Sky Masters

2

With his boyish face, long, gangly arms and legs, his baseball cap, and his thirty-two-ounce squeeze bottle of Pepsi-Cola — he drank five such bottles a day yet was still as skinny as a rail — Jonathan Colin Masters resembled a kid at a Saturday afternoon ball game. He had bright-green eyes and short brown hair — luckily, the baseball cap hid Masters’ hair, or else his stubborn cowlicks would have made him appear even younger, almost adolescent, to the range officers and technicians standing nearby.

Masters, his assistants and technicians, and a handful of Air Force and Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency (DARPA) officials were on board a converted DC-airliner, forty-five thousand feet over the White Sands Missile Test Range in south-central New Mexico. Unlike the military and Pentagon officials, who were poring over checklists, notes, and schematics, Masters had his feet up on a raised track in the cargo section of the massive airliner, sipping his cola and smiling like a kid who was at the circus for the first time.

“The winds are kicking up again, Doctor Masters,” U.S. Air Force Colonel Ralph Foch said to Masters, his voice one of concern…

Masters wordlessly tipped his soda bottle at the Air Force range safety officer and reached to his control console, punched in instructions to the computer, and studied the screen. “Carrier aircraft has compensated for the winds, and ALARM has acknowledged the change,” Masters reported. “We got it covered, Ralph.”

Colonel Ralph Foch wasn’t mollified, and being called “Ralph” by a man — no, a kid — twenty years his junior didn’t help. “The one-hundred-millibar wind patterns are approaching the second-stage ‘Q’ limits, Doctor,” Foch said irritably. “That’s the third increase over the forecast we’ve seen in the past two hours. We should consider aborting the flight.”

Masters glanced over his shoulder at Foch and smiled a dimpled, toothy smile. “ALARM compensated OK, Ralph,” Masters repeated. “No need to abort.”

“But we’re on the edge of the envelope as it is,” Colonel Foch reminded him.

“The edge of your envelope, Ralph,” Masters said. He got to his feet, walked a few steps aft, and patted the nose of a huge, torpedo-shaped object sitting on its launch rail. “You established your flight parameters based on data I provided, and you naturally made your parameters more restrictive. ALARM here knows its limits and it still says go. So we go.”

“Doctor Masters, as the range safety officer I’m here to insure a safe launch for both the ground and the air crews. My parameters are established to—”

“Colonel Foch, if you want to abort the mission, say the word,” Masters said calmly, barely suppressing a casual burp. “The Navy doesn’t get their relay hookup satellites on the air until tomorrow, you can spend the night at the Blytheville, Arkansas, Holiday Inn again, and I can bill DARPA another one hundred thousand dollars for gas. It’s your decision.”

“I’m merely expressing my concern about the winds at altitude, Doctor Masters…”

“And I replied to your concerns,” Masters said with a smile. “My little baby here says it’s a go. Unless we fly somewhere else to launch, away from the jet stream…”

“DARPA is very specific about the launch area, Doctor. These satellites are important to the Navy. They want to monitor the booster’s progress throughout the flight. The launch must be over the White Sands range.”

“Fine. Then we continue to monitor the winds and let the computers do their jobs. If they can’t properly compensate without going outside the range, we turn around on the racetrack and try again. If we go outside the launch window, we abort. Fair enough?”

Foch could do nothing but nod in agreement. This launch was important to both the Navy and Air Force, and he wasn’t prepared to issue a launch abort unilaterally.

The object called ALARM that Masters so lovingly regarded was the Air Launched Alert Response Missile; there were two of the huge missiles on board the DC-10 that morning. ALARM was a four-stage space booster designed to place up to three-quarter-ton payloads in low-to-medium Earth orbit by launching the booster from the cargo hold of an aircraft — in effect, the DC-10 was the ALARM booster’s first stage, with the other three stages provided by powerful solid-fuel rockets on the missile itself.

The ALARM missile had a long, slender, one-piece wing that swiveled out from its stowed position along the missile’s fuselage after launch. The wing would supply lift and increase the effectiveness of the solid rocket motors while the booster was in the atmosphere, which greatly increased the power and payload capability of the booster. An ALARM booster could carry as much as fifteen hundred pounds in its ten-foot-long, forty-inch-diameter payload bay.

On today’s mission, each of Masters’ ALARM boosters carried four small two-hundred-pound communications satellites, which Jon Masters, in his own inimitable way, called NIRTSats — “Need It Right This Second” satellites. Unlike more conventional satellites, which weighed hundreds or even thousands of pounds, were placed in high geosynchronous orbits almost twenty-three thousand miles above the Equator, and could carry dozens of communications channels, NIRTSats were small, lightweight satellites which carried only a few communications channels and were placed in low, one-hundred- to-one-thousand-mile orbits. Unlike geosynchronous satellites, which orbited the Earth once per day and therefore appeared to be stationary over the Equator, NIRTSats orbited the Earth once every ninety to three hundred minutes, which meant that usually more than one satellite had to be launched to cover a particular area.

But a NIRTSat cost less than one-fiftieth the price of a full-sized satellite, and it cost less to insure and launch as well. Even with a constellation of four NIRTSats, a customer with a need for satellite communications could get it for less than one-third the price of buying “air time” on an existing satellite. A single ALARM booster launch, which cost only ten million dollars from start to finish, could give a customer instant global communications capability from anywhere in the world — and it took only a few days to get the system in place, instead of the months or even years it took for conventional launches. NIRTSats could be repositioned anywhere in orbit if requirements changed, and Masters had even devised a way to recover a NIRTSat intact and reuse it, which saved the customer even more money.

Masters’ customer this day was, as it usually was, the Department of Defense, which was why all the military observers were on hand. Masters was to place four NIRTSats in a four-hundred-mile-high polar orbit over the western Pacific to provide the Navy and Air Force with specialized, dedicated voice, data, air-traffic control, and video communications between ships, aircraft, and land-based controllers. With the NIRTSat constellation in place, the Navy’s Seventh Fleet headquarters and the Air Force’s Pacific Air Force headquarters could instantly talk with and find the precise locations of every ship and aircraft on the network. Coupled with the military’s Global Positioning System satellite navigation system, NIRTSats would continually transmit flight or sailing data on each aircraft or vessel to their respective headquarters, although the vessels might be far outside radio range. The second ALARM booster carried another four NIRTSat satellites and was aboard as a backup if the first launch failed.

Jon Masters’ cocky attitude toward this important launch made Colonel Foch very uncomfortable. But, he thought, the little snot had every reason to feel cocky — in two years of testing and over two dozen launches, not one ALARM booster had ever failed to do its thing, and not one NIRTSat had ever failed to function. It was, Foch had to admit, quite a testament to the genius of Jonathan Colin Masters. Worse, the bastard was so young. Boy genius was an understatement.

When Jon Masters was barely in grade school in Manchester, New Hampshire, his first-grade teachers showed Jon’s parents a one-hundred-page treatise on the feasibility of a manned lunar landing, written by a youngster who had only learned to write a few months earlier. When asked about the essay, Jon sat his parents down and explained all the problems inherent in launching a rocket to the moon and returning it safely back to Earth — and the Apollo space program had just gotten under way, with the first lunar landing still three years away.

It didn’t take Jon’s parents a blink of an eye to figure out what to do next: he was enrolled in a private high school, which he completed three years later at age ten. He enrolled at Dartmouth College and received a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering at age thirteen. After receiving a master’s degree in mathematics from Dartmouth, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and after a tumultuous five years finally earned a doctorate in engineering at the age of twenty.

The first love of Masters’ life was and always had been NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and in 1981 he went to work for the space agency immediately after leaving MIT. The Shuttle Transportation System, or STS, program was just heating up by then, and Jon Masters was an integral part of the development of special applications that could take advantage of this new flying workhorse. Almost every satellite and delivery subsystem developed for the shuttle between 1982 and 1985 was at least partially designed by Jonathan Masters.

But, even as the shuttle transportation system was gearing up for more launches per year and more ambitious projects, including the space station, Jon Masters saw a weakness. It was an obvious problem that was creeping into the successful STS program — the spacecraft were accumulating a lot of miles, with even more miles slated for them each year, and no more orbiters were being built. When the success of the shuttle program became obvious, Masters thought, NASA should have had one new orbiter per year rolling off the assembly lines, plus upgraded solid-rocket boosters and avionics. But they had none.

Jon Masters took an active interest in the numerous small companies that built small space boosters for private and commercial applications. In 1984, at age twenty-four, he resigned from NASA and accepted a seat on the board of directors of Sky Sciences, Inc., a small Tennessee-based commercial space booster company that sometimes subcontracted work for the fledgling Strategic Defense Intiative Organization, the federal research and development team tasked with devising an intercontinental ballistic missile defense system. Soon afterward he became vice president in charge of research for the small company. Masters’ presence on the board gave the company a shot of optimism — and a new line of credit — that allowed it to stay fiscally afloat.

With the NASA shuttles grounded indefinitely following the Challenger disaster in 1986, expendable boosters were quickly back in vogue. While NASA was refurbishing old Titan ICBM rockets for satellite booster duty and bringing back the Delta line of heavy boosters, in 1988 Jon Masters, now the twenty-eight-year-old chairman of the board and new president of Sky Sciences, soon renamed Sky Masters, Inc., announced that he had developed a new low-cost space booster that was small and easy to transport and operate. Called SCARAB (Small Containerized Air Relocatable Alert Booster), it was a ground-launched rocket that could be hauled aboard a Boeing 747 or military cargo plane, set up, and launched from almost anywhere in a matter of days or even hours. SCARAB restored NASA and the military’s ability to launch satellites into Earth orbit on short notice.

