Dog was only too happy to put off the pile of pressing bureaucratic details awaiting him over at his office. Technically, taking a turn as a pilot in the heavy test schedule wasn’t part of Dog’s job at Dreamland, and it had been pointed out several times that spending too much time in the cockpit might keep him from the admittedly more important job of running the base and its Whiplash component. But from Dog’s point of view, what was the sense of being a pilot if you didn’t fly? Why had the government spent something approaching a million dollars training him and keeping his skills sharp if not to strap Combat Edge flight gear onto his body on a regular basis? And besides, putting his posterior against an ACES II ejection seat every few days or so made the fact that it spent so much time against a cushioned leather seat almost bearable.
Almost.
But the delay was threatening his plans to have dinner with Jennifer. The two hadn’t had much time to see each other since the end of the so-called ‘Armageddon’ mission. Their deployment to the kingdom of Brunei and Malaysia had interrupted his campaign to more actively ‘woo’ Jennifer, a campaign that he had undertaken with the planning and precision a top pilot would put into a bombing mission.
Not that bombing was like wooing. Not at all. He had to remind himself not to make that comparison to her, at all costs.
‘Wooing.’ Was that even a word people used anymore? Was the word ‘dating’ more appropriate? But dating women seemed like something he had done a million years before. And besides, dating didn’t really cover what he wanted to do. He wanted her to understand, to feel, that he loved her. And was ‘wooing.’ Not bombing.
‘Just another minute, Colonel,’ yelled the engineer, disappearing back over the side of the heavily modified F-16.
The Z, as the XF-16Z was called, had started life as an F-16D, a two-seat version of the versatile fighter-bomber manufactured by General Dynamics. The Dreamland wizards had lengthened the fuselage and completely altered the wing and tail, which looked as if they belonged on a stretched version of the F-22 fighter. The slim body of the Fighting Falcon had been bulked up as well, so that the airplane looked more rectangular than round. This was partly to accommodate the larger engine, which was a Pratt & Whitney power plant originally proposed for the Joint Strike Fighter; the engine was capable of sustained cruising at Mach 1.2 while consuming a little less fuel than an F-16C would have at subsonic cruise. That there was much more room for fuel in the Dreamland version increased its operating range, giving it a typical combat radius well in excess of a thousand miles, depending on its mission and load.
The XF-16Z had been authorized shortly before Dog got to Dreamland. It originally had been intended as a test bed for a variety of technologies, including the wing construction (considered but rejected for the Joint Strike Fighter) and electronics suite (which would probably form the basis of the next generation of Wild Weasel upgrades). But it also showed how older airframes might be given new life; the Z could do for the F-16 what the Megafortress had done for the B-52 – remake a venerable, solidly designed twentieth century aircraft into a twenty-first century cutting-edge warplane. The Z was a cheaper-to-operate alternative to the strike version of the F-22; it could also be employed as a very capable Wild Weasel and – assuming the weapons people continued to make the progress they’d shown over the last twelve months – a likely platform for the lightweight attack version of the Razor antiair laser currently under development. The chemical laser was scheduled to be strapped to the belly of the Z for tests by early January.
Today’s test was rather prosaic – Dog was merely helping the techies shake out some bugs in the radar unit that helped the aircraft track other airplanes around it. A pair of UAV drones – early model Pioneers – would be launched as soon as he was airborne; Dog would fly a few circuits and wait for the radar to pick up the craft and track them.
An easy gig, if the techies would just clear out so he could spool up the engine. The engineer reappeared at the side of the cockpit with a small meter, apologizing for some sort of glitch in the circuitry.
‘How long is this going to take?’ asked Dog.
‘Uh, depends. I get a green here and you can go.’
Dog couldn’t help noticing that the needle on the engineer’s testing device swung into the red zone and stayed there. The engineer mumbled a curse under his breath, then looked up at the colonel and turned red.
‘Sorry.’
‘I’ve heard those words before,’ said Dog. ‘Is this going to scrub the mission or what?’
‘Um, maybe.’ The techie reached down and reseated his tester’s clips. This time when he turned the switch dial, the needle pegged the green post on the meter. ‘Eureka,’ said the engineer. ‘Good to go, sir.’
But as the technician disappeared down the side and the crew with the power cart got ready to ‘puff’ the XF-16Z’s engine to life, a black SUV with a blue flashing light raced toward the aircraft. A sergeant from the Whiplash ground action team, Lee Liu, got out and trotted toward the aircraft.
‘Urgent Eyes-Only communication for you, Colonel,’ shouted Liu.
Dog undid his restraints and climbed over the side. ‘Di-Tullo, you’re going to have to scratch unless you can find the backup pilot,’ he yelled. ‘Somedays you can never win.’
Forty minutes later Dog watched the tussled hair and tired face of Jed Barclay pop onto the screen at the front of the Dreamland Command Center.
‘Colonel, how are you?’ he asked. Jed was the National Security Council assistant for technology, and the Martindale administration’s de facto liaison with Dreamland.
‘I’m fine, Jed. You look a little tired.’
Jed smiled. ‘Stand by for Mr Freeman.’
The screen blinked. The feed indicated that the transmission was being made from the White House situation room, which had recently been upgraded, partly to accommodate secure communications with Dreamland.
‘Colonel Bastian, good evening,’ said Philip Freeman, the National Security Advisor. ‘The President has issued a Whiplash Order. Hopefully, this mission won’t be as intense as some of your others. I’m afraid I have an appointment upstairs. Before I go, I wanted to mention personally that I appreciate the effort you and your people made in Brunei. Good work, Colonel.’
‘Thank you,’ said Dog.
Freeman turned away from the screen.
Jed Barclay stepped back into view. ‘Roughly three weeks ago, one of Libya’s Russian-made submarines left its port on the Mediterranean,’ he said. ‘Ordinarily, they go out a few miles, dive, circle, and go home. This one didn’t. I have some graphics for you, but the illustrations are pretty, uh, basic.’
A blurry black and white photo of a submarine replaced Jed’s face. Dog listened as the NSC assistant described the submarine, an old but still potent diesel-powered member of the Project 641 class, code named ‘Foxtrots’ in the west. Roughly three hundred feet long, the Libyan submarine had a snorkel and improved batteries, which allowed it to travel for several days while submerged. Capable of carrying over twenty torpedoes and possibly submarine-launched cruise missiles, the vessel posed a serious enough threat to shipping that NATO had sent additional forces to track it down. An Italian destroyer succeeded in locating it west of Sicily and trailed it as it traveled toward Gibraltar. But the submarine eventually gave it the slip.
Two
