Текст книги "Nerve Center"

Автор книги: Dale Brown

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DREAMLAND

DUTY ROSTER

LT. COLONEL TECUMSEH “DOG” BASTIAN

Once one of the country’s elite fighter jocks, now Dog is whipping Dreamland into shape the only way he knows how—with blood, sweat, and tears—and proving that his bite is just as bad as his bark. …

CAPTAIN BREANNA BASTIAN STOCKARD

Like father, like daughter. Breanna is brash, quick-witted, and one of the best test pilots at Dreamland. But she wasn’t prepared for the biggest test of her life: a crash that grounded her husband in more ways than one. …

MAJOR JEFFREY “ZEN” STOCKARD

A top fighter pilot until a crash at Dreamland left him paraplegic. Now, Zen is at the helm of the ambitious Flighthawk program, piloting the hypersonic remote-controlled aircraft from the seat of his wheelchair—and watching what’s left of his marriage crash and burn. …

MAJOR MACK “KNIFE” SMITH

A top gun with an attitude to match. Knife had a MiG killed in the Gulf War—and won’t let anyone forget it. Though resentful that his campaign to head Dreamland stalled, Knife’s the guy you want on your wing when the bogies start biting. …

MAJOR NANCY CHESHIRE

A woman in a man’s world, Cheshire has more than proven herself as the Megafortress’s senior project officer. But when Dog comes to town, Cheshire must stake out her territory once again—or watch the Megafortress project go down in flames. …

CAPTAIN DANNY FREAH

Freah made a name for himself by heading a daring rescue of a U-2 pilot in Iraq. Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, Freah’s constantly under fire, as commander of the top-secret “Whiplash” rescue and support team—and Dog’s right-hand man…

TITLES BY DALE BROWN

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND: NERVE CENTER

(with Jim DeFelice)

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

(with Jim DeFelice)

FLIGHT OF THE OLD DOG

SILVER TOWER

DAY OF THE CHEETAH

HAMMERHEADS

SKY MASTERS

NIGHT OF THE HAWK

CHAINS OF COMMAND

STORMING HEAVEN

SHADOWS OF STEEL

FATAL TERRAIN

BATTLE BORN

THE TIN MAN

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,

and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND: NERVE CENTER

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Berkley edition / July 2002

Copyright © 2002 by Dale Brown.

All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in

any form without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

Visit our website at

www.penguinputnam.com

ISBN: 0-425-18772-1

A BERKLEY BOOK®

Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

BERKLEY and the “B” design

are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

I

PREMONITION

 

Allegro, Nevada

1 January 1997, 0410 (all times local)

USUALLY THE NIGHTMARES WERE ABOUT LOSING HIS legs.

Jeff “Zen” Stockard felt the jerk of the ejection seat as the planes collided, or saw the fireball that had seared into his brain. Sometimes the nightmares didn’t replay anything that had really happened the day his spine was crushed; they were subtle in their horror, teasing his fear. He might sit in an empty room, watching while everyone else got up to leave, wondering why he couldn’t move. Or he’d be in a bathtub, surrounded by an immense blue sea, bobbing as the swells turned to waves.

But tonight’s nightmare had nothing to do with his legs. Tonight, the first night of the new year, a sun rose from the middle of his head, a sun of chromium red. Its glow burned holes in the void around him. A black core appeared in the middle of this sun, a whirlpool of force and gravity that grabbed back the rays, grabbed back his brain. Zen’s body was pulled from the inside out toward the void, his bones and the muscles and the skin sucked into the vortex. And then his soul itself was consumed by magenta fire.

Zen shouted. His wife, Breanna, rolled next to him on the bed.

“Jeff, are you all right?”

He didn’t hear her until she repeated the question a third time.

“I’m okay, Rap,” he told her.

She mumbled something, shifting next to him in the bed. Jeff stared at the ceiling of their condominium bedroom, noticing as if for the first time the soft red glow from the alarm clock numerals. The red reminded him of the color of his flesh when it burned in the dream.

But as he stared, he realized the clock had nothing to do with the dream. The nightmare hadn’t come from anything here, nor had it been seeded by his accident.

It had come from ANTARES, the computer-mind interface experiments that taught him to control a robot plane with his thoughts. The sun was part of the metaphor he used to go into Theta-alpha, the mental state where he could interface with the computer.

It had ended long ago. Anything from before the accident was long ago, but ANTARES seemed even further in the past, distant history for him and the rest of Dreamland, even though the program had only been officially shut down six months ago.

