Nerve Center (6 page)

The geezer slipped a Franklin to the attendant who met them at the door to the lounge, then tented one for the waitress who approached with a gin and tonic.

She wore a top. So much for rumors.

Valenz told the woman to bring Mack a double Jack on the rocks, then steered him toward a pair of leather club chairs at the corner. The chairs sat in front of a large plate-glass with a good view of the city; Las Vegas in all its tacky glory spread out before him, neons wailing in the night.

“The Punch is a bit sophisticated for the city, wouldn’t you say, Major?” asked Valenz.

“I guess,” said Mack.

“Besides the Brazilian government, I work for Centurion Aeronautics,” said Valenz. “We are consultants. We’re always looking for new associates.”

Mack smiled. He’d been expecting some sort of pitch. “I don’t think I’d be a very good salesman,” he said.

“Oh, not a salesman,” said Valenz. He reached into his pocket and took out a leather case. “Smoke cigars, Major?”

“Not really,” said Mack.

“Pity.” Valenz opened the small case, which held three cigars. “Cubans.”

“Thanks, I’ll pass,” said Mack. In the reflection of glass he saw several good-looking young women staring at them. Fully clothed—but interesting nonetheless.

“We need pilots who can talk to other pilots. My own country, for example—the Navy is thinking of buying MiG-29’s from the Russians. Someone like yourself, with your experience, could help quite a bit.”

Mack felt his heartbeat double. Did this SOB know he was working on the MiG-29 project? Or was that just a coincidence?

“What we do is all perfectly legal,” said the Brazilian. “We have several Americans on our payroll. We obtain the necessary approvals. Some even remain with the Air Force.”

Time to leave, thought Mack. He stood.

“You know what, I just remembered something I have to do.”

“Take my card,” insisted Valenz, standing. “A man like you appreciates the finer things in life. As I say, nothing illegal.”

“Thanks,” said Mack gruffly. But he did not remove the card from his pocket as he headed for the elevator.

Dreamland Perimeter
10 January, 0455

HIS LUNGS FROSTED WITH EACH BREATH, THE COLD morning air poking icy fingers inside his chest as he ran. Bastian struggled onward, flexing his shoulders and pushing his calf muscles deliberately, trying to flex his muscles to the max. It wasn’t the cold so much as fatigue that dogged him as he ran the perimeter track; his body moved like a car tire breaking through a pile of icy sludge, each joint crackling and complaining. He’d gotten less than two hours sleep and his body wasn’t about to let him forget it.

Dog was thinking about shutting his workout down at the three-mile mark—ordinarily he did five—when a lithe figure poked out of the shadows ahead. The runner trotted in place a second, still trying to get limber in the cold air.

“You’re up early,” said Jennifer Gleason, falling in alongside him as Dog drew up. He’d recognized her from her bright-red watch cap, which this morning was augmented by a set of blue ear muffs. Gleason was a serious runner, and wore a nylon shell workout suit over what seemed to be several layers of T’s and sweats.

“So’re you,” grunted Bastian. He turned to follow the left fork of the path, even though that meant he’d be stretching his workout to six miles.

“Did you shut everything down when you left?” she asked.

“I did, Doc. I did.”

Their running shoes slapped in unison against the macadam, a steady rap that paced their hearts. They ran in silence for nearly a mile. They crested a small hill overlooking the boneyard beyond Dreamland’s above-ground hangars. The fuselages of ancient Cold War warriors and failed experiments lay exposed in the distance, sheltered only by the lingering shadows of the night.

Seeing the hulking outlines of the planes always spurred Dog on; he couldn’t help but think of the inevitableness of time and decay. How many other commanders had run—or perhaps walked—across this very spot, their minds consumed by the problems of the day? The A-12 had done some testing here. Northrop’s Flying Wing had pulled more than a few turns around the airspace. It wasn’t Dreamland then; it wasn’t even a base, just a long expanse of open land far from prying eyes.

Some of the Cheetah sleds, earlier variants of the hopped-up Eagle demonstrator, lay in the bone pile. At least one DreamStar mock-up sat beneath a wind-tattered tarp. It was a 707 whose nose had grown fangs, the early test bed for the forward airfoil of the plane destined to succeed the F-22. Or rather, the plane that had been intended to succeed the F-22. The fiasco that had brought Bastian to Dreamland had shelved DreamStar. And ANTARES, though obviously not for good.