His next project was a booster system similar to SCARAB but even more flexible and responsive. Although SCARAB could place a two-thousand-pound payload into low Earth orbit from almost anywhere on Earth, it still needed a runway for the two cargo aircraft that carried the rocket and the ground-launch equipment, an extensive ground-support contingent, and at least fifteen hours’ worth of work to erect the launch structures and get the rocket ready to fly. In several practice tests, Masters needed no more than thirty hours from initial notification and delivery of the payload to T minus zero. But he wanted to do better.

That was when ALARM was born. ALARM was merely a SCARAB booster downsized to fit in a transport plane and fitted with wings. It used the launch aircraft as its first-stage booster, and it used lift from its scissor-action wings to help increase the efficiency of the smaller first- and second-stage boosters. Two ALARM boosters could be standing by on board the carrier aircraft; they would only need to bring the payloads on board and take off. With aerial refueling, the ALARM carrier aircraft could stay aloft for days, traversing the country or even partly around the world, ready to launch the boosters.

Masters had developed several different payloads for his small air-launched boosters. Along with the communications satellites, he had developed a small satellite that could take composite radar, infrared, and telescopic visual “photos” of the Earth, and the resulting image was dozens of times more detailed than standard visual photos. The images could be digitized and transmitted to terminals all over the world via his small communications satellites, giving commanders real-time reconnaissance and intelligence information. Combined with powerful computers, users from the Pentagon or White House to individual aircrew members on board strike aircraft could conduct their own sophisticated photo intelligence, plan and replan missions, and assess bomb damage almost instantaneously.

With several different payloads on board, the flexibility of the ALARM system was unparalleled. A communications-satellite launch could immediately change to a satellite-retrieval mission or a reconnaissance-satellite mission, or even a strike mission. A single ALARM carrier aircraft could become as important a national asset as Cape Canaveral.

“Fifteen minutes to launch window one,” Masters’ launch control officer, Helen Kaddiri, announced. Kaddiri was the chief of Masters’ operations staff and the senior launch-control officer, in charge of monitoring all flight systems throughout each mission. In her early forties, exotically attractive, she’d been born and raised in Calcutta. She and her parents immigrated to the United States when she was twelve and she changed her name from Helenika to Helen. She was a completely career-minded scientist who sometimes found it very frustrating working for someone like Jon Masters.

She regarded Masters warily with her dark, beautiful, almond-shaped eyes as he studied the command console. Masters was so relaxed and laid-back that all the uptight techno-types he worked with, especially those developing new space technologies, got really rankled — herself included. Maybe it was because Masters seemed to treat everyone and everything the same… like work was one big beach party.

The government officials they dealt with almost always shuddered when working with Masters. Even socializing with him was a strain. Kaddiri thought that every time they got a new government contract was a matter of luck. If it weren’t for his genius…

“Fourteen minutes to launch window one,” she said.

“Thanks, Helen,” Jon replied. He pushed his baseball cap up higher on his forehead, which made him look even younger — like “Beaver” Cleaver. “Let’s get Roosevelt-One in position and ready.”

Kaddiri grimaced at another of Masters’ quirks — he named his boosters, not just numbered them. He usually named them after American presidents or Hollywood actors or actresses. Helen thought that if Jon had a dog, he would probably number it instead.

Jon swung his headset microphone to his lips: “Crew, Roosevelt-1 is moving stage center. Stand by.”

The interior of Masters’ converted DC-10 was arranged much like the firing mechanism of a rifle. Like a cartridge magazine, the two boosters were stored side by side in the forward section of the one-hundred-twenty-feet-long, thirty-foot-wide cargo bay, which afforded plenty of room to move around the fifty-feet-long, four-foot-diameter rockets and their stabilizers. Forward of the storage area was the control center, with all of the booster monitoring and control systems, and forward of the control room was a pressure hatch which led to the flight deck — for safety’s sake, the flight deck was sealed from the cargo section so any pressurization malfunctions in the cargo end would not prevent the flight crew from safely recovering the plane.

The back fifty feet of the cargo hold was occupied by a large cylindrical chamber resembling the breech end of a shotgun, composed of heavy steel and aluminum with numerous thick Plexiglas viewports all around it. The boosters would roll down a track in the center of the cargo hold into the chamber, and the chamber would be sealed from the rest of the aircraft. Just prior to launch, the chamber would be depressurized before opening the “bomb-bay” doors. With this system, the entire cargo section of the aircraft did not have to be depressurized before launch. Floodlights and high-speed video cameras inside the launch chamber and outside the DC-10 launch plane were ready to photograph the entire launch sequence.

With two of Kaddiri’s assistants with flashlights watching on either side, the first forty-three-thousand-pound space booster began rolling on its tracks toward the center of the cabin. The crew, especially the cockpit crew of two pilots and engineer, had to be notified whenever one of these behemoth rockets was being moved. Whenever they moved a rocket, the flight engineer had to begin transferring fuel to the side where the booster was moved to keep the launch aircraft stable. The booster moved about ten feet per minute, which was the same speed that a similar weight in jet fuel could be transferred from body tanks to the corresponding wing tanks.

In two minutes the booster was in position in the center of the launch cabin, and it began its slow journey aft into the launch chamber. This time, to ensure longitudinal stability as the twenty-one-ton rocket moved aft, a large steel drum filled with eight thousand gallons of jet fuel in the belowdeck cargo section would slowly move forward as the booster moved aft, which would help to keep the aircraft stable; after the booster was launched, the drum would quickly move aft to balance the plane.

It took much longer for the booster to make its way aft, but it was finally wheeled into position in the chamber and the heavy steel hatch closed. Once in place, retractable clamps held the booster in place over the bomb-bay doors. “Roosevelt-One in position,” Kaddiri called out as she peered through the observation ports in the chamber. “Flight deck, confirm lateral and longitudinal trim.”

“Aircraft trim nominal,” the flight engineer reported a few seconds later. “Standing by.”

“Roger. Confirm hatch closed and locked.”

Masters checked the console readouts. “Launch-chamber hatch closed, locked, green lights on.”

“Engineer cross-check good, green lights on,” the flight engineer reported after checking his readouts from the flight deck.

Kaddiri reached into a green canvas bag slung over her shoulder into a portable oxygen pack and withdrew an oxygen mask, checked the hose and regulator, and then clicked the mask’s built-in wireless microphone on. Her assistants in the aft end of the DC-10 did the same; Masters and Foch had already donned their masks. “Oxygen On and Normal,” she said. She got thumbs-up from her assistants after they checked their masks, then said, “Ready to depressurize launch chamber.”

Masters got a thumbs-up from Foch, then replied, “Oxygen On and Normal at the control console.” He called up the cargo-section pressurization readout and displayed it in big numerals on a monitor screen so both he and Foch could read them easily — two sets of eyes were always better than one. “Launch chamber depressurizing — now.”

For all that cross-checking and preparation, it was quite unspectacular. In two minutes the launch chamber was depressurized and the cargo-bay pressure was stable. After monitoring it for another minute to check for slow leaks, Masters removed his mask and radioed, “Cargo-section pressure checks good, launch chamber fully depressurized, no leaks.” The computer would continue to monitor the cabin pressure and warn the crew of any changes. Masters and everyone else kept their masks dangling from their necks… just in case.

“Data-link check.” Masters checked to be sure that the booster was still exchanging information with the launch computers. The check was all automatic, but it still took several long moments. Finally: “Data connection nominal. Two minutes to launch window.” Masters turned to Colonel Foch. “We need final range clearance, Colonel.”

Foch was staring intently at one of the screens on the console, which was displaying atmospheric data relayed from the White Sands Missile Range headquarters through their extensive sensor network. “I show the winds at the maximum Q limits, Doctor Masters,” he said. “We should abort.”

“Roosevelt says he’s a go,” Masters replied, ignoring the warning and checking the readouts again. “Let’s proceed.” Jon looked at Kaddiri as he hit the intercom button. “Helen?”

She removed her oxygen mask as she walked back to the command console. “It’s pretty risky, Jon.”

“Helen, ‘pretty risky’ is not a ‘no.’ Unless I hear a definite no, I’d say we proceed.”

Foch cleared his throat. “Doctor, it seems to me you’re taking a big chance here.” He glanced at Kaddiri, expecting a bit more support from someone who obviously wasn’t sure of what Masters was doing, but he got nothing but a blank, noncommittal expression. “You’re wasting one of your boosters just to prove something. This isn’t a wartime scenario…”

“Colonel, this might not be a war we’re fighting, but to me it’s nothing less than an all-out battle,” Masters said. “I have to prove to my customers, my stockholders, my board of directors, and to the rest of the country that the ALARM system can deliver its payload on time, on target.” He turned to Foch, and Kaddiri could see a very uncharacteristic hardness in Masters’ young face. “I programmed these boosters with reliability in mind — reliability to deliver as promised, and reliability to do the mission in conditions such as this.”

