“You have done very well,” said the imam finally.
He leaned forward. Sahurah felt something press him in the side. He turned and looked down, and saw that there was a small pistol in the imam’s hand.
“Take it,” said the imam.
Sahurah reached across his body with his right hand and took the pistol. It was a small, lightweight gun, a semi-automatic that fit easily in the palm of his hand. It occurred to Sahurah that he might take the gun and hold it to his head.
“Kill yourself,” said the imam.
Surely he had willed his leader to say that.
“Sahurah? Did you hear me?”
“To shoot myself?” he asked. “Will I be denied Paradise?”
“To die as a soldier of jihad is to be made a martyr, if you are under orders,” said the imam. “No matter the circumstances.”
Sahurah knew that suicide was a sin, but he also knew that there were conditions when death was not considered suicide. He had done nothing to prepare himself, however—his body was not clean or properly prepared, and he worried that perhaps he would not find Paradise if he complied.
But he must obey. More importantly, he wanted to. He wanted to be finished with this tiresome, trying world, where he could not cleanse himself of evil thoughts and failures. He wanted to be beyond weakness and lust.
“Are you afraid, Sahurah?” asked the imam.
Sahurah put the gun to his mouth and pulled the trigger. When nothing happened, he realized he had pushed too lightly, and pressed again.
And again.
He felt the imam’s hand on his shoulder. “You are our bravest soldier, Sahurah,” said the imam gently. “Give me back the gun. From this moment on, you are to be honored with the title of Commander. How does that make you feel?”
Sahurah stared at the weapon in his hands. He felt cheated, but he could not say that. A finger of pain began clawing up the back of his neck.
“Your future is the future of us all,” added the Saudi in Arabic. “You will bring great glory to the soldiers of God.”
Dreamland
9 October 1997, (local) 0830
Zen was working now. Sweat poured down his back, drenching his undershirt beneath the flight suit. A crowd of onlookers—including three congressmen and their staffs, along with some Pentagon and army VIPs—were watching from only a few feet away as he worked his Flighthawks through an exercise designed to demonstrate the future direction of aerial warfare. It was an all robot engagement—Lieutenant Kirk “Starship” Andrews and Lieutenant James “Kick” Colby were at the sticks of their own U/MF-3 Flighthawks, trying to keep Zen’s Hawk One and Hawk Two from getting past them on the test range to the northwest. They were doing a reasonably good job of it, too; Kick’s Hawk Three was closing in on Hawk Two, with Star-ship’s Hawk Four right behind. A large flat screen directly behind Zen showed the positions of all of the Flighthawks, and even provided a score as calculated by the computer.
“The Super Bowl of the sky,” joked one congressman. He and the others were eating it up.
Starship and Kick were aboard the Megafortress
Raven
which was flying overhead. Zen sat down on the tarmac beneath a specially rigged tarp, the center of attention. There was just enough wind and crowd noise around to interfere with the boom mike, prompting the computer to ask him to repeat every third or fourth voice command.
Zen squeezed the throttle slide on the back of the joystick controller, pushing Hawk One to accelerate past the two Flighthawks trying to close in on him. He got past Kick, but Starship was very much on his game today—he anticipated what Zen would do and managed to get right on his tail.
It took Starship another ten seconds or so to finally lock Hawk Two in his gun sights and take him down. It was a little longer than Zen had hoped—hey, these guys
were
his star pupils—but all in all, it was a respectable show.
Unfortunately for his pupils, Zen had suckered them into that encounter so he could sneak Hawk One to the target. He let the computer take over Hawk Two and concentrated on bringing Hawk One up the deck and nailing the target aircraft. He now had a clear path; the other planes were too far to interfere.
Except that he couldn’t find his target, which should be dead ahead at two thousand feet.
The computer beeped at him. He was being tracked by a ground radar near the target aircraft. If he didn’t confuse the radar within five seconds, the defensive system would fire a pair of improved Patriot missiles and nail him.
“Jam it,” he told the computer.