“Let me ask you a question,” said Dog, pulling up suddenly and putting his hand out in front of Jennifer.

His hand caught the soft looseness of her chest. In the dim light he saw surprise in her eyes.

“ANTARES,” said Dog, dropping his hand awkwardly. “What do you—tell me what you think about it.”

“What do you mean?” Her voice was thin and low, out of breath.

Dog leaned his body forward and fell back into an easy jog. “Your opinion on it.”

“It was never my project per se,” said Gleason, quickly catching up. “Bio-cyber connections aren’t my thing.”

“What about Nerve Center?”

“Some thing. It’s part of ANTARES. It is ANTARES. No one here spoke of them separately.”

“You say that like you don’t like it.”

“No. Not at all. I mean, eventually fluid organic interfaces will be part of the mix. It’s inevitable. You’ve heard about the experiments that have brought sight to people with certain types of blindness.”

“Sure.”

She picked up the pace. Dog felt himself starting to strain now to keep up. Gleason’s words came almost in staccato, pushed out with her breaths.

“That sort of thing—of course it’s not as advanced as AN-TARES. Well, ANTARES is a different model altogether technically.”

Her voice either trailed off or her words were swallowed in a hard breath of air. Dog waited for her to continue or explain, but she didn’t.

“Can ANTARES work?” They were really running now; Bastian had to struggle to get the words out.

“It did.”

“For the Flighthawks?”

“Of course.”

They took a turn to follow the fence. One of the security team’s black SUVs approached slowly on its rounds. Dog waved, then realized he was falling behind. He tried lengthening his stride, pushing to catch up.

The fence tucked to the left up a very slight rise. Bastian’s quarters were down a short road to the right. He goaded his legs to give him one last burst, but barely caught her as he reached the intersection. He slowed, walking, warming down; Jennifer circled back.           

“It does work, Colonel. No question about it,” she said, trotting backward in front of him as he walked, catching his breath. “Major Stockard already passed the first set of protocols and controlled one of the Phantoms using the Flight-hawk protocols.”

“You have—” His breath caught. He stopped and leaned down, hands on hips. “You have reservations.”

“Not about the concept. I’m not an expert,” she added.

“You’ve worked on the gateway translation computers and you know as much about AI and computers as anyone on the base, including Rubeo.”

“ANTARES isn’t a computer. That’s the difference.”

She trotted back and forth, a colt eager to get on with her workout. Her body swayed—even in thick warm-up gear, she was beautiful. If he hadn’t been so exhausted from that sprint at the end, he might have grabbed her to him.

Thank God for exhaustion then. She was just a kid, the age of his daughter.

Ouch.

“I’m not an expert,” she insisted. ‘The program was ready for the Flighthawks when it was shelved. Phase One testing with a Phantom was completed about a month before Major Stockard’s accident. Nerve Center would have been the next step. We rewrote some of the hooks into the flight-control computers and tested them. We dropped some of the code in C3 covering simultaneous flights for memory space, but with some of the changes we’ve made recently I doubt it would be a problem loading them back in.”

“How long?”

“How long are they?”

“How long to load them back in?”

Jennifer shrugged. “Not long, if it’s a priority.”

“It may be.”

“Your call.”

Her whole manner toward him had changed. Damn his clumsiness for grabbing her chest. Damn—he could kick himself for being such a klutz.

“You don’t like ANTARES, do you?” he said.

She started trotting away, resuming her workout. “Not my area of expertise.”

“Thanks, Doc. I’m, uh, sorry.”

“Sorry?” she called back.

“The way I, uh, bumped you before.”

If she answered, her words were muffled by the wind as it suddenly picked up.

Dreamland
Aggressor Project Hangar
10 January, 0905

TO MACK SMITH, THE PLANE LOOKED LIKE A BLACK shark with slightly misplaced fins.

