

  If he couldn’t make this simple intercept, how could he ever control the U/MFs?

  Zen rolled his neck around on his spine, the vertebrae cracking. He’d forgotten how heavy the control helmet was. He could actually take it off, since the console he was sitting at in Hanger B was basically a flight simulator on steroids. Arranged like a cockpit and developed for the Flighthawk, its standard multi-use displays were augmented by dedicated control and sensor displays, along with banks of specific system overrides and data collectors. They’d nicknamed it Frankenstein’s Control Pod.

  But if he was going to get back in the program, he had to do it right, and that meant using the helmet and the Flighthawk flight sticks. It meant sucking it up and hanging in there, kinks, sweat, and all.

  Zen checked the altitude on Green Phantom, nudging up to 15,500 feet. He was five miles away, closing on One-Zero-Mike’s left wing. Though he had his left hand wrapped around Mike’s control stick, the computer was actually flying the plane in its preprogrammed orbit. Zen nudged his right hand back slightly, gently climbing.

  Piece of cake. Two miles to go. He moved his thumb to the center of the stick’s oval top, keying the view screen from optical to FLIR input. The view at the top of his screen changed to a greenish tint, the world shading according to heat sources.

  Driven by his preprogrammed flight plan, One-Zero-Mike began to bank. Zen started to follow, jerked his hand too hard, cursed, and then almost lost Green Phantom. The muscles in his fingers froze. He pushed the computer-assist lever at the base of the assembly, too embarrassed to use the voice command and acknowledge that he had blown it. The computer immediately grabbed the plane, putting it onto the preprogrammed course.

  “Zen?”

  “What?” he snapped over the headset.

  “I have Colonel Bastian on the circuit,” replied Fred Remington, one of the civilians helping run the tests. “Something’s up.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Zen’s pinkie stretched to click down the lever at the front base of his right stick; it automatically engaged computer control for Green Phantom. “Let me talk to him.”

  “Major Stockard, do you think you can do me a favor?” said Bastian as soon as the line snapped open.

  “Colonel?”

  “I wonder if you have enough fuel in Green Phantom to try a rendezvous with Fort Two on Range F. We’d like to see if you can get close enough for a refuel.”

  Zen glanced at the gauge. The Phantom had plenty of fuel.

  But getting close to a Megafortress was not exactly easy. Even the Flighthawks had trouble.

  A Phantom with JSF mods? Ha.

  And forget about the plane—he’d just blown an easy run at a drone.

  Zen didn’t know what to say. “You’re looking for that to happen right now?”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Green Phantom simulates the F-119.”

  “That’s exactly the point. We want to mock up a refuel off a Megafortress. Mack Smith had some trouble,” added the colonel. “I’d like a second opinion.”

  “I’m on it,” snapped Zen.

  BREANNA TOOK FORT TWO OUT OF ITS ORBIT AT 25,000 feet, gliding gently on its left wing to twenty thousand smack in the middle of the range where the new exercise would take place. She pushed the big plane into place, gingerly nudging its nose so it slotted exactly along the three-dimensional flight line the computer was projecting in the HUD navigation screen. They were mimicking a standard tanker track, flying a long oval in the sky as if they were a KC-10 Extender or a KC-135 Stratotanker on its anchor near a war zone, waiting for attack planes and fighters returning from action. Neither Chris nor Major Cheshire had said anything since the colonel ordered the new trial.

  Zen had said exactly four words over the radio, but the tension in his voice practically drilled a hole through her skull.

  “Green Phantom, we have you a
t eighteen thousand feet, on beam, closure rate at two hundred knots,” Cheshire told Jeff.

  The robot Phantom was going approximately a hundred miles an hour faster than it should have been. Breanna flipped her HUD plot that showed the plane approaching behind them. Its speed abruptly slowed, but Green Phantom was still flying too fast to get into the refueling cone. She resisted the temptation to hit the gas, knowing that would only make things more confusing for Zen.

  “Three miles,” Cheshire said. “He’s not going to make it.

  Breanna could feel Chris staring at her. She continued to hold her position.

  GREEN PHANTOM JUST WOULDN’T SLOW DOWN. ZEN nudged the throttle push-bar on the underside of the one-handed stick control. The thrust-indicator graph at the right side of the screen obstinately refused to budge.

  He could tell the computer to lower power. He could tell it precisely how many pounds of thrust to produce—or, for that matter, what indicated airspeed he wanted. But using verbal commands, relying on the computer—it seemed like giving up. And he wasn’t giving up. He was doing this, and he was doing it himself.

  Partly because Smith had failed. And partly just because.

  He tapped the glider with his finger. Finally the robot’s speed began to drop, but it was too late.

  “Breakaway, breakaway, breakaway,” Zen said calmly on the interplane frequency. The “breakaway” call mandated full military throttle and an immediate one-thousand-foot climb by the tanker aircraft, and idle power and a one-thousand-foot descent by the receiver. Zen purposely used a calm tone of voice instead of an excited one to communicate to Bree and Cheshire that there was no imminent danger. When he was level, he said, “Let me try another shot.”