Strike Zone

Near the Vietnamese coast

10 September 1997

1430

“Action at Da Nang,” the EB-52’s copilot, Kevin McNamara, said over the interphone, the Megafortress’s onboard communications system. “We have two MiG-21s taking off. We’re tracking. You have the data.”

Starship felt his throat constrict. His hand involuntarily tightened on the control yoke, even though he didn’t have control of the plane yet.

“Hawk leader copies,” said Zen. “They have two more coming, huh?”

“Looks like it.”

“Should we go ahead with the handoff?” asked Starship, sitting next to Zen on the Flighthawk control deck. They had just begun the prehandoff checklist before the MiGs scrambled from the Vietnamese airfield about a hundred miles to the northeast.

“Absolutely,” said Zen. “You all right?”

Five minutes earlier, Starship would have told him that he’d never felt better in his life. Aspirin and the Brunei coffee had helped him get over the banger of a headache he’d had this morning, a hangover obtained courtesy of a few whiskey sours with Major Smith after the official reception.

But with McNamara’s warning, his headache had returned. His muscles were twitching and his mouth felt dry.

Nothing a shot couldn’t cure, but that wasn’t possible here.

“Let’s do it,” he told Zen, forcing enthusiasm into his voice.

The Flighthawk commander gave verbal authorization. Starship acceded. Zen hit the keys on his panel and gave up control of the bird.

“Authorization Zed Zed Stockard,” said Zen as the computer asked for final confirmation. C³ buzzed in Starship’s ear, turning over the helm.

“Handoff complete,” said Starship. “On course.”

He read off his bearing, altitude, and course speed — a prissy bit of the procedure in his opinion, though no one was asking — then worked through a full instrument check with the computer. Starship went by the book, aware that not only Zen but Kick were watching everything he did, ready to point out the slightest deviation from Major Stockard’s prescriptions.

While ostensibly designed to familiarize the crew with the area and procedures for communicating with the ASEAN task force, Starship sensed that today’s mission was really a tryout. Major Stockard had said during the preflight that he hadn’t decided who was going to take the U/MF-3 on the decoy flight tomorrow, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that today’s flight would help determine who got the glory and who sat on his thumbs in the fold-down rumble seat at the back of the compartment.

Starship liked Kick as a person, but he’d never be able to stomach playing number two to the other lieutenant. Kick had never been a top jock. Heck, he’d been a Hog driver, flying A-10As before coming over to Dreamland, and everyone knew the A-10As were basically cannon fodder.

Granted, he was a hard worker and a decent guy, but he wasn’t first-team material. If he were, he’d’ve been in Eagles like Starship before transferring here.

“Be advised there are now two MiG-21s off Da Nang, bearing at three-one-five,” said McNamara. The Megafortress copilot customarily kept the crew apprised of the location of other players on the field. “Climbing through eight thousand feet, accelerating — looks like they want to come say hello.”

Like many of the members of Dreamland’s Megafortress fleet, the Pennsylvania was named for a famous battleship, in this case the venerable battlewagon Pennsylvania, a member of the Iowa class that had served after World War II. She was equipped with a powerful AWACS-style radar, which rotated in a fuselage bulge around the wing root; augmented by a phased array unit in her nose and a host of other antennas and sensors,Penn could sniff out targets five hundred miles away. She and her sisters were intended as replacements for the venerable and considerably more vulnerable E-3 AWACS Sentry, though more mods and updates were planned before the type went operational with the “regular” Air Force.

Like Zen, Starship used a special control helmet to help him fly the robot plane; while heavier than the brain bucket he would have donned for an F-15 flight, it seemed more intuitive than the panels at the control station where he was sitting, which could also be used if he wished. Infinitely configurable, the display screen in the helmet could be divided into several panels. This allowed the pilot to simultaneously see what was in front of him, glance down at a “sitrep” of the area fed from the EB-52’s sensors, and a full array of instrument readings. Though he wasn’t yet rated to handle multiple planes, the helmet could in theory control up to four Flighthawks at a time, switching its views, sensor, and instrument data between them by voice command or keyboard toggle. Most times, Starship used a standard screen view that provided a nose camera shot in the top screen, with a sitrep at the lower left and various flight info on the right.

The MiGs blinked in the sitrep, two red triangles flying above the gray-shadowed coastline toward the light blue ocean.Penn was about two hundred miles east of them. If they were headed here, it was because of the ground radar and a controller; their own radars were far too limited to see the Megafortress.

And the Flighthawk was invisible to just about everybody, with the exception of Penn.

On the far right of the sitrep, a green-hued rectangle bore the tag YUBARI. If Starship asked for the information, C³ would have looked into its memory banks and announced that Yubari was a Japanese patrol ship, carrying some surface-to-air missiles but primarily intended for antisubmarine work. She was sailing roughly a hundred miles to the east, part of the ASEAN exercises. The ship was working with an Australian cruiser, which was temporarily off the screen further east.

“Those suckers got to be thirty years old,” said Kick, wearing a headset and standing behind him. He was referring to the MiGs, which indeed had been built before any of the men on the Flighthawk had been born.

“The sucker we’re flying in is close to fifty,” said Zen.

“I meant it in a good way,” said the other pilot.

“The ground radars picked up the Megafortress and scrambled these guys to take a look,” Zen added, using a voice that sounded to Starship like the one his Philosophy 101 professor used to explain Plato’s theory that humans saw reality like shadows on a cave. “The MiGs are still picking up speed, but they’re not going to come on too much faster or they’ll end up with fuel issues. C³ has already figured out an intercept. See it Kick, on the dedicated screen?”

“Got it.”

“Obviously, it relies on you to know the ROEs,” said Zen, referring to the rules of engagement that governed when — and if — force could be used. “As far as the computer is concerned, war is always in order.”

“As it should be,” said Kick.

Brown nose.

“Still coming at us,” said Starship. He’d told Zen he’d gotten the nickname because of his first name — Kirk, as in James T. Kirk, the commander of the starship Enterprise. That was partly true — his parents had been serious Trekkies, and had the show in mind when they named him. But he’d actually earned the nickname during flight training for rashly predicting that he would pilot the space shuttle or its successor someday.

A prediction he meant to make good on.

“Mission commander’s call on how to proceed,” said Zen, still in instructor mode. “On a typical radar mission, the profile we’re following, your job is going to be to run interference. But the pilot of the EB-52 is going to have to balance the situation. Let’s say you have two bandits. If they’re hostile and coming at you, he may be under orders to get the hell out of there. Never mind that a Flighthawk could take them in a snap.”

Zen paused. Starship knew the major was speaking from experience — he had a lot of notches on his belt.

“What you don’t want to do is put the Flighthawks in a position where they’re going to get deadheaded,” said Zen. “So you keep with what the EB-52 is doing.”

Deadheaded meant that the command link had been severed. When that happened, the Flighthawk would