For the next hour he treaded slowly, faceup in the brine, cold and salt sandpapering his lips and nose. Then, suddenly, the water began to churn. He felt it coming for him now, the shark, drawn by his fatigue like a radio beacon in the night. It broke water fifty yards to his right, a massive thing of blackness.

Stoner waited. He had no weapon.

There was a sound behind him, an eerie cry not unlike the death rattle of a man at the end.

“Here!” Stoner yelled. “Here!”

A Seachlight played across the surface of the water. Two SEALs in diving gear paddled a rubber boat toward him.

“Here!” he yelled again.

“Mr. Stoner?” said one of the men.

“You’re not expecting someone else, I hope,” said Stoner as the raft crept up. His muscles were so stiff he had to be helped into the boat. But he managed to climb onto the deck of the waiting submarine and go below without further assistance.

“Stoner, I’m Captain Waldum,” said the skipper. “Glad we found you. Your signal’s getting weak.”

“Yeah,” said Stoner. “Let’s retrieve the bow pod from my boat and get back. About a dozen people are trying to have their underwater in knots about now.”

Chapter 2

An excellent coffin

Dreamland

August 21, 1997, 0700 local

Captain Breanna Stockard shifted her left leg for the five hundredth time since getting into the cockpit, trying to make herself comfortable. Her seat, which canted back at a twenty-degree angle, had ostensibly been form-fitted to her anatomy and designed for a maximum comfort on a long mission. Its inventor joked it would be so comfortable the pilot would be in constant danger of falling asleep; Breanna thought that a remote possibility at best. While the chair adjusted in several dimensions, it was impossible to find a setting that didn’t put a kink in her back—or somewhere else.

Captain Stockard was surrounded by four large panels, one in front, one overhead, and one on each side. Constructed of a plasma “Film,” each panel provided, at her command, a full instrument suite, optical view from all four compass points, or synthesized views composed from radar or infrared sensors. The stick at the side of her seat and the pedals at her feet did not actually move, instead sensing the pressure exerted on them and translating it as commands to the flight computer that took care of the actual details involved in trimming the large craft. The throttle was the closest to a “normal” airplane control in the cockpit—assuming, of course, such a control could select a standard turbofan, a scramjet, and a restartable rocket motor or some combination of all three depending on the flight regime. All of the controls could be discarded if Breanna preferred; the computer stood ready to translate her words into commands as quickly as she could utter them into the small microphone at the end of her headset.

That, Breanna felt, was a big part of the problem. The aircraft had been designed to be flown entirely by the computer; the cockpit was really just an afterthought, which explained why it was so stinking uncomfortable. Had it actually been in the plane, however, it would have been even worse. There, it would have had to squeeze into a thick, double-layer ceramic-titanium airfoil whose sinewy, weblike skin slid back from a needle nose into a shape described by its designers as an “aerodynamic triangle.” Its midsection looked something like a stretched B-1 bomber with engine inlets top and bottom, and wings capable of canting about ten degrees up and down as well as swinging out and it. It had a shallow tailfin on both the top and bottom of the fuselage. In order to keep the tailfin clear when landing or taking off, it sat on a set of landing gear that undoubtedly broke all previous records for height. Even so, when the aircraft was fully loaded, less than eighteen inches separated the wingtips from the runway, making it necessary to physically sweep the runway clean before taking off so any mishap might be avoided.

This tedious process added considerably to the pilot’s consternation as she waited for clearance to begin her test flight.

Known as the UMB—Unmanned Bomber Platform—or B-5, the plane was among Dreamland’s most ambitious projects to date. Once fully operational, it would fly at somewhere over six times the speed of sound, yet have the turning radius at Mach 3 of an F/A-18 just pushing five hundred knots. The UMB was designed to fly in near-earth orbit for extended deployments; there it could serve as an observation platform and launch-point for a suite of smart weapons still under study. Its engine, which were powered by hydrogen fuel, were not yet ready for such lofty flights, though today’s test would take it to a very respectable 200,000 feet. Similarly, the configurable leading and trailing portions of the wings—inflated by pressurized hydrogen to microcontrol the airfoil—had not yet replaced the more conventional leading- and trailing-edge control surfaces, thus limiting its maneuverability to a more conventional range.

Assuming taking ten Gs could be called conventional.

“Ground is clear. How are we looking, Captain?” asked Sam Fichera, who led the team developing the controls and was today’s mission boss.

“I think we’re ready to rock,” Bree answered.

“Ready for an engine start. Everything by the book.”

“Ready when you are.” Breanna looked at the left corner of her front screen, where the engine data had been preprogrammed to appear. “Computer. Takeoff engine start. Proceed.”

“Computer. Takeoff engine start,” acknowledged the electronic copilot.

The two GE-built turbofans used for takeoff and low speed flight regimes whipped to life. A detailed checklist appeared at the right side of Breanna’s screen, laid over the endless vista of the cleared runway and the surrounding dry lake beds that encircled Dreamland. Breanna and the computer moved through the long checklist slowly, making sure everything was good to go. The computer could facilitate quick takeoffs by color-coding the items—those it knew were “in the green” or good to go were shown in green letters, problems were in red. No caution (yellow) was permitted on takeoff; the items would be marked red instead, and the takeoff held until the trouble was corrected.