More like one and a quarter.
“Waypoint coming up,” said Sullivan, his copilot.
“Noted,” said Englehardt quickly. He tried to get a little snap into his voice, a bit of professionalism, though it sounded a little hollow.
From now on he was going to do everything by the book. If his crew didn’t like him, at least they wouldn’t have anything to complain about.
Under ordinary circumstances, tracking truck traffic through the Pakistani northeastern territories would have been close to impossible.
Fortunately, these weren’t ordinary circumstances.
Which wasn’t to say that the task was a piece of cake. Or a Yankee Doodle, which the head of the Dreamland photo analysis team was eating as he discussed the possibilities with his counterpart at the CIA.
“One of these six,” the techie agreed, stuffing the last of the snack in his mouth. “Gotta be.”
Ray Rubeo, standing behind his console, frowned. The scientist hated sweets of any kind, but most especially ones that threatened the equipment he had personally helped design. The Command Center’s no food rule had been eased by Catsman as a morale booster as the mission stretched on. Without any authority over operations or military personnel now, Rubeo couldn’t order it reinstated; the best he could do was frown.
“Problem is, so we see those two trucks together, so what?” said the analyst. “We can’t search every inch of Pakistan.”
“What you should do,” said Rubeo dryly, “is search the places where it’s possible to leave Pakistan.”
The techie looked up at him. “Excuse me, Doc, but, uh, I wasn’t talking to you.”
The expert was an Air Force captain, one of many Rubeo had never particularly cared for. The feeling was undoubtedly mutual.
“Whether you are talking to me or not, you have photos of every airport and dock in the country. You can judge how long all of these vehicles would have taken to get to those positions, and see if they are there.”
“Lot of work. And, you know, a pickup’s a pickup.”
“What else do you have to do?” snapped Rubeo. “And each pickup is different. Look at the bumper and the right side fender — you can use those to identify it.”
“Smudges.”
“Hardly.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to do it.” The captain pushed the rest of the Yankee Doodle into his mouth and went back to work.
The sun blossomed on the horizon, throwing a reddish yellow stream of light on the long concrete runway and its nearby aprons. Major General Terrill “Earthmover” Samson, standing at the edge of one of the aprons in front of the Dreamland Command trailer, took a deep breath, as if he might suck in the sunshine and all of its energy.
He might need it. He’d spent half the night talking to the Pentagon, and nearly every friend he had in the upper echelons of the service. He told them about the incident, of course — the metal from the missile made stonewalling moot, even if he’d been inclined to try it. He’d put his best spin on the situation from a personal point of view, saying that he’d come to personally take charge and to get things in order.
The results had been mixed. The head of the Air Force was openly hostile, but the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Balboa, was almost sympathetic. Most of the rest were somewhere in the middle.
The administration, meanwhile, was obsessed with finding the last remaining warhead. That, at least, was out of his hands: Though ordered to continue providing “all due assistance,” the search had been turned over to the CIA.
Samson vowed that if he got through this—
As for some of the
As were the egghead scientists who went with them. Ray Rubeo would lead the parade out.
“Dreamland will be run like a military unit, not the personal toy box of its commanding officer,” said Samson to himself, the line suddenly occurring to him.
It would be the perfect opening sentence for the orientation speech he planned on giving when he got back to the States. He scrambled inside for a pen and paper to write it down.
Dog finally managed to drift off to sleep during the flight. The ejection seat at the Flighthawk station was about as comfortable as most ejection seats, which meant not at all. His head drooped to his chest and his shoulders tightened; when he woke he felt as if someone had him in a headlock.
Stretching helped a little, but not much.
“Couple of beef Stroganoffs in the galley,” said Starship, who was watching a video on his auxiliary screen. “Not too bad if you put Tabasco sauce in it.”
“Tabasco?”
“Just a little punch, you know?”
“Is that
“I’ve only seen it ten times,” confessed Starship. “Practically new.”
Dog laughed, then went upstairs. While his food was cooking in the microwave, he walked over to the pilots and asked them how they were doing.
“Just routine, Colonel,” said Englehardt. “Haven’t even hit turbulence.”
“Great,” said Dog. “How are you, Sully?”
“OK, Colonel,” said Sullivan.
The copilot’s tone seemed a little cold. Maybe that was the reaction he was going to get around the base from now on, Dog thought; no one would want to associate themselves with him. Senior officers would view him as a political pariah, and junior officers would figure he was washed up. No one wanted to be associated with a commander who’d been relieved.
Technically, he hadn’t been relieved for cause — not yet, at any rate. But Samson would undoubtedly go in that direction. While explainable and to some extent excusable on their own, taken together the baby incident and the airliner could easily be whipped into a case against him.
He’d have to get a lawyer if something like that happened.
The microwave began beeping, but Dog left his dinner inside and sat down next to Rager at the airborne radar station. The sergeant was considerably more relaxed now that they weren’t in combat; he had a dozen contacts on his scope, all civilian flights.
“Now that you’ve seen the system in combat, you have any ideas for improvement?” Dog asked.
“A couple, Colonel.” The sergeant ran Dog through some of the identification routines and the automated processes, which were supposed to reduce the operator’s workload by letting the computer take over. In theory, the system let one man do the work of six or eight in the “old” style AWACS. In practice, said Rager, the workload became overwhelming after a half hour in combat.
“Thing is, you just get tired after a couple of hours,” said the sergeant, who’d had extensive experience in AWACS and other systems before coming over to Dreamland. “It works fine in the simulations, but when we were getting shot at for over an hour, at the tail end of a long mission — I have to be honest with you, Colonel, I’m sure I made some mistakes. I haven’t had a chance to review the whole mission tapes, but I’m sure I could have done