Foch leaned forward and spoke directly at Masters in a low voice. “You don’t have to tell me all this, Doctor. I know what you want. You get paid if this thing gets launched. My flight parameters insure both safety for ground personnel and reliability of the launch itself. Yours only covers the launch. My question is, do you really care what happens after that? I think you care more about your business than the results of this mission.”

Masters glared at him. He whipped off his baseball cap and stabbed at Foch, punctuating each sentence: “Listen, Ralph, that’s my name on that booster, my name on those satellites, my name all over this project. If it doesn’t launch, I take the heat. If it doesn’t fly, I take the heat. If it doesn’t deliver four healthy satellites in their proper orbits, I take the heat.

“Now you might think you know my contracts, Ralph. You’re right — I do get paid if Roosevelt-One is launched. I get paid if we bring it back without launching it, too. I’ve already gotten deposits for the next six launches, and I’ve already received progress payments for the next ten boosters. But you don’t know shit about my business, buddy. I’ve got a dozen ways to fail, and each one can put me out of business faster than you can take a pee. I do care about that. And still I say, we launch. Now if you have any objections, say it and we’ll abort. Otherwise issue range clearance, sit back, and watch the fireworks.”

Helen Kaddiri was surprised. She’d never seen Jon so wound up. He was right about the pressure on him and the company — there were more than a dozen ways to fail. Friendly and unfriendly suitors were waiting to snap up the company. The aerospace sector had fared very poorly in the recent U.S. economic mini-recession, and it was worsened by the declining outlook on all defense-industry stocks with the advent of glasnost, perestroika, the opening of Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany. Sky Masters, Inc., had to indeed prove itself on each flight.

But Jon Masters had always let the pressure roll off his back. He paid lip service to the concerns of his board of directors and partners, and treated military experts like Foch and scientists like Kaddiri as part of his road show. He listened only to those who agreed with him. Sometimes he seemed too busy having a good time to see the danger in what he was doing.

Colonel Ralph Foch clearly was not having a good time. He turned away from Masters and checked the data readouts being transmitted to Masters’ launch aircraft from the White Sands Missile Test Range; the data was a collection of sensor readings, meteorological-balloon measurements, and satellite observations about conditions both in the atmosphere and in the region of space that the four NIRTSats would travel. Foch checked several screens of data with a checklist and binders of computer models devised for this launch, then compared the information with corrective actions being reported by Masters’ launch aircraft as well as the data from the ALARM booster itself. Since the launch was, in effect, the ALARM booster’s first stage, the rocket was already “flying” the mission — issuing corrections to the jet’s flight crew, updating its position, and continually plotting its new route of flight — while still within the cargo bay of the converted DC-10.

“You’re right on the borderline, Doctor Masters,” Foch finally said. “But you’re still within the safety margin. Pending final clearance from White Sands, you’re cleared to launch.” Foch swung his headset microphone in place and made the radio call to the missile-range headquarters, recommending clearance to launch. With airborne clearance received, the ground range safety headquarters made a last-minute sweep of the range, alerted Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center to assist in keeping aircraft out of the area, then issued final range clearance.

Masters grinned at Helen. “You’ve got the con, Helen.” He liked to use nautical terms like “con” although Masters had never been near a naval vessel. “Initiate launch sequence.”

“Crew stand by for launch sequence,” Kaddiri sighed over interphone as Masters made his way aft with the two launch technicians. Kaddiri began to read off the fifty-one-item checklist steps, most of which were simply verifying that the computer was reporting the proper readings and was progressing smoothly, with no fault reports. The automatic countdown stopped on step 45, “Final Launch Clearance, Crew Notified,” at T minus sixty seconds, where the computer initiated an automatic countdown hold and transferred control back to Kaddiri. “T minus sixty second hold,” she announced. “Flight controls visually inspected and checked in manual mode.”

Jon Masters liked to accomplish this last check himself instead of sitting up on the launch-control console — it was his last look at each missile before sending it out into the world, like a parent dressing the child before sending him off for the first time to kindergarten.

Both launch officers and Masters checked the long, slender scissor wings and vertical and horizontal stabilizers on the tailplane. When they reported OK, Kaddiri activated the flight-control self-test system. The scissor wings swiveled out two feet until several inches of the wingtips were visible, and the rudder and stabilators on the tailplane jumped back and forth in a pre-programmed test sequence.

“Self-test in progress,” Masters called out. “X-wing to fifteen-degree position, left wingtip right… rudder right… rudder center… rudder left… left stab up… center… down… center… right stab up… center… down… center.”

The test lasted only ten seconds. Kaddiri canceled the self-test, then manually set the booster to launch configuration. The wings swiveled back to he along the top of the booster’s fuselage. “Verifying flight-control settings for launch,” Masters called out. “X-wing centered. Rudder centered. Stabilators set to trailing-edge down position.” With the horizontal stabilizers in the trailing-edge down position, the nose of the ALARM booster would dive down and away from the DC-10 after launch, minimizing the risk of collision.

“T minus sixty countdown hold checklist complete,”

Kaddiri reported. She checked the navigational readouts. “On course as directed by Roosevelt-One, time remaining in launch window one, six minutes fourteen seconds.” By then Jon Masters had walked up beside her and had taken his seat again, taking a big swig from a squeeze bottle.

“Resume the countdown,” Masters said, watching the TV monitors on the console. As he spoke, the pressure-secure bay doors on the lower fuselage snapped open, revealing a light-gray cloud deck a few thousand feet below. Other cameras mounted on the DC-10’s belly, tail, and wingtips showed the gaping forty-foot hatch wide open, with the ALARM booster suspended in the center of the dark rectangle. “Doors open. Thirty seconds to go…”

Those thirty seconds seemed to take hours to pass. Masters was about to call to Helen to ask if there was a problem when she started counting: “Stand by for launch… five… four… three… two… one… release!”

It was a strange sensation, a strange sight. The ALARM booster just seemed to shrink in size as it fell out of the launch chamber — it continued to fly directly underneath the open doors as if it were frozen in place. The doors stayed open long enough so that Jon could see the X-wing begin to move slightly to provide a bit of stability as it cruised along. The DC-10’s tail heeled upward as the twenty-one-ton rocket dropped away — it would take a minute for the movable counterweight tank to rebalance the plane. The crew members in the cargo section held on firmly to handholds in the ceiling or bulkheads as their bodies were pressed to the floor.

“Rocket away, rocket away,” Helen called out. Immediately, the DC-10 began a 30-degree bank turn to the left, and Roosevelt-1 was lost from the bomb-bay camera. Helen switched to a wingtip camera to monitor the motor firing.

“We’re clear from booster’s flight path,” Kaddiri called out. “Coming up on first-stage ignition… ready, ready… now.”

Like a giant stick of chalk drawing a fat white-yellow line across the sky, the first-stage motor of the ALARM booster ignited, and the rocket leaped ahead of the DC-10 in a blur of motion. When the rocket was about a mile away, the X-wing scissored out until the wing was almost perpendicular to the rocket’s fuselage, and the ALARM booster reared its nose upward and began to climb. Nineteen seconds after launch, the booster was traveling almost twice the speed of sound and had recrossed its launch altitude as the wing generated lift. Seconds later, the rocket was lost from view, traveling too fast for the high-speed cameras to follow.

“T plus thirty seconds, Roosevelt-One on course, all systems normal, passing one-twenty-K altitude, velocity passing Mach three,” Kaddiri reported.

“Launch-chamber doors closed, chamber repressurized,” one of the techs reported. “Ready to reload.” They were in no hurry to load Roosevelt-Two into position on this mission, but Masters liked to practice rapid-fire procedures to demonstrate that a multiple ALARM launch within a single launch window was possible.

“T plus sixty seconds, fifteen seconds to first-stage burn-out,” Kaddiri reported. “Altitude one-eighty K, passing Mach six, pitch angle thirty degrees. All systems nominal.”

Using the scissor wings to augment the motor’s thrust with lift, the booster climbed quickly through the atmosphere. As the air started to thin and less lift was being generated by the wings, they scissored back closer and closer to the booster’s fuselage until, just before first-stage motor burnout, the wings were fully retracted back along the body of the rocket. Seventy-six seconds after ignition, the first-stage motor burned out and the rear half of the fifty-feet-long booster, carrying the rear tailplane and the scissor wings, separated from the rest of the booster. The rocket was at the very edge of space, nearly 250,000 feet above Earth. Nine seconds later, the second-stage motor ignited, sending the booster streaking into space.

The first-stage section began its controlled tumble to Earth, and four recovery parachutes opened at sixty thousand feet above ground. A specially equipped Air Force C-130 cargo plane would snag the parachute in midair and reel the first-stage booster in somewhere over the northern section of the White Sands Missile Test Range. This recovery procedure would allow them to use the ALARM booster system anywhere in the world without hazard to people on the ground, even near heavily populated areas. The second- and third-stage motor sections would re-enter the atmosphere from space and burn up.

“Good second-stage ignition,” Kaddiri reported. “Altitude passing three hundred forty K, velocity passing Mach eleven, on course.” She turned to Foch with a look of concern, then at Masters. “Second-stage nozzle reports a gim-bal-limit fault, Jon. It might have overcorrected for winds at altitude and sustained some damage.”

Masters had a stopwatch counting down to the second-stage burnout. “Forty seconds to second-stage burnout,” he muttered. “Is it still hitting a stop? Is it correcting its course?”

