Текст книги "Nerve Center"

Автор книги: Dale Brown

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He looked at her now and said something.

Volunteers, he was looking for volunteers for the ANTARES program.

“We won’t be looking for pilots,” said Bastian. “Dr. Geraldo can give us the whole brief, and we’ll start in a few days. The profile is rather specific actually. At the moment, we believe we need males. Sorry, Jen.”

Jennifer felt everyone look at her. Her face began to flush. Bastian smiled at her.

She wanted to say something. She wanted to say the program was a mistake.

She also wanted to say—what? That she was in love with him?

“I’d like to be in on it. Take a shot at being a subject,” said Bill McKnight. McKnight was an aeronautical engineer who had worked on the DreamStar program.

“Me too,” said Lee Ferguson. He was a communications expert and had designed the nighthawk command system.

Bastian was still looking at her. Did he expect her to say something?

Shit, she thought. I have to. I couldn’t get it out right the other morning.

How would she put it? What specifically were her objections? The fact that no one specifically knew what the subject’s brain did while connected to the computer? The few odd, unaccountable glitches she had come across while adapting some of the early programming for C3?

The fact that his broad shoulders and kind eyes looked so comforting, so warm?

Jennifer felt her hand starting to ascend against her will.

Someone behind her said he’d do it. Jennifer turned and saw Captain Kevin Madrone, the Army weapons specialist, staring right at her.

“I’d like to try,” said Madrone, quickly looking away. Someone else chimed in, and then someone else. This wasn’t the time to object, and she didn’t trust herself besides. Jennifer realized she’d left her arm about halfway up on the small desk in front of her. As she lowered it, she felt so cold she began to shiver.

III

HEAD GAMES

 

Dreamland, Taj Suite 302

23 January, 0750

MADRONE SHIFTED UNCOMFORTABLY IN THE CHAIR, trying to find a spot where the stiff plastic would feel comfortable against his back.

“It’s kind of been a while since I thought about all of that,” he told Geraldo. “My wife, I mean. Five years.”

The psychiatrist put her hand to her mouth, pinching her lower lip between her thumb and forefinger. She nodded, then slowly reached for her coffee mug. She wanted him to talk about Karen. It was almost as if she had a magnet in her brain, trying to draw out the words, but Madrone resisted.

Not resisted exactly. He had nothing to say. He couldn’t even form a picture of Karen in his mind.

If he thought about it, if he analyzed it the way Dr. Geraldo obviously wanted, he might have found the day that it had happened, the moment he’d gotten over her. He’d been obsessed with her for a long time after she’d left him, fantasizing about getting her back, fantasizing about confronting her—and yes, even fantasizing about killing her, though he would never admit it.

Probably, that was what Geraldo wanted to hear. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.

Christina, his daughter, his poor dead daughter—she was locked away in a place he’d allow no one to enter, not Geraldo, not even himself. He’d never mention her to anyone.

“You don’t feel angry with her?” Geraldo asked.

“Well, a little. She left me. But …”

It really did feel like a magnet, pulling at him.

“After a while, it kind of went away. Slowly. I don’t know. It seems almost trite.”

“Time heals all wounds?” said the psychiatrist.

“Exactly.” He glanced at his thumbnail, willing his hand still.

“And there’s been no one else?”

“On that level. No.”

“Afraid of commitment?”

“Not really. But being single does have some advantages.”

Geraldo sat in her thick red chair, waiting to see if the magnet would pull anything else out. Finally, she seemed to decide it wouldn’t.

“I have yet another test for you,” she said apologetically. “It’s another standardized test, but this one is a bit old-fashioned, no computer—pencil and paper. You have to fill in circles.” She got up and went to a filing cabinet at the far end of the room. She returned with a manila folder and a pencil. “Would you like more coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

As she started to hand the folder to him, the psychiatrist stopped. He looked up into her face; for the first time since the testing and interview sessions had begun, her face seemed like a real face, as if it belonged to someone he knew, an aunt maybe, not a scientist. The small wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth furrowed deeper. Her body pitched down slightly, as if the tight iron bands that had held it loosened. Even her clothes—a dark navy-blue suit with a stiff white blouse—became less severe.

“Kevin, if you ever want to talk about your ex-wife, you can,” she said. “Not as an official thing, of course. But if you feel the need.”

He nodded slowly, then took the folder.

ZEN WHEELED HIS CHAIR BACK FROM THE MONITOR, watching as Geraldo left the room. Even though it was his job to help the psychiatrist make the final selection of an ANTARES subject, he felt like a voyeur spying on his friend.