While the computer filled the air with electronic static, Zen threw the Flighthawk into a hard turn, firing off chaff and flares, as well. He actually only needed the chaff, which was composed of shards of metal that confused the radars, but the flares made for a good show. He heard a few
oohs
and
ahs
behind him.
Zen’s speed had dropped below three hundred knots, and he was now vulnerable to a fresh hazard—a pair of Razor antiaircraft lasers, which were using a new optical sighting system that could not be foxed by standard ECMs, chaff, or flares. Zen leaned forward, waiting until the lasers began to revolve in his direction before starting a series of sharp evasive maneuvers, literally zigzagging back and forth across the sky. The laser system was a half-step too slow to hit the Flighthawk at very close range, but Zen knew he couldn’t do this all day; he really needed to find his target, and now.
The computer beeped at him, but it wasn’t marking an X on the target board—it was warning him that he was about to be pounded from above. Zen slapped his stick and dove away as Starship flailed down in a desperate attack, followed not more than two seconds later by Kick.
In anything other than an exercise, the laser would have destroyed their Flighthawks, but it had been programmed to look only for Zen’s aircraft, and they flew through the air untouched. Zen shook them with a flick of his wrist, but he’d not only lost time but his orientation on the battlefield. He started to turn right, then caught a glint of something on his left.
Bingo. The target.
“Computer, target,” he said, designating it with his hand. The screen changed instantly, putting up a blinking yellow triangle that boxed the spec he had pointed at.
Yellow meant not yet.
The computer warned that he was being tracked by the Patriot radar. He fired everything he had—flares, chaff, prayers.
Red.
“Gotcha,” he said, pressing the trigger.
The screen blinked, then went blank.
The computer had taken over. He’d been shot down by the Razor laser.
Zen, exhausted, threw himself back in the chair. There was a gasp from the crowd, then a loud round of applause.
Dog slapped him on the back. “Take a bow, Major.”
Zen looked up and gave the colonel a sardonic smile.
“I think the computer scored it as a tie,” said Dog.
The others were now gathering around his station. Zen reached over for his coffee, which was propped on a small table near his wheelchair.
“That was some performance,” said Congresswoman Sue Kelly, a Republican from New York. “You really had those computers going.”
“Thanks,” said Zen.
“And you almost got the blimp,” she added enthusiastically.
“Almost,” said Zen.
Of course, “almost” meant he’d lost the exercise, though that didn’t seem to matter to them. And it certainly didn’t bother Dog, who would now use the exhibition to talk up his favorite ugly-duck weapons system, the LADS blimp.
The blimp’s shape and structure were not terribly different from the basic design airships had used since roughly 1910. It was a fattish sausage, with its inner skeleton made of carbon-fiber material that helped keep it light. The engine was a hydrogen-cell powered propeller shielded within a baffled area at the lower end of the rear. It could do fifty knots or so—not particularly fast but respectable for a lighter-than-air vehicle. The sensors employed by the unit were housed in a flat pod that hung at the bottom of the bag. The pod, and two-thirds of the blimp, were covered by a lightweight plastic panel and an array of advanced LEDs, or light emitting diodes, which were powered by the engine and a strip of solar electric cells at the top of the craft. In simple terms, the LEDs—considerably more advanced than the ones used in consumer products, though the basic principles behind their functioning remained the same—tinting reflected light to create an optical illusion. The system was optimized for daylight skies—not only would it not blend well against a forest, for example, but it also had some difficulty at dusk. Even during the day, if someone were to stare at the vehicle for a long time, they would probably realize that there was something not quite right about that part of the sky. But at a distance to a casual observer, the LED system was the closest thing to a magician’s magic cloak of invisibility ever invented. Once problems with voltage spikes and the infrared signature were worked out, the system was likely to represent as big a revolution in warfare and surveillance as the first-generation Stealth Fighter had.
The blimps were visible on radar, and by very finely tuned infrared systems. The radar problem could be taken care of—as it had been in the demonstration—by placing jammer units close to the blimp but not actually in it, preventing an attacker from homing in on them. The IR problem was more difficult to overcome, but even the sensors in the Flighthawk could not pick up the blimp until the aircraft was within roughly two miles.
