127
Mountain was one thing, landing on this mountaintop metal-covered sand trap quite another.
And Breanna hadn’t fully recovered from her injuries either.
“Want me to fuel and prep Two for launch?” asked Fentress.
“I got it,” said Zen, louder than he’d intended. He worked quickly through the checklist, jumping momentarily into the cockpit of Hawk One, then handing it back over to the computer in its orbit around the airstrip.
Fueled and powered, Hawk Two purred beneath the EB-52’s wing, eager to launch.
“Can I take it?” Fentress asked.
“Sorry,” said Zen, immediately telling Breanna they were set to launch because he didn’t care to debate with his sidekick.
“READY?” BREANNA ASKED CHRIS AFTER THE GROUND
controller gave them the all-clear.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Engines are yours,” she said. “Like we chalked it up.”
“Gotcha, coach,” said Ferris.
They brought the big plane out of her last leg on the approach pattern, lining up with the runway. They were at an off angle, their nose about fifteen degrees away from a straight-on run. Several simulations on the Megafortress control computer showed this would give them the best handle on the swirling winds.
“Four’s too hot,” Breanna said. She had the power-graph in the configurable HUD, its green bars overshad-owing the rocks as they approached.
“Backing off four, five percent. Seven percent.”
“Five thousand feet,” said Breanna, reading the altitude against the runway, not sea level—which would have 128
DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
added nearly seven thousand feet to the total. “On course.”
“Crosswind!” warned Chris. Quicksilver moaned as he said that, the plane lurching slightly to their left as a gust of wind caught them.
“I have it,” she said. “Gear.”
“Gear,” confirmed Chris. The plane shook slightly, her airspeed quickly dropping below 150 knots against the stiff head wind as the landing gear doors opened. Their momentum bled away; within seconds they were no more than three knots over their stall speed, with a goodly distance to go.
“Hold our power,” said Breanna.
“Gear set and locked,” said Chris. “Okay okay okay.”
“Systems,” prompted Breanna.
“Green, we’re in the green, we’re in the green. Jesus—too low, Bree, we’re going to clip the rocks.”
Breanna resisted the impulse to break off the approach and instead held back on her stick ever so slightly longer than she had intended. They did cut the lip of the ridge close, but they cleared it.
“Chutes!” said Breanna and Chris together. They’d timed the deployment down to the millisecond, trying to balance the different effects and maximize the drag without ending up too far off course. The jet wobbled slightly but held herself in the air, the extended trailing edges on the wings adjusted by a series of small actuators that responded in micrometer increments to the pilot’s input.
“Reverse thrust! Reverse!” Breanna shouted.
The swirling gusts suddenly changed direction and died. The Megafortress’s tail threatened to whip out from behind her and the plane rolled faster than she’d wanted, its speed jumping nearly fifty knots, if the speedo were to be believed. Breanna’s fingers compressed around the stick, her soft touch suddenly gone, her biceps cramping.
RAZOR’S EDGE
129
An alarm sounded in the cockpit, and Chris shouted another warning.
Then she did something she’d never done before when landing a Megafortress: She closed her eyes. The plane’s wings seemed to hulk over her shoulders, extensions of her body. Her stomach felt for the runway, her legs dragging the brakes. She fought the muscle knots in her hand and back, pushing the plane as gently as she could, willing it along the path as she’d planned, compensating for the wind, feeling her way dead onto the middle of the runway.
God, she thought. The word filled her head, the only conscious idea. Every other part of her belonged to the plane.
“Holding, holding, oh yeah, oh yeah,” Chris was saying. “Fifty knots. Thirty. Oh mama! Stopping! We’re stopping! This is pretty, Captain!”
Someone behind her started to cheer. Breanna opened her eyes, looking out the windshield of the jet for the ground controller who was supposed to meet them and steer them to their parking slot.
High Top
1800
DANNY FREAH WAITED AS THE HATCHWAY BENEATH THE
Megafortress hissed and began to lower. He jumped onto the steps as soon as they touched the ground. Hopping aboard, he popped up into the Flighthawk control deck, where Zen was busy bringing the U/MFs in for their landings. The major’s new sidekick, Captain Fentress, looked around with a surprised expression, but Zen remained oblivious, hunkered over his controls. Danny waved at Fentress, then clambered up the access ramp to the flight deck, where the crew was just stowing their gear.
130
DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
“Nice landing, Bree,” said Danny. “Welcome to the No-Tell Motel.”
“Glad to be here,” she said.
“Colonel Bastian wants to conference,” he told her. “I was hoping I could sit in Quicksilver with you guys when we take it. We don’t have the headquarters trailer down yet, and our only radio is the SatCom.”
“Not a problem,” she said, stepping back as he climbed into the ship. Breanna caught his arm as he reached the deck. “We appreciate your getting that strip together so fast. Thanks.”
It was the first thank-you he’d heard all day, and it felt incredibly good. “Thanks.”
“Now that I’ve brown-nosed you,” added Breanna,
“can I drive one of those bulldozers?”
Dreamland Secure Command Center
1012
DOG PACED BACK AND FORTH ACROSS THE FRONT OF THE
situation room like an anxious father-to-be waiting word from the delivery ward.
He should have found a way to go himself. Nobody had ordered him not to this time—so why hadn’t he even thought of it?
Because he was superfluous. Because his job was here.
Because Major Alou and Breanna were much better Megafortress pilots than he was.
Bree, at least. Alou was still a little new. But the arguments that had kept Cheshire here went triple for him.
Except that he wanted to be out there, in the mix.
Why had he sent Jennifer? Because she knew the computer systems better than anyone in the world, including her boss, Ray Rubeo, who was sitting at one of the nearby RAZOR’S EDGE
131
consoles. Not only had she helped develop half of the avionics in the Megafortress and Flighthawks, but she could probably figure out the rest with her eyes closed.
If he was worried about Jennifer, why wasn’t he worried about his own daughter, Breanna? She was taking much more risk, flying the plane into combat.
Because Breanna had never seemed vulnerable?
Vulnerable wasn’t the right word.
Rubeo sighed loudly, leaning back in his chair. He’d brought a book to read as well as a pile of technical fold-ers, and seemed to flit back and forth between them as if reading them all simultaneously.
Losing two more F-16s—it still had not been confirmed that the planes had been shot down, though everyone assumed they were—had sent CentCom as well as Washington into a frenzy. It didn’t help that no one knew what had shot down the planes. The latest CIA theory was that the Iraqis had managed to acquire modified versions of the Russian Straight Flush radar, a low PFR radar that had been modified not only to frequency skip but to resist jamming. The theory held that they were able to use the radars in conjunction with older but also undoubtedly modified Fan Gong F radars, all of which were turned on for extremely short periods of time in a predetermined pattern. Data from these extremely brief bursts were then used to launch several missiles.