Breanna leaned over him. Stale perfume and smoke from the party they’d been to earlier wafted across his face; her breath carried the overly sweet scent of her last glass of Chardonnay.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Just a dream.”

She ran her fingers across his forehead and down his cheek, obviously thinking he’d had a nightmare about his legs. With her touch she tried to console him for the inconsolable, sympathizing with him for something that couldn’t be sympathized for. He took her hand gently, placing it back on her side.

“Go back to sleep, Bree,” he said. “It was just a dumb dream. Old junk.”

He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of her heart in the still room, the light, steady rhythm pulling him back to rest.

II

NIGHT MOVES

 

Bunker B, Air Force High Technology Advanced

Weapons Center (Dreamland), Nevada

9 January, 1405

THE HELICOPTERS KEPT GETTING IN THE WAY. ZEN barely kept his U/MF-3 from colliding with a Blackhawk, mashing his control stick left and flailing away at the last possible instant. He was so close to the helicopter’s blades that the wash whipped his wings into a nearly uncontrollable spin, despite the computer’s efforts to help him steady the plane.

Before he could fully recover, he found himself in the middle of a stream of lead, thrown by the two ZSU-23 antiaircraft guns he was assigned to hit. Fortunately, the guns were being sighted manually and the gunners couldn’t keep up with Zen’s hard zag back to the right. But the sharp maneuvers made it impossible for him to lock on his target. Zen pressed the trigger as the four-barreled mobile antiaircraft unit on the left slid through his targeting pipper, while he simultaneously tried to walk his Flighthawk back into the target by sticking his rudder with a quick jerk left. That might have worked—might have—in a plane like an A– 10A Thunderbolt, built for low-speed, low-level target-thrashing. But the U/MF-3 Flighthawk was a different beast altogether, originally designed for high-altitude, high-Mach encounters.

Not that she couldn’t fly down here in the mud. Just that she didn’t necessarily appreciate it. Zen found himself fighting for control as the small craft jerked herself right and left, shells bursting from beneath her belly as she tried to follow his commands. The spin had taken him too low, and his cannon fire had slowed him down. The unmanned aircraft was in serious danger of turning into a brick.

Stubbornly, Zen ignored the computerized voice that warned of an impending stall. He goosed off enough slugs to nail the flak-dealer, then tossed off a few prayers to get the Flighthawk’s nose pointing skyward. The antiaircraft gun exploded with a brilliant crimson glow just as the assault leader announced that the helos were on the ground.

But before Zen could draw a breath to relax, the radar-warning receiver in the lead Flighthawk went berserk, screaming that an enemy fighter had somehow gotten close enough to launch AMRAAM air-to-air missiles at the helicopters Zen was supposed to be protecting.

MAJOR MACK “KNIFE” SMITH GRINNED AS HE POPPED his F-16 up over the mountains he’d been using to mask his approach. He’d snuck in behind the two fighters tasked to keep him at bay; the four helicopters carrying the enemy assault force floated naked in front of him. Four helicopters, four missiles, four turkeys ready to be gassed.

A quartet of AMRAAMS slid off his wings in quick succession. Preset for the encounter, the missiles turned on their active seekers, each homing in on their targets as their solid-fuel rockets burst them forward at speeds approaching Mach 4. It was overkill really—the helicopters were less than five miles away; the missiles barely lit their wicks before nailing their targets. The helos were history before their pilots even realized they were targeted.

Mack didn’t have time to gloat. One of the helicopters’ escorts flashed for his tail. Its pilot—Jeff Stockard—had been caught with his pants down, and now he wanted revenge.

Of course, the fact that he didn’t have time to gloat did not actually mean that Knife wouldn’t gloat. On the contrary—he flicked on his mike and gave a roar of laughter as he took his Viper into a nearly ninety-degree turn, pulling close to thirteen g’s. The “stock” plane would quite possibly have rattled apart; Knife most certainly would have blacked out from the force of gravity pelting his body. But nothing at the Air Force High Technology Advanced Weapons Center—aka “Dreamland”—was stock. The F-16’s forward canards and reshaped delta wings were fashioned from an experimental titanium-carbon combination that made them several times stronger than the ones the factory had first outfitted her with. Mack’s flight suit was designed to keep blood flowing evenly throughout his body at fifteen g’s, negative as well as positive.

It couldn’t keep his heart from double-pumping as he took the turn and managed to get his pursuer in his sights. He got off a half-second slap shot as the enemy zigged downward. The odds against hitting the small, nimble U/MF fighter were at least a hundred to one, but he got close enough to force the SOB to break downward, keeping it an easy target for the F-16. Knife laughed so loud his helmet almost came off—he hadn’t had this much fun in months.