“Continuous faults on the nozzle,” Kaddiri replied. “It’s maintaining course, but it might slip out of stage-three tolerance limits.” The third-stage section of the booster was much smaller than the first two stages, designed only to increase the booster’s velocity to Mach 25 for orbital insertion; it could not perform large course corrections. If the second-stage motor could not hold the booster within a gradually narrowing trajectory corridor, the booster could slip into a useless and possibly dangerous orbit. Numerous “safe” orbits were computed where the NIRTSat satellites would not interfere with other spacecraft and where they could be “stored” until it was possible to retrieve them, but it was usually very difficult to place a malfunctioning booster into a precomputed “safe” orbit. If it could not be placed in a position where it was not a hazard to other satellites, it could damage or destroy dozens of other payloads and reenter the atmosphere over a populated area. Before that could be allowed to happen, they would destroy it.

That was exactly what Foch had in mind as he opened the plastic-guarded safety cover on the command destruct panel. Foch, Kaddiri, Masters, and the ground safety officers at the White Sands range could command the ALARM booster to self-destruct at any time; now that the booster was flying, Masters had very little authority over its disposition — he could not override a “Destruct” command. “I told you this might happen, Doctor Masters,” Foch said. “The booster was obviously shaken off course by the strong, high-altitude winds, and it sustained some damage and can’t correct its course enough.”

But Masters sat back and, to everyone’s surprise, put his feet up on the control console. “Ten seconds to second-stage burnout,” he said, sipping his soda. “Sit back, relax. It’ll stay in the groove long enough.”

“The decision doesn’t rest with you this time, Masters,” Foch fumed. “The command’ll come from White Sands or the Air Force Space Tracking Center. White Sands will initiate the destruct sequence. If their command doesn’t work, I initiate mine.”

“Well, well…” Masters laughed, pointing to the computer monitor. Foch turned to look. “Second-stage burnout, and Roosevelt-One is still on course.” They studied the readouts for a few more moments. The booster, headed into a polar orbit over Canada, was picked up by Alaskan radar sites as it continued its climb to its orbit altitude. Soon its orbital insertion would be picked up by space-tracking radars at San Miguel Air Force Station in the Philippines, and the NIRTSats would begin their work.

After a while, Masters turned to Foch with a smug expression. “Minor course corrections being made, but it’s right on course. Expect third-stage ignition in four minutes.” He took another big sip of soda, then punctuated his victory with a loud burp. “I’d get your finger away from that destruct button if I were you, Colonel. The Navy wouldn’t appreciate you blowing up a perfectly good booster.”

One of the first major uses of Masters’ new NIRTSat constellation of real-time position and communications reporting capability for Air Force aircraft was a few days later — and it was the most inauspicious. It was the day the last of the United States Air Force’s aircraft departed the Philippines as the Americans turned over their military bases to full Filipino control. The satellites would control the last of the American fighters and tankers as they withdrew from the Philippines to bases in Japan and Guam.

Headquarters of the U.S. Air Force’s Thirteenth Air Force at Clark Air Base, sixty-five miles north of Manila, was in a magnificent white six-story stucco building, at the end of a long grassy mall between the NCO and officers’ family-housing areas. Both sides of the mall along the Weston and Wirt Davis avenues had once been lined with flags of the numerous military units of several nations that had liberated the Philippines from Japan during World War II, standing as a monument to those who had died defending this island nation against the Axis. Now the sixty poles were vacant except for the three flagpoles at the head of the mall opposite the headquarters building — the flags of the Philippines, the United States, and the U.S. Air Force.

From his vantage point on the review stand in front of the headquarters building, Major General Richard Stone noticed that someone had lowered the American flag down several feet from the top of its staff — it almost appeared to be at half staff. Perhaps it should be so.

Stone’s aide, Colonel Michael Krieg, stepped over to his boss and handed him a Teletype report. “Latest on that skirmish near the Spratlys, sir,” Krieg said. “The Chinese are still claiming they were attacked by heavy antiship weapons. Twenty-seven Filipinos dead, six Americans, and five missing.”

“Christ,” Stone sighed. He had watched the repercussions build over the last week since the skirmish. “Do the Chinese expect anyone to believe that? Why the hell would an oil company have any antiship missiles on an oil-exploration platform?”

“They did have machine guns, sir. Twenty-millimeter. World War Two vintage American Mk 4. Pretty good operating condition, too — before the Chinese melted it with a Fei Lung-7.”

“Idiots,” Stone muttered. “Opening up on a warship like that. So what are the Chinese doing now?”

“Laying low,” Krieg replied. “Only occasional incursions in the Spratly Island neutral zone. President Mikaso’s government is being very understanding about it so far. Vice President Samar issued a statement calling for reparations from the Chinese.”

“Lots of luck.”

“Vice President Teguina called for an investigation — not of the Chinese, but of Mikaso’s government,” Krieg added.

“Of Mikaso’s government? Not the Chinese? ’Course — that’s typical,” Stone said. “Whatever it takes to distance himself from Mikaso… just as he’s always done. Anything for a headline.”

“The little bastard’s got balls, that’s for sure.”

Major General Stone grunted. “You can say that again — Teguina loves to stir things up. Now, what do we have out there keeping an eye on things?”

Krieg looked at his boss with a look of pure concern. “In two hours — nothing.”

“What?”

“Message from CINCPAC.” CINCPAC was the acronym for Commander in Chief Pacific Command, the U.S. military organization responsible for all military activities from the West Coast of the United States to Africa. “He wants no combat aircraft or vessels near the area until they can get a reading from the Chinese. Strictly hands off.”

“Well, what did we have out there?” Stone grumbled, irritated at CINCPAC’s order.

“A couple F-16s from here checking it out, maybe a P-3 subchaser diverted to Zamboanga Airport or Bangoy Airport near Davao — er, sorry, they call it Samar International Airport now — to take some pictures. Apparently the Chinese feel our presence is threatening. CINCPAC agreed. No more flights within fifty miles.”

“A fitting end to a perfectly lousy day,” Stone said, straightening his uniform and heading toward the reviewing stand for the ceremony.

Major General Richard “Rat” Stone was the commander of the now disbanded Thirteenth Air Force — the principal American air defense, air support, and logistics support organization in the Republic of the Philippines. General Stone — whose nickname was short for “Rat Killer” after a strafing run in his F-4 along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam had killed dozens of rats with 20-millimeter cannon fire — commanded the twenty different organizations from five major operating commands at Clark Air Base.

Principal of all the organizations on his base was the Third Tactical Fighter Wing, composed of F-16 fighter-bombers and F-4G “Advanced Wild Weasel” electronic warfare and defense suppression fighters; and the 6200th Tactical Fighter Training Group, who operated the various tactical training ranges and fighter weapons schools in the Philippines and who ran the seven annual “Cope Thunder” combat exercises to train American and allied pilots from all over the Pacific. The Third Tactical Fighter Wing, whose planes had the distinctive “PN” letters on the tail plus either the black “Peugeots” of the Third Tactical Fighter Squadron or the “Pair-O-Dice” of the Ninetieth Tactical Fighter Squadron, flew air-to-air and air-to-ground strike missions in support of American interests from Australia to Japan and from India to Hawaii.

Clark Air Base had also been home to a very large Military Airlift Command contingent of C-130 Hercules transports, C-9 Nightingale flying hospitals, C-12 Huron light transport shuttles, and HH-53 Super Jolly and HH-3 Jolly Green Giant rescue and special-operations helicopters. The 374th Tactical Airlift Wing shuttled supplies and personnel all across the South Pacific and would, in wartime, deliver troops and supplies behind enemy lines. The Ninth Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, the Twentieth Aeromedical Airlift Squadron, and the Thirty-first Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron all provided medical airlift support and would fly rescue missions over land or water to recover downed aircrews — these were the organizations that first welcomed the American prisoners of war from Vietnam in 1972. Clark also housed the 353rd Special Operations Wing, whose MC-130E Combat Talon aircrews trained to fly psychological warfare, covert resupply, and other “black” missions all across the Pacific.

The base also supported the other American and Filipino military installations, including Subic Bay Naval Station, Sangley Point Naval Station, Point San Miguel Air Force Station, Camp O’Donnell, Camp John Hay, Wallace Air Station, Mount Cabuyo, Mactan Airfield, and dozens of Philippine Coast Guard and National Guard bases.

In essence, Clark Air Base had been a vital link to the Pacific and a major forward base for the United States and its allies since it opened in 1903. Now it was all being handed back to the Philippines — handed back to them during some of the most volatile and dangerous times in the country’s history.

Stone’s gaze moved from his country’s flag to the throngs of noisy protesters outside the perimeter fence less than a kilometer away. At least ten thousand protesters pressed against the barbed wire-topped fences, shouting anti-American slogans and tossing garbage over the brick wall; Stone had arranged armored personnel carriers every one hundred yards along the wall surrounding the base to counter just such a demonstration. The Americans inside those carriers were armed only with sidearms and tear-gas-grenade launchers, and the Filipino troops and riot police outside the gates had nothing more lethal than fat rubber bullets. They were being pelted by rocks and bottles so badly that the carrier’s crews dared not poke their heads out or even open one of the thin eye-portals. The throngs could easily overrun them all if they were stirred up. Occasionally a shot could be heard ringing out over the din of the crowd. Stone realized that, after weeks of these protests, he no longer jumped when he heard the gunfire.