The MiG-29M/DE Dream Fulcrum, better known by its nickname “Sharkishki,” had a boxer’s stance. Her twin engines hung beneath a cobra cowl that melded seamlessly into her wings. Stock, the MiG-29 was a serious air-superiority fighter, not quite better than the F-16 or F/A-18, but close enough to cause a few beads of perspiration on an opponent’s brow. But Sharkishki was anything but stock. Dreamland power-plant specialists had worked over her RD-33K turbofans to the point that she had a third more thrust at full military power than even the uprated engines she had come with. They now put out 35,000 pounds in afterburner mode, a good sight better than the Pratt & Whitneys on an F-15C. As the plane remained several thousand pounds lighter than the average Eagle, she could easily outaccelerate one. With the help of new leading- and trailing-edge control surfaces, her already impressive roll rate had been considerably improved, and variable-geometry nozzles helped cut down her turning radius. The notoriously bumpy MiG skin had been smoothed out by the Dreamland techies so that hardly a blemish remained.

But it was in the cockpit that the Sharkishki’s improvements really shone. Her antiquated Russian avionics had been replaced with Dreamland’s finest microchips. Her HUD was slaved to a trial version of the F-22 radar and target-tracking units; her own reasonably competent infrared search and tracking (IRST) system had been replaced with a longer-range passive-detection system capable of detecting warm toast at twenty nautical miles in the rain. While not without bugs, the all-weather infrared system allowed Sharkishki to detect and engage enemy fighters before they knew they were being detected; its small size and radar-defeating paint meant the plane could generally not be scanned by fighter-borne radars until they were about fifteen nautical miles away. Granted, detection by AWACS was a different story, and a pilot who knew he was going up against the Sharkishki could employ tactics to neutralize the improvements—but he had to know what he was up against.

Which was the point of the project. When she was finished, the MiG-29M/DE—DE stood for “Dreamland Enhanced”—would be turned over to an “aggressor” fighter squadron tasked with training exercises at nearby Nellis Air Base. Sharkishki would take the role of Russia’s next-generation fighter, helping groom Air Force Top Guns for the future.

Kicking their butts was more the way Mack thought of it.

“Typical Russian piece of tin shit,” groused Chief Master Sergeant “Greasy Hands” Parsons behind him on the runway, joining Mack and the crew chief on the preflight walk-around. Parsons had a large ceramic bowl of coffee in his twisted fingers, and a thick stub of a cigar in his mouth. “We ready to go, Alan?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” said the chief, with considerably more snap and starch than he directed toward Mack. Parsons grunted. Then he spat some of his cigar juice out and took a swag of coffee. Shaking his head, he stepped close to the plane, frowning as he looked into the modified air intakes. The original Russian grates, intended to keep out rocks and debris on poor runways, had been replaced with an interior baffle system that acted like a turbo-booster at high speed.

“Something wrong, Sergeant?” Mack asked.

“Piece of Commie tin-shit garbage. You sure you want to fly this crate, Major?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Parsons didn’t answer, moving instead to the leading edge of the wing, where he pointed his cigar at the gap and demanded that the chief have it checked. A crewman ran up with a micrometer; the gap was shown to be within tolerances. That hardly suited Greasy Hands, who growled and continued around the aircraft. He soon had five men making last-second adjustments and checks, none of which were warranted, in Mack’s opinion.

“This plane is more than ready,” said Knife finally. “Ground crew did a hell of a job.”

Parsons ducked out from under the fuselage, where he’d been inspecting the landing gear.

“You got a problem with me, Major?”

“Hell, no,” said Mack. “Just lighten up. The ground crew kicked butt here.”

“Excuse me?” asked Parsons.

“I said the ground crew kicked butt,” Mack shouted.

“Well, thank you, Major,” said the chief master sergeant, breaking into a wide grin. “Nice to hear an officer say that.” He stepped so close to Mack that his breath nearly knocked the pilot over. “Now don’t fuckin’ break my plane.”

Mack’s mood didn’t lift until he slid the throttle to takeoff power and kicked Sharkishki into the air nearly a half hour later. He cleaned the underside of the MiG, pulling in the landing gear, and yanked the stick back, taking the MiG in a steep climb that made him forget all about sergeants and their typical bullshit.

Knife hit his marks and leveled off, vectoring toward the range where the day’s test was scheduled. He keyed into the shared frequency that would be used by all of the players in the exercise. Ringmaster—actually Army Captain Kevin Ma-drone, who was flying in an E-3 AWACS above, monitoring the test—acknowledged, then quickly reminded everyone of the ground rules: no hitting, no spitting, and no talking back.