ZEN WORKED HARD NOW. HIS BREATH GREW SHORT and the muscles in his shoulders hardened into cannonballs as he tried desperately to break his airplane out of the low-energy scissors he’d been tricked into.

Not tricked exactly. He’d blundered into it, failing to use his airplane properly. Failing to use his head—truth was, he’d been surprised twice in the space of ninety seconds. He was stuck now in a three-dimensional game of follow-the-leader where being the leader meant you had a fifty– or sixty-percent chance of landing in the other guy’s gunsight.

The pursuer had to be careful not to be sucked into a turn or even a loop that would send his plane shooting ahead, effectively changing places. This was a real danger since the U/MF could turn tighter than even the high-maneuverability F-16 Knife was flying. Mack was no sucker, nor a fool, hanging back just far enough to stay with him, but still close enough to cut off any fancy stuff with gunfire.

Zen had three other Flighthawks hurrying to his rescue. Eventually, they’d force Mack to break off, turning the tables on the hunter. But eventually seemed to be taking forever.

The problem was, he couldn’t control four of the robot planes at one time, not easily anyway. It was especially hard when they were tasked with different missions in different places. Changing mental gears wasn’t bad enough—the U/ MFs’ control gear took forever to cycle into the right plane. Forever being ten nanoseconds.

Three months ago, Jeff had saved Mack’s sorry butt and oversized ego with a near-impossible foray into Libya. Shot down and captured while taking part in a covert operation, Smith had been headed to Iran to have his head chopped off when Dreamland’s Spec Ops team, “Whiplash,” intervened. Controlling the still-experimental U/MF-3 Flighthawks from a hastily modified weapons bay of an EB-52 Megafortress, Zen had found Smith and his captor in a small plane over the Mediterranean. When Smith was finally rescued, he was more grateful than a groom on his wedding night.

For about thirty seconds. Now they were back in their usual places, clawing each other at the nation’s top center for weapons development. It didn’t matter that this fight was being played out in a massive computer, projected on a series of screens in a high-tech hangar. Both men went at it like boxers competing for a ten-million-dollar winner-take-all purse.

At the end of the day, both men would go home with the knowledge that they’d helped test and perfect the next generation of front-line weapons for the country. More importantly—as far as they were concerned, at least—one would go home the winner, the other the loser.

Or, as Mack would put it if he won, “the peahead loser.”

Tracers flared over Jeff’s Flighthawk, arcing to his left. The burst of red ignited an idea in Zen’s brain—he yanked hard on the stick, pointing his nose straight up, directly into Mack’s path.

KEVIN MADRONE EDGED WHAT WAS LEFT OF HIS thumbnail against his tooth, watching the bird’s-eye view of the dogfight on the large display screen. The Army captain could see that Mack had the advantage, but it wasn’t quite enough to nail Zen. Their dogfight was incidental to the overall exercise, but he couldn’t help watching. They were like old-fashioned gladiators, flailing at each other in the Colosseum, willing to go to any lengths to beat their opponents. There was something irresistible in their single-mindedness, something attractive in the danger they faced.

And frightening as well. Madrone whittled his nail, nervously razoring two sharp V’s on the cartilage. Blood pricked from his finger as he finally broke away from the conflict to glance at the screen on his right, where one of the computers monitoring the encounter was kicking up data.

“Weapons test complete,” declared the computer.

As the test supervisor, Madrone ought to end the encounter. But instead he turned back to it, drawn by the swirling energy and fascinated by his own fear.

The Flighthawk suddenly veered straight up. Mack’s F-16 seemed to stutter in midair, less than two hundred feet from the smaller craft. The planes seemed to collide. Then it became obvious that the F-16 had veered off at the last possible instant, wings spinning violently. The Flighthawk somehow managed to flip its nose downward, lighting its cannon. Three or four slugs ripped through the F-16’s wing, but Mack managed to zip off in the opposite direction, the craft in an invert.

The two pilots cursed at each other.

“You stinking cheater. You used a hole in the programming!” snapped Mack.

“Oh, like you didn’t to nail the helos.”

“Knock it off,” said Kevin, snapping into his role as mission boss. “Exercise over.”

Neither pilot acknowledged.

Aboard EB-52 BX-2 “Raven”

Range 2, Dreamland

9 January, 1415

“YOU HAVE TO KEEP YOUR SPEED UP OR YOU WON’T GET off the ground.”

