Nerve Center (2 page)

The problem was, he couldn’t control four of the robot planes at one time, not easily anyway. It was especially hard when they were tasked with different missions in different places. Changing mental gears wasn’t bad enough—the U/ MFs’ control gear took forever to cycle into the right plane. Forever being ten nanoseconds.

Three months ago, Jeff had saved Mack’s sorry butt and oversized ego with a near-impossible foray into Libya. Shot down and captured while taking part in a covert operation, Smith had been headed to Iran to have his head chopped off when Dreamland’s Spec Ops team, “Whiplash,” intervened. Controlling the still-experimental U/MF-3 Flighthawks from a hastily modified weapons bay of an EB-52 Megafortress, Zen had found Smith and his captor in a small plane over the Mediterranean. When Smith was finally rescued, he was more grateful than a groom on his wedding night.

For about thirty seconds. Now they were back in their usual places, clawing each other at the nation’s top center for weapons development. It didn’t matter that this fight was being played out in a massive computer, projected on a series of screens in a high-tech hangar. Both men went at it like boxers competing for a ten-million-dollar winner-take-all purse.

At the end of the day, both men would go home with the knowledge that they’d helped test and perfect the next generation of front-line weapons for the country. More importantly—as far as they were concerned, at least—one would go home the winner, the other the loser.

Or, as Mack would put it if he won, “the peahead loser.”

Tracers flared over Jeff’s Flighthawk, arcing to his left. The burst of red ignited an idea in Zen’s brain—he yanked hard on the stick, pointing his nose straight up, directly into Mack’s path.

KEVIN MADRONE EDGED WHAT WAS LEFT OF HIS thumbnail against his tooth, watching the bird’s-eye view of the dogfight on the large display screen. The Army captain could see that Mack had the advantage, but it wasn’t quite enough to nail Zen. Their dogfight was incidental to the overall exercise, but he couldn’t help watching. They were like old-fashioned gladiators, flailing at each other in the Colosseum, willing to go to any lengths to beat their opponents. There was something irresistible in their single-mindedness, something attractive in the danger they faced.

And frightening as well. Madrone whittled his nail, nervously razoring two sharp V’s on the cartilage. Blood pricked from his finger as he finally broke away from the conflict to glance at the screen on his right, where one of the computers monitoring the encounter was kicking up data.

“Weapons test complete,”
declared the computer.

As the test supervisor, Madrone ought to end the encounter. But instead he turned back to it, drawn by the swirling energy and fascinated by his own fear.

The Flighthawk suddenly veered straight up. Mack’s F-16 seemed to stutter in midair, less than two hundred feet from the smaller craft. The planes seemed to collide. Then it became obvious that the F-16 had veered off at the last possible instant, wings spinning violently. The Flighthawk somehow managed to flip its nose downward, lighting its cannon. Three or four slugs ripped through the F-16’s wing, but Mack managed to zip off in the opposite direction, the craft in an invert.

The two pilots cursed at each other.

“You stinking cheater. You used a hole in the programming!” snapped Mack.

“Oh, like you didn’t to nail the helos.”

“Knock it off,” said Kevin, snapping into his role as mission boss. “Exercise over.”

Neither pilot acknowledged.

Aboard EB-52 BX-2 “Raven”
Range 2, Dreamland
9 January, 1415

“YOU HAVE TO KEEP YOUR SPEED UP OR YOU WON’T GET off the ground.”

“I’m not stupid,” snapped Lieutenant Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian, struggling to get the big EB-52 off Dreamland’s Runway Number Two. The big plane was trimmed for takeoff, its four freshly tuned engines humming at maximum takeoff power. He even had a crisp takeoff kind of wind at eighteen and a half knots in his face.

And still he couldn’t coax the plane into the sky. The mountains loomed ahead.

Worse—the computer-pilot-assist droned a stall warning in his ear.

“Daddy.
“

“I have it, Breanna,” he snapped to the copilot, Captain Breanna “Rap” Stockard. Bree was not only acting as his mentor on his first flight in the big plane; she also happened to be his daughter. “I have it,” he repeated.

But Colonel Bastian didn’t have it. The Megafortress’s nose stubbornly remained horizontal and its wheels on the pavement. He was nearly out of runway, and nothing he did—nothing—would get his forward speed over seventy-eight knots. Way too slow for anything but disaster.

