just the fact that he believed in McLanahan’s Air Battleship scenario. Even as a ‘simple’ bomber, the Megafortress made sense. With a few tweaks, it could be as survivable as an F-15E while carrying several times the payload two or three times as far. Get into low-intensity war in hot climate – say, the Middle East, as McLanaha had hinted, or Southeast Asia – and a few Megafortress might just turn the tide. And it would be cheap; the Air Force had literally hundreds of B-52’s available for conversion.
At the moment, though, that was a drawback. There weren’t enough jobs at stake to easily apply political pressure and keep it alive. But attack it to the F-119 as a survivable tanker, and there’d be plenty of pols. A few months of demonstration flights, maybe some careful work with contractors, and they’d have enough political support to revive the battleship concept.
But it was dead now.
Bastian listened as the controller exchanged information with an aircraft conducting a test near Range F.
“What’s going on?” he asked Mickey Colgan, the flight officer coordinating the day’s tests.
“Oh, that’s just a drone taking off,” said the captain. “Unpiloted Green Phantom doing IR testing. Pretty straightforward. It’s got a JSF suit on. It has to catch another drone.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I’m sorry, Colonel. There are two Phantoms. One’s just a stock drone. The other, Green Phantom, has some wing baffles and a few other mods to stimulate the F-119 flight characteristics. They’re controlled out of the Flighthawk hangar. We’re running checks on the nitrogen-cooling system for the gear in the IR’s eye. It has to be kept at a constant temperature or –”
“You think Green Phantom could rendezvous with Fort Two?”
Colgan blinked. “Well, if the F-119 can’t do it, that old Phanton, I mean, it’s at least as bad a flier as the JSF itself.”
“Who’s the pilot?” asked Bastian
“That would be Major Stockard, sir.” Colgan seemed to bristle a bit. “They, uh, they’re trying to get him back into the swing of things.”
“How good a pilot is he?”
“Sir?”
“I mean with the drone.”
“Well, before his accident, there was no one near as good as him,” said Colgan. “But …”
“But what?”
“I don’t know if he’s back up to speed, Colonel. And he, uh, he’s in a wheelchair.”
“What’s the frequency to the Flighthawk bunker? Said Bastian, moving back to the com panel.
To say he’d flown the QF-4 drone ten thousand times wasn’t an exaggeration; Zen had learned to control the Flighthawks with the exact airplanes he was flying. He’d gotten so he could work them with his eyes closed before moving up to the much-more-difficult-to-control Flighthawks.
He closed his eyes now in frustration. The gig was simple – all he had to do was fly Green Phantom behind Phantom One-Zero-Mike at fifteen thousand feet with three miles of separation. Piece of cake.
Except his heart was pounding and there was sweat pouring from his wrists, and if it weren’t for the automated flight computer fail-safe, he would have smacked Green Phantom into the ground on takeoff.
Things had gone badly yesterday, but that at least could be attributed to rust; he’d gotten better as the exercises wore on.
He wasn’t sure what to blame this on. Maybe the F-119 mods. JSF wasn’t exactly the world’s most flyable plane, and Green Phantom was a pig’s pig.
It was easier to handle than two Flighthawks at supersonic speed, though. So what was he sweating like a bull being chases by toreadors?
If he couldn’t make this simple intercept, how could be ever control the U/MFs?
Zen rolled his neck around on his spine, the vertebrae cracking. He’d forgotten how heavy the control helmet was. He could actually take it off, since the console he was sitting at in Hangar B was basically a flight simulator on steroids. Arranged like a cockpit and developed for the Flighthawk, its standard multi-use displays were augmented by dedicated control and sensor displays, along with banks of specific system overrides and data collectors. They’d nicknamed it Frankenstein’s Control Pod.
But if he was going to get back in the program, he had to do it right, and that meant using the helmet and the Flighthawk flight sticks. It meant sucking it up and hanging in there, kinks, sweat, and all.
Zen checked the altitude on Green Phantom, nudging up to 15,500 feet. He was five miles away, closing on One-Zero-Mike’s left wing. Though he had his left hand rapped around Mike’s control stick, the computer was actually flying the plane in its preprogrammed orbit. Zen nudged his right hand back slightly, gently climbing.
Piece of cake. Two miles to go. He moved his thumb to the center of the stick’s oval top, keying the view screen from optical to FLIR input. The view at the top of his screen changed to a greenish tint, the world shading according to heat sources.
“Zen?”
“What?” he snapped over the headset.
“I have Colonel Bastian on the circuit,” replied Fred Remington, one of his civilians helping run the tests. “Something’s up.”
“Yeah, okay.” Zen’s pinkie stretched to click down the lever at the front base of his right stick; it automatically engaged computer control for Green Phantom. “Let me talk to him.”
“Major Stockard, do you think you can do me a favor?” said Bastian as soon as the line snapped open.
“Colonel?”
“I wonder if you have enough fuel in Green Phantom to try a rendezvous with Fort Two on Range F. we’d like to see if you can get close enough for a refuel.”
Zen glanced at the gauge. The Phantom had plenty of fuel.
But getting close to a Megafortress was not exactly easy. Even the Flighthawks had trouble.
A Phantom with JSF mods? Ha.
And forget about the plane – he’d just blown an easy run at a drone.
Zen didn’t know what to say. “You’re looking for that to happen right now?”
“Can you do it?”
“Green Phantom simulates the F-119.”
“That’s exactly the point. We want to mock up a refuel off a Megafortress. Mack Smith had some trouble,” added the colonel. “I’d like a second opinion.”
“I’m on it,” snapped Zen.
Breanna took Fort Two out of its orbit at 25,000 feet, gliding gently on its left wing to twenty thousand smack in the middle of the range where the new exercise would take place. She pushed the big plane into place, gingerly nudging its nose so it slotted exactly along the three-dimensional flight line the computer was projecting in the HUD navigation screen. They were mimicking a standard tanker track, flying a long oval in the sky as if they were a KC- 10 Extender or a KC-135 Stratotanker on its anchor near a war zone, waiting for attack planes and fighter returning from action. Neither Chris nor Major Cheshire had said anything since the colonel ordered the new trial.
Zen had said exactly four words over the radio, but the tension in his voice practically drilled a hole through her skull.
“Green Phantom, we have you at eighteen thousand feet, on beam, closure rate at two hundred knots,” Cheshire told Jeff.
