Текст книги "Dreamland"

Автор книги: Dale Brown

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Zen left them in silence, wheeling out the door before they could react. He continued across the hangar and out onto the tarmac where the modified 707, “Boeing,” waited.

The Flighthawk remote systems had grown even bigger since Zen’s accident. The UM/Fs had been grounded for nearly nine months while the entire project was reviewed; computer capacity had been increased on the controlling end, adding to the stored emergency procedures and routines. In the interim, and unrelated to the accident, the cooling mechanisms for the secure communications gear had been “improved.” These increased the remote controlling computer pallet from the size of a Honda Accord to that of a Chevy Suburban with a weight problem. Not only did it no longer fit in an F-15E, it was a squeeze to make the rear of the Boeing.

The scientists swore the gear would be miniaturized in the future—but they kept coming up with “improvements” that added to its bulk. Near-room-temperature superconducting chips and circuitry promised great advances in speed and much smaller sizes, but the gear was still too sensitive to be relied on. Not to mention expensive.

Zen’s accident had led the Air Force to abandon an important part of the original concept—having a combat pilot fly the robots along with his own plane. There were proposals to fit the gear into a B-2, but the guidance telemetry could theoretically alert next-generation sensors to the invisible bomber. The B-1 fuselage needed extensive modifications to fit the controlling unit. Neither plane’s wings could easily handle both UM/Fs, though the B-2’s could be reinforced to do so.

The Megafortress EB-52, on the other hand, was big and strong enough to handle the job. And in fact they had conducted several airdrops and test runs from the Mega-fortress before Zen’s accident. They’d managed one last week, just to make sure some of the modifications to the computer worked properly. Zen would have liked to do more, but the only Megafortress currently plumbed for airdrops was being used as a test bed for next-generation radar and communications jamming equipment. Those tests were running behind and had very high priority. By the time the plane—nicknamed “Raven”—was free for real feasibility work, the Flighthawks would be history.

“Hey, Major. Ready for blastoff?” asked Pete Connors out on the concrete apron.

“I’ve been ready all my life,” Zen told him, following Connors out toward the Boeing. The airman had parked a forklift near the rear crew door. They’d perfected this method of boarding the plane several days before. It was a hell of a lot easier than crawling down the stairs on his butt—which he had done on Raven.

“I ought to get one of these built into my wheelchair,” Stockard told him as he maneuvered under the large forks. Connors had played with the blades so he could easily lock them beneath Zen’s chair.

“Gee, Major, I’m surprised you haven’t gone for the Version 2.0 Upgraded Wheelchair,” joked Connors. “Has your TV, your satellite dish, your come-along cooler.”

“No sauna?” Jeff braced his arms as the metal forks clicked into the bottom of his chair.

“That’s in 3.0. You should sign up for beta-testing,” said the airman. “Ready?”

“Blastoff.”

It took Connors two attempts to get him lined up and through the special equipment bay in the rear of the plane. But that was a vast improvement over the first day, when it had taken eight or nine and he’d nearly fallen to the ground. Zen gave the airman a thumbs-up before rolling forward into the test-crew area.

“Great speech, Major,” said Ong, who’d sprinted out to oversee one of the engineering crew’s most important pre-flight tasks—brewing coffee in their zero-gravity Mr. Coffee.

“I thought you guys fell asleep on me,” said Zen. “I heard some snores.”

“No, seriously. Thanks.” Ong tapped his shoulder. “You’re damn right.”

“Thanks,” said Zen.

“Oooo, Mr. Coffee is smiling,” said Jennifer, climbing in. “Smells like we should use that for fuel.”

“Too corrosive,” said Ong.

Zen wheeled over to the nighthawk station, carefully setting the brake on his wheelchair before snapping the special restraints that locked it in place. The mechanics had cleared a pair of seats and reworked the control area so his seat could be locked in place.

Zen reviewed the hard-copy mission data Ong had left for him before getting ready for takeoff. Placing the Flighthawk computer in static test mode, he took hold of the mirror-image flight sticks, working quickly through the tests with the dedicated mission video tube at the center of the console. He limbered his fingers—they were always cramping like hell—and then pulled on the heavy flight helmet for a new round of checks.

The ground crew, meanwhile, had wheeled the Flight-hawk and its portable power cart out onto the runway. With the control systems operational, Jeff and the computer began yet another round of tests, making sure that both sets of flight computers and the link between them were optimal. Only when this new round of tests was finished did the ground crew fire up the Flighthawk engine, powering the small plane with a “puffer,” or power cart specially designed for it. The Flighthawk’s miniature engine needed a large burst of air running through its turbines before it caught fire.