“Now remember, there’s a lot of work to do yet,” Dog told the crowd as the airship rode toward them. “You can see, though, how it comes in steadily even though there’s a good wind today out of the west. High winds have been a problem for lighter-than-air ships since their invention.”
“Is that a problem at thirty thousand feet?” asked one of the congressmen.
The airships’ ability to fly that high—it actually had been taken to over forty, and larger ships could go much higher—was classified. Dog made a show of acting perplexed, then answered.
“I thought I heard a question about altitude. I can only say we fly very high around here. And our altitude at the moment would be limited by sensor abilities to something oh, just out of the range of normal anti-aircraft guns. But no, that’s not a problem.”
There were some nods and appreciative winks. Zen shook his head, admiring the way the colonel handled the VIPs. For a guy who didn’t like politics and Washington BS, he sure could play the bigwigs when he had to.
Dog continued, waxing poetic about the system. The colonel was totally sold on blimps—with or without cloaking LEDs—as a low-cost way of providing radar and other sensor coverage over remote areas in the future. Much larger blimps were also being studied as low-cost equipment movers, and to hear Dog tell it, the day of the lighter-than-air vehicle was just around the corner.
The VIPs started drifting away toward the LADS landing area, watching the six-foot aircraft slide downward. Zen snickered as the aircraft’s controllers—it was flown entirely from the ground—pulled one last trick out of their hats: the LED system flashed, making the airship disappear into the background for a moment. Then the crowd of onlookers seemed to appear in the sky; as they settled down, they were replaced by a message: “Welcome to Dreamland.”
The VIPs applauded heartily.
“Everything’s PR,” said Zen, shaking his head.
“Yes,” said Ray Rubeo. Rubeo was the head scientist at the base, and its resident cynic.
“You should be happy, Ray,” Zen told the scientist. “Your computer beat me.”
“A draw is not a victory,” said Rubeo. He put his hand to his ear, squeezing the tiny gold earring there. “You flew well, and probably were only held off because your two students cheated.”
“Want to go for two out of three?”
“Another time, Major,” said the scientist, walking away.
DOG SPOTTED JENNIFER WALKING TOWARD ZEN’S STATION AS the blimp dropped into a hover. He turned to Major Natalie Catsman, his second in command, and asked her to take over for him. She nodded.
“I have to tie up a few things, but I’ll meet everyone for lunch,” he announced. Then he walked swiftly toward Jennifer.
She was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a light blue T-shirt. Even in those simple clothes, even with her hair military-short, she was beautiful, ravishingly beautiful.
And she was angry with him, though he wasn’t exactly sure why.
Dog waited while Jennifer and Zen discussed the parameters of the exercise they’d just flown. Zen started to laugh.
“Good morning, Jen,” said Dog, finally breaking in. He saw her whole body stiffen, inexplicably tensing up. Dog ignored it, turning to Zen. “You flew very well, Major. Your guys did a good job, too”
“I almost got your blimp,” Zen said.
“Either way, we would have looked good,” said Dog. “You going to be at lunch? The congresspeople can’t get enough of you.”
“I’ll do my bit for the team.”
“I appreciate it.” Dog turned to Jennifer. “You have a second, Doc?”
She shrugged, then followed as he walked toward the hangar.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“You weren’t at the apartment when I came back.”
“I had to work.”
“I’m sorry I had to leave. I know you were trying to make it a surprise. I just …”
The words stopped coming. He wanted to tell her—what, exactly?
That he loved her, damn it. But he couldn’t get that to come out of his mouth. Maybe it was because he was her boss, maybe it was because he was a good decade—well, decade and a half—older than her.
Maybe it was because the sun glinted off her hair and made her look like an angel. He just couldn’t say anything worthwhile. And so he said nothing.
“I’ve got some work,” she said. Her hand reached to her shoulder, as if to flick back her hair. It was an old habit, one she hadn’t completely erased. Something flashed into her face—pain maybe, a grimace of recognition.
“Dinner later, you think?” suggested Dog.
“I don’t know,” she said, turning.