He knew Madrone was divorced, even though Kevin said little about his ex-wife. Yet something about the way he talked about her surprised him. Over the past two years or so that they’d known each other, Kevin had seemed rather muted, not just shy, but not an emotional guy—as if being an engineer was deeply embedded in his personality. Even when he talked about things he liked, the Yankees and baseball, for example, he sounded as if he was reading down a column of numbers.

When he had talked about Karen, however, his eyes had changed. His motions had become, if not animated exactly, at least more fluid. Zen got the impression he was hiding something, struggling to keep something bottled away.

Anger? Did that make any difference for ANTARES?

Madrone had consistently scored the highest or second highest on all of the tests they’d given him, even the manual-dexterity and physical-endurance tests. His IQ, tested by computer no less than five times, had turned out to be an astounding 180. His only flaw was an inherent shyness and possibly a slight feeling of inferiority, or as Geraldo put it: “an image of self-worth that does not accurately reflect his abilities.”

Zen wheeled toward the low table where he’d placed his coffee nearly an hour ago. Geraldo pushed through the door briskly.

“Very good, Major, don’t you think?” she said, going immediately to the desk. She glanced at the monitor, then pulled a thick spiral notebook from the top drawer and made some notes.

“What do you think about his wife?” said Zen.

“Oh, the usual anger and resentment, some bewilderment,” said Geraldo, still writing. “I think he honestly was blind-sided. Perhaps it accounts for his reserve, no? The nail-biting under pressure, the cigarette-smoking—classic. Minor. To some extent the military has replaced his wife; he throws himself into work. Very common. Not an impediment. His emotions don’t run all that deep. Not good for a marriage, but for ANTARES, it’s a plus.”

Zen didn’t say anything. Geraldo pried into people’s minds for a living. It had to be done, but sometimes the notion that a personality could be dissected and examined like a piece of code in a computer or the components of a jet engine bothered him. Zen had undergone a battery of tests and examinations as part of his rehab in the hospital. He’d gone through it because it was necessary, but he hadn’t particularly liked it. Now he realized that people must have been watching him on hidden monitors just as he had watched Madrone. One more indignity; one more surrender.

Necessary, but still humiliating.

“I think he’s the one,” said Geraldo, putting down her pen finally. “But you’re reluctant.”

Her comment took him by surprise. “What do you mean?”

“You just seem reluctant. Should we bring Ross back in?”

“I’m not reluctant,” said Zen.

Geraldo pushed back in her seat, swiveling gently. “You’re his friend. You have doubts about the program, and you’re worried about endangering him.”

“I’m friends with a lot of people. He’s the obvious choice, no doubt about it.”

“You have reservations about ANTARES.”

“Of course,” said Zen. “We’ve gone over that.”

“The spy did not compromise the project.”

Spy. No one would even say the name Maraklov—or Captain James, as he had been known here. He had nearly ruined Dreamland, and all of them.

“It’s not that,” said Zen.

“Perhaps you should explain, Jeff. Are you feeling jealous?”

“Not in the least.”

They’d been over it before, twice as a matter of fact, neither time very satisfactorily. Jeff believed in the concept of ANTARES; he was the only person left on the base who had gone through the program, and in fact still had the old-style chip implant in the side of his skull. He had always assumed he would be involved in the next stage of the project, always assumed it would eventually be green-lighted again after the Maraklov business died down.

But he had reservations, objections he couldn’t quite put into words. His recent nightmare for one. The way he felt when he woke from it—as if a part of him he didn’t completely trust or like had taken control of him.

There was no way to put those vague feelings into rational arguments. They sounded like reasons to continue studying ANTARES. They were, in fact.

“We’ve made numerous improvements,” said Geraldo. She spoke as if she were making the case for the first time. “We’re light-years ahead of where the project was when DreamStar was canceled. Fresh eyes—fresh minds—a new start. Kevin Madrone will be a perfect subject.”

“I’m sure he will.”

“So we have your approval?”

What was it that bugged him? Kevin or ANTARES?

Shit. The way Geraldo was looking at him, he could tell she thought it was jealousy—that he looked at Kevin as a potential rival on the Flighthawk program.

“I think Captain Madrone is the obvious choice,” said Zen. “And I’ll put that in writing.”

“Very good,” said Geraldo, standing. “We’ll start this morning.”