The Thirteenth Air Force commander had aged far beyond his fifty years in just the last few months. Of no more than medium height, with close-cropped silver hair, piercing blue eyes, broad shoulders narrowing quickly to a trim waist, and thin racehorse ankles, Stone was a soft-spoken yet energetic fighter pilot who had risen through the ranks from a “ninety-day-wonder” Officer Training School pilot candidate during the Vietnam War to a two-star general and commander of a major military installation defending a principal democratic ally and guarding America’s western flank. In the past year, however, he had found himself supervising a degrading, ignoble withdrawal from the base and the country he had learned to love so well. It was deeply depressing.

From a contingent of nearly eleven thousand men and women only twelve months earlier, Stone had assembled the last remaining two hundred American military personnel on the mall in front of the reviewing stand, to march one last time in parade. Although there were supposed to be ten persons from each of the twenty resident and tenant organizations on the base, Stone knew that most of the two hundred men and women who marched before him were security policemen, who had been hand-picked to ensure the safety of General Stone and the other Americans from Clark AB as they departed that day.

Part of the reason for the huge demonstration outside the perimeter fence was the presence of the two Filipino men on the reviewing stand with Stone: Philippine President Arturo Mikaso, and First Vice President Daniel Teguina. Teguina had carried the cry for the Philippines to cut all ties with the West and to not renew the leases on American military bases. Unlike the refined and elderly Mikaso, Daniel Teguina liked to be in the public eye, and he carefully polished his image to reflect the young radical students and peasants that he believed he represented. He dressed in more colorful, contemporary clothes, dyed his hair to hide the gray, and liked to appear in nightclubs and at soccer matches.

The National Democratic Front, despite reputed ties to the New People’s Army, the organization that controlled the Communist-led Huk insurgents in the outlying provinces, flourished under the Mikaso-Teguina coalition government. Under Mikaso’s strong popular leadership, the military threat to the government from the extremist Communist forces subsided, but the new, more radical voices in the government were harder to ignore. It didn’t take long for a national referendum to be called after the 1994 elections, which forbade the President to extend the leases for American bases any further. The referendum passed by a narrow margin, and the United States was ordered to withdraw all permanent military forces from the Philippines and turn control of the installations to the Philippine government within six months.

Second Vice President General Jose Trujillo Samar, who was not present at the ceremonies, shared the majority of Filipinos’ distaste for American hegemony, and he fought hard for removal of the bases.

Leaving, Rat Stone was out of a job.

Over the slowly rising screaming and yelling from the protesters, the American airmen marched in front of the reviewing stand, formed, into four groups of fifty, and were ordered to parade rest by Colonel Krieg, acting as the parade adjutant general. Surrounding the grassy mall were two sets of bleachers, where guests of the government and a few American family members and embassy personnel watched with long faces the lowering of the colors for the last time over Clark Air Base. Banks of photographers, television cameras, and reporters were clustered all around the reviewing stand to capture the ceremonies. While several network news companies were on hand, no live broadcast of the ceremony was permitted. General Stone had felt, and the Air Force concurred, that a live broadcast might cause widespread demonstrations all across the country. That was also the reason no high-level American politicians were on hand. The official transfer had been made in the safety of Washington, D.C., weeks ago.

President Mikaso stepped forward to the podium as a taped trumpet call was played. The crowd began to cheer, and an appreciative ripple of applause issued from the bleachers. When the music stopped, Mikaso spoke in flawless English: “My friends and fellow Filipinos, we are here to mark a historic end, and a historic beginning, in the relations between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States of America. On this day of freedom and independence, we also mark a significant milestone in the future of the Philippines.

“For over ninety years, we have relied on the courage, the generosity, and the strength of the people of the United States for our security. Such an arrangement has greatly benefited our country and all its people. For this, we will be eternally grateful.

“But we have learned much over these long years. We have studied the sacred values of democracy and justice, and we have strived to become not just a dependency of our good friends in the United States, but a strong, trusted ally. We are here today to celebrate an important final stage of that education, as the people of the Philippines take the reins of authority of our national security responsibilities. We are thankful for the help from our American friends, and we gratefully recognize the sacrifices you have made to our security and prosperity. With your guidance and with God’s help, we take the first great step toward being a genuine world power…”

Mikaso spoke eloquently for several more minutes, and when he was done, appreciative applause made its way from the bleachers all the way out beyond the wall, over the crowds.

The people clearly loved their President.

But Teguina listened to the speech and Mikaso’s praise for the United States with growing impatience and disgust. He loathed the Americans and had always resented their presence. As for Mikaso, he owed him nothing. He’d agreed to this hybrid coalition only after he’d realized he didn’t have enough votes to win the presidency himself.

As taped music was played over the PA system, Mikaso,

Stone, and, reluctantly, Teguina, positioned themselves in front of a special set of three flagpoles behind the reviewing stands.

An honor guard stepped onto the stand and positioned themselves around the flagpoles. As Mikaso placed a hand over his heart in tribute, the Philippine flag was lowered a few feet in respect. Then, as “Retreat” was played, the American flag was raised to the top of the staff, then slowly lowered.

“Why is our flag lowered?” Teguina whispered, as if to himself. When no one paid him any attention, he raised his voice: “I ask, why is the Philippine flag lowered first? I do not understand…”

“Silence, Mr. Teguina,” Mikaso whispered.

“Raise the Philippine flag back to the top of the staff,” he said, his voice now carrying clearly over the music. “It is disrespectful for any national flag to be lowered in such a way.”

“We are paying honor to the Americans—”

“Bah!” Teguina spat. “They are foreigners returning home, nothing more.” But he fell silent as the American flag was lowered and the honor guard began folding it into the distinctive triangle. When the flag was folded, the honor guard passed it to General Stone, who stepped to Arturo Mikaso, saluted, and presented it to him.

“With thanks from a grateful nation, Mr. President,” Stone said.

Mikaso smiled. “It will be kept in a place of honor in the capital, General Stone, as a symbol of our friendship and fidelity.”

“Thank you, sir.”

At that, the two men looked skyward as a gentle roar of jet engines began to be heard.

Flying over the base and directly down the mall over the reviewing stand were four flights of four F-4 Phantom fighters, followed by a flight of three B-52 bombers, all no more than two thousand feet above ground — and everyone could clearly see the twelve Harpoon antiship missiles hanging off the wings of each B-52. The audience in the bleachers applauded and cheered; the crowd outside the gate was restlessly cheering and shouting at the impressive display.

But Daniel Teguina decided he had had enough.

This… this American love feast was too much for a native Filipino. He pushed past Stone and Mikaso and quickly lowered the Philippine flag from its pole, unclipped it, and reattached it to the empty center pole where the American flag had just been removed.

“What in God’s name are you doing, Teguina?” Mikaso shouted over the roar of the planes.

Teguina ordered one of his bodyguards to raise the Philippine flag. He turned, glaring at Stone, and said, “We are not going to defer to Americans any longer. This is our land, our skies, our country — and our flag!”

As the flag traveled up the pole, Stone heard one of the most chilling sounds he’d ever experienced — the screams of fury, anger and, ultimately, jubilation coming from the thousands outside the gates. As the Philippine flag reached the top of the pole, the screams reached a deafening, roaring crescendo.

Teguina and Stone stared long and hard at each other, while President Mikaso began babbling apologies for his First Vice President’s behavior.

Thus ended the American presence in the Philippines.

After the ceremonies quickly ended, Rat Stone made his way to the air terminal to supervise the final departure — he still preferred not to call it an evacuation — of American military personnel from Clark Air Base. He couldn’t shake the feeling deep in his gut that this cessation of mutual defense arrangements had happened too quickly, too abruptly. The skirmish just last week in the Spratly Islands was still fresh in his mind. And so was the look in Daniel Teguina’s eyes… it chilled him to the bone.

No, Rat Stone decided, this would not be the last time he would see the Philippines…

The question was when.

“Tell me this is a joke, sir,” Lieutenant Colonel Patrick McLanahan said to Brigadier General John Ormack, “and — with all due respect, of course — I’ll beat your face.

John Ormack, the deputy commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center — nicknamed HAWC, the Air Force’s secret flight-test research center that was a part of the Dreamland complex — didn’t have to look at the wide grin on McLanahan’s face to know that he wasn’t seriously threatening bodily harm to anyone. He could tell by McLanahan’s voice, wavering with pure excitement, that the thirty-nine-year-old radar navigator and flight-test project officer was genuinely thrilled. They were standing in front of the newest, most high-tech aircraft in the world, the B-2 stealth bomber. And best of all, for the next several months, this B-2 — nicknamed the “Black Knight” — belonged to him.

“No joke, Patrick,” Ormack said, putting an arm around McLanahan’s broad shoulders. “Don’t ask me how he did it, but General Elliott got one of the first B-2A test articles assigned to Dreamland. That’s one nice thing about being director of HAWC — Elliott gets to pull strings. This one has been stripped down quite a bit, but it’s a fully operational model — this was the bomber that launched the first SRAM-II attack missile a few months back.”

“But they just made the B-2 operational,” McLanahan pointed out. “They don’t have that many B-2s out there — just one squadron, the 393rd, right?”

Ormack nodded.

“What are we doing with one?” McLanahan asked.

“Knowing Elliott, he put the squeeze on Systems Command to begin more advanced weapons tests on the B-2, in case they begin full-scale deployment. Air Force stopped deployment, as you know, because of budget cutbacks — but, as we both know, General Elliott’s projects aren’t under public scrutiny.”

