She’s trying to seduce me somehow, he realized as he rolled his wheelchair toward the table area. Geraldo took a bag of cinnamon-apple herbal tea and placed it in a cup as she waited for the kettle to boil. She didn’t disapprove of coffee or “real” tea, but she advised against it. As a physician, she said, she had some doubts about the long-term effects of caffeine.

“Jeff, do you remember the accident when you lost your legs?”

“I didn’t lose them,” he said. “I have legs just the same as you.”

“They’re not the same. Though I did misspeak,” she said, correcting herself.

Geraldo was a viper. She came off like a grandma-type, but beneath it she was always plotting.

“I remember the accident,” he said.

The electric teapot whistled. She poured out two cups. “Do you think about it often?” she asked, waiting as the tea steeped.

“No. At first, sure. But not now.”

“Would you say you’ve accepted it?”

“Who the hell accepts something like that?” Zen struggled to keep his anger in control. Geraldo was trying to provoke him. “The thing is, see, you don’t accept it. Not really. Never. But you, it’s like you move to the next problem. A pilot, see—a pilot knows there’s a checklist.”

“Losing your ability to walk isn’t the same as missing an item on the checklist.” She stopped stirring the tea for a moment. “Do you think you’ll ever walk again?”

The bitch must have some way of reading his mind while he was hooked up into the machine.

They’d always said that was impossible. They’d claimed they could only see waves.

But hell, if it meant walking again, he’d put up with it. He could put up with anything.

“The doctors have been pretty much universal that I won’t walk. And, yes, it seems pretty evident, don’t you think?” He reached for his tea. He smelled it, could tell from the steam rising that it would be too hot, held it in his lap. “Everyone is in agreement that walking isn’t in my future.”

“But you don’t agree.”

Zen laughed. He really did like her; she really did remind him of his grandmother. “The fact of the matter is, Doc, even if I thought I could walk—hell, if I wished to right now—it wouldn’t change a damn thing. I’d still fall flat on my face and you’d laugh your ass off.”

“I wouldn’t laugh at you, Jeffrey,” she said, so seriously that he couldn’t do anything but sniff once more at the tea.

Dreamland Hangar 1

27 February, 1000

LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE AT DREAMLAND, THE SURVIVAL shop was on the cutting edge. While there were no masseuses on duty, pilots suiting up for test flights had nearly every other conceivable amenity. Their flight gear, of course, was custom-tailored; the men and women who prepared their suits could embarrass a team of London tailors with their speed and accuracy. The survival gear itself—parachutes, etc.—was mostly standard issue, and received the same standard of care administered at any U.S. Air Force facility: in other words, the best possible. But the experts attending pilots before and after their test runs included a nurse who helped make sure the legs and arms and chests fitting into the suits were in top condition. She had certificates in sports medicine and nutrition as well as aviation medicine.

She was also as free with her advice as Ann Landers. Which meant that Dog got the full harangue as he dressed before taking the new EB-52 for a flight.

“You’ve put on two pounds since you’ve come here, Colonel,” warned Nurse Yenglais. “Too much of the good life.”

“Good life?” Dog slid his helmet liner on his head. “Are you implying I’m getting fat, Maria?”

“Six thousand calories,” she said, undeterred. “At this rate, you will be outside of your ideal weight range in two years.”

Which would still leave him about ten pounds lighter than nearly everyone in the Air Force at his rank. But Dog knew better than to voice that objection, and merely winked at the nearby staff sergeant who was performing what amounted to a quadruple check of his safety gear.

“See you all in exactly ninety minutes,” said Dog, taking his helmet and striding for the plane.

The practice sessions that had started because he wanted to prove to his daughter that he could fly anything had become welcome escapes from the rigors of his desk job. In the space of two weeks, Bastian had made himself into an excellent Megafortress pilot, and in fact an important fill-in for test flights. The plane’s flight computers even rated him the third-best EB-52 skipper on the base.

Which irked him no end. He didn’t mind—much—that his computer scores were lower than Major Cheshire’s. She’d been flying big jets forever, and had helped build the plane and spent more time at the helm every day than he spent at his desk.

But ranking behind Breanna was another matter. Never mind that Bree also had considerable experience in multiengined jets, or that she too had worked with the designers and whiz kids on the Megafortress. Dog wanted to beat her.

Not too bad, of course. Just enough to show he was better.

“Colonel, you have five?” shouted Danny Freah just as Dog touched the ladder to board his plane.

“I can spare about three,” he told the captain.

“Just, uh, can we talk over here?” asked Freah, gesturing with his thumb. Dog followed Freah a short distance away, out of earshot of the techies completing last-second checks of the new plane, which had been dubbed “Galatica.”

“I’ve been talking to Jed Barclay over at the NSC. We have a weird theory about the 777.”

Dog squinted into the sun. “More hiker reports, or has the Navy found something?”

“No. The Navy contacts turned out bogus, just as you predicted.”

Despite several promising leads, the search teams had failed to turn up any wreckage in the Sierras, and the search had been extended to the Pacific, where the Boeing and Flight-hawks could theoretically have flown after the pilots ejected. The fact that the big plane did not appear on any radars and had not been sighted, of course, argued against it continuing to the Pacific, but it had to have landed somewhere.

“You’re going to think this is nuts,” added Danny.

“If Jed Barclay came up with it, I will.”

“It’s more my idea,” said Danny. “A few hours after Hawk-mother and the Flighthawks disappeared, there was an incident at a small national airport in Mexico. A large plane set down there, using the registration and ID of a 707. A gang stole some fuel, killed a man, and blew up a tanker before taking off.”

“A gang?”

“It’s not a good fit, I know. But one of the reports states that other planes were involved, and that one swooped in low and tried to shoot up some of the security vehicles. It could have been a Flighthawk.”

“I don’t know, Danny. I’m still thinking it’s in the mountains somewhere, buried under the snow.”

“With no beacon?”

“Disabled in the crash.”

“I checked some of the technical data out. Hawkmother could have reached Mexico. The airport is down the peninsula, in the western mountains not far from the sea.”

“The Flighthawks would never have made it that far.”

“They could have refueled,” said Danny. “I checked that out too. There would have been just enough fuel for all three to have made it. It would explain why we can’t find the planes, Colonel.”

Bastian looked back at the sun. Sabotage had, of course, been considered from the start. But theft was a different angle, and most unlikely. Madrone was the only other person on the plane; it seemed almost inconceivable that anyone else had snuck aboard. The Army captain had no experience as a pilot beyond ANTARES, and even if he had been an ace, he would have had a difficult time in the cockpit once the ejection seats were gone.

“Maybe the computer was programmed to fly the plane away,” suggested Danny. “Maybe ANTARES is the target. The Russians know about it. They obviously want it. I talked to Dr. Rubeo,” added Freah. “He says it would have been impossible to preprogram the computer to take the plane without it showing up in the preflight dumps. Apparently, they download the memory before taking off for some sort of baseline check.”