Dog started to curse. In the next second, the plane magically lifted her chin, instantly gaining momentum. It wasn’t until he went to clean his landing gear a few seconds later that Bastian realized what had happened—the computer had taken over.

His copilot, meanwhile, was having serious trouble stowing a smirk.

“What the hell, Bree?”

“You tried to take off with only one engine.”

“What do you mean, one engine? They were all in the green.” The colonel ignored a query from Dreamland Tower, which was monitoring the airplane’s progress toward Range DL/2. “The controls—”

“You never punched it out of Sim-2,” said Breanna. “You were looking at old numbers.” She laughed uncontrollably.

They had used the plane’s command computer’s simulator module to run through a few mock takeoffs before starting down the field. The colonel realized now that he had failed to authorize the computer to switch back into real mode for takeoff. Obviously, Breanna had counted on the Megafortress’s safety protocols to get them off the ground safely.

Which, of course, they had.

“That’s dirty pool, Breanna,” Dog told her. “You shut off the engines.”

“No. I just dialed them down to ten percent. You weren’t paying attention,” she added. There was no trace of humor in her voice now—she was the veteran flight instructor verbally whacking a greenie pilot. “You didn’t ask for a check, which you should have, because as you can see, my screen clearly indicates the proper output. Inattention is a killer. In any airplane except the Megafortress, you would have bought it.”

“Any other plane and there’s no way you could have done that,” said Dog angrily. “You tricked me with a bogus reading.”

“Your screen clearly says sim mode. You didn’t go through the checks properly,” she said. “This was a dramatic way to point that out. I’m sorry, Daddy,” she added, her voice suddenly changing.

The change in tone killed him.

“No, you were absolutely one-hundred-percent right,” said Bastian. He practically spat the words through his clenched teeth, then sighed. She
was
right, damn it—he hadn’t dotted his stinking i’s and it could have cost him his plane, his crew, and his life. “Can I get control back?”

Breanna reached to her panel. “On my mark, Daddy.”

“
Don’t
call me Daddy.”

Bunker B, Dreamland
9 January, 1415

THE FLIGHTHAWK AND F-16 SWIRLED IN THE SKY, CAT and dog locked in a ferocious match. Neither could gain enough of an advantage over the other to end the battle. Then the big screen at the front of the room flashed white and a loud
pffffffff
cracked the speakers—Captain Madrone had cut the feed.

“I said,
knock it off”
Madrone stood back from the console, folding his arms in front of his chest. At five eight and perhaps 140 in a winter uniform with boots, thermals, and two sweaters, Madrone hardly cut an imposing figure. Even for an engineer he was considered shy and quiet, and most people at Dreamland who knew him even casually could mention several nervous habits, beginning with his nail-biting. But somewhere in the recesses of his personality lurked a young lieutenant who had faced down a pair of tanks in Iraq. The same ferocious snap that had led his team to wipe out the tanks with nothing more than hand grenades now brought the joint-services team that had been fighting the mock battle on a new simulation system to rapid attention.

Except for the two men at the heart of the battle, that is.

“You fucking
cheated,”
Zen told Mack, tossing off his Flighthawk control helmet. A control cable caught the custom-built device about a millimeter from the ground, just barely keeping it from turning into a bucket of ridiculously expensive but busted computer chips.

“I didn’t cheat,” said Smith, standing from his station on Madrone’s left. “I just flew under the radar coverage. How is that cheating?”

“You flew beyond the parameters of the plane,” said Zen. “You pulled over ten g’s twice. And besides, no way no how could you have gotten past the F-15’s at Mark Seven.”

“The computer let me take the g’s,” said Mack. “As for the F-15’s, where were they?”

“He got past us,” admitted Captain Paul Owens, who’d been handling the F-15 combat air sweep from one of the back benches. “The damn simulator has a hole in the radar coverage big enough to fly a 747 through. You can’t see anything under a thousand feet.”

“Gentlemen, please.” Dr. Ray Rubeo, one of the scientists overseeing the simulation, leaned over the railing at the back of the room. His voice had the world-weary tone a kindergarten teacher would use at the end of a long week. “I believe we have our data for today. I suggest everyone take the afternoon off to play with their Tinkertoys. Live-fire exercise in the morning. Tomorrow, please, keep the WWF routine on the ground.”