Ormack went on. “He was pushing the shift from nuclear to conventional warfighting strategy to Congress, just as Air Force did. It was hard for the Air Force to sell the B-2 as a conventional weapons platform — that is, until Elliott spoke up. He wants to turn this B-2 into another Megafortress — a flying battleship. The man managed to convince the powers-that-be to let him use one for advanced testing.

“Of course we need a senior project officer with bomber experience, experience on EB-series strategic-escort concepts, and someone with a warped imagination and a real bulldog-type attitude. Naturally, we thought of you.”

McLanahan was speechless, which made Ormack smile even more. Ormack was an Air Force Academy graduate, medium height, rapidly graying brown hair, lean and wiry, and although he was a command pilot with several thousand hours’ flying time in dozens of different aircraft, he was more at home in a laboratory, flight simulator, or in front of a computer console. All of the young men he worked with were either quiet, studious engineers — everyone called them “geeks” or “computer weenies” — or they were flashy, cocky, swaggering test pilots full of attitude because they had been chosen above 99.99 percent of the rest of the free world’s aviators to work at HAWC.

McLanahan was neither.

He wasn’t an Academy grad, not an engineer, not a test pilot. What McLanahan was was a six-foot blond with an air of understated strength and power; a hardworking, intelligent, well-organized, efficient aviator. The eldest son of Irish immigrants, McLanahan had been born in New York but raised in Sacramento where he attended Air Force ROTC at Cal State and received his commission in 1973. After navigator training at Mather AFB in Sacramento he was assigned to the B-52s of the 320th Bomb Wing there. After uprating to radar navigator, he was again assigned to Mather Air Force Base.

Along the way, McLanahan became the best radar bombardier in the United States, a fact demonstrated by long lines of trophies he’d received in annual navigation and bombing exercises in his six years as a B-52 crew member. His prowess with the forty-year-old bomber, lovingly nicknamed the BUFF (for Big Ugly Fat Fucker) or StratoPig, had attracted the attention of HAWC’s commanding officer, Air Force Lieutenant General Brad Elliott, who had brought him to the desert test ranges of Nevada to develop a “Megafortress,” a highly modified B-52 used to flight-test high-tech weapons and stealth hardware. Through an unlikely but terrifying chain of events, McLanahan had taken the Megafortress, idiomatically nicknamed the Old Dog, and its ragtag engineer crew into the Soviet Union to destroy a renegade ground-based antisatellite laser site.

Rather than risk discovery of the highly classified and politically explosive mission, McLanahan had been strongly encouraged to remain at HAWC and, in effect, accept an American high-tech version of the Gulag Archipelago. The upside was that it was a chance to work with the newest aircraft and weapons in the world. McLanahan had happily accepted the position even though it was obvious to all that he had little choice. The Old Dog mission, one of the more deadly events that ultimately drove the Soviet Union to glasnost, had to be buried forever — one way or another.

Many successful, career-minded men might have resented the isolation, lack of recognition, and de facto imprisonment. Not Patrick McLanahan. Because he was not an engineer and had very little technical training, his job description for his first years at HAWC consisted mainly of answering phones, acting as aide and secretary for General Elliott and General Ormack, and rewriting tech orders and checklists. But he educated himself in the hard sciences, visited the labs and test centers to talk with engineers, begged and pleaded for every minute of flying time he could, and, more important, performed each given assignment as if it were the free world’s most vital research project. Whether it was programming checklists into a cockpit computer terminal or managing the unit’s coffee fund and snack bar, Patrick McLanahan did his work efficiently and professionally.

Things began to change very quickly. The Air Force promoted him to Major two years below the zone. He was given an executive officer, then a clerk, then an assistant, a staff, and finally his own office complex, complete with flight-test crews and dedicated maintenance shops. The projects began to change. Instead of being in charge of documentation and records, he was heading more concept teams, then more contractor-MAJCOM liaison jobs, then more subsystem projects, and finally full-weapon systems. Before the ink was dry on his promotion papers to Major, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.

His “exile” was occasionally broken, and the young “fast-burner” was frequently “loaned” with assignments with other research, development, and government agencies, including Border Security Force, Special Operations, and the Aerospace Defense Command. Very soon, McLanahan had become a fixture in any new project dealing with aviation or aerospace. He was now one of the most highly respected program managers in the Department of Defense.

The mission of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center had changed as well. With budget cutbacks and greater downsizing in all strategic bombardment units, some place had to be designated to keep all these inactive aircraft until they might be needed again. Although most were sent to the “boneyard,” the Air Force Aerospace Maintenance and Restoration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, to be stored for spare parts or for scrap, a few were secretly sent to Dreamland, in the desert of central Nevada, for research and special missions.

The place was the Strategic Air Reserve Group, commanded by General Elliott. SARG took the work of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center one step further — it created an operational unit out of exotic research experiments. Whereas the Old Dog became an operational mission completely by accident, now other “Old Dogs” were being created and held in reserve until needed. The new Old Dogs collected over the years now included six B-52 bombers; two B-1 bombers — both original A-models; six F-111G fighter-bombers, which were formerly SAC FB-111A strategic bombers; and the newest arrival, McLanahan’s B-2 Black Knight bomber.

“The other task you’ve got is ASIS,” Ormack continued. “Air Force is finally considering putting a pilot-trained navigator-bombardier on board the B-2 instead of the current navigator-trained ‘mission commander’ layout. The cockpit is designed for two pilots; you have to redesign it for a weapons system officer and defensive systems operator, but retain the dual pilot control capability. You’ve got a few months, no more than four, to get ASIS ready for full-scale production and retrofit, including engineering blueprints and work plan.”

He smiled mischievously and added, “The B-2 pilot ‘union’ is not too happy about this, as you might expect. They think ASIS is a bunch of crap, that the B-2 is automated enough to not need a navigator, and the B-2 should keep its two pilots. I think our experience with the Old Dog proved otherwise.”

McLanahan laughed. “That’s an understatement. Now, what’s ASIS stand for?”

“Depends on who you ask,” Ormack said dryly. “Officially Attack Systems Integration Station. The flight test pilots and B-2 cadre call it something else — in honor of all navigators, of course.”

“What’s that?”

“Additional shit/aside.”

McLanahan laughed again. “Figures.” Slamming navigators was common fare in this fighter pilot’s Mecca in southern Nevada. Still awestruck, he walked toward the huge bat-winged bomber sitting inside the brilliantly lit hangar.

The Black Knight was designed specifically to attack multiple, heavily defended, and mobile targets around the world with high probability of damage and high probability of survival. To fly nearly five thousand miles unrefueled, the B-2 had to be huge — it had the same wingspan as a B-52 and almost the same fuel capacity, able to carry more than its own weight in jet fuel.

In the past, building a bomber of that size meant it was a sitting duck for enemy defenses — a quarter-to-half-million pounds of steel flying around made a very easy target for enemy acquisition and weapons-guidance radars. The B-52, first designed in the 1940s when it was designed to fly at extremely high altitudes, eventually had to rely on flying at treetop level, electronic jammers and decoys, and plain old circumnavigation of enemy threats to evade attack. The B-58 Hustler bomber relied on flat-out supersonic speed. The FB-111 and B-1 strategic bombers utilized speed, a cleaner “stealthier” design, advanced electronic countermeasures, and terrain-following radar to help themselves penetrate stiff defenses. But, with rapid advances in fighter technology, surface-to-air missiles, and early warning and tracking radars, even the sleek, deadly B-1 would soon be vulnerable to attack.

The black monster before Patrick McLanahan was the latest answer. The B-2 was still a quarter-million-pound bomber, but most of its larger structural surfaces were made of nonmetallic composites that reduced or reflected enemy radar energy; reflected energy is dispersed in specific narrow beam paths, or lobes, which greatly decreases the strength of the reflected energy. It had no vertical flight-control surfaces that could act as a radar reflector — viewed on edge, it appeared to be nothing more than a dark sliver, like a slender tadpole. Each wing was made of two huge pieces of composite material, joined like a plastic model — that meant there were no structural ribs to break, no rivets attaching the skin to a skeleton, producing an aircraft that was as strong at the wingtips as it was at the fuselage.

Its four turbofan engines were buried within V-shaped wings, which eliminated telltale heat emissions, and engine components were cooled with jet fuel itself to further reduce heat emissions. Its state-of-the-art navigation systems, attack radars, and sensors were so advanced that the B-2 could strike targets several miles before the bomber could be detected by enemy acquisition radars.

The cost of the Black Knight bomber program was staggering — a half billion dollars per plane and nearly eighty billion dollars for an entire fleet, including research, development, and basing. A planned total purchase of one hundred and thirty-two B-2s in five years quickly went away, replaced with an extended procurement deal that would bring only seventy-five bombers on-line over ten years. Even that reduced production rate had been compromised — by April of 1992 there were only twelve fully operational B-2s in the inventory, including the initial three airframes used for testing and evaluation and nine more that had been purchased in 1991. The 1992 and 1993 budgets had carried only “life-support” funding for the B-2 — just enough money to keep the program alive while retaining the ability to quickly gear up production if the need arose. Because there would only be seventy-five B-2s active by the turn of the century, the B-52 — slated for replacement by the Black Knight — would still be in the active strategic nuclear penetrator arsenal well into the twenty-first century.

