Technically, Bastian was a long way down the chain of command from O’Day. But he’d worked for her in D.C. and she had personally pulled the strings to get him here.
“Assuming your phone call with Ms. O’Day is only its normal marathon length,” said Ax, “we can do this today like you wanted. You start seeing your section commanders, one by one, at 0800. Fifteen minutes a pop, that gets you to 1145, with a thirty-minute time-out for Ms. O’Day. Lunch at your desk. Senior scientists, two minutes apiece, you’ll be done by one.”
Dog looked up from his papers. “Two minutes?”
“Just checking to see if you were awake,” said the sergeant. “Fifteen minutes for the eggheads, like everybody else. Brings you to 1545, or maybe 1630. I can’t quite figure out their damn organization chart.”
“That will be fixed by tomorrow,” said Dog. “Each project gets a specific commander, with staff attached. Line officers in charge. This is a working squadron.”
Bastian hadn’t worked out all of the details yet, but his idea was relatively simple and followed the plan he had outlined years before. You got the technology onto the front lines by using it right away. The best way to do that was to slim down your organization. The people who had to use the weapons would be the people running the show.
“I’ll have the paperwork in two batches for you this morning,” said Ax. “Usual routine. And seriously, there are two guys I’d like to bring in to fill out the staff.”
“There’s a personnel freeze,” Dog reminded him.
“Oh, that’s no problem.” Ax grinned. He glanced down at the desk. “You want a piece of unsolicited advice, Colonel?”
“No.”
“I’d eighty-six this fancy desk and the bookshelves and the paintings, the whole bit. I mean, if you were a three-star like the last commander, it would be austere. Hell, simple even. But some Congressman comes wandering in here, he’s going to wonder why your office is fancier than his.”
“No Congressman’s wandering around Dreamland,” said Dog. “But thanks for the advice.”
“Anytime, Colonel. It’s free.”
“And worth every cent.”
SMITH PUNCHED THE TWO-PLACE F-15E NEARLY straight up, letting the big warbird feel her oats. The Pratt & Whitneys unleashed nearly sixty thousand pounds of thrust, easily overpowering gravity.
“Eeeeyow ! ! ! !” shouted the major’s backseat rider, a young staff sergeant selected from the engine maintenance shop. His yell of enthusiasm was so loud Smith had to knock the volume down on the plane’s interphone circuit.
At five thousand feet, Knife sliced the plane’s right wing in a sharp semicircle, leveling off in an invert that had the sergeant squealing with delight.
“Hot shit! Hot shit!” said the man as Smith brought the Strike Eagle right-side-up. His next comments were lost as Knife pulled a six-g bank and roll, literally spinning the plane on her back before heading off in the other direction.
“I love it! I love it!” said the sergeant when he got his breath back.
Knife grinned in spite of himself. He loved it too. The F-15E was designated as a strike aircraft, a bomber. But she had been developed from the basic F-15 Eagle design, and was still an Eagle at heart—a balls-out hard rocker that could load g’s on her wings like feathers and accelerate as easily as a bird hummed a tune.
Rolling through a fresh invert at near-supersonic speed, Knife realized he’d been on the damn F-119 project so long he’d almost forgotten that flying was supposed to be fun. This was why he’d joined the Air Force.
Two weeks before, Major Smith had been offered a slot in a provisional unit known only as Wing A. The details about its mission were sketchy—according to a friend who was helping put it together, it was going to be a blood-and-guts quick-response unit, a kind of Air Force equivalent of Delta Force. Smith would be Director of Operations for a four-plane F-16 sub-squadron connected with a black operation called Madcap Magician. It had been a while since he’d flown F-16’s, but all in all it sounded promising. When he checked it out through the back channels, however, he got mixed responses. One general whom he trusted a great deal thought it would be an A-1 career ticket to the upper ranks. Another said it was Hot Dog Heaven, a sure way to be shunted off the fast track into a career culvert.
But damn—it was a real live flying gig, and if it was like Delta Force, he’d at least be where the action was. Besides, it seemed obvious that Dreamland was about to be flushed. The previous commander was a three-star general; no way they were going to put a lieutenant colonel in charge if they were intending on keeping HAWC up and running.
And what a colonel. If last night’s self-important rant was any indication, Colonel Bastian—aka “God,” as everyone in the Gulf had called the one-time hotshot pilot turned Centcom strategic planner—had succumbed to serious delusions of grandeur. Knife was willing to concede that Bastian was an okay pilot and a reasonably good thinker; he knew that Dog had helped set up some good mission schemes while working with Black Hole, the central planning unit that ran the Gulf Air War out of a bunker in Riyadh. Bastian had also briefly served as a wing commander in action after the war, again supposedly doing a good job. But Dog’s ego had obviously gotten the better of him since.
Knife had been ninety percent sure he would take the new gig when he slipped into the Eagle this morning. Now he was committed. Good riddance, Dreamland. Good riddance, F-119, chariot of slugs.
Knife yanked the Eagle into another hard turn, leveled off, then reached for the throttle to see if the afterburners would work this early in the morning.
They did. His backseater let out a yelp as the plane threw off her shackles and started to move. The plane bucked for a moment, then seemed to tuck her wings back, sailing through the sky as if she were a schooner gliding across a glass-smooth lake.
“You ever break the sound barrier, Sergeant?” Knife asked as the engines swirled.
“Sir—no!” yelled his passenger.
“Well, now you have,” said Smith. He backed off the engines as they passed the boundary into Test Range K, which he’d been cleared to use as long as he stayed above five thousand feet. The airspace below was reserved because of static tests of an Army electronic-pulse system, due to begin within the half hour.
“See the tank down on the ground, Sergeant?” Knife asked.
“Affirmative, sir. That’s the EMF target. Think it’ll get nuked?”
“Couldn’t tell you. We’re talking Army here.”
“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant with a laugh. “We’re shielded against those pulses, aren’t we?”
“Well, allegedly their weapon defeats standard shielding,” answered Knife, who knew that the test had been conducted about twenty times over the past month—obviously because the device didn’t work. “But, like I say, we’re talking Army.”
“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, snickering again.
“We’ll give it plenty of room,” said Smith, starting to bank.
They’d been using Range K the day Stockard got nailed.
Poor bastard.
Stockard was a good pilot, but he hadn’t been quite good enough. A blink too slow, and it cost him.
Knife curled his hand around his stick and took another turn, a truly hard one this time, briefly touching eight g’s.
“What’d you think of that one?” Knife asked, easing back on the stick. “Sergeant?”
There was no answer.
“Sergeant?”
There was a low moan. Apparently the force of the turn had knocked his passenger unconscious.
Laughing out loud, Knife gunned the plane back toward the runway.
* * *
“CAN’T DISAGREE, MS. O’DAY. CAN’T.” COLONEL Bastian picked up his pen and began tracing a series of triangles on his white notepad. He leaned his left elbow against the chair’s armrest, the phone pressed against his ear. The National Security Advisor had just reminded him how important it was to keep Dreamland going.