“I have six guys on the Whiplash response team,” Danny told her. “I’d like to qualify each one of them on the gun.”

“It is a sniper’s weapon, Captain. At some point in the future, perhaps, we will be able to mass-produce it. For now there is exactly one available for use.”

“All the same, I want them checked out on it, if possible.” Freah’s Whiplash response team was an elite subgroup of his air commandos, cross-trained for a variety of jobs. Organized only in the last six months, they hadn’t been called into action yet, with the exception of one training detail. But it was accepted that each member would be trained and expected to take on any other member’s job at a moment’s notice.

“As you wish. I suppose you’ll be wanting body armor as well,” said Klondike.

“We have flak vests.”

“Captain, please.” She shook her head. “Your vests are made from KM2, correct?”

“Well—”

“They weigh more than twenty-five pounds, and I doubt that half your men wear them half the time, no matter what the standing orders or situation may be. Our armor, on the other hand, is made of boron carbide plates and a thinner, stronger Kevlar derivative. Unfortunately, there’s some loss of flexibility in our version, and we’ve only fashioned vests so far. Nonetheless, you’ll find they weigh less than ten pounds, and can stop a 30mm shell fired from point-blank range.”

“I’m in your hands, Annie,” said Danny.

“Yes, well, don’t get fresh,” said Klondike, leading him out of the room.

Dreamland

11 October

COLONEL BASTIAN WALKED AROUND THE CHUNKY airframe that sat in the middle of Development Shed B/3, trying to hide some of his displeasure from Rubeo and the others he had gathered on the tarmac for this impromptu brainstorming session. To him, the F-119 looked like a flying tugboat.

A barely flying one, given its performance specs. Mike Janlock, an aeronautical engineer who specialized in BMI resin airfoils, had just finished saying that a handful of alterations would turn the aircraft into a robust attack weapon. But those changes would make it unusable aboard aircraft carriers, as well as highly unlikely to meet the Marine Corps requirement for vertical landing at forward combat weight.

Janlock and the others had said over and over that there were three pretty good planes locked inside the F-119 airframe. Choose one—hell, even two—and America would have a cutting-edge aircraft capable of filling a wide variety of attack roles for the next two decades.

But Dog’s mandate was clear. He had to proceed with all three. Congress was so high on the project that yesterday afternoon a Congressional committee had voted to increase F-119 funding three hundred percent.

The same committee had postponed a decision on Dreamland, per the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs and Ms. O’Day.

If Dreamland survived, it would get a good hunk of the F-119 development money. Bastian’s new “all ranks” mess halls—already a hit—could dish out all the fancy food they wanted for the next ten years.

But damn. The plane was a flying tugboat. Hell, it was one of those five-hundred-dollar hammers the media claimed the Pentagon was always buying.

“Colonel, you were saying?” prompted Rubeo.

“A survivable tanker,” repeated Bastian. “The thinking is to replace KC-10 Extenders and HC-130’s at the same time. It would be connected to the JSF project.”

“So it has to be fast and slow,” said Janlock.

He didn’t mean it as a joke, but everyone laughed. Except Rubeo, of course.

“Seriously, if we did have one aircraft that could refuel helicopters as efficiently as CAP aircraft, in combat situations as well as on ferry flights, it would be a hell of an asset,” said Bastian, reining them in. “I can tell you from experience, a fighter with battle damage can have trouble reaching normal tanking altitude and speed. KC-135 and KC-10 tankers did a hell of a job during the Gulf War, doing things they weren’t technically capable of. I’d say more than a dozen lives were saved. At least. And ten times that number of planes. So what we’re talking about, if you guys could pull it off—the potential would translate into a lot less orphans and widows. I realize it’s not the conventional thinking, but I’ve seen what you guys can do.”

With the exception of Rubeo, who was wearing his customary scowl, the engineers and officers nodded their heads. They hadn’t thought about the problem in those terms before.

“What if we take the C-17 apart?” asked Jeremy Winters, a tall engineer with a hawk’s nose and thick, wire-rimmed glasses. “Good capacity, short takeoff so we can use forward bases.”

“Piffle,” said Rubeo.

“All right, Doc,” snapped Bastian, who’d had enough of the scientist’s chronic pessimism. “What do you suggest?”

“It depends on our goal,” said the scientist. He pursed his lips as if he had just bit into a lemon. “If our goal is simply to sustain funding, I suggest we take any aircraft we’re interested in and claim that it should be studied as a tanker.”

“All right, that’s enough,” said Bastian. “I’ll deal with the politics. I want real ideas here, not fodder for Congress.”

“Colonel, you and I both know that the JSF is our lifeline,” said Rubeo, refusing to back down. “And charitably put, it’s a camel. So the most optimum solution would be another camel. But as for a survivable tanker”—the scientist’s voice rose an octave as he finally made a serious point—”the C-17 is a large and easily hit target. There is no way to change that.”

“Escorts could protect it,” said Smith. “Going to need them for the JSF.”

Uncharacteristically, Smith hadn’t said much at all. Dog suspected that he had decided to say as little as possible about the JSF now that he was leaving; probably he was watching his political backside.

Smart, even though it pissed Bastian off.

“We already have a project study for a survivable, deep-penetration tanker on the shelf,” said Major Nancy Cheshire. “It would need some work for low-speed refueling, but it would certainly meet the requirements for near-Mach speed, high-altitude regimes.”

“What are we talking about?” Bastian asked, still glaring at Rubeo.

“The Megafortress KC.”

Rubeo opened his mouth to object, but Cheshire cut him off.

“Some studies were done two years ago, but they never went anywhere. The idea was that we would need something that could keep up with the flying battleship concept, refueling it in a hostile environment,” she explained. “Survivability was an important consideration and on that score, I know the plane got high marks.”

“Megafortress, back from the dead,” said Rubeo.

“What’s your objection to that idea?” Bastian asked the scientist.

“None as far as the specific plane goes,” said Rubeo, surprising Bastian. “My objection is one of principle. The Megafortress—all manned aircraft are redundant.” He folded his arms in front of his chest. “Colonel, if you’re looking to tie a project to the F-119’s tail, tie the Flighthawks. They’re the future.”

“We’ve been down that road,” said Bastian. “And in any event, the robots can’t even refuel themselves.”

“Piffle. We simply haven’t thought about it properly.”

Dog wanted his people to feel that they could speak freely; he didn’t want a group of yes-men and suck-ups around him. And he knew that for a place like Dreamland to succeed, discipline had to be pretty loose.

But Rubeo really pushed the envelope.

“I appreciate your comments, if not your tone,” Dog told him. “The debate about robot planes isn’t relevant at the moment.” He turned back to Cheshire. “How far along was the tanker project?”

“I don’t know that it got beyond one or two proof-of-concept flights,” she said. “But I’ in sure it wouldn’t take much to dust it off.”

“The plane kicks out some fierce vortices,” said Jan-lock. “We barely have them controlled enough for stable flight. We all saw how difficult it was to handle without the flight computer. If anyone other than Rap was at the controls when the gear crashed, we would have lost the plane.”