Day of the Cheetah

Air Force High Technology Advanced Weapons Center (HAWC)

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Patrick S. McLanahan watched Captain Kenneth Francis James preparing to mount his “steed.” James’ tall, powerfully built frame was covered — a better term might have been “encased”—in a stiff flight suit made of nylon and metallic thread. James had to carry around a small portable air conditioning unit to stay comfortable, and the suit was so stiff that James had to be hoisted into his steed on a hydraulic lift. A small army of “squires”—military and civilian scientists and technicians, led by Doctor Alan Carmichael, the chief project engineer and Patrick’s civilian counterpart — followed James on his lift up toward his incredible steed.

Both McLanahan’s and James’ aircraft were in a large open-ended hangar, used more to shield the two fighters from the ultra-magnified eyes of Soviet reconnaissance satellites than to protect against the weather. It was only four-thirty in the morning, but the temperature was already starting to climb; it was going to be a scorcher in the high Nevada desert test-site north of Las Vegas known as Dreamland.

But Patrick wasn’t thinking about the heat. His eyes were on the sleek lines of the jet fighter before him.

DreamStar…

As McLanahan stood gazing at the fighter the senior noncommissioned officer of the DreamStar project, Air Force Master Sergeant Ray Butler, moved alongside him.

“I know how you feel, sir,” Butler said in his deep, gravelly voice, running a hand across his shaved head. “I get a shiver every time I see her.”

She was a child of the first X-29 advanced technology demonstrator aircraft built in the early and mid-1980s. Long, low, sleek and deadly, DreamStar was the only fighter aircraft anywhere with forward-swept wings, which spread gracefully from nearly abeam the cockpit back all the way to the tail. The forward-swept wings allowed air to stick to the aircraft’s control surfaces better, making it possible for the aircraft to make faster and wilder maneuvers than ever thought possible. She was so agile and so fast that it took three independent high-speed computers to control her.

“Chief,” Patrick said as they began a walkaround inspection of the fighter, “there’s no question she’s one sexy piece of hardware. Very sexy.”

Butler nodded. “Couldn’t put it better myself.”

The cockpit seemed suspended in mid-air on the long, pointed forward fuselage high above the polished concrete floor of the satellite-bluff hangar. Beside the cockpit on each side of the fuselage were two auxiliary fins, canards, integral parts of the DreamStar’s advanced flight controls. When horizontal, the canards provided extra lift and allowed the fighter to fly at previously unbelievable flight attitudes; when moved nearly to the vertical, the canards let the fighter move in any direction without changing its flight path. DreamStar could climb or descend without moving its nose up or down, turn without banking, dart sideways in, literally, the blink of an eye.

The one large engine inlet for the single afterburning jet engine was beneath the fuselage, mounted so that a smooth flow of air could still be assured even at radical flight attitudes and fast changes in direction. DreamStar had two sets of rudders, one pair on top and one on the bottom, which extended and retracted into the fuselage as needed; the lower stabilizers were to assure directional control at very high angles-of-attack (when the nose would be pointed high above the flight path of the aircraft) and low speed when the upper stabilizers would be ineffective.

Even at rest she seemed energetic, ready to leap effortlessly into the sky at any moment. “She looks like a great big cat ready to pounce,” Patrick said half-aloud.

They continued their walkaround aft. DreamStar’s engine exhaust was not the typical round nozzle on other fighters. She used an oblong vectored-thrust nozzle that could divert the engine exhaust in many different directions. Louvers on the top and bottoms of the nozzle could change the direction of thrust instantaneously, giving DreamStar even greater maneuverability. The vectored thrust from the engine could also act as added boost to shorten takeoff rolls, or as a thrust-reverser during dogfights or on landing to bleed off energy.

She was one hell of a bird, all right, and Patrick McLanahan figured he had the best job in the world — turning her into the world’s newest and deadliest combat-ready weapon. Patrick “Mac” McLanahan, an ex-Strategic Air Command B-52 radar navigator-bombardier — especially remembered for his role on the Flight of the Old Dog that knocked out a Soviet laser installation — was the project officer in charge of development of the DreamStar advanced technology fighter. Once perfected, the XF-34A DreamStar fighter would be the nation’s new air-superiority fighter.

Walking around the engine exhaust they noticed a crew chief running over to activate an external-power cart. “Looks like they’re ready for power,” Butler said. “I’d better go see how they’re doing. Have a good flight, Colonel.”

Patrick returned his salute and headed toward the plane he would be flying that morning. If the two aircraft were humans, the second jet fighter, Cheetah, would be DreamStar’s older, less intelligent cousin. A by-product of the revolutionary SMTD, Short Takeoff and Landing and Maneuverability Demonstrator projects of the last decade, Cheetah was a line F-15E two-set jet fighter-bomber, heavily modified and enhanced after years of research and development in the fields of high performance flight and advanced avionics. It had come to Dreamland, this top-secret aircraft and weapons research center northwest of Las Vegas, seven years earlier. It had been at Dreamland for less than a day before then Lieutenant General Bradley Elliott, the director of HAWC, had had her taken apart for the first time. The changes to the airframe had been so extensive that it had been given a code-name Cheetah instead of keeping its original nickname, Eagle.

Hard to believe, McLanahan thought, that such a machine like Cheetah could be outdated in so short a time.

The remarkable enhancements built into DreamStar had been tested years earlier on Cheetah, so Cheetah shared DreamStar’s huge movable forward canards, vectored-thrust engines and computer-commanded flight controls. But even Cheetah was starting to show its twenty years of age. Modifications to every component of the fifty-seven-thousand-pound aircraft meant lots of riveted access panels scarred across its fuselage, performance-robbing patches that layers of paint could barely hide. With an eleven-hundred-pound remote-control camera mounted just behind her aft cockpit, her once impressive top speed of Mach two was now a forgotten statistic — she’d have a tough time, Patrick thought, of reaching Mach one without afterburners. DreamStar could easily cruise at one point five Mach without ‘burners.

Where all of the high-tech components had made DreamStar the fighter of the future, those same enhancements had taken a severe performance penalty on Cheetah. But there was still one man who could make Cheetah dance in the sky like a brand-new bird. Patrick found that extraordinary young pilot asleep under Cheetah’s nose, using the nosewheel as a headrest.

“J.C.”

“Yo,” came a sleepy reply.

Patrick went up the crew-boarding ladder, retrieved a set of ear noise protectors from the cockpit. “On your feet. Time to go aviating.”

For J. C. Powell that bit of Air Force jargon was raw meat to a starving wolf — he was up, on his feet and skipping up the crew entry ladder like a kid.

“Say the word, Colonel.”

“I’m stopping by to see how our boy is doing in DreamStar,” McLanahan said, putting on the ear protectors to block out the noise of the external power cart. “Should be fifteen minutes to engine start. Get Cheetah ready to fly.”

“You got it, boss.”

In another life, Captain Roland Q. Powell, the only son of a very wealthy Virginia family, all five feet five and one hundred twenty pounds of him, must have been a barnstormer; before that he might have ridden barrels over Niagara Falls. “Plain reckless” would have been the wrong term to describe his flying, but “reckless abandon” was close. He was totally at home in airplanes, always pushing his machine to the limit but staying in control at all times. He never flew slow if he could fly fast, never made a turn at thirty degrees’ bank when he could do sixty or ninety, never flew up high when he could fly down in the trees. He earned the nickname “J.C.” from his Undergraduate Pilot Training instructors who would mutter “Jesus Christ” (usually followed by “help me” or “save me”) when they found out they had been scheduled to fly with Roland Powell.

He became an FAIP, first assignment instructor pilot, out of Undergraduate Pilot Training, but the Air Force didn’t want an entire Air Force filled with J. C. Powells, so he was assigned to Edwards Air Force Base. Flight test was the perfect place to stick Roland Powell. He knew all there was to know about aerodynamics but would still agree to do anything the engineers asked of him, no matter how dangerous or impossible it seemed. As a result Powell got the hot planes. Every jet builder wanted to see what magic J. C. Powell could conjure up with his airframe. He was soon enticed to Dreamland by General Elliott with the promise of flying the hottest fighter of them all — Cheetah. Pow-ell’s expertise both as a pilot and as an engineer helped speed up the development of DreamStar, but he chose to stay with Cheetah. From then on, he had been her only pilot.

But J. C. Powell had had his time in the spotlight. Now, it was Kenneth Francis James’ turn.

When he got to DreamStar again, Patrick climbed up the ladder on the hydraulic lift and watched as James was lowered into the cockpit. His special flight suit was preformed into a sitting position, making James look like a plastic doll. Once James was lowered into place, Patrick moved toward him as close as possible without interfering with the small army of experts attending to the pilot’s seat configuration.

“Feeling okay, Ken?”

James nodded. “Snug, but okay.”

Patrick watched as James was set into his specially molded ejection seat, strapped into place, and had his oxygen, environmental and electronic leads connected. The image of a medieval knight being readied for combat flashed in Patrick’s head, topped off when they placed James’ helmet on his head and clipped it into a clavicle ring on his shoulders. The helmet was essentially a holder for a variety of superconducting sensors and terminals that covered the inner surface. Once the helmet was locked into place, the flight suit became one gigantic electronic circuit, one big superconducting transistor. It became the data-transmission circuit between James and the amazing aircraft he was strapped into.

“Self-test in progress,” Carmichael said. The computer, a diagnostic self-test device as well as an electroencephalograph to monitor the human side of the system, checked each of the thousands of sensors, circuits and transmitters within the suit and their connections through the interface to DreamStar. But Carmichael chose not to let the computer do his work, even though he was the one who had designed the interface; the scientist manually ran through the complex maze of readouts, checking for any sign of malfunction or abnormal readings.