Aboard EB-52 BX-4 “Missouri”

Range 2, Dreamland

23 January, 0807

WAS IT THE FACT THAT HE WASN’T USED TO FLYING something so big? Or the fact that he wasn’t used to flying with a copilot?

Or maybe he just felt odd flying a plane named after a Navy battleship.

Then again, it was better than Cheshire’s suggestion—”Rosebud,” ostensibly for the sled in Citizen Kane.

“Crosswind,” prompted Major Cheshire from the copilot’s station.

Colonel Bastian told the computer to make the crosswind correction, probably a half second before the computer would have taken over from him. He was near the edge of his localizer course, off center and coming in a bit too fast. He nudged the throttle glide slightly. The speed and engine readings flashed on the HUD, all green.

Was that temp on three nudging into yellow?

Just land.

Just land.

Dog blew a laboriously long breath from his lungs as he edged the stick ever so gently to move the big plane back into the sweet spot as it approached the landing. If he’d been flying an Eagle, he would have simply—

Irrelevant, he told himself.

“In the green,” said Cheshire. “You’re looking good. Temps are all normal.”

The concrete seemed to expand as he approached. He could feel the heat wafting upward, gentle hands taking hold of him as he settled down.

Then all hell broke lose. The plane jerked suddenly to the side: a dozen warning buzzers went off. Cheshire shouted something at him.

He had no lateral control. The computer had begun to compensate. Stick dead.

No, he had stick. No rudder.

No tail?

He forced the plane down, felt a jolt as the wheels on the right undercarriage hit the ground. He could feel himself sliding to the right.

“Steer! You still have steering!” shouted Cheshire over the interphone.

“Okay,” he managed. “Okay.”

The plane straightened out. Their speed knocked down to twenty, then fifteen, then ten knots. Firmly in control now, Dog permitted his eyes to move to the left-hand multi-use display, which was slaved to the emergency status nodes.

Clean.

Clean?

“What the hell happened?” asked Bastian.

“You were doing such a good job I decided to complicate things,” said Cheshire. “You just landed without a tail.”

“Jesus.”

“Well, he would have done a better job,” said Cheshire, clearly enjoying herself. “Still, you did okay. I didn’t take off the entire tail, just one of the stabilizers.”

Actually, Cheshire had directed the plane’s advanced flight computer to simulate the loss of one of the stabilizers. The flight profile was among several the major had preprogrammed into the flight computer as part of the advanced training Bastian had persuaded her to give him.

“You’re worse than Rap,” Dog told her.

“Thank you, Colonel.”

“What would you have done if I crashed?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t have crashed,” she said. “We were always within specs. The computer has tested the profile on its own.”

“You can’t really fly without a tail,” said Dog, who didn’t trust the simulator modules in the flight computer, no matter how sophisticated they actually were. He turned back to the windshield. The SUV designated to shepherd them toward the maintenance area was just now approaching from his left, a little behind schedule.

“Sure, you can. If you’re good. You could.”

“Ha.”

“You’re better than you think, Colonel.”

“I mean, the plane would auger in without a stabilizer.”

“Over my desk there’s a photograph of a B-52 that landed without a tail in Vietnam,” said Cheshire. “And another that was shot nearly in half through the fuselage. Then there’s the one with three quarters of its wing missing.”

Dog grunted. He finally realized he’d been suckered into a sales job.

“Colonel, you might want to relax your grip on the yoke,” said Cheshire. “You look like you’re going to snap it off.”

“Right.” He trundled the plane to the edge of the runway, where three support vehicles had joined the SUV.

Missouri—better known as “Mo”—was testing a modified version of the PW4074 turbofan, and carried one apiece on the inside engine pylons. The PW4074 turbofans, highly efficient engines originally developed by Pratt & Whitney for Boeing’s 777, were to be quickly checked by the ground crew. Assuming they were okay, the bomber would take off for a second tier of tests, then repeat the process for a third.

Dreamland’s specialists had tweaked the systems to achieve somewhat more thrust; nowhere near as thirsty as the J57’s that came stock on early B-52’s, the jets were considerably more powerful. The Megafortress engineers were still diddling with the computer models and specs to determine what exactly their optimum arrangement might be. While the conventional wisdom was that one new engine could sit in place of two old ones on each pylon, the Dreamland whiz kids were fond of defying common wisdom. The vast airframe of the B-52 gave flight to all manner of fantasies. Computer models had been devised showing the plane with six and eight power plants. One odd design even called for two of the engines to be mounted at the rear, somewhat like a 727.