The UM/F purred like a contented kitten. Impatient to get going, Jeff ran through the control surfaces quickly, flexing the flaps and sliding the rudder back and forth. He split the top screen of the visor into feeds from the forward and tail cams for the test, confirming visually the computers’ signal that all the surfaces were responding properly. He revved the engine one last time, checking temps and pressures.

Preflight finally complete, he put his visor screens back into their standard configuration. Blue sky filled the top half, with a ghosted HUD-like display in the middle and engine and flight data in color graphs to either side. The bottom was divided in three, with radar, flight-information, and instrument screens left to right. If he were flying two Hawks, the typical layout would feature the second plane’s optical or FLIR view on the left, and a God’s-eye of both planes and the mother ship in the middle.

“Let’s get this show on the road, Captain,” he told Bree.

“Acknowledged, Hawk Commander,” she said. “Hell of a speech, Jeff. Everybody appreciated it.”

“Uh-huh.”

The jerk of the aircraft as it moved toward the main runway always took him by surprise; he was so absorbed by the Flighthawk’s stationary view that the sensation was momentarily disorienting.

“Fly the prebriefed orbit,” he told Breanna as they waited for the tower to give them final takeoff clearance. “I wouldn’t do otherwise,” said his wife.

“Anything else you want to say?”

“No,” replied Bree.

“I stayed in the officers’ guest suite. I was too tired to come home.”

“I wasn’t asking,” said Bree.

Zen waited silently as Boeing lifted off and began to circle across the range. Hawk One continued to idle, waiting for its mother ship to hit its first way marker before coming up.

“Point Alpha reached,” said Breanna finally.

“We’re good, Jeff,” said Jennifer, monitoring the systems a few feet away from him. “It’s your show.”

“Flighthawk Control to Dream Tower, request Clearance B for Hawk One, takeoff on Lake Runway D, per filed plans,” he snapped.

“Tower confirms, Hawk Control. Hawk One, you are clear for takeoff,” said the controller. “Unlimited skies, we have no wind at the present time. Not a bad day for a picnic. Good aviating, Major.”

“Thanks, Straw,” Zen told the controller. He brought the Flighthawk to takeoff power and let off the brake. The slope graph indicating speed galloped upward as the ground flew by in Jeff’s visor view. By 120 knots the Flighthawk was already starting to strain upward. Zen pulled back on the joystick and the aircraft darted into the sky, eager to fly.

How could they kill this plane? he thought. It needs less room to take off than a Piper, is harder to find than a Raptor, and can turn twists around an F/A-18.

Hawk One’s speed and altitude built exponentially as the P&W powering it reached its operating norms. Zen flew to five thousand feet, steadying his speed at five hundred knots. He began banking into an orbit approximately three miles south of the mother ship, Boeing’s tail appearing in the top of his screen. The techies would run through a series of signal tests here before proceeding with more difficult maneuvers.

“Data flow is good,” reported Ong. “Ninety seconds more,” said the engineer. Physically, he was somewhere to Zen’s left, but he seemed a thousand miles away, back on the ground.

God, to be flying again, Jeff thought. To feel the g’s hitting you in the face as you yanked and banked, to hear the roar of the engines as you went for the afterburners and shot straight upward, to gag on the kerosene as the smell of jet fuel somehow managed to permeate the cockpit.

Okay, some things he could do without.

“We’re ready to push it,” said Gleason.

“Pilot, proceed to second stage,” Zen told his wife. “Proceeding,” said Breanna.

Smith was gone. Jeff hadn’t said anything to her about the SOB that night—what was there to say? Who could blame her for going somewhere else?

He would have preferred anyone else in the world. But you didn’t get to choose who your wife had an affair with.

“Major, we’re ready. If you can bring your altitude up to ten thousand—”

“I’m on it,” he told Ong, pulling back on the flight stick and nudging the throttle slide.

They were going to simulate an air launch with a roll and tumble beneath the mother ship—not the preferred, smooth method, but a necessary test to make sure the improvements to the communications system held. Jeff pushed away the extraneous thoughts, pushed his head into the cockpit, into the unlimited sky around Hawk One. He was flying again, and if he didn’t smell the kerosene in his face or maybe feel the g’s kicking against his chest, his head was there, his mind rolling with the wings as his eyes fought for some sort of reference, his sense of balance shifting and almost coming undone as the small plane inverted beneath Boeing to kick off the test pattern.

