Revolution

Prelude: Night Shivers

Black smoke enveloped the front of the Mega-fortress, shrouding the aircraft in darkness. Wind howled through the open escape hatches.

Lt. Colonel Tecumseh "Dog" Bastian was alone on the flight deck. The rest of the crew had already ejected. Now it was too late for him to get out.

The plane's electronic controls had been fried by an electromagnetic pulse. Dog struggled to control it using the sluggish hydraulic backups. The smoke was so thick he couldn't even see the control panel immediately in front of him.

He pulled back on the stick, but the aircraft didn't respond. Instead, the right wing began tipping upward, threatening to throw the plane into a spin. Dog fought against it, struggling with the controls. Then suddenly the blackness cleared and he could see the aircraft carrier below.

It was on fire, but was going to still launch a plane.

The plane he had to stop.

He leaned on the stick, trying to muscle the nose of his aircraft toward his target. He was moving at over five hundred knots, and he was low, through a thousand feet, yet there was time to see each detail — the crew fueling the airplane, the sailors on the deck, the destroyer in the distance….

I'm going to crash, he thought. This is it.

Colonel Bastian rolled over onto his back in the bed, half awake, half still in the dream. His legs felt as if they had immense weights on them, pinned to earth by his oppressive unconscious.

The dream had been a nightmare, but it was more memory than invention. Dog had barely survived a similar encounter with the Chinese navy a week before. He'd been moments away from crashing into a carrier's flight deck to prevent the launch of a plane with a nuclear bomb when the Chinese finally stood down. He'd been flying the Megafortress on hydraulics, just like in the dream, and nearly lost control before pulling up so close he could have grabbed the ship's arrestor cables if he'd had the gear.

But the dream wasn't a perfect recreation of the incident either. It was better in some ways — less scary, not more. The billowing black smoke hadn't gotten in his way. There'd been antiaircraft fire — a lot of it. He couldn't see any people on the flight deck. And time certainly hadn't slowed down.

No, if anything, time had moved considerably faster than normal. Things had crowded together as he pushed the plane toward what he was sure would be his last moment.

But there was one element of the dream that was far darker than reality. He hadn't felt the fear he felt now, sitting up on the bed. He hadn't been afraid at all — he'd been too focused to be afraid, too consumed by his duty.

If Dog's girlfriend, Jennifer Gleason, had been here with him, he would probably have rolled next to her and fallen back to sleep, relaxed by her warmth. But she was on the other side of the country, at a hospital in New York, recovering from an operation on her kneecap. There was nothing to keep him in bed now, not warmth, not habit — Dog got up, flexing his shoulders against the stiffness of the night. The shadows of the room played tricks on his eyes, and he thought for a second that Jennifer was here after all. He saw the curve of her hip, the swell of her breast as she stood on the threshold. But the shadows gave way to solid objects: her robe hanging over his on the hanger behind the door.

Dog pulled on his pants, then two sweatshirts, grabbed his boots and stepped outside in his socks.

The cold desert air smacked his face as he leaned up against the wall of the house to put on his boots. It was good to feel cold — he'd been in the tropics and the Middle East so long he forgot what fifty degrees felt like, let alone 34 degrees.

Had it been a little later, Dog might have gone for a run. But it was too early for that, and besides, he wanted to walk, not run. Something about walking helped make his brain work.

He took short, easy steps up the path. By habit, he turned right, heading for the Taj Mahal — the unofficial name of Dreamland's command building — most of which was underground. After two steps he stopped, realizing he didn't want to go in that direction.

Dog no longer had an office at the Taj. In fact, he had no office at all, anywhere. A week ago he'd been commander of Dreamland, responsible not just for the base and its people, but for its many missions and, ultimately, its myriad programs. Now he was just a lieutenant colonel looking for a job, replaced as commander by a highly connected major general, Terrill Samson. The general had been assigned to bring Dreamland back into the fold of the regular military, and wanted no part of Tecumseh "Dog" Bastian, a man the brass thought of as a cowboy, at best. So he was now a knight without portfolio — not quite as bad as a man without a country, but close.

The cold air nipped at him. Dog pulled the hood on his sweatshirt over his head and tightened the strings to choke off the chill as he headed in the direction of the old boneyard— the graveyard of experiments past, where old aircraft came to sit out their remaining days, oxidizing in the sun. The first he saw was his favorite — an F-105 Thunderchief, which had most likely flown in Vietnam, surviving untold trials before safely returning its pilot home.

He'd never flown a Thud, but his first squadron commander had, and he'd spent long hours listening as Pappy talked about riding the Thunderchief up and down the Ho Chi Ming trail, "bombing the bejesus out of the commie rice eaters, and getting nothing but SA-2s up our tail pipes for thanks."

Dog stopped and smiled, thinking of Pappy. The funny thing was, he couldn't remember his real name.

Maybe even funnier — they called him Pappy because to the young bucks in the squadron, their leader was a grizzled old coot, one step from the retirement home.

Truth was, Pappy couldn't have been a day past forty. That didn't seem so very old to him anymore.

Amused by the turn his thoughts had taken, Dog laughed at himself, then continued walking.