He found none; neither did the computer. A few minutes later, Carmichael turned to Patrick, nodded. “He’s ready.”

Patrick walked around the lift’s narrow catwalk and knelt down in front of James. He could barely see a movement of James’ eyes through the helmet’s thick electro-optical lenses.

“Ready to do some flying, buddy?”

They looked at each other. There was no movement at all from James. Patrick waited, watched. James appeared to be trying to decide on something. He didn’t seem fearful or apprehensive or at all nervous. He was just … what?

Patrick glanced at Carmichael. “Alan? How’s he doing?”

“His beta is pinging off the scale,” Carmichael said, rechecking the electroencephalograph readouts. “No alpha or theta activity at all.”

Patrick turned again to James, bent down close to him. “We can reschedule this, buddy. Don’t push it. It’s not worth the grief.”

“No. I’ll be okay. I’m just … trying to get ready …”

“Then relax, let it come to you; don’t chase it. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.”

“Hell of a way to fight a war,” James said — the tension in his voice was obvious. “I can see a fighter pilot telling his squadron commander, ‘I know the enemy is rolling across the base but I can’t fly today — my damn theta isn’t responding …” I’ve got to prove that I can go in and out of theta-alpha in a moment’s notice.”

“Making the system operational is still a few years off, Ken,” Patrick told him. “Don’t worry about all that. Relax; don’t force yourself or the system. Let’s just go up and have some fun. Finish up and buy me a beer at the Club afterward. That’s all.”

Patrick raised a hand in front of the test pilot, and James slapped a metallic-lined glove into it. “Punch a hole in the sky, buddy. That’s an order, too.” He gave James one last thumbs-up and stepped off the lift.

By the time Patrick had stepped back onto the tarmac Dr. Carmichael was shaking his head in disbelief.

“He’s already under alpha-C parameters. I think he’s getting to the point where he can do it anytime. If we had him hooked up outside the plane, he could probably go into theta-sine A before we strap him in.”

“He gets nervous every now and then,” Patrick added, “especially before a big test like this one. Back me up on monitoring him, Alan.”

An external power cart was running on Cheetah by the time Patrick returned, climbed into the aft cockpit and strapped in. Aircraft power was already on, and his crew chief and test-range officers had already done a fast preflight of the telemetry and data collection instruments packed into the cockpit. Because Cheetah was the only jet around that could even try to keep up with the DreamStar, it was now used to fly photo-chase on training and test flights. The special high-speed camera Cheetah carried tracked DreamStar as it went through its paces. Patrick could monitor all of DreamStar’s important electronic indications and if necessary take control of the plane by remote control.

With all of DreamStar’s power off, however, there was only one readout to monitor — the EEG of Ken James himself. Like Carmichael, Patrick was amazed as he watched the electronic traces of James’ different brainwave patterns. He clicked open his interphone.

“He’s almost into theta-sine alpha already.”

“Does that mean I can go to sleep too?” J. C. Powell said.

“How fast could you go into theta-alpha?” Patrick said, watching the readouts change. “I know you’ve flown the DreamStar simulator. Could you do any better?”

“Patrick, I’m a pilot, not a robot.” J.C.’s voice had lost its sardonic tone. “Seems to me ANTARES turns pilots into near-robots. But to answer your question: sure, I could go into theta-sine-alpha quickly. Couple of minutes. Staying in theta-alpha was another trick. I could never quite get the hang of it. But I didn’t lose DreamStar, I gained Cheetah. I figure I got the better deal”

Which was a long speech for J. C. Powell; it underscored his dislike for ANTARES. ANTARES might be the great addition to DreamStar’s already amazing array of avionics, it might be the future of air combat — but J. C. Powell didn’t see it in his future.

“It doesn’t turn anyone into a robot,” Patrick said. “You still have full control. I don’t see what your problem is about AN-TARES.”

“Full control? Of what? A computer tells him what to do, and he does it.”

“It’s still the pilot calling the shots, J.C.”

“Sure, he can pick up his own options out of a list the computer presents to him, or he can override everything and go his own way. I know that. But if a smart computer offers up a list of a hundred options, well, most guys will pick something out of that list.” Powell spread his hands out across his lap. “Say you’re at a fancy restaurant.” He motioned an imaginary waiter to his table. “You’ve been to this restaurant before because they have the best steak in town, but Pierre hands you the menu. What do you do?” Powell opened his imaginary menu and pretended to read it. “You look at the menu. Why? Because it’s there. So maybe you order the steak because that’s what you always order, but you still look at the menu.

“See, even with ANTARES it takes time to scan the menu. A real pilot will use that time to use his head and instincts to execute a real maneuver. In ANTARES there’s no thought, analysis, decision making … it’s been done for you. And I call that programming.”

“But if it results in a better system?”

“ANTARES hasn’t been proved to be better than a human pilot …”

“We still use a human pilot, J.C.”

“More or less, I guess,” Powell said sarcastically, returning switches to their proper positions. “But in a significant way we don’t — I say ANTARES can be beat.”

“Well,” Patrick said, rubbing his eyes wearily, trying to massage away the headache that usually happened when arguing with J. C. Powell, “it’s a moot point, at least for now. Like I said, we’re not concerned with how well DreamStar fights, deploying her is still a ways off. We’re here to test the aircraft and test the concept.”

J.C., slumping so far down in his seat Patrick couldn’t see him, said, “But all those generals and congressmen don’t care about testing the concept. They all want to know the same thing — can she win dogfights?”

“And you’re saying she can’t.”

“I’m saying that she can be beat. A pilot with the right combo of skill and balls can beat ANTARES. And if ANTARES is forced out of the combat loop, the pilot in DreamStar has to be able to take charge and fight on his own. DreamStar’s not really set up for pilot-directed dogfighting. For me that’s her weakness … And look what we’re doing to our combat pilots”—J.C. motioned toward DreamStar—”Ken James is one of the best pilots in the Air Force. He’s been a star ever since he graduated from the Zoo. So what have we done with him? We’ve trussed him up in a steel flight suit, a twenty-pound helmet and more damn electrodes than Frankenstein’s monster. We’re using his brain but not his mind. There’s a big difference, I figure. Are all our best military pilots going to be used as protoplasmic circuit boards for ANTARES?”

For a guy that was only thirty years old, Powell could be a real stick-in-the-mud sometimes. Patrick scanned the EEG readouts. “Everything looks normal. It should be awhile before he radios in that he’s ready. I’ll let you know when he’s coming around so we can crank engines.”

“Roger that. I’m gonna do another flight-control check.”

“Didn’t you just do a computer self-test?”

“Having a computer check a computer to see if a computer is working is just looking for trouble. One of these days all those computers will get together and drive us into the ground. I wanna catch them before they do it. I’m doing the check manually. Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

“Rog.” Patrick was tired of arguing. Besides, J.C. had a point. He turned again to the EEG monitors.

Theta-sine-alpha indicated that James was relaxed, but it was a much deeper level of relaxation, more neurological, much more than ordinary muscle relaxation. The ability to get to theta-sine-alpha had taken months of training. They called it biofeedback when psychologists would hook a patient up to a mini-EEG or polygraph that would beep whenever a beta wave would be detected, indicating stress or irregular muscular or nervous activity. The idea was to relax the body or control nerve activity until the beeping stopped. James had to go far beyond such muscle relaxation — he had to relax his mind, open it, create a window into the subconscious.

For Kenneth Francis James, the window to his mind did not open like a door or a window — it opened like a hot, rusty knife ripping through pink flesh. But that was the nature of the Advanced Neural Transfer and Response System that linked the brain with a digital computer. James had gone far beyond Carmichael’s lectures. This was the real thing, the link-up between the computer on the plane and his suit.

The first mind-numbing phase of transition was activation of the system itself, which occurred automatically once ANTARES detected that James had entered theta-sine-alpha. In order to pick up the tiny changes in electrical activity in James’ body, the metallic ANTARES flight suit itself had to be electrified. Even though the charge was very small’ it was applied to almost every part of the body, from the skull to the feet; it was like touching one’s tongue to the terminals of a nine-volt battery and feeling the tiny current jolt the taste buds, except that James felt that sweet, tingling sensation in every part of his body. And through it all, he had to maintain theta-alpha …

Enduring activation of the ANTARES system was only the first step; the now familiar slight physical pain was easy to block out. The next assault, however, was on the mind itself.

Once ANTARES was open it would transmit a complex series of preprogrammed questions to various conscious and subconscious areas of James’ mind. The questions, programmed months earlier by countless hours in a simulator-recording unit, would match the existing brainwave patterns of each level encountered. After scanning, recognizing and matching the patterns, AN-TARES would then overpower that particular neural function, force the original pattern to a compatible subconscious level and allow the ANTARES computer to control that level. It was like submitting a series of passwords to several levels of guards, except each time ANTARES would reach a level it would hammer, not knock, on the door, demanding entry. Once admitted, it would first befriend, then overpower, the resident inside. The takeovers accomplished by ANTARES were sometimes painful, sometimes soothing. At times images would force their way out of James’ subconscious, long-stored memories of childhood that Maraklov had long forgotten.

His conscious mind was now like a big living room that had just had all its furniture moved to different parts of the house. ANTARES had taken over control of most conscious activity, keeping only a few essential activities in the conscious foreground while relegating the rest to higher parts of the brain. Now ANTARES was ready to start remodeling.