Rubeo turned and walked from the room, shuddering slightly at the doorway, as if shaking a great chill from his body.

“Easier to walk away than fix the holes in the sim program,” muttered Zen.

“I think he was right,” said Madrone. “We all pretty much know what we have to do tomorrow.”

He turned to Captain Rosenstein and Lieutenant Garuthers, who were to pilot the actual helicopters they would test tomorrow. The Army commanders were here to test new helicopter upgrades and combat communications in something approaching real conditions; they cared little for what they called the “Hair Force testosterone show,” and were only too happy to knock off early.

Knife and Zen, meanwhile, traded snipes across the floor.

“You were lucky today,” said Zen. “Tomorrow we’re in real planes.”

“Tomorrow I’m going to kick your ass all over town, you peahead loser,” promised Knife. “I can do things in the MiG that would tear an F-16 apart, even with Dreamland’s mods.”

“1 can nail a MiG with my eyes closed,” said Zen.

“We’ll see,” said Mack. He popped the CD that had recorded his part of the exercise out of the console near him and left the room, practically whistling.

Zen wheeled toward his helmet, still shaking his head. He picked it up and handed it to Jennifer Gleason, one of the computer scientists on the Flighthawk project. Gleason smiled at him, pushing a strand of her long, brownish-blond hair back behind her ear. The computer screens bathed her face and neck an almost golden yellow; she looked like a nymph emerging from bed. A genius nymph—Dr. Gleason was among the world’s leading authorities on AI circuitry and intelligence chips—but a nymph nonetheless.

Madrone stared at the curve of her two breasts in the slightly oversized black T-shirt she wore. Lowering his eyes to her hips, he watched them sway slightly while their owner went over some of the details of the encounter with Jeff. Madrone turned back to his station, pretending to sort through his papers, pretending not to be driven to sense-crushing distraction by an expert on gallium arsenic chips.

“We’re seeing you tonight, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” Madrone said, still distracted.

“You okay, Kevin?” Zen asked.

“I’m fine. Have to, uh, sort all this out, you know.”

“Yeah. Listen, don’t worry about the holes in the simulation program. Jennifer will work them out. Nail’s bleeding,” Zen added, smiling. “Bad habit.”

Madrone nodded sheepishly. Stockard gripped the wheels of his chair and rolled himself back a foot or so. The others had left the control area, but Zen still made a show of looking around, a car thief checking if the coast were clear. “Listen, I have to give you a heads-up on tonight. Bree’s playing matchmaker.” Zen rolled his eyes and shrugged apologetically. “You know how it goes.”

Madrone suddenly had a vision of Jennifer Gleason sitting on the Stockards’ couch in a short, wispy skirt, breasts loose beneath a silk white polo shirt.

“Abby Miller,” added Jeff.

The vision evaporated.

“I’m sorry, Zen. What’d you say?” asked Madrone.

“Abby Miller. She’s a civilian. She works over at Nellis in the public affairs office. I think she used to be a reporter or worked for a magazine or something. I’m not exactly sure how Bree first met her. You know Rap—she knows just about everybody. Uh, nice personality.”

Madrone folded his thumb beneath his other fingers, holding his fist close to his side. “If Breanna likes her, she’s okay,” he said.

“That’s the spirit.” Zen gave him another sardonic grin, then began wheeling away. “Seven P.M.
sharp.
Bree’ll have dinner timed out to the half second. Bring the wine.”

Madrone suddenly felt real fear. “Wine? What kind?”

But Zen was halfway out the door and didn’t respond.

Aboard Raven
9 January, 1415

NOWHERE IS IT WRITTEN THAT POINTY-NOSE FIGHTER jocks are better than all other pilots. No military regulation declares that just because a man—or woman—regularly subjects himself to eight or nine negative g’s and hurtles his body through the air at several times the speed of sound is he—or she—better than those who proceed in a more considered fashion. Not one sheet in the mountains of official Air Force paperwork covering piloting and flying in general includes the words “Teen-jet jocks are superior to all others.”

But every go-fast zippersuit who ever strapped a brain bucket on his head believes it is true. He—or she—did not get to fly the world’s most advanced warbirds by being merely good. Personal preferences and luck aside, front-line fighter pilots in the U.S. Air Force are the best of the best. And most would have no problem telling you that.