around for another pass.
The Megafortress pilot had forgotten to tell the computer that the exercise was over, and so it kept blinking a warning at him that he was outside of the programmed flight area. It was nothing more than an annoyance, since the plane wouldn’t override the pilot’s commands, but the flash was driving Breanna crazy. Still, she avoided the temptation to turn it off herself, or even to bring it to his attention. In a few days she wasn’t going to be here to straighten him out; it was time to take the training wheels off.
But boy, it bothered her.
Finally, the pilot turned to her and announced: ‘I have a difficulty with the warning system.’
‘It just needs to be acknowledged. Tell the computer the exercise is over. You might check your course, as well,’ she added, noticing that he had allowed his heading to drift well to the west.
‘Right. Yes,’ said the pilot. He was in his late thirties, older than Breanna. Even so, he seemed nervous and jumpy; he didn’t have the been-there, done-that, I-remember-one-time-we-had-to-fly-backward-in-a-storm-with-one-engine calm most jocks pushing forty displayed. Not that he was a bad pilot; he just didn’t seem to have the hash marks his age implied.
Something else bugged her. The crew was, well, quiet.
In an American plane, certainly on a Dreamland crew, the specialists would be singing out, talking about contacts and the like. But the two men at the mission stations behind her on the flight deck were silent. Breanna’s copilot station allowed her to peek at their contact screens; she did so and saw that the men were refining their equipment and seemed to have a competent handle on things – they just didn’t talk about it.
By now, Mack had completed a third orbit of the stricken vessel and reported that he saw no boats in the water. He switched to a different frequency and began talking to the harbor patrol, which had been alerted by their ground controller.
‘Captain, what do you think of this?’ asked Deci. ‘Hit that two scan, low resolution. I’m feeding it.’
Enhanced by the computer, the image showed a dark blur in the left-hand corner of the screen, racing along the coast toward Malaysia.
‘Just a ghost?’ asked Breanna.
‘No. There’s something there,’ said Deci. ‘Moving real fast – out around three hundred knots.’
‘What boat goes that fast? Cigarette speed boat?’
‘Never heard of one even half that fast. Has to be a plane, but according to the radar it’s at three feet.’
‘Three feet?’
‘I know it’s weird,’ added Deci, ‘but it’s a live contact. The computer has never seen it before.’
‘I’ll bet.’ Breanna flipped into Mack’s circuit. ‘Brunei Dragon One, we have an odd contact you might want to know about,’ she said. ‘Indications are it’s a plane flying very low, but it may be a weird radar bounce off a boat of some sort. Moving to the east, northeast at a very good clip. You might want to check it out.’
‘Give me a vector,’ he snapped.
Clean, throttle lashed to the last stop, and a good wind at its back, the manual said the A-37B Dragonfly could do 440 knots.
Mack had it nudging 470 as he tracked in the direction Breanna had fed him, running up the coastline. He was about thirty seconds from the spot where she’d gotten the first contact – just a hair under four miles – but he had nothing on his radar and couldn’t see anything, either.
He leaned his head far forward, as if the few inches of extra distance would help his eyes filter away the shadows and mist.
‘Dragon One to Jersey – yo, Breanna, where is this thing?’
‘Stand by.’
She came back again with a GPS location.
‘Hey, I’m in the Stone Age, remember? I don’t have a GPS locator on board.’
‘Sorry – you look like you’re almost on top of it. Two miles.’
Mack reached for the throttle, easing off on his speed. The shoreline was an irregular black haze to his right.
Sixty seconds later, Breanna announced that they had lost it. ‘Stand by,’ she added.
Stand by yourself, he thought. He had let his altitude slip to two thousand feet. He was passing just over a marina, but moving too fast to sort out what he saw.
‘Pleasure boat,’ he said with disgust, snapping the speak button as he tucked into a bank to check it out. ‘Hey, Jersey girl – did you have me chase a pleasure boat? There’s a marina down here.’
‘You know a pleasure boat that goes three hundred knots? Stand by. We’re looking for it.’
Mack circled around. There were at least two dozen boats in the marina, but no airplanes.
‘Not a seaplane?’ he asked, though he didn’t see one.
‘Seaplane? If so the computer couldn’t find it on its index. Hold on.’
Mack pulled out the large area map from his kneeboard and unfolded it, checking to see where he was.
‘Dragon One, we have it twenty-five miles to your northeast, along the coast,’ said Breanna over the radio.
‘Your sure about that, Jersey?’
‘We’re as sure as – stand by,’ she added, a note of disgust creeping into her voice.
Mack started a turn in the direction she had advised, but as he came to the new course Breanna told him they had lost the contact completely.
‘Right,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We’re trying.’
‘I’m looking at empty ocean.’
‘You’re right on the vector.’
She added that the Brunei authorities had just reported a ship underway to rescue survivors at the stricken ship, which had now been identified as a freighter due to dock at 6 A.M. in Brunei. Mack flew about ten miles to the east-northeast, then banked into an orbit fifteen hundred feet over the waves, riding a curlicue as he looked for Breanna’s contact. He began heading toward the masts of a group of fishing vessels further northward on the shore.
‘Flight Jersey to Dragon One,’ said the airborne radar operator aboard the EB-52. ‘Report: Two Su-27s coming in your direction from the south. Report: bearing one-six-five. Report …’
Mack listened incredulously to the contact information. The two planes were over Malaysian territory, on a course that would take them out over Mack’s position. But Malaysia didn’t have any Su-27s, and all eighteen of their MiG-29s were over at Subang, a good thousand miles away. As the MiGs were the most capable planes in the region, two spies
