Mack ran through his instrument checks, working swiftly with the no-nonsense rhythm he’d perfected during his days flying combat air patrol in the Gulf. With the systems at Dash-One spec, he asked for and received clearance from the tower. He tapped the top of his helmet for good luck – a necessary part of his preflight ritual – then began trundling toward Lakebed Runway 34. A black Hummer and a Jimmy, both with blue security lights and yellow ‘Follow Me’ signs, led the way. Off to the east a temporary aboveground control tower and observation deck had been erected to monitor the flight.
Knife narrowed his attention to the small bubble around him as the vehicles peeled off. He pushed the F-119 to its mark, setting his brakes for one last systems check before takeoff. The right panel of his trio multi-use displays were entirely given over to flight details. His eyes scanned the graphical readouts deliberately. Satisfied, he turned his eyes toward the left MUD, where he had the GPS system selected. The enhanced God’s-eye-view screen rendered his plane as a blue dot on the color-coded terrain – in this case a brownish topo map overlaid by a gray rectangle signifying the limits of the test range. Groom Mountain’s seven-thousand-foot-high peak lurked at the far end, drawn in sharp black lines. Smith shifted his thumb on the Hostas stick, adding radar input to the display; the shading changed to indicate that it was working, though it couldn’t properly paint anything until he was over four hundred feet above ground, and couldn’t really be trusted until about eight or nine hundred.
Something for the engineers to work on.
Ready, Knife thought. His left hand moved the throttle to maximum military power. The plane trembled as the turbines spooled, the brakes straining.
Temp, RPM, pressures perfect. Good to go. He backed to idle, took another breath, gave himself another good-luck pat.
Not that he needed it, of course.
“Tower, Playboy One, I’m ready for one last fling,” he said.
“Playboy One,” acknowledged the controller stiffly.
Knife released the brakes and spooled takeoff power, his mount rumbling forward.
Breanna banked northward, heading toward Range F where the rendezvous was supposed to take place. The check flight and tests had gone well, but she could feel her stomach pinching her as they got ready for the rendezvous.
Maybe it was just the ham sandwich she’d managed while they orbited out of the Russian satellite’s view, waiting for Smith and the F-119 to take off. Mustard always gave her indigestion. Everyone else was raving about her father’s decision to spread the expertise of the executive chef among all of the base’s cafeterias, but in her opinion the food at Dreamland still rated among the worst in the world.
“Optimum, optimum, optimum,” sang her copilot as he ran through his check of the flight systems. Two of Dreamland’s top techies were performing similar checks in the former radar and navigation suite below. The weapons bay was unoccupied, except by the computers.
sitting behind Breanna and Chris on the flight deck was Major Cheshire, who was overseeing the refueling exercise. The Megafortress’s synthetic bird’s-eye view, created from radar inputs, was projected on one of her monitors. Another carried the input from a video cam installed at the rear of the plane, roughly where a refueling boom would be. With her com unit set to Playboy’s frequency, Cheshire would pretend to be a boomer, talking the attack plane in for a tank. It was ad hoc, of course – there was no boom, and Major Smith had no lights to guide him under Fort Two’s belly. But they just needed a rough approximation to make sure the concept was sound.
Breanna reached Range F at twenty thousand feet, precisely as planned for the first track. It bothered the hell out of her that the world’s most versatile bomber might only survive as a milk cow. But as Cheshire had said when she explained the mission, better a live cow than a dead dream.
“We’re ready any time you are, Major,” she told her boss.
Knife stomped the rudder pedal in a last, desperate effort to close in to the target cone below Fort Two. His right wing pulled up, propelled by a nasty eddy of air from the Megafortress’s fuselage. He steadied if for a second, then felt the plane starting to lose speed and got a stall warning.
“Shit,” he said, out loud and over the open circuit as he ducked the plane off the EB-52’s tail.
“Okay, let’s take a break,” said Major Cheshire.
“Roger that,” he snapped.
They’d been flying for nearly thirty minutes to get the F-119 under the Megafortress’s belly. The vortices and wind sheers coming off the bigger plane’s wings, fuselage, and tail were just too much for the F-119, even with its constantly correcting fly-by-wire controls.
Knife thought the controls themselves might be the problem. In his opinion, having a computer between him and the plane’s control surfaces dampened the edge he needed to put the plane precisely where he wanted. It as like the difference between driving an automatic-shift and a standard-shift car; being able to flutter the clutch or hold the revs above redline without shifting could make all the difference.
But it wasn’t like he could turn the system off. Like other inherently unstable craft such as the F-117, the fly- by-wire system was an integral part of the design, not an enhancement like in the EB-52. The JSF couldn’t fly without it.
What had Bastian called it? A flying bathtub? Have to give Dog his due – he had that nailed.
“Let’s move on to the drogue routine off the left wing,” Knife radioed. “Stay at twenty thousand feet.”
“You sure?” asked Cheshire.
“Look, you guys just follow the script, all right?”
“You okay, Major?” asked Cheshire.
Smith reminded himself the project was being monitored down in the tower.
“Yeah, okay. Let’s go,” said Smith. He began closing in on the Megafortress’s left wing, now nearly a half mile ahead. He came in ever so slowly, drawing even with the tail – then found the plane sheering off to the left into a rapid spin.
His master warning panel freaked. He fell to nearly fifteen thousand feet before he could manage a recovery.
“Playboy, you have visible damage to the leading-edge aileron on the right wing,” said Cheshire. “Copy? Knife, are you okay? Are you with us?”
“Roger that,” he said. the plane’s high-flying position – the pilot sat in what looked like a glass bulb at the top of the plane – gave him a good view of the wings. Finally sure he had it back under control, he twisted back and forth, doing a visual inspection to confirm Cheshire’s warning and the legion of problem codes on the systems screen. The leading-edge surface was bent, and he could see a piece of metal extending out from behind it. he guessed that was part of one of the motors that worked it, which the screen warned had failed. Now he had to admit that the FBW system was useful – it was compensating so smoothly for the damaged wing that he barely noticed it. undoubtedly the flight-control system had played a big role in helping him regain control of the craft.
Though serious, the damage wasn’t fatal. But his gauges showed the temperature in his right engine had shot up to the redline; there must be a problem there as well.
Stinking F-119. What a way to go out.
Appropriate, though, considering the plane.
“Dream Tower, this is Playboy One. Emergency declared. I have a slight situation with my wing and engine. Looks like it’s time to land,” Mack said, adding his altitude, position, and heading, though they would be projected by Dreamland’s powerful sensors. He and Fort Two had the sky to themselves; all he had to do was line up, pop his wheels, and land.
“Tower acknowledges, Playboy. Copy your flying emergency.”
“Mack?”
Breanna’s voice seemed to come at him from the clouds, breaking through the outside fuzz of his consciousness as he pushed toward Runway Two. He felt the kiss again, then returned to the matter at hand.
“I’m okay, beautiful,” he told her. “I can’t even tell there’s a problem. But listen, do I get a kiss if I land in one piece?”
Colonel Bastian stood back from the monitor, nudgin tnext to the air-conditioning unit in the cramped quarters of Dreamland’s mobile test tower. He could see Smith’s plane coasting toward the hangars in the distance. Obviously, the damage to the plane had been minimal.
The damage to the idea of using the Megafortress as a tanker, however, was another story.
But he had decided this morning that he definitely wanted to keep the Megafortress project alive. It wasn’t