The goal was to improve low-level speed without decreasing overall unrefueled range. Stock, a B-52 could clock roughly 365 knots at sea level with the old power plants. The Megafortress, with its much cleaner airframe, notched roughly 425 nautical miles an hour. The engineers wanted 475, which was well beyond the venerable and trusty J57’s.

Fifty knots didn’t seem like much, but it would exponentially reduce the detection envelope for a Megafortress on a low-level attack mission. In practical terms, it would allow an EB-52 to evade all but the most sophisticated defense radars, and to get close enough to air-launch torpedoes against a surface ship, one of the design goals remaining to be achieved.

Do that and even the Navy might order up a few dozen. Missouri indeed.

Dog powered back, preparing to turn the plane around at the edge of the ramp. In some ways it was more difficult to guide the big plane on the ground than in the air, since the flight computer didn’t help. Bastian found it nearly impossible to judge the clearance distance accurately, and twice twitched the control column, afraid he was about to clip one of the chase vehicles with his wings. But Bastian handled the turn expertly, stopping precisely parallel to the techies’ yellow and black pickup.

“You have time for the second flight?” Cheshire asked.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” said Dog. Then he realized she had a funny expression on her face. “Did I do that bad?” he asked.

“No, I told you, you did fine,” she said. “I was hoping to talk to you a minute.”

“Fire away,” Dog told her.

“I have to quick run over some of the numbers with Peter first, though,” she said, referring to the engineer in charge of the engine testing. “A quick check and we’re good to go.”

“All right,” said Dog. It wasn’t like he wanted to go back to his office and the mounds of paperwork waiting for him. Truth was, he would greatly prefer taking off again, even if it meant listening to Cheshire’s pitch for more resources. “Thanks, Colonel. I’ll be right back. I appreciate it.”

Dog undid his restraints and stretched his arms, watching out the cockpit windows as the ground crew gave the plane the once-over.

It wasn’t just that he preferred flying to paperwork. He wanted to master the Megafortress, just as he had every other plane on the base.

Not every plane. He hadn’t flown the two 767’s or the 777 they were testing as tankers. But he had flown every combat plane. The F-22, the modified F-16, the Joint-Service Strike Fighter, even the SR-71D spy plane with its hypersonic hydrogen engines. Flown them all, and damn well.

But something about the Megafortress kept him at bay. He could fly it, but he wanted to fly it—to master it, twist it over and around and in and out of knots. He wanted to get out on the edge of the envelope with it. The flying battleship was the future of the Air Force.

He wanted to prove he was a great pilot. He wanted to prove…

That he was better than his daughter?

The idea shot into his head like the snap vector from an AWACS controller. Dog pushed up out of his seat, squeezing out of the Megafortress’s cockpit. He didn’t have to prove anything to anyone, especially himself, and definitely not Breanna. He had other things to do than fiddle around in the sky.

Cheshire met him on the ladder down to the lower deck. “Colonel,” she said. “You’re leaving?”

“Sergeant Gibbs will be waiting. What did you want to say?”

Cheshire leaned against the bulkhead and began talking about the Megafortress project, saying that the engine tests were taking much longer than anticipated. The mechanical delays were only part of the problem. She needed more engineers—a common and justified complaint. The decision to develop the Megafortress as a mother ship for the Flighthawks was also stretching her people and the planes to the max.

“We only have the three planes,” said Cheshire. “Raven, Bear Two, and Mo. Galatica, the AWACS tester, won’t be on board until at least next week.”

Bastian nodded.

“We need at least two planes to complete the engine tests. Bear Two is needed for static tests, and Galatica still has to go through the usual flight trials. We won’t have the others for at least three weeks. The tanker program is already on hold, and the backlog on the avionics tests is thicker than a phone book.”

“The Flighthawks remain a priority,” Dog told her, guessing what she was going to suggest. “Raven has to stay with them.”

“I wasn’t going to suggest we stop using the EB-52 as the Flighthawks’ mother ship,” she said. “Though I’ve heard the control gear won’t fit in the Megafortress weapons bay once you reach eight U/MFs.”

Obviously she’d been talking to Rubeo.

“That may be a problem,” said Bastian. “That’s why we’re in business—to solve those sorts of things.”

Damn Rubeo. He was throwing every possible objection in the way of ANTARES.

“We can’t solve it if we don’t have the resources,” said Cheshire.

“Pete Rensling suggested using the 777 airframe as the ANTARES mother ship,” said Dog. “It has a huge bay, and the fuel tanks that would be needed for refueling were already part of the tanker testing.”