With the doors and windows to James’ subconscious mind wide open, his mind was ready to receive and process vast amounts of information. Normally that information would come from the five senses, and even with ANTARES some still did, but now altogether new sources of information were open. AN-TARES could collect and transmit digital data signals to James’ conscious mind, and James could receive that information as if it came from his own five senses. But James no longer had five senses — he had hundreds, thousands of them. The radar altimeter was a sense. The radar was a sense. So was the laser rangefinder. Dozens of thermometers, aneroids, gallium-arsenide memory chips, limit switches, logic circuits, photocells, voltmeters, chronometers — the list was endless and ever-changing.

But it was an enormous shock to the system to find that the list of senses had grown from five to five thousand, and here ANTARES was no help at all; when the “room” was fu!) it simply began cramming in more input sources. For James the new impulses weren’t coherent or understandable. They were random flashes of light or crashes of sound, battering his conscious mind, all fighting for order and recognition. Put another way, as he once had, it felt like a crushing wall of water, a wave of unbearable heat, and the swirling center of a thunderstorm all mixed up at once. And ANTARES was relentless. The instant an image or an impulse was set aside, a hundred more took its place. The computer only knew that so much had to be learned. It had no conception of rest, or defeat, or of insanity.

Suddenly, then, the flood of input was gone. The tornado of data subsided, leaving only a room full of seemingly random bits of information lying scattered about. The furniture was overturned — but it was all there, all intact. Now, like a benevolent relative or kindly neighbor, ANTARES began sorting through the jungle of information, creating boxes to organize the information, placing boxes into boxes, organizing the mountains of data into neat, cohesive packages.

The random series of images began to coalesce. Undecipherable snaps of sound became long, staccato clicks; the clicks turned to a low whine; the whine turned into waves of sounds rising and falling; the waves became words, the words became sentences. Flashes of lights became numbers. And then the numbers disappeared, replaced by numbers that James wanted to “see.”

The energy surges generated by ANTARES were still coursing through James’ body, but now they were acting like amphetamines, energizing and revitalizing his body. He was aware of DreamStar all around him, aware of its power waiting for release.

James’ eyes snapped open, like those of a man awaking from a nightmare. Swiveling his heavy helmet on its smooth Teflon bearings, he looked across at Cheetah’s open canopy. Powell was busy in the forward cockpit; McLanahan was watching his instruments. But he must have read something in the instruments in Cheetah’s aft cockpit, because just then McLanahan looked over toward him. He could see the DreamStar project director with his oxygen visor in place, apparently talking on the radios. Patrick was looking directly at him now — was he talking to him…?

… And suddenly the energy was unbearable. It was as if DreamStar was a wild animal straining on a leash, hot with the scent of prey, demanding to be released.

James looked down at the left MFD, the multi-function display, on the forward instrument panel. He imagined the index finger of his left hand touching the icon labeled “VHF-1.” Immediately the icon illuminated. Now, hovering right there in front of his eyes, was a series of numerals representing the preprogrammed VHF radio channels — the image, transmitted from DreamStar’s computers through ANTARES to his optic nervous system, was as clear and as real as every other visual image. He selected the proper ship-to-ship channel on the computer-generated icon and activated the radio. The whole process, from deciding to activate the radio to speaking the words, took less than a second.

“Storm Two ready for engine start,” James reported. Although the ANTARES interface did not take away his ability to speak or hear, all traces of inflection or emotion usually were filtered out. So the voice that Patrick heard on the radio was eerie, alien.

“Welcome back, Captain,” Patrick said. “I saw you come out of theta-alpha. Ready to do some flying?”

“Ready and waiting, Colonel.”

“Stand by.” Patrick switched to a secondary radio. “Storm Control, this is Storm One.”

In the underground command post of the High Technology Advanced Weapons Center a four-star Air Force general seated at a large cherry desk replaced a phone on its cradle, then looked down with disgust at his right leg. He reached down, took his right calf in both hands, straightened his leg, then raised himself out of his leather seat using the stiff right leg as a crutch. Once fully standing he unlocked the graphite and Teflon bearings in the prosthetic right knee joint, allowing it to move much like a regular leg.

An aide held the office door open for General Bradley Elliott as the director of HAWC stepped out and down the short hallway to the command post. He used a keycard to open the outer door to the entrapment area. A bank of floodlights snapped on, filling the entrapment area with bright light, and the outer door automatically locked behind him.

Two security guards armed with Uzi submachine guns came through the doors on either side of the area. They slowed when they recognized who it was but didn’t alter their moves. While one guard quickly pat-searched Elliott and ran a small metal scanner over his body, the other stood with his Uzi at port arms, finger on the trigger. The metal detector beeped when passed over Elliott’s right leg. Elliott tolerated it.

The guards watched as Elliott signed in on a security roster and double-checked the new signature against other signature samples and the signature on Elliott’s restricted-area badge pinned to his shirt. Satisfied, the guards slipped away as quickly as they had appeared.

A tall black security officer wearing a nine-millimeter Beretta automatic pistol on his waist walked quickly to the general officer as he emerged from the entrapment area. “Sorry, sir,” Major Hal Briggs said, handing Elliott a cup of coffee. “New guy on the security console. Buzzed the sky cops when the metal detector in the entrapment area went crazy. He’s been briefed again on your … special circumstances.”

“He did right. You should have commended him. The response guards too.”

“Yes, sir,” was all Briggs had time to mutter as Elliott pushed on past him and entered the communications center. One of the controllers handed him a telephone.

“Storm Control Alpha, go ahead.”

“Alpha, this is Storm One. Flight of two in the green and ready to taxi.”

“Stand by,” Elliott said. As he lowered the phone Briggs handed him a computer printout.

“Latest from Lassen.Mountain Space Tracking Center,” Briggs said. “Three Russian satellites will be in the area during the test-window: Cosmos 713 infrared surveillance satellite still on station over North America in geostationary orbit, but it’s the other two we’re concerned with. Cosmos 1145 and 1289 are the kickers. Cosmos 1145 is a low-altitude, high-resolution film-return photo-intelligence satellite. Cosmos 1289 is a radar-imaging film-return bird. We believe they’re mainly ground-mapping satellites with limited ability to photograph aircraft in flight, but obviously they can be damaging. Both will be over the exercise area during the test throughout the day. Do you want to reschedule, sir?”

“No,” Elliott said. “I don’t want to give the Russians the pleasure of thinking they can disrupt my schedule with a couple of old Brownies. Just make sure DreamStar and Cheetah stay in the bluff while they’re overhead.”

He took a sip of coffee, scowled at it, then set the cup down with an exasperated thump. “Besides, it seems like they have all the information they need on DreamStar anyway. I could have dropped my teeth when I saw the DIA photo of the Ramenskoye Flight Test Facility in Moscow with the exact same short-takeoff-and-landing runway-test devices as ours here at Dreamland. The exact same ones. In precisely the same position right down to the inch.”

“We’ve known the Russians have been working on high-performance STOL fighter-aircraft for years, sir …”

“Right. Exactly as long as we’ve been working on them here at Dreamland. We launch Cheetah; they launch an STOL fighter. We develop a supercockpit for DreamStar, and four months later we intercept plans for nearly the same design being smuggled into East Germany. The Joint Chiefs will close down Dreamland if we don’t stop the leaks around here.”

“I’m rechecking the backgrounds of every person remotely connected with the project,” Briggs said. “DIA is rechecking the civilian contractors. But that adds up to over five thousand people and more than a hundred and fifty thousand man-years’ worth of personal histories to examine. And we do this every year for key personnel. We’re just overloaded—”

“I know, I know,” Elliott said, picking up the phone again. “But we’re running out of time. For every success we have on the flight line we have one defeat with intelligence leaks. We can’t afford it.” He keyed the switch on the telephone handset. “Storm Flight, this is Alpha. Clear for engine start. Call for clearance when ready for taxi.”

“Roger,” McLanahan replied.

Elliott turned to Briggs. “Join me in the tower when you’ve gotten the overflight update on those two Russian satellites. Before I have you work your tail off to find our security leaks, the least you can do is watch a little of our success.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for all the stolen STOL plans in Ramenskoye,” Briggs said, and immediately regretted it as Elliott gave him a look and limped out of the command post.

“Storm Two starting engines,” James reported to Powell. The pilot of the F-15 Cheetah barely had time to acknowledge when the whine of the engine turbines pierced the early morning stillness.

Engine start was triggered by a thought impulse that selected the “engine start” routine from the “home” menu transmitted to James by ANTARES. Computers instantly energized the engine-start circuits and determined their status; since no external air or power was available, an “alert” status would be performed.

Less than a second later the ignition-circuits were activated and a blast of supercompressed nitrogen gas shot into the sixteenth-stage compressor of DreamStar’s engine. Unlike a conventional jet engine, it was not necessary for one compressor stage at a time to spin up to full speed — all compressor stages of its engine were activated at once, allowing much faster starts. Less than twenty seconds later the engine was at idle power and full generator power was on-line. Once the engine-start choice had been activated, the computer knew what had to be done next — James just allowed the results of each preprogrammed check to scroll past his eyes as the on-board computers completed them.

“Storm Two engine start complete, beginning pre-takeoff checks.”

“Amazing,” Powell murmured in Cheetah. He had begun his engine-start checklist at the same time James had, but he had barely had his left engine up to idle-power by the time DreamStar’s start-sequence was completed.

Immediately after James made his report to McLanahan and Powell, he commanded the start of an exhaustive computer check of all of DreamStar’s systems. With the engine powering two main and one standby hydraulic pump; energy was available to DreamStar’s flight controls. Outside, the check made Dream-Star’s wing surfaces crawl and undulate like the fins of a manta ray. From outside the cockpit the flight-control check was almost surreal … each wing bent and unbent in impossible angles, stretching and flexing more like a sheet of gelatin rather than hard fibersteel. The process from hydraulic system power-up to full flight-control certification had taken fifteen seconds.