“Good, good, good,” sang Jennifer. “Oh, Mama, we’re good.”

“Yes!” said Ong. “Solid.”

“Hawk One copies,” said Jeff, swinging around and heading into a trail pattern behind Boeing as briefed.

“Drop simulation was perfect,” added Ong.

“I got that impression.”

“You want to push it? We can try that penetration test we put off yesterday,” added the engineer. “I think our game plan was way too conservative.”

“Copy. Bree?”

“I’m game, if you tell me what you want.”

“Circle back and just begin again. I’ll take it from there.”

“Roger that,” she said.

Jeff took the Flighthawk off toward the west end of the range, zooming near Groom Mountain before heading back on a high-speed intercept with the mother ship. As he came around, the search-and-scan radar bleeped out a big, fat target for him, painting Boeing as if she were an enemy bomber trying to sneak in for an attack.

Fit this sucker with some decent missiles and it would be a front-line interceptor.

“Beginning Test Phase,” Jeff told the others as he closed behind the Boeing at a rate of roughly fifty miles an hour. “Ten seconds.”

“Go for it,” said Ong.

“Copy,” said Bree.

Why was he avoiding her? It was more than Smith. Hell, Smith had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with it.

Zen pushed the Flighthawk into a dive as it flew under the tail area of the mother ship. He mashed the throttle and rolled inverted, swooping down and around in the direction of the mountains. The plane swooped through a thousand feet before he leveled off at five hundred feet, cranking at just over five hundred knots.

“Computer, ground terrain plot in left MUD,” he said. Immediately a radar image appeared. Zen pushed the Flighthawk lower, running toward the mountain range.

Attack planes often flew at low altitude to avoid radar. The reflected ground clutter made it difficult to detect planes when they were close to the ground. Something as small and stealthy as the Flighthawk would be invisible.

Zen flew Hawk One into a long canyon at the far end of the test range, gradually lowering his altitude to three hundred feet above ground level. The floor of the canyon was irregular; he went through one pass with only fifty feet between the UM/F and the side of narrow ridge.

The image in the main viewfinder was breathtaking. He could see the sides of the mountains towering above him as he raced down the long corridor. He flicked his wrist right, pulling the small plane on its wing as he took a turn into a pass. The radar plot in the lower quadrant flashed with a warning of an upcoming plateau, but Zen was on it, gently pulling back and then nailing the throttle for more speed. The exercise didn’t call for him to break the sound barrier, but what the hell. He felt the shudder, then eased back as the image steadied—there was no longer a line between him and the robot plane; the distance had been erased.

“Looking good,” said Ong somewhere behind him.

“Mama!” yelled Jennifer.

“I’m having trouble keeping up,” reported Breanna.

A complaint? A compliment?

The Flighthawk was at nearly top speed, flying at less than a hundred feet over the ground. Zen began his turn, starting to lose speed as the wings dragged through the air. The UM/F’s flight surfaces adapted to minimize some of the loss, the forward canards pushing upward as he made the turn. He was down to 550 knots, pretty damn good, the plane having taken nearly nine g’s. The maneuver would probably have blacked out a “real” pilot.

“We’re still hot,” said Ong. “Okay, Major, Captain—knock off and return to holding track. Series One, Two, and I guess we’ll call Three complete. We need a few minutes to dump the data, but it looked impressive.”

“Full communications gear and functions,” reported Gleason.

“I had some trouble at the end,” said Breanna. “You pulled out to about eight miles.”

“Yeah, well, you just have to keep up,” Zen told her.

“Doing my best, love,” she snapped.

Zen could feel the others in the control area around him bristling. They used to banter back and forth like this all the time—but then it had been joking fun; now it seemed to stick, to wound.

“Sorry, Captain,” he said. “I guess I was feeling my oats. I’m still getting the kinks out.”

“No apology necessary.”

He couldn’t remember how they’d been. He couldn’t remember the past and didn’t want to—the past was poison now.

“Let’s try the same test, only at twenty-five miles,” suggested Ong. “You think you can work the track out, Zen?”

Twenty-five miles was twice as far as their improvements were supposed to be good for, and beyond the theoretical limit of the communications and control system. But Jeff just snapped back, “Copy,” and began pushing the Flighthawk to its starting point.

This time he took the initial dive a little easier, letting his wings sweep out as he found the thicker air. Boeing swept south, widening the distance between itself and Hawk One. Zen concentrated on the virtual windshield, moving with the small plane as it sailed over the mountain slopes at five hundred knots. His altitude over ground level dipped to a bare fifty feet.

