Dale Brown - Dale Brown's Dreamland 04 - Piranha(and Jim DeFelice)(2003) (5 page)

 
          
Dog
jinked
back, hit chaff as one of the Tomcats launched
from long range.

 
          
“Were
did they get the Scorpion missiles codes?” asked Ferris. “They’re only supposed
to use operational missiles.”

 
          
“Take
them over,” said Dog.

 
          
“Huh?”

 
          
“
Overrise
their guidance. Use our circuits.”

 
          
“I
don’t know if I can, Colonel. And even if I could, that would be cheating.”

 
          
“Weren’t
you just complaining about them using missiles that aren’t in their armament
lockers?” inquired Dog. “Issue the universal self-destruct. See what happens.”

 
          
The
Scorpions—still some months from production—had been designed at Dreamland. The
test missiles contained what the programmers called off-line
paragraphs—telemetry code useful for testing but not intended for the final
product. Among them were instructions allowing the
testbed
aircraft to override onboard guidance and detonate the missiles—useful in case
one veered off course. Dog wasn’t sure the code had been included in the
simulated version, but it was worth a try.

 
          
Ferris
dutifully hit the commands, and got an extra bonus—not only did the two dummies
“explode,” but so did the four simulated ones that hadn’t been launched yet.

 
          
Fortunately
for the Naval aviators carrying them, the self-destruct merely killed the
programming.

 
          
Ferris
laughed so hard and loud he drowned out
Delaford’s
report that they were spitting at the carrier’s bridge.

 
          
“Almost,”
said Delaford. “We’re twelve feet off their starboard side, bobbing up and
down. I hope some of those sailors have cameras.”

 
          
“Gentlemen,
and Miss English, job well done,” said Dog, who, despite his best effort to
sound professional, was chuckling a bit as well. “Let’s go home.”

 
          
South China Sea

 
          
August
17, 1997, 1900 local (August 17, 0100 Hawaii)

 
          
Stoner
steadied himself against the rail of his boat as he drifted toward the piece of
torn gray fabric bulky piece of flotsam bobbed a few yards beyond it; Stoner
suspected it was the tip of something large enough to damage his boat. But he
wanted the fabric, and decided the approach was worth the risk. There were
words on the cloth, or at least something that looked like words.

 
          
He
reached out with his long pole, sticking it in the middle of the material. Like
a jellyfish prodded from above, it slipped downward and drifted away. Stoner
reached again, nearly losing his balance grabbing the cloth.

 
          
He
pulled the stick up quickly. The characters were definitely Chinese, though he
couldn’t make them out. He’d have to use his digital camera to take a picture,
then transmit the image back.

 
          
Enough
to go on.

 
          
Stoner
looked back at the water. The flotsam was only a few feet away. It was smaller
than he though, and not connected to anything. Even so, he put his pole out,
trying to fend it off.

 
          
It
rolled upward, revealing a face and torso. There were no legs, and only
half-stumps where the arms had been.

 
          
In
his career, Stoner had seen many
unpretty
things. He
went back over the rail and reached down to a fabric-covered pocket at the top
of the hull. Opening the compartment, he took out his camera, examining it
quickly to make sure the settings were correct before slipping the thick strap
over his neck. He went back and photographed the dead man’s face, recording it
in case it might prove useful in the future. Then he out the long stick in the
body’s chest and pushed it away, leaving it for the sharks.

 
          
Back
at the helm, Stoner took the engines out of neutral, and steered the boat
eastward. As he started below, he heard the drone of an aircraft in the
distance.

 
          
The
transmission would have to wait. He continued forward past the paneled area to
the compartment at the bow. He threw the camera and media card inside, then
stepped back and slammed the hatch shut. He struggled with the three long bolts
at either side of the wall until his fingers were raw, finally taking off his
sneakers to push at the end of the last bolt. By then, the aircraft was
overhead.

 
          
He
waited until he heard it pass, then pushed his head up to look. He knew of
course, that it would be a Chinese patrol plane, though there was always hope
he’d be wrong.

 
          
He
wasn’t. And now a pair of delta-shaped blurs approached from the west—Shenyang
F-811Ms, long-distance attack jets.

 
          
While
he knew enough about the Chinese military to identify the planes’ units and air
bases if he cared to, Stoner was much too busy to do so. With an immense leap,
he threw himself overboard and into the water, just as the aircraft began
firing.

 
          
It
took approximately ten minutes for
Samsara
to sink.
It would have taken considerably longer had Stoner not began flooding it by
removing the bolts. He spent much of the time well below the surface of the
water; what he lacked in negative buoyancy, he more than made up for in
motivation.

 
          
When
the aircraft were gone, Stoner bobbed to the surface, floating with as little
effort as possible. It was at least an hour before sunset; if he were to
survive the night he had to conserve his energy. And of course he knew he would
survive. It was his job. It was what he always did.

 
          
Samsara’s
life raft had been shot to pieces by the attack.
Nothing else came off the boat after it went down—a matter of design, not
accident. And so it was inevitable that Stoner resorted to the wreckage of the
Chinese freighter—or what he strongly suspected was a Chinese freighter—to stay
afloat. It was inevitable that the half-man he had poked before would float
toward him. Stoner wrapped his arms around the torso without emotion. He kicked
slowly, just enough to stay afloat and awake: Despite the warm day, the water
cramped his muscles with its cold, and maybe made his teeth chatter.