“That’s not a bad idea, if the wings could take it.”

“Being studied right now. If it works, that will lessen some of the burden on you. In the meantime, I’ll expedite more conversions as part of ANTARES.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” said Cheshire. She was smiling broadly. “Now how about more pilots?”

“I’m still working on that,” said Bastian. There were presently only six qualified B-52 pilots on the base; since even with the new flight computers it typically took two to fly a Megafortress, there was only one crew per plane. Two of the pilots were due to be transferred next week.

“You better be careful, Colonel. If you get any good, we may slide you into the rotation.”

“I’ll help out anyway I can,” said Bastian, smarting a bit from her tone.

“You sure you don’t want to take this run? I still need another pilot.”

“Maybe I will,” he said. “As a matter of fact, let’s go for it.”

Dreamland Handheld Weapons Lab

23 January, 0807

“LATE, AS USUAL.”

Danny grinned at the gray-haired woman in the white lab coat. Her frown turned into a smile, even as she shook her head and wagged her finger.

“Captain, you need a secretary to look after you,” Annie Klondike told him. She turned and began walking briskly toward the back rooms of the handheld weapons lab.

“You want the job?” asked Freah, falling in alongside. “You wouldn’t last twenty-four hours.”

Klondike shuffled toward the large room where the firing ranges were located.

“Annie, those new slippers?”

“Don’t get fresh.”

Klondike walked to a large gray box that sat in front of a series of drawer-shaped lockers. About eight feet wide and another six feet deep, the box came up to the diminutive weapons scientist’s chest. It seemed to be made of a very hard plastic material. Klondike put her palms on the top and the box began to move. Fascinated, Danny watched as the box pulled itself apart, a shallow section remaining behind the top.

“Opens only with my palm print and could withstand a one-megaton explosion,” said Klondike.

“This thing?” asked Danny. The shell material was no more than three inches thick.

“As long as it’s not a direct hit. Of course, if it was one of my bombs—”

“You do nukes too, Annie?”

“In my youth, Captain. I’m retired from that.”

“You shittin’ me?”

Klondike lowered her face, but kept her eyes fixed on him, as if she were a Sunday school teacher peering over her glasses. She sighed, then again shook her head, shuffling over to the table.

“At the moment, the Combat Information Visor must be attached to the Smart Helmets,” she said, turning her attention to the device Danny had come to inspect. “I have some hopes of miniaturizing it further, so that it can be used as goggles. I find the visor cumbersome, and I’m told some troops do not like the helmet.”

“It’s heavy,” said Danny. The so-called Smart Helmet included a secure com link and a GPS system. It could withstand a direct hit by a fifty-caliber machine-gun bullet from fifty yards—though that produced a hell of a headache. Klondike’s prototype visor added two additional functions: a long-range multi-made viewer, and an aiming screen for a specially adapted M-16.

The visor looked like a welder’s shield. It shifted the helmet’s center of gravity far forward when it was snapped on, promising severe neck strain.

“There are four native modes to the viewer,” said Klondike, reaching to cinch the chin strap. “They select on the right, zoom and back out on the left. They toggle through in sequence. One is unenhanced. Two allows—wait, let’s kill the lights.”

Mode Two was infrared. Three was starlight-enhanced. Four actually did not work yet; they were perfecting a graphics Geiger counter, which would allow the unit to detect radioactive materials from twice the distance as the “sniffers” or portable Geiger counters Whiplash now packed on NBC missions. But the gear wasn’t quite ready.

“I’d trade it for making it lighter,” Danny said, fiddling with the helmet.

“Well, it won’t make it heavier, because we hope to press the functions into a pair of chips. I’m sorry, Captain. The weight comes from the LED panes and the carbon-boron sliver-plates at the side,” she added. “We’ve actually lightened it about a pound and a half since we began. Notice how the slide here is almost round?”

“Oh, yeah, first thing I noticed.”

Klondike turned the lights on. “The helmet can accept inputs from external sensor systems, assuming they meet MAT/ 7 standards. You’ll need an RCA plug, but once you plug in you’re slaved to a Pave Low’s infrared, assuming the helicopter’s gear has been modified for an additional output. The host thinks it’s the original screen. Adjustment’s easy; we’ll have it put on your C-17 the next time Quick-mover goes in for a lube.”

While she was talking, Klondike had approached the gun drawers. These were locked with an old-fashioned key, which she kept on a string around her neck. She bent to one and opened it, then removed an M-16.

“I prefer my MP-5,” Danny told her.