Next was an electrical system check. Total time for a complete check of two generators, two alternators, one emergency generator, and two separate battery backup systems: three seconds. James stayed immobile during the checking process, allowing his senses to be overtaken by the rush of information.

The aircraft itself was like a living thing. Personnel were not allowed near the aircraft during the preflight because damaging radar, electromagnetic, and laser emitters were being activated all around the aircraft at breakneck speed. The throttle advanced and retarded by itself. The mission-adaptive wings continued their unusual undulations, arching and bending so wildly it seemed they would bend clean in half or twist right off the fuselage.

Through it all James was constantly informed about each system’s exact status and operation. He could no longer feel his feet or hands, but he knew which circuit in the superconducting radar was energized, and through that system he knew down to the millimeter how far Cheetah was parked from him. He knew the position of DreamStar’s canards, the pressure of the fluid in the primary hydraulic system and the RPMs of the ninth-stage engine’s turbine, just as one might know which way his toes were pointing without seeing them or the way one picks up a pencil and begins to write without consciously thinking about the action. ANTARES had cut James off from monitoring his own body, had relegated that function to a deeper portion of his brain and had shifted his conscious mental capacity to the task of operating a supersonic fighter plane.

Suddenly, DreamStar ceased its wild preflight movements, and the engine throttle returned to idle …

“Storm One, Two is in the green, ready for taxi,” James reported.

“My radar’s not even timed out,” Patrick said to J. C. Powell. “How are you coming on your preflight?”

“Few more minutes.”

“How can he accomplish an entire systems preflight in just a few minutes?”

“How long does it take you to wake up from a nap?” J.C. told him as he put the finishing touches on the preflight he had begun long before. “How long does it take you to ask yourself how you feel? That’s what ANTARES is like. If something was wrong with DreamStar, Ken would feel it just like he’d feel a sprained ankle or a crink in his neck.”

Where Ken had banks of computers to check his avionics, J.C. manually had to “fail” a system to check a backup system, or manually deflect Cheetah’s control stick and have the wing flex checked by a crew chief to verify the full range of motion of the fighter’s elastic wings. But after a few minutes of setting switches and checking off items in a checklist strapped to his right thigh, he was ready to go.

Patrick keyed his microphone: “Storm Control, this is Storm One flight. Two birds in the green. Ready to taxi.”

General Elliott was now on top of Dreamland’s portable control tower, a device fifty feet high that was set up and taken down for each mission to confuse attempts by spy satellites to pinpoint Dreamland’s many disguised dry-lakebed runways. Major Hal Briggs had just come up the narrow winding stairs and handed Elliott another computer printout when Patrick made his call.

“Those Cosmos peeping Toms start their first pass over the range in fifteen minutes,” Briggs said. “They’ve got our test time scoped out almost to the minute. Those satellites will be overhead every fifteen minutes for the next two hours — exactly as long as this scheduled mission.”

“Another damned security leak. And I scheduled this mission only two days, ago.”

“But those spy birds weren’t up there two days ago,” Briggs said. “I checked. You mean—?”

“I mean the Soviets took only two days — maybe less — to launch two brand new satellites just for this test flight,” Elliott said. “Well, at least they won’t catch our planes on the ground.” He picked up his microphone. “Storm Flight, this is Alpha. Taxi to hold point and await takeoff clearance. Winds calm, altimeter …” Elliott checked the meteorological data readouts on an overhead console “… three-zero-zero-five. Taxi clearance void time is one-zero minutes. Over.”

“Storm Flight copies ten minutes. On the move.” Moments later both fighters emerged from the satellite bluff and fell in behind a jeep with a large sign that read “FOLLOW ME.” The caravan moved quickly across an expanse of hard-baked sand to another smaller satellite-bluff hangar that had been towed out to the end of one of the disguised runways that crisscrossed Groom Lake in the center of the Dreamland test range. Now Cheetah and DreamStar pulled alongside each other and set their parking brakes while technicians and specialists did a fast last-chance inspection of each.

“Pre-takeoff and line-up checks,” Patrick said over interphone.

“Roger,” J.C. replied. “In progress.”

“Storm Two ready for release,” James suddenly radioed in.

“Amazing,” Patrick said to J.C. “He’s already done with a pre-takeoff checklist twice as complicated as ours.” He keyed the UHF radio switch. “Standby, Storm Two.”

“Roger.”

“MAW switch set to V-sub-X, max performance takeoff.” J.C. read off the most critical switch positions for the mission-adaptive-wing mode, and Patrick saw that the leading and trailing edges of the wings had curved into a long, deep high-lift airfoil.

“Canard control and engine nozzle control switches set to ‘AUTO ALPHA,’ “ J.C. continued. “This will be a constant-alpha takeoff.” J. C. Powell always briefed his back-seater on the takeoff, abort, and emergency procedures, even though he and Patrick had flown together for almost two years and Patrick knew the procedures as well as J.C. “Power to military thrust, brakes of and power to max afterburner. We’ll expect negative-Y push after five seconds, with a pitch to takeoff attitude. After that we monitor angle-of-attack throughout the climb and make sure we don’t exceed twenty-eight alpha in the climb-out. I’m looking to break my previous record of a seventeen-hundred-foot takeoff roll on this one … In case we don’t get the push-down I’ll cancel auto-alpha and switch to normal takeoff procedures — accelerate to one-sixty, rotate, maintain eight alpha or less, accelerate to two-eight-zero knots indicated and come out of afterburner. Same procedures if we lose vectored thrust after takeoff … All right.” Powell slapped his gloved hands together, finished off the last few items of the checklist: “Circuit breakers checked. Caution panel clear. Canopy closed and locked. Seat belts and shoulder harnesses?”

“On and on,” Patrick intoned.

“Checked up front. Lights set. Helmets, visors, oxygen mask, oxygen panel.”

“On, down, on, set to normal.”

“Same here. Parking brakes released.” J.C. touched a switch on his control stick. “Takeoff configuration check.”

“Takeoff configuration check in progress,” responded a computer-synthesized voice. It was the final step in Cheetah’s electronics array. A computer, which had monitored every step of the pre-takeoff checklists being performed, would make one last check of all systems on board and report any discrepancies.

“Takeoff configuration check complete. Status okay.”

“I already knew that, you moron,” J.C. murmured to the voice. He never relied on the computerized system although he consulted it. It was, as he would frequently remind everyone within earshot, another computer out to get him. “We’re ready to go, Colonel,” he said.

Patrick keyed the radio switch. “Storm Control, this is Storm flight of two. Ready for departure.”

Hal Briggs, on the narrow catwalk of the portable tower, spoke four words into a walkie-talkie. “Sand storm, one-seven.”

His cryptic message activated a hundred security officers spread out within some four-hundred square miles of the takeoff area. They were the last line of defense against unauthorized intrusion or eavesdropping on the test that was about to begin. Each man checked and rechecked his assigned sector with an array of electronic sensors — sound, radar, heat, motion, electromagnetic — and once secure, reported an “all secure” by sending a coded electronic tone. Only when all of the tones were received would a “go” signal be sent to Briggs.

Five seconds later he received that coded tone. “Good sweep, General,” he reported to Elliott. The general took one last look at the satellite overflight schedule, picked up the mike:

“Storm flight of two, clear for unrestricted takeoff. Winds calm. Takeoff clearance void time, five minutes. Have a good one.”

Patrick hit a switch, and the faint hum of the big gyrostabilized video camera mounted on Cheetah’s spine could be heard. “Camera’s slaved on DreamStar, J.C.,” he said. “Don’t lose him.”

“A cold day in hell before any machine can outrun me.”

They saw DreamStar taxi a few feet forward just ahead of Cheetah, until the tip of DreamStar’s forward-swept right wing-tip was just cutting into J.C.’s view of Ken James.

“Comin’ up,” J.C. said. He brought the throttles forward, keeping his toes on the brakes. Cheetah began to quiver, then shake with a sound like the distant rumble of an earthquake.

“Turn ‘em loose, baby,” J.C. murmured. He scanned his engine-instrument readouts on the main display, running down the graphic displays of engine RPM, fuel flow, nozzle and louver position, turbine inlet temperature and exhaust gas temperature. Each bar graph lined up in the normal range, everything right smack in the green — both engines in full military power, one hundred and nine percent of rated thrust, sixty thousand pounds of power. His grip on the stick and throttles unconsciously tightened. “Turn ‘em loose …”

James also performed a last-second engine instrument check. But he had no bar graphs to check out with his eyes. ANTARES reported information not only through the visual nervous system in the form of words, numbers and symbols that he could “see,” but, to avoid overload of the visual senses, also as sensations that he could detect with his other senses. He could feel the power of the engine as clear and as real as air inflating his lungs or strength rippling down his arms. He knew in an instant that the engine was at full military thrust. At a thought-command, a computer that metered fuel flow performed a retrim of the engine to compensate for pressure altitude and outside temperature, which yielded a few hundred pounds extra thrust. The engine-fuel trim would be accomplished every six seconds thereafter as DreamStar began its test flight, accomplished as easily and as subconsciously as a person might ride a bike or drive a car along a much-traveled highway.

James briefly activated the search radar, which transmitted its signals as visual images — no obstructions or targets within thirty miles. A fast scan of VHF or UHF frequencies — no emergency calls, air traffic control challenges, no abort call from the tower. One quick check of hydraulic systems — all running normally. Electrical — one generator on the engine running a bit hot. On a mental suggestion, a digital flight-data recorder logged the time, conditions and readouts on the left generator for the crew chiefs to analyze after the flight.

The check of the secondary systems, including the flight-data recorder entry, had taken less time than it took J. C. Powell to tighten his grip on his throttle quadrant.