“I’m not stupid,” snapped Lieutenant Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian, struggling to get the big EB-52 off Dreamland’s Runway Number Two. The big plane was trimmed for takeoff, its four freshly tuned engines humming at maximum takeoff power. He even had a crisp takeoff kind of wind at eighteen and a half knots in his face.

And still he couldn’t coax the plane into the sky. The mountains loomed ahead.

Worse—the computer-pilot-assist droned a stall warning in his ear.

“Daddy. “

“I have it, Breanna,” he snapped to the copilot, Captain Breanna “Rap” Stockard. Bree was not only acting as his mentor on his first flight in the big plane; she also happened to be his daughter. “I have it,” he repeated.

But Colonel Bastian didn’t have it. The Megafortress’s nose stubbornly remained horizontal and its wheels on the pavement. He was nearly out of runway, and nothing he did—nothing—would get his forward speed over seventy-eight knots. Way too slow for anything but disaster.

Dog started to curse. In the next second, the plane magically lifted her chin, instantly gaining momentum. It wasn’t until he went to clean his landing gear a few seconds later that Bastian realized what had happened—the computer had taken over.

His copilot, meanwhile, was having serious trouble stowing a smirk.

“What the hell, Bree?”

“You tried to take off with only one engine.”

“What do you mean, one engine? They were all in the green.” The colonel ignored a query from Dreamland Tower, which was monitoring the airplane’s progress toward Range DL/2. “The controls—”

“You never punched it out of Sim-2,” said Breanna. “You were looking at old numbers.” She laughed uncontrollably.

They had used the plane’s command computer’s simulator module to run through a few mock takeoffs before starting down the field. The colonel realized now that he had failed to authorize the computer to switch back into real mode for takeoff. Obviously, Breanna had counted on the Megafortress’s safety protocols to get them off the ground safely.

Which, of course, they had.

“That’s dirty pool, Breanna,” Dog told her. “You shut off the engines.”

“No. I just dialed them down to ten percent. You weren’t paying attention,” she added. There was no trace of humor in her voice now—she was the veteran flight instructor verbally whacking a greenie pilot. “You didn’t ask for a check, which you should have, because as you can see, my screen clearly indicates the proper output. Inattention is a killer. In any airplane except the Megafortress, you would have bought it.”

“Any other plane and there’s no way you could have done that,” said Dog angrily. “You tricked me with a bogus reading.”

“Your screen clearly says sim mode. You didn’t go through the checks properly,” she said. “This was a dramatic way to point that out. I’m sorry, Daddy,” she added, her voice suddenly changing.

The change in tone killed him.

“No, you were absolutely one-hundred-percent right,” said Bastian. He practically spat the words through his clenched teeth, then sighed. She was right, damn it—he hadn’t dotted his stinking i’s and it could have cost him his plane, his crew, and his life. “Can I get control back?”

Breanna reached to her panel. “On my mark, Daddy.”

“Don’t call me Daddy.”

Bunker B, Dreamland

9 January, 1415

THE FLIGHTHAWK AND F-16 SWIRLED IN THE SKY, CAT and dog locked in a ferocious match. Neither could gain enough of an advantage over the other to end the battle. Then the big screen at the front of the room flashed white and a loud pffffffff cracked the speakers—Captain Madrone had cut the feed.

“I said, knock it off” Madrone stood back from the console, folding his arms in front of his chest. At five eight and perhaps 140 in a winter uniform with boots, thermals, and two sweaters, Madrone hardly cut an imposing figure. Even for an engineer he was considered shy and quiet, and most people at Dreamland who knew him even casually could mention several nervous habits, beginning with his nail-biting. But somewhere in the recesses of his personality lurked a young lieutenant who had faced down a pair of tanks in Iraq. The same ferocious snap that had led his team to wipe out the tanks with nothing more than hand grenades now brought the joint-services team that had been fighting the mock battle on a new simulation system to rapid attention.

Except for the two men at the heart of the battle, that is.

“You fucking cheated,” Zen told Mack, tossing off his Flighthawk control helmet. A control cable caught the custom-built device about a millimeter from the ground, just barely keeping it from turning into a bucket of ridiculously expensive but busted computer chips.

“I didn’t cheat,” said Smith, standing from his station on Madrone’s left. “I just flew under the radar coverage. How is that cheating?”

“You flew beyond the parameters of the plane,” said Zen. “You pulled over ten g’s twice. And besides, no way no how could you have gotten past the F-15’s at Mark Seven.”