“Captain, please,” said Klondike. “With all due respect to my friends at Heckler-Koch, submachine guns are meant to be sprayed, even theirs. A fine weapon under certain circumstances, but hardly a one-bullet, one-kill solution. Now come on or I’m going to miss my soap opera—or worse, Jeopardy.”

The M-16A3’s laser sight had been replaced with a small, stubby bar that had only a small pinhole at the barrel end. Nudging a slider on the top of the gun activated a VSRT or Very-Short-Range FM Transmitter, which allowed the gun to communicate with the targeting screen. A pair of cursors appeared on the view screen; as the gun was aimed horizontally, the cursors merged. A tear-shaped ring appeared around the cursor, showing the probable trajectory if the shot deteriorated because of the wind or distance.

“The cursor is absolutely right on to two hundred yards in all conditions,” Annie told him after he’d put five bullets into the center of a target at three hundred feet. “But we haven’t been able to reliably compensate for weather conditions beyond that. Additionally, you can’t aim through water or glass as you can with the sniper rifle. But it’s an improvement over the laser dot, both in distance and detectability. And it has the added bonus of persuading men to keep their helmets on,” added Klondike, “no matter how heavy they may be.”

“Ready for field testing?” asked Danny.

“Didn’t you notice the helmet was formed for your head?” said Klondike.

“If I weren’t married already, Annie …” said Danny.

Klondike’s response was drowned out by the report of the rifle as he squeezed off the rest of the clip.

Dreamland, Aggressor Hangar

23 January, 0182

WHEN YOU WERE A GENERAL, YOU NEVER HAD A BAD day. Generals had drivers. Generals had staffs. Generals had people who made sure their stinking alarm clocks didn’t malfunction so they didn’t oversleep.

More importantly, when you were a general it didn’t matter if you overslept.

Mack Smith wanted more than anything to be a general. He’d had a master plan from the day he entered the recruiting office, and until getting shot down over Somalia three months ago, he’d followed it perfectly: combat experience, an air kill (two), serious seat time in the country’s most advanced planes. He had numerous connections inside and outside Washington, dozens of military godfathers—all of whom knew he had the right stuff and were willing to pull strings to make sure he got ahead.

His next step, command of a top-tier squadron, had seemed assured. For the last three months, though, everything seemed to be going wrong. The President—bit of a windbag, but still the commander in chief, don’t forget that—had shaken his hand and thanked him—thanked him!—for doing such a “good job over there.” Then he’d gone and lost the election. With him went the Defense Secretary, who had smiled and murmured something about a promotion to colonel.

Worse, Knife hadn’t been able to snag an important assignment. The gig testing Sharkishki was the best he could manage, a bit of an end run that had brought him back to Dreamland against his wishes. He’d taken it in hopes that it would lead to an assignment at Nellis heading the Aggressor squadron, which was where the MiG and its brethren were headed next. Recently, though, there were rumors that the Aggressor squadron, which trained top-rung fighter pilots for combat, was overstaffed. It was possible he’d get there only on temporary duty, assigned to show the boys how to work the stick and rudder—a cushy job certainly, but not one calculated to take him to any great heights. It would also put him back where he had started, in search of a command billet.

Was he in the midst of a bad streak? Or were others out to sabotage him? Everywhere there were minor annoyances trying to trip him up. Like his alarm clock. And this morning’s Dolphin, whose pilot insisted on waiting at Nellis for nearly a half hour because he was the only passenger.

As if anyone else important might show up.

By the time Knife reached the hangar where he and the engineers were due to review the upgrades to the MiG’s passive avionics, he was nearly forty-five minutes late.

Which didn’t explain why his team wasn’t here.

One look at the man who was, Major Franklin Thomas. and Mack knew his luck was going from bad to absolutely terrible. Thomas was a bean-counter who always came up three beans short. He also never delivered good news.

“You missed the meeting,” said Thomas.

“What meeting?”

“0730. There was an e-mail on it last night.”

“To me? Musta missed it.”

“Major, I won’t sugarcoat this,” said Thomas. “The Advanced Aggressor program has been canceled.”

“What?”

“Completely. The MiGs are going to be mothballed.”

“You have to be shitting me.” He gestured toward the three fuselages to the right, in various stages of renovation. “There’s got to be ten million dollars of work tied up in those planes, and never mind what the airframes cost.”

“The Aggressor program isn’t going to make the cut,” said Thomas. “The new Administration believes it’s better to cut bait right now, rather than dragging it on. I can run through some of the numbers if you want.”