He could go lower. He nudged the stick, more brown flooding into the view screen.

He was fifteen miles from the mother ship, forty feet AGL.

Thirty-five.

He felt like he was there. The dirt-alert buzzer sounded, warning him of an upcoming ridge.

Zen leaned his body with the stick, sliding around the obstruction.

Oh baby.

“Hawk connection lost,” scolded the computer suddenly.

“Hold present course. Override safety procedure. Reacquire,” Zen demanded. He still had live visuals, and in fact thought he was in control.

“Out of range,” said the computer. “Safety Routine Two.”

“Shit. Bree.”

“We’re where you put us,” she said defensively. “Reacquire,” Zen repeated. He jerked the stick, but nothing happened.

Then the view screen went blank.

Behind him, the engineers were scrambling.

“It went into fail-safe mode,” said Ong. “Sorry. Once it’s in Routine Two it’s impossible to override. That was added.”

He stopped short of saying, “After your accident.”

“We did really good, though,” insisted Gleason. “We were at seventeen miles before the signal began degrading.”

“Once it did, it went like shit,” added Ong.

“Com modules are off-line,” reported Jennifer.

“Hawk One is returning to the lake bed,” said Ong. He broadcast a generic “Knock it off” alert over the Dreamland frequencies, even though the skies were clear.

“Well, at least we know the fail-safe is working,” said Breanna.

If Jeff hadn’t known how expensive the helmet was, he probably would have thrown it through the Boeing’s fuselage.

* * *

DANNY DIDN’T GET AROUND TO CHECKING HIS SECURE e-mail until mid-morning. Hal had gotten back to him—but not with the football prediction he’d expected.

“Danny, won’t be talking to you for a while,” read the message. “Having too much fun. Wish you were here.”

He leaned back on the hard metal chair in his security commander’s office. He wasn’t sure where “here” was, but he had a pretty good guess. CNN that morning had reported that the Iranian Navy had stopped a tanker off the northern African coast. It had also reported that the President had been “in close consultation” with his security advisors and other world leaders all night.

If Danny hadn’t taken the Dreamland assignment, Hal probably would have asked him to join whatever he was putting together. He’d be in the middle of things.

He might still end up there, if Whiplash was called out.

For just a second, the young captain allowed himself the luxury of fantasy. He saw—felt—himself on a big Pave Low, zooming into a firefight, bullets and missiles flying through the air. He saw himself in a Hollywood zoom, dashing into the smoke, a wide grin on his face.

It wasn’t really like that. It was dirty and it was messy and you never knew exactly where the hell you were, or whether you were going to live or die.

But he loved it anyway. Or at least, loved having survived it. Nothing could beat that rush.

Danny jumped to his feet and went to attend to one of the million things that needed attending to.

WITH MACK SMITH GONE, MAJOR RICKI MENDOZA WAS the ranking officer on the F-119 test project. Colonel Bastian found her in the JSF project hangar, an underground complex directly below Hangar Three, an hour after his conference broke up.

“Colonel, glad you could come over,” she said as if she had been hoping he’d come. Her voice echoed off the polished concrete floor. “I was just about to discuss the testing schedule for the new avionics suite with Greg Desitio, the vender rep. Want to join in?”

Bastian grinned at Desitio, who’d told him earlier that the avionics suite had been delayed another six months because of “unspecifiable contingencies.” Then he turned back to Mendoza. “Actually, Major, I wanted to take one of the fighters out for a spin.”

“For a spin, sir?”

“You think you can arrange a test flight?”

Mendoza’s cheery manner vaporized. “Well, we’d have to check for the satellite window and—”

“I looked at the satellite window already,” Dog told her. “It’s clear until three.”

“And then the prep time involved—”

“I understand there were some landing gear issues to be gone over, and you had slotted a test flight.”

“Well, yes, but we’ve already prepped that mission.”

“You don’t think I can handle it?” Dog asked.

Mendoza narrowed her eyes. With Mack’s departure, her stock had skyrocketed; clearly she didn’t want to be bothered by a puny lieutenant colonel.

Bastian struggled to keep his poker face.

“Of course you can handle it, sir,” said Mendoza. “The JSF is a pleasure to fly. It’s just that Captain Jones is already upstairs and ready to go.”

“Jonesy doesn’t mind,” Bastian said, enjoying the sight of the air deflating from her cheeks. “I already had him brief me on the flight. He’s flying chase in my F-16.”