But the B-2, despite charges of being a “billion-dollar boondoggle” and obsolete before becoming operational, was now a reality and had proven itself ready to go to war in extensive flight testing. The first Black Knight bomber squadron — the 393rd Bomb Squadron “Tigers” — the same unit that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II — had been activated at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri a few months earlier, and when that happened, it had rendered billions of dollars’ worth of the enemy’s military air-defense hardware instantly obsolete.

“Got time for a walkaround, sir?” McLanahan asked.

“You bet,” the young Air Force General replied. Ormack let Patrick drink in the sight of the magnificent black bomber before him as Patrick stepped toward it for a walkaround “get-acquainted” inspection.

The B-2 had no fuselage as on more conventional airplanes; it was as if someone had sawed off the wings of a B-52, stuck them together, and put wheels on it. For someone like McLanahan, who was accustomed to seeing the huge, drooping wings of the mighty B-52, it was amazing to notice that the B-2s, which were just as long and easily twice as wide, did not droop one inch — the composite structures were pound-for-pound stronger than steel. The skin was perfectly smooth, with none of the stress wrinkles of the B-52, and it had no antennae attached to the hull that might act as a radar reflector. The plane’s “flying wing” design had no vertical flight control surfaces that would create a radar reflector; instead, it achieved stability by a series of split flaps/ailerons on the wing’s trailing edges, called “flaperons,” which would deflect in pairs or singularly in response to a triple-redundant laser optic flight computer’s commands. The unique flaperon flight-control system, plus a thrust ejector system that directed engine exhaust across the flaperons to increase responsiveness, gave the huge bomber the roll response of a small fighter. To prevent any radar image “blooming” when the flaperons were deflected in flight — even the small flaperon deflection caused by a 5-degree turn would increase the radar image size several times — the trailing edge of the B-2’s wings were staggered in a zigzag pattern, which prevented any reflected energy from returning directly back to the enemy’s radar receiver.

Patrick ducked under the pointed nose on his way back to the double side-by-side bomb bays, the natural part of such an aircraft that would attract any SAC bombardier. The lower part of the nose section on either side of the nose gear had large rectangular windows protected by thick pads. “Are these the laser and IR windows?” Patrick asked Ormack.

“You got it, Patrick,” Ormack replied. “Miniature laser spotters/target designators and infrared detectors, slaved to the navigation system. The emitter windows and the cockpit windows are coated with an ultrathin material that allows radar energy to pass through the windows but not reflect back outwards, much like a one-way mirror. This reduces the radar reflectivity caused by energy bouncing off the crew members or equipment inside the plane itself. If allowed to reflect back, the radar return from the pilots’ helmets alone can effectively double the B-2’s radar signature.”

“Where’s the navigation radar? Is there one on the B-2?”

“You bet. The Black Knight has an AN/APQ-181 multimode radar mounted along the wing leading edges, with ground-mapping, terrain-following, targeting, surveillance, and rendezvous modes — we can even add air-to-air capability to the system…”

“Air-to-air on a B-2 bomber?” McLanahan whistled. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Not after what we did on the B-52 Old Dog,” Ormack replied. “After our work in Dreamland putting antiair missiles on a B-52, I don’t think there’ll ever be another combat aircraft that can’t do a dozen different jobs, and that includes heavy bombers carrying air-to-air weapons. It makes sense — if you can take sixteen to twenty weapons of any kind into battle with you, you have the advantage. Besides, the B-2 is no slouch of a hot jet any way you look at it — the B-2 bomber has one-one hundredth the radar cross-section of an F-15 Eagle Fighter, one-twentieth the RCS of an F-23 Wildcat fighter — which means it could engage targets before the other guy even knows the B-2 is out there — and at high altitude it has the same roll rate and can pull as many Gs as an F-4 Phantom.”

The underside of the B-2 was like a huge dark thundercloud — it seemed to stretch out forever, sucking up every particle of light. Patrick was surprised by what he found — two cavernous weapon bays. “It’s a hell of a lot bigger than I thought, General,” he said.

“Each bomb bay carries one Common Strategic Rotary Launcher filled with eight SRAM short-range attack missiles,” Ormack replied. “Sixteen SRAM missiles — it packs quite a wallop. Putting B61 or B83 gravity nuclear bombs on board is still possible as well, although using standoff-type weapons instead of gravity bombs makes the B-2 a much greater threat. The Black Knight can only carry four cruise missiles, so there are no plans to include AGM-129A cruise missiles although we modified the weapon-delivery software to do so.”

“It’ll make a great battleship escort,” McLanahan said. “I think the boss is right — it’s a waste to have these babies sitting on the sidelines with nukes on board while we’re getting hammered in some non-nuclear dogfight. Air Force talks about ‘global reach, global power,’ but they don’t talk much about how long-range bombers can defend themselves in a hostile environment without an initial nuclear laydown. They talk about sending B-52s from Guam, Diego Garcia, or Loring to anywhere else in the world in twelve hours, but they don’t explain how the bomber is supposed to survive its attack. With the Black Knight configured as a counterradar escort, it can do it. It has the range to fly just as deep as the strike bombers, and it carries as much firepower as a B-52. We’ll put that new PACER SKY satellite data stuff on it, maybe an ISAR radar, smart bombs…”

“We’ve tested every possible weapon on a B-2,” Ormack acknowledged, “from AGM-130 Striker glide-bombs — your personal favorite, I know — Harpoon antiship missiles, sea mines, MK 82 iron bombs, AMRAAM missiles, Sidewinder missiles, the TACIT RAINBOW antiradar cruise missiles, Durandal runaway-cratering bombs, AGM-84 SLAM TV-guided missiles, hell, even photoreconnaissance pods. At half a billion dollars a pop, Congress didn’t want to buy a nuclear-only plane, so we’re going to demonstrate that the B-2 could be flexible enough for any mission.” Ormack shrugged, then added, “I’m not convinced myself that the B-2 can make a good defensive escort plane. If a fighter or ground missile site gets a visual on this thing, you’re dead.”

“I don’t know about that,” Patrick said. “I think it’d be tough to kill in a tactical battle.”

“Yeah? Most of the Air Force would disagree,” Ormack replied. “Look at these wings — this thing is huge, even when seen from several thousand feet up. It’s subsonic, which makes it a more inviting target and less elusive. No, I think the Air Force would forgo risking B-2 on a conventional raid.” He looked at McLanahan for feedback and was surprised when the young navigator gave him an unsure shrug in reply. “You still disagree?”

“I haven’t flown fighters as long as you, sir,” McLanahan said, “but I have a tough time finding an airport from five thousand feet in the air, much less a single plane. At five thousand feet, a pilot is looking at almost four hundred square miles of ground. If he’s flying, say, eight miles per minute on a low combat-air patrol, forty square miles zip under his wings every ten seconds — twenty on each side of his cockpit. If he can’t use a radar to at least get himself in the vicinity, his detection problem is pretty complicated.”

“If a combat air patrol always had that wide an area to search, I might agree with you,” Ormack said. “But the field of battle narrows down rapidly. One lucky sighting, one squeak of a radar detector or one blip on a radar screen, and suddenly the whole pack’s on top of you.”

“But I might have my missiles in the air by then,” Patrick said. “If not, I sure as heck will not stay high over a target area. I’ve got an infrared camera that can see the ground, and the pilots have windows — those boys better be flying in the dirt with fighters on my tail. Even the F-23 advanced tactical fighter can’t fight close to the ground — they have to rely on taking ‘look-down’ shots from higher altitudes. That’s where a stealthy plane has the advantage.”

Ormack didn’t have a reply right away — he was thinking hard about McLanahan’s arguments. “You bring up a few good points, Patrick,” Ormack admitted. “You know what this calls for, don’t you?”

“RED FLAG,” McLanahan replied. “No — better yet, the Strategic Warfare Center. General Jarrel’s little playland up in South Dakota.”

“You got it,” Ormack said. “We’ll have to put an EB-2 up against a few fighters on Jarrel’s range and see what happens. Maybe even have them fly along with other aircraft on the range to see if our escorts can be effective with other strike aircraft.” He smiled at McLanahan and added, “I think that can be arranged. We can send you out to the Strategic Warfare Center for some operational test flights when the 393rd Bomb Squadron goes to the SWC in a few months. I’ll bring it up to General Elliott, but I think he’ll go for it. You might have just found yourself a new job, Patrick — developing penetration and attack techniques for Black Knight stealth escort crews.”

“Throw me in the briar patch,” McLanahan said as they moved forward to the entry hatch.

McLanahan’s new bird was AF SAC 90-007, the seventh B-2 bomber built. He found the plane’s nickname, “License to Kill,” stenciled on the entry hatch as he and Ormack walked to it and opened it up to climb inside — it was a perfect nickname. Patrick checked that the “Alert Start” switch was off and safed — the B-2 had a button in the entry hatch that would start the bomber’s internal power unit and turn on power and air before the pilots reached the cockpit. With this system, the B-2 could have engine started, the inertial navigation system aligned, and the plane taxiing for takeoff in less than three minutes, without any external power carts or crew chiefs standing by. Ormack did activate the “Int Power” switch in the entry way, which activated internal power on the plane.