James now ordered the brakes to be released …

J.C. saw DreamStar shoot forward. “Here we go,” he said.

Patrick took a firm grip on the steel “handlebars” surrounding the instrument panel in the aft cockpit. Without a stick, throttle, or pedals, Patrick could do nothing during takeoff but watch the engine instruments and hang on. He glanced at the large yellow-and-black-painted handgrip between his legs underneath the center of the instrument panel — the ejection handle — and mentally measured the distance to it …

DreamStar shot forward like a dragster popping off the starting line. James commanded the engine to max afterburner, increasing thrust to well over eighty thousand pounds. At almost the same instant he also commanded activation of the auto-alpha flight mode. Louvers on the top of the engine nozzle swung open, diverting one-third of the engine thrust diagonally upward, compressing the rear main landing gear struts to their lowest position and allowing the nose-gear strut to extend fully. DreamStar was now pointing ten degrees upward, in full unstick, takeoff attitude.

The trailing edges of the two canards deflected downward. The engine, coupled with the foreplanes, was now shoving DreamStar’s nose skyward — its computers controlling the canards kept the one-hundred-thousand-pound fighter from flipping backward out of control. As speed increased and the canards began to fly the nose, the louvers diverting the engine thrust upward gradually swung downward, allowing the thrust to accelerate the fighter and lift the tail off the runway. At one hundred knots airspeed DreamStar’s nose gear lifted off the runway. The pitch attitude increased to thirty degrees, held just below the stall by the computer-controlled foreplanes. At one hundred and fifty knots DreamStar lifted off the runway, and because the wings, foreplanes and engine were commanded for maximum lift, she rose like an elevator.

In just over one thousand feet, the same distance a small general-aviation plane used at takeoff, the fifty-ton jet fighter had left the ground. Once airborne, thrust again was automatically diverted to optimize climb performance. DreamStar was now a rocket, being propelled skyward at well over twenty thousand feet per minute. By the time it reached the end of the two-mile-long camouflaged runway, it was over eight thousand feet above the ground.

J. C. Powell’s promise to keep up with DreamStar was kept for about five seconds.

He and McLanahan saw James give the signal to release brakes. “Two good engines,” McLanahan called out from the aft cockpit as J.C. eased both engines into max afterburner.

“Roger. Two good cookers.”

They saw DreamStar dash forward, then saw its forward fuselage jut into the sky and its canard’s trailing edges snap downward …

Then DreamStar disappeared.

J.C. cursed. “Hang on.” But try as he did, Powell could not match DreamStar’s spectacular liftoff or climb rate. While DreamStar’s pitch, power, and thrust controls were automatic, Cheetah’s were mostly hand-controlled, relying on reaction time rather than electronics to trim the aircraft. When DreamStar disappeared from view, J.C.’s first reaction was to pull back on the stick to try to follow. But Cheetah had not reached unstick speed, and Cheetah’s computerized canard pushed the nose down to the runway to gain speed.

“Command override,” the computerized voice suddenly interjected as Cheetah’s nose fell and the nosewheel struts compressed. “Stall warning.”

“Damn, too much,” J.C. murmured, and let the nose fall a few feet and watched the airspeed rise. “So much for a short takeoff record.” He let the airspeed rebuild to one hundred eighty knots, then eased back on the stick. Cheetah glided gently off the runway. This time, with plenty of “smash,” Cheetah’s canards responded by pulling the nose higher into the air to take advantage of the extra speed.

J.C. touched the compute interactive control on his stick. “Gear up.”

Three red “LANDING GEAR UNSAFE” lights illuminated, and Patrick could feel the rumble as the two main wheels and the nosewheel lifted through the slipstream. “Landing gear unsafe,” the computerized voice said. Five seconds later: “Landing gear up and locked.”

“Gear’s up,” Patrick said. “Two hundred knots. Passing six thousand feet.”

J.C. began pulling the engines one by one out of afterburner to conserve fuel. “Left engine to MIL power … right engine to MIL … Okay, where is he?”

“Four o’clock high, coming down—”

DreamStar had appeared out of nowhere; it was in a full-power descent, nose aimed straight at Cheetah’s canopy.

J.C. jammed both throttles back into max afterburner and began a hard roll to the right.

“Too late, he’s gonna hit …”

Cheetah lunged forward but DreamStar kept on coming. Patrick could now see DreamStar’s canards, deployed diagonally underneath the fighter’s belly in their high-maneuverability position. He could even see DreamStar’s thirty millimeter Vulcan cannon muzzle screaming in closer and closer …

But DreamStar did not hit. The closer it came, the more the fighter began to flatten its flight path. It resembled a giant eagle swooping in on its prey. The cannon muzzle never strayed off Cheetah’s canopy, even as DreamStar reached its prey’s aititude — it began to fly sideways, keeping the gun dead on target, paralleling Cheetah’s right turn. As Cheetah began to accelerate, DreamStar snapped out of its sideways flight path and maneuvered into a right rear quartering missile-attack aspect.

“He hosed us,” Patrick said. “He’s at our six. He made a gun pass on us on our climbout. He’s in infrared missile-launch position. Roll out and get him back into fingertip formation.”

J.C. rolled wings level, paused, then rocked his wings twice. A few seconds later DreamStar was tucked in on Cheetah’s right wing, so close that they could have had overlapping wingtips. “Only got a glimpse of him,” J.C. said, “but he looked like he was haulin’ ass. Tell him to stay with the ROE.”

It was a J. C. Powell trademark to push the rules of engagement to the limits; now he was complaining about someone else pushing the ROE. “He’s in fingertip,” Patrick reported to Powell. “I’m sending him to the tactical frequency.” Patrick extended both hands in front of him, fists clenched, one on top of the other, the signal to switch to the agreed-on scrambled tactical frequency; hand signals, used as much as possible, prevented eavesdropping. James nodded that he understood.

On the new scrambled VHF frequency, J.C. called, “Storm flight, check in.”

“Two,” a monotone voice immediately replied.

“Nice moves, Ken,” Patrick said. “But remember the ROE. No maneuvering and no closure rate greater than two hundred knots within one mile of your target. I’d say you came close on both.”

“Yes, sir.” The metallic-sounding voice was James’ altered by the computer. It sounded almost sarcastic. Or was Patrick imagining that?

“Okay, forget it,” Patrick said, imaging Powell’s face. J.C. didn’t like being upstaged. He wouldn’t be sore because he had been upstaged by a younger pilot but that he had been hosed by a machine called ANTARES. “Ken, ready to start some dogfighting?”

“Affirmative.”

“Roger. Lead will come left, heading three-one-zero to stay inside our airspace. On roll-out, Ken, you are the fox. We’ll give you fifteen seconds, then we’re coming after you. Block is ten to fifty thousand feet, keep it under the Mach, please, or the camera telemetry won’t keep up with you. And stay within the ROE, gents. We’re all on the same team … Lead, come left heading three-one-zero. Heads up.”

“Two’s in.”

J.C. started a hard left turn to Patrick’s assigned heading. The roll was a bit more abrupt than it should have been but it didn’t seem to faze James — he stayed right in there, perhaps a few feet farther out, but still in tight fingertip formation. The instant J.C. rolled out of his turn, DreamStar merely dropped straight down out of sight.

“There he goes,” Patrick said. “Straight down, I can’t see him.”

“Fifteen seconds,” Powell complained dryly. “He could be in the next state in fifteen seconds.”

“That’s why he only gets five seconds. Go get ‘em.”

Powell rolled inverted, then pulled hard on the stick. Cheetah did a tight inverted turn, losing five thousand feet. Patrick was straining against the G-forces shoving him deep into his seat, trying to look up through the canopy to where he thought DreamStar would be.

“Tally ho,” J.C. sang out. “Coming up on our twelve o’clock. Right where I thought he’d be.” Patrick fought a wave of vertigo as he searched for DreamStar on radar. Normally the back-seater on an F-15E fighter-bomber would use his radar and process the attack for the pilot, but Patrick was only along as a camera operator and observer — J.C. would have to find and process his own targets. But J.C. already had very unconventional help, and he quickly began working on his kill.

He hit the voice-command button. “Attack radar transmit; target report.” Patrick watched as the attack radar went automatically from “STANDBY” to “TRANSMIT” and began a wide-area scan.

“Radar transmit,” the computer responded. Almost immediately, the computer reported, “Radar contact, range fifteen miles.”

“Heads up display.”

J.C.’s windscreen was filled with symbols and numbers, seemingly floating in space. Unlike regular HUDs, heads-up displays — pieces of plate glass that reflected up from the instrument console to the pilot — Cheetah’s consisted of large banks of high-resolution laser projectors that created three-dimensional images that hung in space. Unlike a reflected HUD system, which relied on the pilot orienting himself directly behind the glass, Cheetah’s laser-projected images were visible no matter how the pilot moved in his seat, and even bright sunlight or glare on the windshield could not wash the images away. The laser images showed an icon of DreamStar with a diamond symbol around it, indicating that Cheetah’s attack radar was locked onto it. Columns of numbers surrounding the icon showed DreamStar’s heading, airspeed, range and closure rate.

“Target designate …” Powell said. Instantly micro-wattage laser projectors in his helmet scanned his eyeballs, and a holographic circle and crosshairs was projected up onto the windscreen corresponding to exactly where he was looking. He centered the crosshairs on the icon, “… now.”

“Target radar lock, “ the computer reported.

“Laser slave to radar,” J.C. ordered.