 
          
The
sun turned the sky pink as it set. Stoner waited in the water with his dead
companion. Night crept up with an immense, bright moon. In the distance, he
thought he saw the shadow of a shark’s fin. The wreckage of the freighter was
drifting closer; paper with Chinese characters drifted near his nose. He moved
to grab it, but found his arms frozen in place. He let go of the man’s head and
sunk down in the water, trying to shake his limbs back to flexibility. When he
reached the surface, the paper was gone and so was the head.

 
          
For
the next hour he treaded slowly,
faceup
in the brine,
cold and salt sandpapering his lips and nose. Then, suddenly, the water began
to churn. He felt it coming for him now, the shark, drawn by his fatigue like a
radio beacon in the night. It broke water fifty yards to his right, a massive
thing of blackness.

 
          
Stoner
waited. He had no weapon.

 
          
There
was a sound behind him, an eerie cry not unlike the death rattle of a man at
the end.

 
          
“Here!”
Stoner yelled. “Here!”

 
          
A
Seachlight
played across the surface of the water.
Two SEALs in diving gear paddled a rubber boat toward him.

 
          
“Here!”
he yelled again.

 
          
“Mr.
Stoner?” said one of the men.

 
          
“You’re
not expecting someone else, I hope,” said Stoner as the raft crept up. His
muscles were so stiff he had to be helped into the boat. But he managed to
climb onto the deck of the waiting submarine and go below without further assistance.

 
          
“Stoner,
I’m Captain
Waldum
,” said the skipper. “Glad we found
you. Your signal’s getting weak.”

 
          
“Yeah,”
said Stoner. “Let’s retrieve the bow pod from my boat and get back. About a
dozen people are trying to have their underwater in knots about now.”

 
          
Dreamland

 
          
August
21, 1997, 0700 local

 
          
Captain
Breanna Stockard shifted her left leg for the five hundredth time since getting
into the cockpit, trying to make herself comfortable. Her seat, which canted
back at a twenty-degree angle, had ostensibly been form-fitted to her anatomy
and designed for a maximum comfort on a long mission. Its inventor joked it
would be so comfortable the pilot would be in constant danger of falling
asleep; Breanna thought that a remote possibility at best. While the chair
adjusted in several dimensions, it was impossible to find a setting that didn’t
put a kink in her back—or somewhere else.

 
          
Captain
Stockard was surrounded by four large panels, one in front, one overhead, and
one on each side. Constructed of a plasma “Film,” each panel provided, at her
command, a full instrument suite, optical view from all four compass points, or
synthesized views composed from radar or infrared sensors. The stick at the
side of her seat and the pedals at her feet did not actually move, instead
sensing the pressure exerted on them and translating it as commands to the
flight computer that took care of the actual details involved in trimming the
large craft. The throttle was the closest to a “normal” airplane control in the
cockpit—assuming, of course, such a control could select a standard turbofan, a
scramjet, and a
restartable
rocket motor or some
combination of all three depending on the flight regime. All of the controls
could be discarded if Breanna preferred; the computer stood ready to translate
her words into commands as quickly as she could utter them into the small
microphone at the end of her headset.

 
          
That,
Breanna felt, was a big part of the problem. The aircraft had been designed to
be flown entirely by the computer; the cockpit was really just an afterthought,
which explained why it was so stinking uncomfortable. Had it actually been in
the plane, however, it would have been even worse. There, it would have had to
squeeze into a thick, double-layer ceramic-titanium airfoil whose sinewy,
weblike
skin slid back from a needle nose into a shape
described by its designers as an “aerodynamic triangle.” Its midsection looked
something like a stretched B-1 bomber with engine inlets top and bottom, and
wings capable of canting about ten degrees up and down as well as swinging out
and it. It had a shallow tailfin on both the top and bottom of the fuselage. In
order to keep the tailfin clear when landing or taking off, it sat on a set of
landing gear that undoubtedly broke all previous records for height. Even so,
when the aircraft was fully loaded, less than eighteen inches separated the
wingtips from the runway, making it necessary to physically sweep the runway
clean before taking off so any mishap might be avoided.

 
          
This
tedious process added considerably to the pilot’s consternation as she waited
for clearance to begin her test flight.

 
          
Known
as the UMB—Unmanned Bomber Platform—or B-5, the plane was among Dreamland’s
most ambitious projects to date. Once fully operational, it would fly at
somewhere over six times the speed of sound, yet have the turning radius at
Mach 3 of an F/A-18 just pushing five hundred knots. The UMB was designed to
fly in near-earth orbit for extended deployments; there it could serve as an
observation platform and launch-point for a suite of smart weapons still under
study. Its engine, which were powered by hydrogen fuel, were not yet ready for
such lofty flights, though today’s test would take it to a very respectable 200,000
feet. Similarly, the configurable leading and trailing portions of the
wings—inflated by pressurized hydrogen to
microcontrol
the airfoil—had not yet replaced the more conventional leading-and
trailing-edge control surfaces, thus limiting its maneuverability to a more
conventional range.