While Dog felt pretty full of himself as he hustled into his flight gear, he hadn’t pulled rank just to annoy Mendoza and upset the flight-test crew. He had decided that if Dreamland’s future was tied to the JSF, he should at least feel how the seat felt beneath his fanny.

It felt fairly good, actually. Stonewall One—one of the three F-119 testers—had a newly modified ejection seat that featured a form-molded back and bottom. It wasn’t possible to make the padding on an ejection seat very thick; the force of the seat as it rocketed out of the craft would bruise a pilot’s butt, if not break his bones. But this was by the far the most comfortable pilot’s chair Dog had ever sat in.

Unfortunately, that was about the only superlative the plane deserved. The sideseat control stick, familiar from the F-16, felt sloppy from the get-go. The plane was supposed to be optimized for short-field takeoffs, but the engines were sluggish. Even with a reduced fuel load and no payload, Dog found himself struggling to get into the air.

Airborne, things seemed even worse. The plane lumbered rather than zoomed. In a turn, the wings acted as if there were five-thousand-pound bombs strapped below them—and maybe one or two above. Worst of all, the AC wasn’t working properly; Bastian kept glancing around the cockpit to double-check that he wasn’t on fire.

All of these things could and would be fixed. An up-rated engine was under development, though its weight and some maintenance issues made it unattractive to the Navy. The present avionics system—stolen from an F-16—would be replaced eventually by a cutting-edge system that would do everything but fly the mission for the pilot. And on and on.

Still, the plane itself seemed like a tugboat. Dog tried yanking and banking as he completed his first orbit around the test range at six thousand feet. The F-119 moved like a toddler with a load in his pants, waddling through maneuvers that would be essential to avoid heavy flak while egressing a target.

Not good.

It did somewhat better at fifteen thousand feet, but it took him forever to get there. Dog thought back to the complaints of the A-10A pilots during the Gulf War, when standing orders required them to take their heavily laden aircraft well above the effective range of flak as they crossed the border. Those guys hated going over five hundred feet, and they had a point—their airplanes were built like tanks and carried more explosives than the typical World War II bomber.

The JSF, on the other hand …

Dog sighed. The politicians were in love with the idea of a one-size-fits-all-services-and-every-mission airplane. The military had to suck it up and make do.

Did they, though? And what would those politicians say when the people who flew the F-119 were coming back in body bags?

He checked his instruments and position, then radioed in that he was ready to check the landing gear.

“WE WERE NEVER OFF THE BRIEFED COURSE,” BREANNA repeated. She folded her arms and stared across the makeshift conference room. Zen continued to glare at her; she felt sure that if she turned she’d find the plasterboard wall behind her on fire.

“I didn’t say you were off course,” he said.

“Well, you implied it.”

“I think we did fairly well,” said Ong, clearly as uncomfortable as the other techies in the room debriefing the mission. “We have to go through the downloads and everything else, but we were out at seventeen miles before the connection snapped.”

“I think I can tweak the corn module some more,” said Jennifer. “We’re definitely on the right track.”

The scientists continued to talk. To Breanna, it was as if they were speaking in a room down the hall. She could feel Jeff’s anger; it was the only thing that mattered.

But why? The scientists were saying they’d just kicked butt on the test.

That was what they were saying, wasn’t it?

So why was Jeff frowning?

He was pissed at the world because of his legs.

“We keep bumping up against the limits of the bandwidth,” said Jennifer, talking to Bree with what was probably intended as a sympathetic smile. “The degradation of the secure signal is difficult to deal with in real time. If we didn’t have to encode it and make it so redundant, we’d be fine.”

“We are making progress,” said Jeff. “The changes you made worked.”

It seemed to Breanna that his manner changed as he spoke to the computer scientist. He was more like himself.

“We can make it better.” The young scientist twirled her finger through one of the long strands of her light hair. Maybe she did it absentmindedly, but the way she leaned against the table at the same time irked Breanna. Her shirt was at least a size too small.

Why didn’t she just yank it off and be obvious?

“What’s the big deal whether it’s ten miles or twenty?” said Breanna.

“Because the mother ship is a sitting duck,” snapped Jeff, turning on the glare again. “A MiG or a Sukhoi at ten miles could crisp Boeing before it even knew it was there. We need to push out to fifty at least.”

“You’re supposed to be flying with combat planes,” said Breanna.

Ong started to explain about the size of the computer equipment, but Breanna cut him off.

“Yes, I know. Right now you need a lot of space in the mother ship for the control computer and the communications equipment,” she said. “What I’m suggesting is, you make the mother ship survivable.”

