Chapter 3
Ghosts in the Jungle
Until you actually did it, patrolling the ocean sounded like the sort of easygoing assignment a pilot and crew could do with their eyes closed. Especially a crew like the one aboard Quicksilver. Breanna Stockard had flown the Megafortress platform for so long, the plane and its complicated systems seemed to have grafted themselves onto her body, and vice versa. Chris Ferris, her copilot, had been with the program nearly as long, and had worked with Breanna through all of Whiplash’s important deployments. The newcomer on the crew, Torbin Dolk, had proved his worth in Iran, and even he seemed tied into the crew’s shared ESP. they took turns sleeping on the long flight to South Asia, and while they couldn’t quite be called bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, they were nonetheless ready when they finally began their surveillance track.
Thirty minutes later, they were bored stiff, butts dragging lower than the troughs in the waves. Even Breanna had to fight to keep her attention focused on the mission and the plane she was flying.
All of the Dreamland Megafortresses were hand-built from older B-52’s. All had their own personalities as well as configurations, but they could be broken down into three main categories.
The general-purpose Megafortresses were essentially highly efficient bombers with the capability of acting as mother ships for up to four Flighthawks. IOwa was the leader of this class, intended to be configured for roles such as attack and long-range patrol.
The second category of Megafortress added a powerful onboard radar to the EB-52 skeleton, giving it nearly the ability of an advanced AWACS, but able to operate in an extremely hazardous environment. To accommodate the radar dome, these craft, around the forward wing area, had a prominent bulge. Though it was nowhere near as immense as the massive saucers that say atop a standard E-3 Sentry, Galatica or “Gal” belonged to this category. Her powerful radar altered the flight characteristics of the aircraft as it revolved, necessitating changes in the control computer to compensate.
The third category of Megafortress added electronic interception and eavesdropping equipment, along with a suite of ECMs that could turn a Spark Vark green with envy. These planes included Raven and Quicksilver. Their automated telemetry gathering skills were on call here.
They would record all electronic transmission from and to the Indian weapon, augmenting the data gathered by the EB-52’s powerful radar suite and the visual data from the Flighthawks. They weren’t just spy planes, however; armed with Tacit-Plus anti-radiation missiles, they could do the job of two or three different planes, protecting an attack package as effectively as a coordinated group of Wild Weasels, Spark Varks, and Compass Call aircraft.
There were other possibilities for the type. The Army was very interested in adapting the plane for the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System or JSTARS role, another mission currently filled by aircraft of the 707 type.
JSTARS E-8As, which had made their debut during the Gulf War, used Army and Air Force technology to track ground warfare units and targets; they could do for ground-attack forces what AWACS did for fighters. In theory, a Megafortress could accomplish the same thing while getting even closer to the action and delivering weapons itself. In fact, a good portion of the JSTARS technology had originally come from the Air Force’s Pave Mover and related programs, which were already incorporated in the development base of the “standard” EB-52.
Various other improvements for the Megafortress were in the works, including new engine configurations, but the program itself was now fairly “mature.” With production models ready to go, it had a certain set character to it — and, of course, it already had its own project manager, Major Alou.
The B-5 Unmanned Bomber Platform was wide-open, a vast cloud of potential waiting to be shaped, like the Megafortress had been when Bree joined the program. It was also the sort of program a captain could ride to a colonelcy and beyond.
Was that important? Was that what she was worried about?
No way. She wanted to be promoted.
Even though it would strain her marriage.
Zen was due for promotion soon, and with his record no one was going to stand in his way. That would almost certainly mean going to Washington. He hadn’t served in the Pentagon, and for someone like Zen the Pentagon was a necessary and expected ticket to be punched. He’d be there already if it hadn’t been for his accident.
What did that have to do with anything? She’d be at Dreamland and he’d in D.C., one way or the other.
Give up the B-5? Why? Because it wasn’t a “real” plane?
Maybe she was worried about something else. Maybe there wasn’t room to have a two-career family.
So she’d do what? Quit? Play Suzy Homemaker?
Bullshit. She was to Suzy Homemaker as Zen was to …
A Pentagon paper-pusher. He’d never last a week there, even in a wheelchair.
“Coming up to Cathay,” said Chris Ferris. His voice had a cackle to it, accented by the interphone circuit shared throughout the airplane. He’d spent considerable time coming up with an elaborate list of code words for the various coordinates on their mission chart and, for some reason, thought they were amusing as hell. “Cathay” was the release area for the Flighthawks. “Byzantium” was the southernmost point of their patrol orbit; “Confucius” was the northern point.
It could have been worse. Bree had put her foot down on a list of kung-fu heroes.
“Ten minutes to launch area,” she told Zen, who was below on the Flighthawk deck.
“Ready to begin fueling, Quicksilver,” he told her.
“All right. Chris?”
“As Li Po would say, ‘The sun rises with anticipation.’ ”
“Li Po would be a Chinese philosopher?” Bree asked innocently.
“My barber,” he answered, guffawing.
Zen watched the countdown impatiently, waiting for the Megafortress to being the alpha maneuver that would increase the separation forces and helped propel the Flighthawk off the wing of the big plane. The vortices thrown off by the Megafortress were a complicated series of mini-tornadoes, but the computer and untold practice sessions made the launch almost routine. As the Megafortress dipped and then lifted away, Zen dropped downward with the Flighthawk, hurtling toward the sparkling ocean; the plane’s engine rippled with acceleration. He pulled back on the stick, rocketing ahead of the Megafortress. No amount of practice, no amount of routine, could change the thrill he felt, the electricity that sparked from his fingers and up through his skull as gravity grappled for the plane, losing — temporarily at least — the age-old battle of primitive forces.
And yet, he was sitting in an aircraft more than three, now four miles away, flying level and true at 350 knots.
“Launch procedure on Hawk Two at your convenience, Hawk Leader,” said Bree.
“Ready when you are, Quicksilver.”
They launched the second Flighthawk, then worked into their search pattern, a 250-mile narrow oval or “race-track” over the ocean. The earlier spin around the surveillance area had shown there were a half-dozen merchant vessels in the sea lanes but no military vessels. Likewise, the sky was clear.
“We have a PS-5 at seventy-five miles,” said Chris, reading off the coordinates for a Chinese patrol plane coming south from the area above Vietnam. Known to the West as the PS-5, the flying boat was designated a Harbin “Shuishang Hongzhaji,” or “marine bomber,” SH-5 by the Chinese; the SH-5 had limited antiship and antisubmarine capabilities. With a boat-shaped hull and floats beyond the turboprops at the ends of its wings, the PS-5 belonged to an early generation of waterborne aircraft.
Anything but fast, the PS-5 was lumbering about three thousand feet above the waves at 140 knots. Zen noted the location, which was fed from Quicksilver’s radar systems into C?. the long-range sitrep map showed the patrol aircraft as a red diamond in the left-hand corner of his screen, moving at a thirty-degree angle to his course.
Just beyond it were two circles, civilian ships on the water, one a Japanese tanker, the other a Burmese