“Target laser lock. “ A four-pointed star superimposed itself on DreamStar’s icon. Unlike Cheetah’s attack radar, the laser rangefinder was undetectable by any of DreamStar’s radar-detecting threat-warning receivers. Cheetah could carry a dozen laser-guided ATM-12 Cougar hypervelocity missiles, which were high-speed, nonexplosive, relatively inexpensive guided missiles. Fired from very short to very long ranges — it had no warhead and therefore no minimum-range requirements — the Cougar missile could be used to attack both air and ground targets, destroying its target by sheer force of impact.

DreamStar was still cruising along on the same heading. He hadn’t been detected — yet. As James drove in closer he would eventually pick up Cheetah’s radar emissions. J.C. had to control his excitement and steady his voice to issue more commands to the computer.

“Radar standby.”

“Radar standby. “ The laser rangefinder would now process the entire kill without danger of detection.

J.C. took a deep breath. “Arm laser missile.”

“Arm laser missile; warning, practice missile armed.” The weapons multi-function display showed Cheetah’s ten weapons stations, the belly-mounted Cougar missile rack illuminated with the number 12 on it, signifying the number of hypervelocity missiles remaining.

“Launch laser missile.”

“Launch. … Warning! Collision warning. Collision warning.

J.C. barely had time to react. DreamStar had just frozen in mid-air, still on its original heading, and let Cheetah drive right at him, chopping the distance between the two advanced fighters from ten miles to practically zero in the blink of an eye. Powell, with no choice, rolled hard behind DreamStar and dived past him. The computer had processed the launch command, but Powell doubted very much if he’d ever be credited with a “kill” with a closure rate and maneuver like that.

“God …” McLanahan breathed. He remembered how they had used the same maneuver in the B-52s in the past. Especially one particular B-52, his Old Dog Zero One, on that mission over Russia that seemed like a million years ago. “Now 1 know what it feels like to get sucked in …”

“He knew we’d try that dive on him,” Powell said. “He was waiting for us. The minute he detected our attack radar was off, he knew we were committed. He just put DreamStar on max alpha hover and chopped his power.” But J.C. didn’t linger on James’ maneuver. He knew DreamStar could accelerate back to combat speed and pull in right behind him just as fast as he had slowed down. So J.C. selected full afterburner and yanked the nose skyward, throwing Cheetah into a near-vertical climb.

“You mean ANTARES outguessed you?” Patrick taunted as he clung to his handlebars in the steep climb.

J.C. didn’t take the bait. “That was my fault. I performed like any pilot would if he sees a bogey below him. Well, enough of that. No more predictability.”

Fighting in the horizontal, DreamStar, it seemed, was unbeatable — but DreamStar had only one engine and was less powerful when fighting in the vertical. In spite of Cheetah’s weight penalties she was still a powerhouse when it came to dogfighting in two dimensions.

“Laser to standby. Radar to transmit,” Powell spoke into the voice-recognition computer. It acknowledged his commands and gave presentations of his emitter and weapons status on the displays in the cockpit.

Cheetah was nearing the top of the altitude block when J.C. suddenly rolled her into a wild backward loop. “I’m betting he didn’t have time to break out of that hover and follow us up here. I’m betting he’s still right where we left him …”

J.C. had let the nose just barely fall through the horizon when the holographic diamond again appeared on the windscreen. “Tally ho.” He didn’t wait for the computer to acknowledge the radar lock-on but centered the electronic crosshairs on the icon. “Target, now. Arm missile. Launch missile.”

The computer acknowledged. “Radar missile launch.”

“Fox two, fox two for Storm One,” Powell called over the interplane frequency. “Storm One descending through forty thousand. Heads up, partner.”

“Fox four for Storm Two,” came the reply. “Seven o’clock, one-half mile …” And then the voice added, “Partner. Heads-up.

Still inverted, Powell looked to.his left, and right off his tail, also inverted, following as if it was Cheetah’s shadow, was DreamStar!

“But I’ve got a lock-on …”

“On a cloud of chaff,” Patrick said. “When you made your zoom, he must’ve popped a dozen bundles of chaff and climbed up with you and stayed on your tail. You just shot a Sparrow missile into a bunch of tinsel.”

J.C. rolled wings-level and lowered his oxygen visor with an exasperated snap. “The guy’s right on today.”

Patrick checked the fuel readouts, did a quick check of his equipment and warning lights. “Looks like forty minutes to go, J.C.”

Powell gave Patrick a thumbs-up. “Storm flight station check, lead’s in the green with forty minutes to joker”—”joker” being the code for the minimum fuel reserves necessary on a normal training flight, about fifteen thousand pounds.

“Two has twenty minutes, all systems nominal.”

J.C. said: “He’s sucking gas. He’s got a bigger jet, more capacity, only one engine, but half the fuel.”

“And two kills,” Patrick shot back. “We’re not concerned about saving fuel here, J.C. I know you’d give every drop of JP-4 we’ve got left to get one good shot at him.”

“Then turn me loose; let’s get to it.”

“I want you to be the fox this time, J.C.,” Patrick said. “I want him on the pursuit.”

“Fine, but open ‘em up this time. Let’s see what the boy wonder over there can really do.”

J.C. had a point. They had really not pushed DreamStar to the edge of the envelope. And if there was anybody who could really force DreamStar to perform, it was J. C. Powell.

“All right, J.C., you got it. But don’t break the bubble …” Patrick lined it out. “This time lead will be the fox. We’re coming up on the southeast corner of the area. Lead will come left heading three-zero-zero toward the center. Two, give us fifteen full seconds — then start your pursuit. Stay heads-up. Lead’s coming left …”

J. C. Powell turned hard left. Patrick had time to grab hold of his handlebars before being squashed into his seat by the turn. J.C. stayed on the northwesterly heading for five seconds, then rolled inverted and pulled the nose earthward, pushing the throttles to full power, aiming the nose directly for Lookout Peak twenty thousand feet below.

Patrick watched as the altimeter readout clicked down taster than he’d ever seen it before. “I swear, Powell, you have got to have some kind of death wish”—Patrick’s attention was drawn to a blinking red warning light near the radar altimeter, which read the distance between the ground and the belly of the jet. “Watch it!”

Powell checked his threat receivers — no signals from anywhere. He began to level off, pointing Cheetah toward a wide cleft in the jagged peaks below. “Colonel, if I stay at high altitude with DreamStar he’ll hose me again. Let’s see how he does in the rocks.” He hit the voice-recognition computer switch— “attack radar standby,” and threw his jet into a screeching right turn, arcing around the rugged peaks. “Fifteen seconds — he should be in his turn toward the northwest by now.” Powell selected a flat valley in the desert, staying as close to the rocks as possible. Patrick stared out the top of the canopy expecting the tops of Cheetah’s twin tails to scrape along the face of those rocks any second.

J.C. rolled out of his steep turn, passing only a few hundred yards from a lone craggy butte. “You’re going to wait down here for him to come after you?”

“Not exactly, sir.” He steered Cheetah into the narrow valley he had selected, set the autopilot, then began searching the skies far overhead. “Wondering why I selected thirty-nine thousand feet back there?”

“It’s a higher altitude … better fuel economy—”

“Contrails.”

Patrick followed J.C.’s pointing finger out the top of the canopy. Far above, they saw a thin white line against the dark blue sky, heading northwest. “You think I never listen to the morning weather briefings?”

“You’re always asleep.”

“I always manage to catch the contrail forecasts. The center of the vapor level was thirty-nine thousand feet. That’s where we left him and that’s where he is.”

Patrick took a firm grip on the handlebars. J.C. had aimed Cheetah for the center of the southern ridge of the Shoshone Mountains, in the center of Dreamland’s southern restricted area, and now was moving the throttles up to full afterburner. Ten seconds later they were at Mach one and building …

Attack radar on … spherical scan … radar off …

James checked in seconds over a half-million cubic miles of airspace for Cheetah. His superconductor technology allowed the power of a standard fighter’s nose radar to be transmitted into an antenna the size and thickness of a playing card so that the antennae could be spread out all around DreamStar’s skin instead of located only in the nose cone. A thousand of such micro-miniature radar arrays made a complete spherical sweep of the sky within two hundred miles of the aircraft. But except for commercial and civilian aircraft outside Dreamland’s restricted airspace, the radar scan came up negative. Cheetah had disappeared!

ANTARES immediately suggested a data link with Dreamland’s powerful ground-based surveillance radar, but James squelched that idea. Although DreamStar could integrate data from a variety of outside sources, he’d been ordered not to use them — and McLanahan could detect the link with his equipment on Cheetah. Never mind: he wouldn’t need outside help to find Cheetah.

A pause as ANTARES weighed alternatives to an outside data-link, then suggested a ground-map scan.

Nothing. The Shoshone Mountain range was bright and prominent directly below, surrounded by dry lakebeds and nonreflecting sand. DreamStar’s high-resolution radar picked out power lines, roads and tiny buildings scattered all across the desert floor. Nothing moving faster than sixty miles an hour anywhere within range.

James shut down the scan. Cheetah was obviously hiding in the Shoshone Mountains somewhere, probably ridge hopping among the rocks, staying in the radar clutter as much as possible. But this was supposed to be an air-to-air attack. Powell was screwing up big-time.

James mentally ordered another spherical radar sweep of the skies. McLanahan would probably direct Powell to climb out of the low-level regime, and then he’d—

ANTARES broke in with its warning: “Radar contact, directly below and climbing.”

ANTARES suggested a roll and a ten-G push-over to an emergency descent. But just as James ordered the maneuver he heard on the interplane channel, “Fox four, Zero-One, three-niner thousand. Underneath you, Ken.” Powell had already started shooting …

What was happening? Why didn’t he see Cheetah coming? The questions brought spikes of pain that shot through his head and reverberated through his body. For the first time that James could remember, DreamStar had no options. The pain intensified as he continued polling the database, hunting for answers—

Abruptly the confusion that had lasted only a few seconds ended as DreamStar’s sensors continued to track Cheetah. Suddenly the pain in James’ head disappeared and he found himself presented with a series of maneuvers.