“A JSF with a trailer,” joked one of the engineers.

No one laughed.

“Megafortress,” said Breanna. “Twenty miles, even ten, would be fine.”

“Yeah, well, get us the flight time,” said Jeff. “We’ve had a total of two hours with Raven in two weeks. And before I got here, there had been two drops in three months.”

“I’ll try “

Zen nodded. For an instant, maybe half an instant, his anger melted away. Breanna thought she saw something in his eyes, something she hadn’t seen in a long time.

She might have imagined it. She knew in that second that she truly loved him, that she wanted to help him past this—past everything. She loved more than his legs. She loved his mind, his spirit, the way he laughed, the way he said everything was bullshit when it was. The way he actually listened to her—listened to anyone, no matter what he felt toward them.

Breanna felt more and more like an outsider as the debriefing session continued, the crew and engineers picking over different possibilities for improving their connection. Jeff was very businesslike, rarely joking; it seemed to her he’d become colder since the accident, and not just to her.

She followed him into the hall as the meeting broke up. “Jeff’ she called as he started into the men’s room.

“I got to pee. It’s full,” he told her. He pointed to the small pouch he carried at the side of the chair—a piddle-pack.

“Tonight?” It was all she could manage as her throat started to close.

“Yeah. No sweat. I’ll be home. Sorry about last night. I was just too beat to deal with getting back. And it was late.”

“Sure,” she said, but by the time she got the word out of her mouth, he’d pushed into the rest room.

* * *

WHEN COLONEL BASTIAN RETURNED TO HIS OFFICE after his test flight, he found himself walking around, rearranging things on his desk that didn’t need to be rearranged. He went through Ax’s two piles of papers that needed attention—left pile, immediate attention; right pile, sooner-than-immediate attention—got up from his chair, sat back down, got up again.

Dreamland had been included as a direct line item in the F-119 program. In the past few days he had received calls from several generals above him, including the three-star Air Force “liaison” for the interservice project. He’d also spoken to two admirals, three DOD budget analysts, no less than five Congressmen, and a Senator. All had congratulated him, assuring him that Dreamland’s future was now set. While other facilities were trying to wrestle some of the JSF tests, it was clear that Dreamland was the best suited for the project.

Part of the reason for this, Bastian knew, was the fact that everyone figured they could keep a puny lieutenant colonel under their thumb. And while there had been hints of a promotion “in the wind,” as one Congressman put it, even a full bird colonel or brigadier general would be a long way down the pecking order.

In the wind. It was a foul wind. By hitching himself and Dreamland to the JSF, he was saddling the Air Force with a turkey.

Worse, he was going against his conscience and his duty.

Was he? Was telling other people what they wanted to hear such a sin?

The JSF wasn’t that bad a design. Hell, the people here knew how to fix it. They could too—though the necessary changes would turn it into two or three different planes, with less than forty percent interchangeable parts. Each plane would be excellent, well suited for its job. The only drawback would be the expense.

No, the only drawback would be the fact that DOD and the Joint Chiefs and Congress and the President wanted a Joint Services airplane, one size fits all.

How many men would die because of that?

None—there’d be excellent CAP and AWACS and the SAMs would be suppressed, and everything would snap together clean and to spec every day. What could go wrong?

“Hey, Colonel, why are you messing up my system?” asked Ax, standing in the doorway. “You’re making one pile out of two.”

“Jeez, Ax, did you knock?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” snapped the sergeant, momentarily coming to full drill-master attention.

“Come on in, Sergeant Ballbuster,” said Bastian. “What the hell are you up to?”

“Just looking after my papers, Colonel,” said Ax, fishing the signed documents from Bastian’s desk. “How was your flight?”

“Uneventful, thanks,” said Dog. “Who’s my next appointment?”

“Nothing on your agenda rest of the day.” Gibbs smiled. “I believe there was some sort of scheduling snafu that indicated your test flight was continuing until tomorrow and that you couldn’t be disturbed.”

“You’re a piece of work, Ax.”

“Thank you, sir.” The sergeant smiled again. “I do actually have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking. I have this friend who has this problem. He’s an executor for a trust. All the people connected with the trust, they want him to buy some stock. He thinks the stock is lousy, but he knows that if he doesn’t buy it, they’ll can his sorry ass and hire someone who will. He kinda needs the job, and he figures if they fire him he’ll be bagging groceries. On the other hand, he likes to look himself in the mirror every morning when he’s shaving.”