Unlike the B-1 bomber, whose offensive and defensive stations seemed to have been put in reluctantly, almost haphazardly, the B-2’s cockpit was massive. There was almost enough room for McLanahan to stand up straight as he slid into the right seat and began to strap in.

Ormack looked at the young navigator with amusement as he set his seat and even put on a pair of flying gloves. “Going somewhere?”

“You want a redesigned cockpit, sir, then you gotta do it with the crew dog strapped into position,” McLanahan replied. “The reach is much different. If I had a helmet, I’d put it on.” Ormack nodded his agreement and smiled — as usual, McLanahan was getting right down to business.

The bomber’s left instrument panel was like a television director’s console. Four color MFDs, or multi-function displays, dominated the instrument panel; each MFD was encircled with buttons that would change the screen’s function, allowing hundreds of different displays on each screen. The bomber used small sidestick controllers, like a fighter plane, with throttle quadrants to the left of each seat and the button-festooned control stick to the right. Each seat also had a wide, oval-shaped heads-up display, or HUD, that would project flight and attack information on the windscreen.

“Where’re all the instruments?” McLanahan exclaimed with obvious surprise. “There’s hardly anything installed in here. Did they give us a stripped-down test article or what?”

“This is a fully functional production model, Patrick,” Ormack replied. “Everything is done on the MFDs or using switches on the throttles and control stick. The screens show menu choices for selecting options for each piece of equipment, and you just push a button to select it or use the set button on the stick.”

“But I don’t see any flight-control system switches,” McLanahan persisted. “What about a flap lever? Gear handle? How do you raise the landing gear — haul it up with a rope?”

“This is almost the twenty-first century, my friend,” Ormack replied. “We don’t move levers — we tell the plane what to do and it takes care of it.” He pointed to the right-hand MFD at each station, which showed a simple five-line menu: BATT POWER, APU POWER, ALERT START, NORMAL START, and EMER START. Each item was located next to a corresponding button on the screen.

“To start engines, you simply press the button and advance the throttles to idle,” Ormack explained. “The computer takes care of everything else. Start engines, and up comes a different menu of items. Select TAKEOFF. The computer configures the plane for takeoff and continues to configure the plane during the climbout and all the way to level off — it’ll raise the gear and flaps, monitor the power settings, everything. Once at cruise altitude, you select CRUISE and it’ll fly the plane, manage the fuel, and report any errors. It has several different modes, including LANDING, LOW LEVEL, GUST for bad weather conditions, GO AROUND, and ATTACK modes.”

“Computerized flying, huh?” McLanahan muttered. “Pretty slick. You almost think they could do away with the pilot and nav.”

“It’s advance hardware, but not totally foolproof,” Ormack said. “The pilot in the loop is still important.”

“And the nav in the loop as well,” McLanahan said with a smile, examining the right-hand seat. “Or should I say, ‘mission commander’? I like the sound of that.”

The right-hand instrument panel had boles and slots for the same size and number of color MFDs as the pilot’s side, but technicians had already removed the monitors themselves. “This looks like a duplicate of the pilot’s side,” McLanahan observed.

“I think it is,” Ormack said. “The original idea was to have two pilots, remember. They decided it—” As Ormack watched, Patrick suddenly reached down to an awkwardly mounted keyboard on the right bulkhead and pulled it out of its slot. “Hey—!”

“Sir, having these nice color MFDs on the right side for the nav would be fine,” McLanahan said, “but it would also be a huge waste. Small MFDs are nice, but they’re old technology…”

“Old technology? These MFDs are the latest thing — high-resolution, high-speed, one twenty-eight K RAM per pixel, the whole nine yards…”

“Compare it with pilot’s side,” McLanahan said. “Look here. The pilot can sit back, set up a scan, and fly his plane with complete ease and confidence. What does the nav have? The nav has got to focus on one screen at a time to do his job. His eyes lock on one screen — they have to, because you got one screen that displays only one set of information. What happens then? He loses track of what’s going on around him. He loses situational awareness. Something important might be happening on one of the other screens, but he doesn’t know that because he’s got to stare at this screen for several seconds. The setup forces him to divert his attention in several different directions at once, and by doing so you make him less effective, not more.”

“These are the best MFDs available,” Ormack said wryly. “You can swap displays around on each screen, split the screens and have two displays on one screen, even have the computer shift displays for you — sort of an autoscan. What’s wrong with all that?”

“They’re great, but they’re outdated,” McLanahan repeated. “We can get something better.” He shook the keyboard at Ormack, then tossed it over his shoulder. “And no important keyboards on the side instrument panels. If the nav has to take his eyes off the scope on the bomb run, it’s no good and it shouldn’t be in the plane. That’s what gets crews killed.”

“We can rig up a swivel arm for the keyboard… Ormack began, but McLanahan was clearly unimpressed. “I don’t know exactly what you have in mind, Patrick, but I don’t think you can just decide to replace the entire avionics suite…”

“You want my recommendations, you’ll get them,” McLanahan said. “You didn’t mention any restrictions or specifications, so I’ll build you the best cockpit I can think of.” He paused for a moment, then said, “And we’ll start with the Armstrong Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory at Wright-Pat.”

“Armstrong? What…?” And then he realized what Patrick was getting at: “The Super Cockpit program? You want to put one of those big six-square-foot screens in the B-2?”

“Sir, it’s tailor-made for the Black Knight,” McLanahan said excitedly. “The screen would fit perfectly in this big cockpit, and they can rewrite the software in a matter of months. We can bring it in within a few weeks and have a demo flight within four months, I guarantee it.” He paused for a moment, then added, “And once we get Super Cockpit installed, we can install that Sky Masters PACER SKY system General Elliott is working on — real-time satellite target reconnaissance. That’d be awesome. A satellite sending you real-time pictures of a target area, a computer drawing your route of flight, and having it displayed on a huge mother Super Multi-Function Display? Oh, man, this is gonna be great!”

John Ormack thought about the idea for several long moments. He knew McLanahan was nothing if not a walking idea machine, but he never expected him to devise two such radical ideas in so short a time. It was an interesting combination: Super Cockpit was a 1980s technology demonstration program that had never been implemented in any tactical aircraft, and PACER SKY was a brand-new idea that was just now being operationally tested.

Ormack knew Sky Masters’ NIRTSats could make combined synthetic radar, infrared, and visual photographs of a geographic area in one pass, uplink it to a satellite, then download it. But uplinking it to a TDRS satellite (Tactical Information Distribution System used by the Army and Air Force) then downloading it to a targeting computer on a strike aircraft was brilliant. The computer would be able to classify each return with known or suspected targets, measure the precise target coordinates, and load them into the crew’s bombing computers. The crews could then call up each target, evaluate the information and direct a strike against the targets in virtually real-time.

It would be the first time crews would have access to virtual real-time imagery during a conflict.

Leave it to McLanahan, Ormack thought proudly.

“Jesus, Patrick,” Ormack said, “you’ve already come up with six months’ worth of work and you haven’t been in the seat five minutes — and you’ve probably busted the bank as well.”

“Well, we can eliminate a lot of this stuff, then,” McLanahan said, gesturing to a small shelf under the glare shield. “We can ditch this attempt at a work desk — with the Super Cockpit installed, we won’t need charts and books out cluttering the cockpit — but we’ll need coffee-cup holders, of course…”

“Coffee-cup holders!” Ormack cried. McLanahan’s extraordinary capacity for coffee was well known throughout Dreamland. “On a B-2? Get outta here!”

“You think I’m kidding, sir?” McLanahan replied. “I’ll bet you lunch for a week that there’s not only coffee-cup holders for the pilot over there, but a pencil-holder and maybe even an approach-plate holder. How about it?”

“You’re on, buddy,” Ormack said. “Coffee-cup holders on multimillion-dollar warplanes went out with khaki uniforms and nose art. Besides, everything on this plane is computerized — why would the pilots need pencils and approach plates when everything’s on the multi-function displays in living color?”

Ormack searched the aircraft commander’s station for a moment as McLanahan confidently sat back in his seat and waited. A few moments later he heard a muttered, “Well, I’ll be damned…”

“Find something, General?”

“I don’t believe it!” Ormack shouted. “Chart holders, pencil holders, coffee-cup holders — no ashtray, hotshot… unbelievable.”

“Let me guess,” McLanahan teased, “there’s a space up there for an inflight lunch box?”

“Box lunches and even a stopwatch holder. I just don’t believe it. There are twenty systems on this plane that’ll give you a countdown. The plane practically flies itself, for God’s sake! If you want, a female electronic voice’ll even give you a countdown over interphone. But they went ahead and put in a black rubber stopwatch holder anyway.”

“The Air Force probably paid a thousand dollars for it, too,” McLanahan added dryly. “The more things change, the more they stay the same. We’ll have developed a hypersonic bomber that can circumnavigate the globe in one hour, and someone’ll still put a stopwatch holder in the cockpit.”

Ormack tried to ignore McLanahan’s smug smile. “Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you over here, that’s for sure, but you’ve made a terrific start. When can you get to work?”

“Right away, General,” McLanahan replied. “The F-15F Cheetah project is off the flight line for a few months, so this’ll work out perfectly. I’ve got a staff meeting with J. C. Powell and McDonnell-Douglas in about an hour, and I’ll clear the desk and schedule an afternoon staff meeting on this project. We’ll be back out here taking measurements” — he paused, then gave Ormack a sly smile — “right after we get back from lunch. Your treat, I believe?”