DreamStar inverted and began a tight descending vertical roll. If Cheetah was in a high-speed climb underneath him, J.C. would be out of airspeed at the top of the climb and would have to go inverted and begin a descent to regain lost airspeed. Now DreamStar had the power advantage. All it had to do was complete the roll and Cheetah should be dead ahead and directly in his gun sights.

But as James hit the bottom of the roll the G-forces reached their peak. Air tubules in the legs of James’ flight suit inflated, which helped force blood back into the upper part of his body, but it wasn’t fast enough. James’ vision went to a gray-out as blood was forced out of his brain, then darkened completely as he lost consciousness.

ANTARES detected the elevated blood pressure and the interruption of theta-alpha. The computer immediately lowered the back of James’ ejection seat so that his head was below heart level to improve blood flow back to the brain. Oxygen shot into his face mask as he fought to regain theta-alpha. With his face mask flooded with oxygen, his breathing was slowed, making him feel light-headed.

It took a few seconds more for James to take control of ANTARES again. He countermanded the computer’s suggestion to raise the seat upright — he would need several more hard turns before he could get within firing range of his adversary and he’d be in less danger of blacking out if the seat-back stayed down. He began a hard seven-G turn back toward Cheetah, but by then he had lost his advantage. Cheetah was in a dive at nearly Mach one.

DreamStar pulled in six miles behind Cheetah, and James tried for a radar lock, but Cheetah executed a vertical scissors and darted away — even though Cheetah did not have DreamStar’s sophisticated high-maneuverabilities, her large foreplanes and temporary speed advantage allowed her to execute such a move. DreamStar easily performed the same inverted vertical scissors to pursue. Cheetah had moved out to nine miles by then, and James ordered the throttle into min-afterburner in the descent to catch up. With the throttles up in the steep descent, the lighter, aerodynamically cleaner DreamStar fighter quickly regained the speed advantage.

Closure rate five hundred knots, ANTARES reported. James “heard” the stream of computer-generated reports as if he was listening to the sound of his own breathing. Range seven miles. Action: High-maneuverability configuration, maintain speed advantage, ANTARES infrared pursuit, deactivate attack radar, laser lock, attack, close to gun range, attack, constant AOA wing mode, maintain gun range, attack. The messages began to repeat, informing him of altitude, closure rate, weapons status, external heating, stress factors, power demands, air-conditioning faults. James accepted ANTARES’ engagement suggestions — the computer had already decided how the battle would be fought several minutes in the future — why not let it go?

Using its infrared tracker and laser rangefinder, ANTARES had predicted the moves Cheetah could make in its present flight attitude and airspeed and had devised an attack for those maneuvers. There were also reversals Cheetah could make, and ANTARES had computed how to defeat them. The final moves of this aerial chess game were now being played. Cheetah was making a hard left turn, but DreamStar had the cutoff angle and the power advantage. DreamStar did not need to snap over in a hard bank to make the kill — her high-maneuverability canards and strake flaps pulled the laser rangefinder onto target and held it there. Cheetah tried another hard turn, this time to the right, but the XF-34’s guns were locked on solid now — Cheetah was just burning up airspeed in each high-G turn. DreamStar was flying “uncoordinated,” sideways and downward at the same time—

Suddenly James heard McLanahan over the interplane channel: “Storm Flight, knock it off, knock it off! Storm Two, pull up!”

Ground-map radar, James immediately ordered. The phased-array radars snapped on … revealing a sheer rock cliff no more than a thousand feet away and straight ahead. Cheetah had flown directly at two tall buttes, diving and banking away just before reaching them. ANTARES faithfully computed the deadly news — DreamStar would impact in exactly eight-tenths of a second.

Which was like eight minutes to the ANTARES computer. James canceled high-maneuverability mode and threw Dream-Star into a hard left bank. DreamStar’s large canards and computer-controlled rudders kept her nose from pushing in the opposite direction in a hard turn, and she slipped between the twin towering buttes. ANTARES reported the data from the ground-mapping radars: DreamStar had missed the right butte by eight feet.

James cleared the left butte and rolled to the right, only to find Cheetah directly in his gunsights less than two miles away. He quickly lined up on him, switched to his twenty-millimeter cannon to activate the gun camera and called, “Fox four, Storm Two, your six-o’clock.”

“1 said knock it off!” McLanahan ordered. “Storm Flight, route formation, station check. Weapons on standby. Move.”

James raised his ejection seat back out of the reclined anti-G setting and activated the radars that would help keep DreamStar in formation with Cheetah. “Two has twelve minutes to joker, all systems nominal.”

“Lead’s in the green, nine minutes,” Powell reported.

“Storm Flight, right turn heading zero-four-three, direct beacon red five at ten thousand feet.” Powell executed the turn, and DreamStar stayed with him in route formation.

“What the hell happened, Ken?” McLanahan said as they rolled out on the new heading. “You passed out of theta-alpha for a few seconds but you pressed the attack anyway. We watched you side-slip behind us right into that butte. You almost got yourself killed and destroyed—”

“I had contact with the ground at all times,” James lied. “I was conscious during the entire attack, except at the bottom of my loop when ANTARES took over. I had clearance between the obstructions.” Another lie — James would not soon forget the rivulets of ice and the lichens he saw growing on the sides of the rock … he was that close to it. If Patrick hadn’t yelled out … “I had the last shot after passing between the buttes,” he insisted, “and I processed the shot. before you called—”

“Save it for the debriefing,” Patrick said, “and the data tapes. Storm Flight, fingertip formation. Prepare for penetration and approach.”

DreamStar and Cheetah were now to demonstrate their landing abilities. Powell redeemed himself for his poor takeoff. Keeping Cheetah in perfect balance, he guided the fighter to a pinpoint landing and stop within five hundred feet — he could have landed Cheetah on an aircraft carrier without the use of a tail hook or arresting cables. But DreamStar’s landing was even better — it was as if the one hundred-thousand-pound fighter was a bee alighting on a flower. The combination of the large canards, mission-adaptive wings in their long-chord, high-lift configuration and thrust-vectored nozzles, all controlled by the fastest “computer” extant — the human brain — and James had DreamStar stopped within four hundred feet of touchdown, a hundred feet better than Cheetah.

Hal Briggs replaced the phone in its cradle and turned to General Elliott, who was watching the landing through binoculars from on top of the portable control tower. “Those Russian birds are still several minutes from their flyby,” he said. “Good thing our guys landed early—”

“The hell it is. They even knew when the test was supposed to terminate. If they had landed on time the satellite would’ve been right there taking pictures and there’d be nothing we could do about it.” He ran his fingers through silver hair that, Briggs noted, seemed to grow thinner every year. He turned toward Briggs. “I want you to pull out all the stops, Major.” The tower controllers as well as Briggs caught Elliott’s ominous tone. “Do whatever you have to do to find the leak on this installation. You have an unlimited budget, unlimited resources, and very little damn time. Search anywhere and everywhere. Go off-base with federal authorities to investigate — I’ll back up whatever you do. I want answers, Briggs. Fast.”

Briggs knew that at least off-base activities needed huge amounts of cooperation, hard to come by, from state and federal law enforcement. He needed some clarification, but now wasn’t the time to ask for it.

Elliott thumbed the microphone on the command frequency. “Storm Flight, taxi without delay to parking. Over.”

“Lead.”

“Two.”

Ken James had been disconnected from his fighter and hoisted out of DreamStar’s cockpit. He was wheeled to an air-conditioned transfer van that drove McLanahan, Powell and him to the project headquarters, where the special flight suit was removed from James’ sweat-soaked body. The two test pilots went to the locker room nearby, said not a word to each other. They were dressing when Patrick McLanahan walked up to them. “Both of you are off flying status as of right now.”

James exploded. “What?” There was panic mixed in with outrage, but it belonged to Maraklov the agent, not to Ken James the pilot. Lately Maraklov had felt his alter ego taking over — this pronouncement jolted him back, some …

“There’s a difference between evaluating the aircraft and pushing the limits to the danger level. You two cross it every time you fly together. I’m grounding you both until I figure out what to do about it.”

“Then give me another chase pilot,” James said quickly. “Canceling all flying isn’t the answer, Colonel.”

“You’re assuming that Powell is the problem,” and he started to walk away.

“There are a dozen guys who can fly Cheetah,” James said behind him. McLanahan turned. “There’s only one who can fly DreamStar. Me.” James realized how this sounded and tried to soft pedal … “The project doesn’t have to suffer, sir. I think we can continue …”

“Listen, hotshot, I’ve got six guys training to fly DreamStar. I’d rather put this project on hold for eight months until they’re ready than risk that machine and this project. You read me?”

“Yes, sir. Sorry …” Six guys, eight months … More of a shock … time was running out …

“Meet me in my office at two o’clock, both of you. The data tapes should be ready to review by then. General Elliott might be interested in what they show.”

Patrick McLanahan was waiting for an elevator up to his office when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned irritably. “Yeah?”

“Charming,” Wendy Tork said. “Next time I’ll do that with a pole.”

He managed a grin and kissed her.

“Long day, Colonel?”

“You could say so.”

“You had an early morning go, didn’t you?”

The elevator arrived, and Wendy cut off the exchange, knowing that Patrick would not talk about his project in an unsecure elevator. She waited until they returned to Patrick’s office and he closed the door. An electronic grid in the walls and floor, she knew, would activate when that door closed, which would offset wiretapping or any other electronic eavesdropping.