“The computer let me take the g’s,” said Mack. “As for the F-15’s, where were they?”

“He got past us,” admitted Captain Paul Owens, who’d been handling the F-15 combat air sweep from one of the back benches. “The damn simulator has a hole in the radar coverage big enough to fly a 747 through. You can’t see anything under a thousand feet.”

“Gentlemen, please.” Dr. Ray Rubeo, one of the scientists overseeing the simulation, leaned over the railing at the back of the room. His voice had the world-weary tone a kindergarten teacher would use at the end of a long week. “I believe we have our data for today. I suggest everyone take the afternoon off to play with their Tinkertoys. Live-fire exercise in the morning. Tomorrow, please, keep the WWF routine on the ground.”

Rubeo turned and walked from the room, shuddering slightly at the doorway, as if shaking a great chill from his body.

“Easier to walk away than fix the holes in the sim program,” muttered Zen.

“I think he was right,” said Madrone. “We all pretty much know what we have to do tomorrow.”

He turned to Captain Rosenstein and Lieutenant Garuthers, who were to pilot the actual helicopters they would test tomorrow. The Army commanders were here to test new helicopter upgrades and combat communications in something approaching real conditions; they cared little for what they called the “Hair Force testosterone show,” and were only too happy to knock off early.

Knife and Zen, meanwhile, traded snipes across the floor.

“You were lucky today,” said Zen. “Tomorrow we’re in real planes.”

“Tomorrow I’m going to kick your ass all over town, you peahead loser,” promised Knife. “I can do things in the MiG that would tear an F-16 apart, even with Dreamland’s mods.”

“1 can nail a MiG with my eyes closed,” said Zen.

“We’ll see,” said Mack. He popped the CD that had recorded his part of the exercise out of the console near him and left the room, practically whistling.

Zen wheeled toward his helmet, still shaking his head. He picked it up and handed it to Jennifer Gleason, one of the computer scientists on the Flighthawk project. Gleason smiled at him, pushing a strand of her long, brownish-blond hair back behind her ear. The computer screens bathed her face and neck an almost golden yellow; she looked like a nymph emerging from bed. A genius nymph—Dr. Gleason was among the world’s leading authorities on AI circuitry and intelligence chips—but a nymph nonetheless.

Madrone stared at the curve of her two breasts in the slightly oversized black T-shirt she wore. Lowering his eyes to her hips, he watched them sway slightly while their owner went over some of the details of the encounter with Jeff. Madrone turned back to his station, pretending to sort through his papers, pretending not to be driven to sense-crushing distraction by an expert on gallium arsenic chips.

“We’re seeing you tonight, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” Madrone said, still distracted.

“You okay, Kevin?” Zen asked.

“I’m fine. Have to, uh, sort all this out, you know.”

“Yeah. Listen, don’t worry about the holes in the simulation program. Jennifer will work them out. Nail’s bleeding,” Zen added, smiling. “Bad habit.”

Madrone nodded sheepishly. Stockard gripped the wheels of his chair and rolled himself back a foot or so. The others had left the control area, but Zen still made a show of looking around, a car thief checking if the coast were clear. “Listen, I have to give you a heads-up on tonight. Bree’s playing matchmaker.” Zen rolled his eyes and shrugged apologetically. “You know how it goes.”

Madrone suddenly had a vision of Jennifer Gleason sitting on the Stockards’ couch in a short, wispy skirt, breasts loose beneath a silk white polo shirt.

“Abby Miller,” added Jeff.

The vision evaporated.

“I’m sorry, Zen. What’d you say?” asked Madrone.

“Abby Miller. She’s a civilian. She works over at Nellis in the public affairs office. I think she used to be a reporter or worked for a magazine or something. I’m not exactly sure how Bree first met her. You know Rap—she knows just about everybody. Uh, nice personality.”

Madrone folded his thumb beneath his other fingers, holding his fist close to his side. “If Breanna likes her, she’s okay,” he said.

“That’s the spirit.” Zen gave him another sardonic grin, then began wheeling away. “Seven P.M. sharp. Bree’ll have dinner timed out to the half second. Bring the wine.”

Madrone suddenly felt real fear. “Wine? What kind?”

But Zen was halfway out the door and didn’t respond.

