Piranha

Dale Brown, Jim DeFelice Piranha

DREAMLAND DUTY ROSTER

LT. COLONEL TECUMSEH “DOG” BASTIAN

Once one of the county’s elite fighter jocks, now Dog is whipping Dreamland into shape the only what he knows how — with blood, sweat, and tears — and proving that his bite is just as bad as his bark …

CAPTAIN BREANNA BASTIAN STOCKARD

Like father, like daughter, Breanna is brash, quick-witted, and one of the best test pilots at Dreamland. But she wasn’t prepared for the biggest test of her life: a crash that grounded her husband in more ways than one …

MAJOR JEFFREY “ZEN” STOCKARD

A top fighter pilot until a runway crash at Dreamland left him paraplegic. Now, Zen is at the helm of the ambitious Flighthawk program, piloting the hypersonic remote-controlled aircraft from the seat of his wheelchair — and watching what’s left of his marriage crash and burn …

MAJOR MACK “THE KNIFE” SMITH

A top gun with an attitude to match. Knife has a MiG kill in the Gulf War — and won’t let anyone forget it. Though resentful that his campaign to head Dreamland stalled, Knife’s the guy you want on your wing when the bogies start biting …

MAJOR NANCY CHESHIRE

A woman in a man’s world, Cheshire has more than proven herself as the Megafortress’s senior project officer. But when Dog comes to town, Cheshire must stake out her territory once again — or watch the Megafortress project go down in flames …

CAPTAIN DANNY FREAH

Freah made a name for himself by heading a daring rescue of a U-2 pilot in Iraq. Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, Freah’s constantly under fire, as commander of the top-secret “Whiplash” rescue and support team — and Dog’s right-hand man …

Chapter 1 Piranha

South China Sea

August 17, 1997, 0800 local (August 16, 1400 Hawaii)

The ocean sat before him like an azure mirror, its surface gleaming with a light haze of silky heat. His small sloop glided forward slowly, as if too much movement would disturb the tranquility. There was no wind for the sail and he had just cut the engine, content to drift into the calm of the open sea. A man could count on one hand the number of days he might encounter such perfect peace, and as Mark Stoner gripped the rail of his boat, the Samsara, a sensation of great ease came over him, a taste of the nirvana his Zen Buddhist teachers promised would come when he managed to shed worldly desire. The moment lingered around him, vanquishing time in its perfection. As the thick muscles of his neck and shoulders loosened, the rest of his body seemed to float upward, assimilating into the universe.

But all was not as it appeared.

A geyser broke three hundred yards off Samsara’s port bow, the water erupting as if a volcano had tossed a fireball into the sky. The blue water furled green and black as a thick spear crashed upwards, rising quickly from the ocean’s surface. It stuttered momentarily, as if it were a fish shocked at the sudden loss of water flowing over its grills. Then it steadied and began picking up speed, rocketing north by northeast at something over five hundred miles an hour.

“Shit,” said Stoner aloud, though he was the only one on the boat. “Hole shit.”

Then he ran back to the cabin to make sure the recording devices were working.

Aboard EB-52, “Iowa,” west of Hawaii

August 16, 1400 local time

Lieutenant Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian slipped the throttle the throttle forward, continuing to pick up speed as they approached the approximate location of Task Force Nirvana. The Megafortress’s forward airspeed push up past five hundred knots as the big plane shot no more than twenty feet over the ocean swells. Dog hated flying over the ocean, especially at low altitude; he somehow couldn’t shake the feeling that a massive tsunami lurked just ahead, ready to rise up and engulf him. Even at high altitude, he had a landlubber’s paranoia about going down in the water. Something about the idea of struggling to inflate and then board a tiny rubber raft filled him with irrational dread. It didn’t help that any time he thought about it, his mind supplied a posse of circling sharks to supervise the operation.

“Should be able to see the test area buoys in sixty seconds,” said Bastian’s copilot, Chris Ferris. “We’ll have the feed of the Flighthawk.”

“Roger that,” replied the colonel. “Zen, how are we looking?” he asked over the Dreamland com circuit.

“Ocean’s clean,” replied Major Jeff “Zen” Stockard. Stockard was flying two U/MF-3’s or Unmanned Fighters, nicknamed Flighthawk, from Raven, the second EB-52 in the flight. The two robot planes, roughly the size of Miata sports cars, acted as forward scouts for Bastian’s three-Megafortress flight. Two other U/MF’s flown by Captain Kelvin “Curly” Fentress in Galatica, were flying above the EB-52’s as combat air patrol. The Megafortresses were spread across the water at roughly half-mile intervals, flying what would have looked like an offset V from above. Though all shared the basic Megafortress chassis, each craft was outfitted differently.

Galatica, on the left wing, had a radar suite comparable to an E-3 AWACS. Since the powerful radar would alert their quarry, it was currently in passive mode — for all intents and purposes turned off.

Raven, at the right of the formation, featured a suite of electronic listening devices that would rival any Rivet Joint RC-135 spy plane. A myriad of antennas picked up both voice and telemetry transmission all across the radio spectrum; the computer gear stuffed into the rear compartments provided the onboard operator with real-time decoding of all but the most advanced encryptions. A second operator commanded a suite of gear similar to that found in Wild Weasel and Spark Vark aircraft; he could both detect and jam active radar units at roughly two hundred miles. The rotating dispenser in the bomb bay included four Tacit-Plus antiradiation missiles. Launched from just inside one hundred miles, they could either fly straight to a known radar site or orbit a suspect area until the radar activated. A thick, eighteen-inch section had been added to the weapons behind their warhead. This new section had been designed specifically for the sea mission. The gear inside the area allowed the missile to use its active radar on its final leg if the target switched its own radar off. Though relatively weak and short-ranged, it was hard to detect and also difficult to jam. Once fully operational, the missile promised to make aircraft essentially invulnerable to surface ships — at least until enough missiles were used so that an enemy could figure a way around them.

The payload aboard Iowa, Bastian’s plane, was the reason the three Megafortresses were here.

Stuffed into Iowa’s forward bomb bay were a half-dozen fiberglass and steel container that looked like the old-fashioned milk containers once used to gather milk from cows on the copilot’s family farm. A thick ring that sat about where the handles would have been contained just enough air to properly orient the container’s “head” float a few meters below the surface of the water. Above the ring was a rectangular web of thin wires that, once deployed,