He dropped into his chair. “I’ve got two pilots butting heads.”

“I like them both, but I can see both of them being very competitive.”

“At least James comes right out and says it. He’s an excellent pilot, and he’s the only one right now who can fly DreamStar. J.C. sits there putting on an innocent and contrite act, but he’s as big a show-off as James.” He rubbed his eyes. “I can’t afford to lose either one of them, but …”

“What will happen if you transfer either one of them?”

“I can get someone to fly Cheetah — hell, I’ve got enough hours, I could probably fly the thing. If I ground James, the project gets set back six months, maybe more. I told him I have people training on DreamStar. Who can be sure when or if they’ll be ready? I exaggerated some to take him down a bit. Brad Elliott will hit the roof. The security leaks — or what seem like security leaks — are already turning him sour.”

“Are you saying you’ll have to transfer or reassign J.C. if they don’t get along?”

“I suppose. But Ken knows he’s the only guy who can fly DreamStar. That would be like giving him a veto in almost every other matter that comes up during this project from here on. I ended up grounding both of them until I have a chance to talk to the general.”

Wendy smiled. “Eight years ago you were just a captain, responsible only for a radar scope in the belly of a B-52 bomber. Your big worry was your next emergency procedures test. Now, you’re a lieutenant colonel in charge of a hundred men and women and two of the hottest jets there are … We’ll put it all on hold for a few hours. I’m here to take you to lunch. You probably don’t have time to take the helicopter to Nellis, do you? General Elliott has got to have some decent restaurants built out in this desert.”

McLanahan grabbed his flight cap. “We’ve got time to take the Dolphin into Nellis if we hurry. I’m not expected back until—” The desk phone rang. He looked at it, then at Wendy.

“Let’s go.”

She smiled, shook her head. “You’d hate me in the morning.”

He picked it up. “McLanahan … Hi, Sergeant Clinton … The data tapes are ready now? … Yeah, we had some maneuvers that may have overstressed the canards … how bad? All right, I’ll be right down.” He dropped the phone back on its cradle. “I knew it. My two hotshots may have bent DreamStar some. I’ve got to take a look and prepare a report before this afternoon’s meeting.” He circled his desk, gave Wendy a hug and a kiss. “Rain check?”

“Anytime.” Especially on flying days, she reminded herself, dates were always crap shoots. She watched as Patrick hurried off.

“Wendy?”

She turned and found Captain Kenneth James standing behind her. His bright blue eyes sparkled, as usual. He was a head taller than Patrick, less broad-shouldered but still athletically built. They looked at each other for a moment. Be honest, Wendy Tork, she told herself, Ken James is a charmer. Plus he has a magnetism, a sort of masculine grace, and he’s not arrogant or cocky or condescending. He also had this way of making a woman feel special, as if he had been waiting all his life just to say hello to her.

She had met him eighteen months earlier when he first joined the High Tech Advanced Weapons Center at Dreamland. He wasn’t like many of the other jet jockeys in and around Nellis Air Force Base. Getting an assignment to HAWC was the top achievement for any young officer, and most new test pilots seemed not to be able to let you forget it. Not Ken James. He took the time not only to get to know senior officers but noncommissioned officers as well. He seemed just as interested in the engineering and technical parts of the job as the flying. He quickly established himself as the best pilot at HAWC … a scholar of flying and aerospace, not just a participant. Quite a package. And no wonder they had become good friends.

“If you’re looking for the old man …” he paused at the intentional slip, smiling winningly … “I mean, the colonel, he just left.”

“I know.”

Maraklov understood, as everybody did, the special relationship between Wendy Tork and the colonel. Which, of course, was the chief reason for making her his friend. And it was not exactly hard duty. Tall, good figure, brunette with hints of gray, still foxy for a woman going on forty. But be careful, he reminded himself. And helped himself do that by remembering the research on her. A considerable dossier: Wendy Tork, Ph.D., electrical engineering. Chief of DOPY5, the cryptic office symbol of HAWC’s Director of Penetration Aids, Project Y5—the Megafortress Plus, the super-bomber and strategic escort battleship. This woman had developed many of the twenty-first-century electronic jammers used on American military aircraft, including new jammers that could electronically defeat infrared- and laser-guided missiles. She had built a jammer the size of a toaster that could disrupt much of the known electromagnetic spectrum for thirty miles in every direction. Considered a sort of outsider in HAWC because of her former independent contractor status, she tended, except for the colonel, to keep to herself. Scuttlebutt said that started after the mysterious Old Dog mission that she and most of the brass at HAWC were involved with eight years before. It seemed to have affected her more than the others.

In any case, possibilities here, he had decided, for a special source of information. “How about lunch?” he said easily.

“Do you have time? Don’t you have a meeting this afternoon?”

“I think they’d rather not have me at this particular meeting,” he said, pretending embarrassment. “I’m sort of in the doghouse. But it’s my lucky day. I don’t have to be back until late, and I have a pretty lady to share lunch with. If she’ll give me a break.”

For a moment she hesitated, then decided why not … they were, after all, friends.

If there was room on one of the shuttle helicopters that flew hourly to and from Dreamland, it was open for anyone at HAWC to hop a ride for the twenty-minute flight back to the “mainland,” as people from Dreamland called Nellis Air Force Base. But Maraklov had a different plan. When he climbed aboard the Dolphin transport helicopter he went forward and spoke briefly with the crew. Then as the helicopter touched down on the broiling tarmac at Nellis, Ken touched Wendy’s arm as she began to unbuckle her seat belt.

“We’re not there yet,” was all he said.

The helicopter lifted off once again and sped northwest. Ten minutes later it touched down on another military-looking airfield. As they left the chopper Wendy noticed the helicopter landing pad had been painted with a stylized Indian thunderbird symbol.

“What’s this?”

“One of the best-kept secrets in the Air Force,” he told her. “Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field. This is where the Air Force Aerial Demonstration Team, the Thunderbirds, work and practice even though the unit is based out at Nellis. You know, the Thunderbirds do a lot of demonstrations for the brass and foreign dignitaries here — not to mention that the Thunderbird pilots get the best of everything, being on the road so much — so Indian Springs is an oasis for them out in the middle of nowhere. The base is open to all military personnel, but that’s not widely advertised. I knew the Thunderbirds were gone/ so I asked the Dolphin pilot to get us permission to land.”

They walked past immaculately groomed desert landscaped yards and freshly painted buildings to a Spanish-style stucco building with red tile veranda and cane-ceiling fans. They were seated at a table on the veranda.

“I’ve been coming to this area for eight years,” Wendy said, “and I’ve been at HAWC for three years, and I never knew about this, or only vaguely if at all. Patrick and I are both so busy …”

He nodded. “The Dolphin pilot enacts a toll for side trips — I think he’s got a Chris Craft on Lake Mead that needs refinishing. Guess who’ll get asked to help.”

“Well, it’s delightful and I’m glad we came.”

“You’ll have to tell Patrick about it, if he doesn’t know.”

“Believe me, I will. I know how important his project is to him, to all of you, but I do wish he’d slow down just a little. Actually I don’t know if he’d take advantage of a place like this even if he knew about it.”

“Sure he would … but he is a busy man.”

Over lunch he said, “Most people here thought you two would be married by now. You’ve known each other for seven years? Eight?”

“Eight,” Wendy said. “Ever since the Old Dog flight … God, has it been that long?”

“That must have been some mission,” Ken said. “I’ve heard about it, of course, but mostly scuttlebutt. I’d like to get the whole story from you someday.”

She only nodded, smiling briefly.

“Well, the colonel joined HAWC a short time after that project … ended. What about you? You didn’t join HAWC until recently, a little before I came here.”

“I still had a civilian position in my own laboratory. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t just leave or get reassigned to Dreamland. I started to work more closely with General Brad Elliott and his group, but my home base was still in Palmdale. I visited every chance I could, but Patrick and I were still apart. When they announced the reactivation of the Old Dog project 1 saw my chance and got assigned to HAWC permanently. What I didn’t expect was that Patrick was going to shoot up like he did under General Elliott. Don’t misunderstand. I knew Patrick was good, very good, but when I first met him he was, believe it or not, thinking about leaving the Air Force and working his family’s business in Sacramento. It’s hard to get promoted by just being the best navigator around. And that’s all I thought he wanted to be. I was wrong. In two years he went from being just another non-technical test-flight crewmember to a project director. He got promoted so fast you’d think there was a time warp. One year after becoming director of his first program he was made chief of a full-blown flight-test development program with state-of-the-art hardware. In another five or six years he’ll have his first star and probably be chief of HAWC soon after.” Through most of this she’d been looking down into her napkin. Now she looked up abruptly. “God, if I sound like I’m complaining, I’m not. Or I don’t mean to. Just for the record, I happen to love McLanahan even more than I respect him … Okay, enough of me, what about you? There’s an army of ladies in Vegas waiting to snag someone like you. When are you going to take the fall?”

He laughed. “The right woman is hard to find, even in the sun belt.”

“But you’re having a good time looking, right?”

“I confess … I’m not suffering.” It had gone well, very well, he thought.

The waiter reappeared with the check and a message.

“Helicopter’s on its way,” he said. “We should head back.”

As they waited on the helicopter landing pad a few minutes later, Wendy took a deep breath of warm yucca-scented desert air and looked out at the mountains surrounding the tiny base. “I enjoyed it, Ken. The lunch and the talk. I haven’t gone on like this for a long time. Thanks.”

“We’ll do it again some time.”

“I don’t want you to spend too many weekends refinishing some chopper pilot’s boat.”

“Believe me,” he said, watching her, “it’s worth it.”

Yes, she could be another source of information … on the new ECM gear, for example.