Aboard Raven

9 January, 1415

NOWHERE IS IT WRITTEN THAT POINTY-NOSE FIGHTER jocks are better than all other pilots. No military regulation declares that just because a man—or woman—regularly subjects himself to eight or nine negative g’s and hurtles his body through the air at several times the speed of sound is he—or she—better than those who proceed in a more considered fashion. Not one sheet in the mountains of official Air Force paperwork covering piloting and flying in general includes the words “Teen-jet jocks are superior to all others.”

But every go-fast zippersuit who ever strapped a brain bucket on his head believes it is true. He—or she—did not get to fly the world’s most advanced warbirds by being merely good. Personal preferences and luck aside, front-line fighter pilots in the U.S. Air Force are the best of the best. And most would have no problem telling you that.

Lieutenant Colonel Bastian was, more than anything else, a front-line fighter jock. It did not matter that his last mission in combat had been more than five years ago during the Gulf War. Nor did it matter that that mission was actually in a bomber—the F-15E Strike Eagle, at the time one of the newest swords in the weapons trove. It did not even matter that his present post as a commander—a ground commander—was several hundred times more important than anything he had done during the war.

What mattered was that he was a fighter pilot. Dog thought like a fighter pilot. He talked like a fighter pilot. He walked—some might say swaggered—like a fighter pilot. One who had seen combat. One who had big hours in F-16’s as well as F-15’s. A fighter pilot who had flown F-4’s, F-111’s, and even an A-10A once or twice. A fighter pilot who had taken the stick of an F-117 and a turn in an F-22 demonstrator. In short, a zippersuit who could fly and had flown anything the Air Force had to offer, and had done it very well.

Except for today, when he was sitting at the helm of an antiquated, out-of-date, obsolete, lumbering, slow-as-a-cow-going-backward BUFF. A plane as old as he was, and twenty times as creaky.

Actually, if it had been simply a B-52, Dog might not have felt as bad. The Stratofortress’s vintage controls took a hell of a lot of getting used to. Levers and knobs stuck out at all angles, the dash looked like the display case in a clock shop, and there was no way to get comfortable in the seat until a dozen hard landings form-fitted your butt. But the B-52 he was flying had been rebuilt from the fuel tanks outward as an EB-52. Rebuilt and reskinned, reengined and recontrolled, the Megafortress retained the soul of the old machine—the most capable and durable bomber of the Cold War era. But she flexed twenty-first-century muscles. It was like having the wisdom and experience of a sixty-five-year-old—and the muscles and reflexes of a twenty-one-year-old young buck.

As Breanna somewhat gushingly put it after they landed.

“I can do without the metaphors, thank you, Captain Stockard,” snapped Dog, unhooking himself from the seat restraints.

Or rather, trying to unhook himself. Damn, he couldn’t even undo a stinking belt buckle today.

“All I’m saying, Daddy, is that Raven takes a little getting used to. It’s not your average F-16. I know that with a few more flights, you’ll be right on top of it.”

The restraint finally snapped clean. Dog unfolded himself from the seat, struggling to maintain what little was left of his dignity as he left the plane. The other crew members—he had foolishly agreed to fly with a navigator and a weapons officer—wisely made their way out the ventral hatch well ahead of him.

“Daddy—”

“And another thing, Captain.” Bastian twisted at the back of the flight deck before starting downward. “Do not, under any circumstances, while we are on duty—at work—ever refer to me as Daddy, Dad, Pop, Poppy, Father, Papa, or anything in that vein. Got it?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

The Megafortress’s stealthy carbon-resin skin was specially treated to withstand high temperatures. The runway apron, however, seemed to melt as Dog stalked from the plane, which was being refueled for a flight by another crew. He headed toward the ramp to the Megafortress’s subterranean hangar, where a state-of-the-art simulator waited to replay his flying mistakes in bold colors.

A black Jimmy SUV with a row of flashing blue lights whipped off the access ramp to his right, speeding toward him. Dog stopped, thankful for the interruption, even if the flashing lights boded a problem. The Jimmy belonged to his head of base security, Captain Danny Freah. Danny was loath to use the blue lights—he claimed they made the truck look like it was leading a fire department parade—so something serious must be up.

But instead of Freah, Chief Master Sergeant Terence “Ax” Gibbs pulled down the driver’s-side window as the truck rolled up.

“Colonel, you have visitors,” said the sergeant.

“Visitors who?” snapped Dog.

“Secretary-to-be Keesh for one,” said Ax. “A whole pack of muckety-mucks nipping at his heels.”

An ex-Congressman, John Keesh was the new Administration’s nominee for Defense Secretary. Bastian knew him vaguely from Washington, but hadn’t seen or spoken to him for months. He was expected to be confirmed next week.