Authors: Dale Brown
“Train well!
Your attitude is your ally!
Think, then perform!
Whatever you dream, you will live.”
The vestibule opened into a corridor on the left; an open staircase was on the right. Danny walked down the corridor slowly. Small rooms lined the hallway. Some had doors, some not; all were open. There were no furnishings in any of the rooms, nothing in them but dust, a few old shades, and in one, rolled rug liners. The place had a musty smell, the scent of abandonment.
Upstairs it was the same. He went into one of the rooms and looked out the windows. He couldn’t quite imagine what it would have been like—a hundred jocks and their trainers, always running, working out, practicing their various sports.
Getting injections and God knew what else.
How did that relate to Stoner?
The athletes were just a cover for an experiment to create supermen?
And Stoner . . . became one of their experiments?
It didn’t sound plausible. What Danny saw instead was more benign—people trying to help him back into shape after being broken. The downside of steroids and other drugs wasn’t understood at the time.
Or maybe he was being too naive. Maybe the doctors knew exactly what they were doing.
But steroids weren’t evil. He’d known guys who took them back in the nineties. Amateur bodybuilders trying to get ahead. An almost pro wrestler hoping to get the “look” so he could land a job with WCW, back in the day. Not evil guys.
Did they help? He couldn’t even say. But it didn’t seem to hurt. He didn’t buy the “ ’roid rage” hysteria.
Maybe he just didn’t have the right information. And maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg compared to what they were doing here, as Breanna had implied.
But could Stoner have survived the crash? Not from what he saw. No way.
Danny went back outside. Walking through the grounds, he could tell without even referring to the
Le Monde
story that several other buildings had been removed, bulldozed without a trace.
The remarkable thing, he thought, was the lack of vandalism. Granted, the population in the surrounding area was small, but there must be kids somewhere, and he’d have thought at least the windows would have been tempting targets on a boring Saturday afternoon. He was tempted to put a rock through one himself, right now, just for the hell of it.
Going to his car, he caught a glint of light, a reflection of the sun sinking toward the nearby hills. Once again he had the sensation of being followed. But it was distant, and even MY-PID couldn’t detect anything. He stared for nearly ten minutes; unable to detect any movement, he got into the Renault and headed back for the main road.
D
anny followed the road south to a slightly larger village about two miles away, driving through a bucolic countryside of rolling hills and farm fields. Small corners of the fields were cultivated, here and there. The idle land was a sign of the country’s current economic woes, where farmers couldn’t afford the money for seeds and new tractors, but from the distance, driving by, they only made the place more beautiful.
This area had been used by the rebels during Romania’s troubles. A good portion of the people here were ethnic Romanians, and in the wake of the Soviet collapse, there had been active attempts toward unifying the country with its neighbor. The Romanian rebels, however, were aligned with the Russians, who were at odds with the Moldovan government as well as the Romanians.
The politics were complicated, tangled in family relationships and issues that stretched back hundreds if not thousands of years. An American had no hope of untangling them, not even with MY-PID’s help, and Danny treaded lightly when he stopped at the police station and asked if he could speak to the police chief.
The woman at the desk didn’t speak English, and his pronunciation of the words MY-PID had given him was off far enough that he had to repeat them several times before she realized what he was saying. Even then she didn’t completely understand—the chief came out of the back room in a rush, thinking he was reporting a stolen car.
“Auto?” said the chief, who spoke a smattering of English.
“I’m here to look for a grave,” said Danny. “A friend of mine died here fifteen years ago. I think he was buried here.”
“Your car stolen?”
“No, my car isn’t stolen.”
“A friend took your car?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Danny took out the MY-PID, telling the chief it was a translating computer. He struggled with the words at first, but the more he spoke, the easier the pronunciation became.
When the chief finally understood what he was saying, he laughed. There hadn’t been a real crime in town in over a decade, he said, and he had worried not only for the town’s reputation, but his job.
That confusion cleared, the chief invited Danny to dinner with him. Danny wanted to see the cemetery before nightfall, and with the sun on the horizon, tried to pass.
“Not far,” said the chief, grabbing his hat.
“But—”
“We talk and we eat. Then, there is grave, we see.”
“I—”
“Come, come. Not far.”
The man’s hospitality was too generous to resist, and finally Danny agreed.
It wasn’t far at all. The chief, his wife, and their teenage son lived in a four-room cottage next door to the police station. The boy’s English was considerably better than his father’s, and he acted as translator through the meal. Danny explained why he had come—a friend of his had died in a helicopter crash some fifteen years before. He didn’t mention that he’d been working with the Romanian army, or even that he was an American, not knowing how those facts might be received.
“I remember the crash well,” said the chief, taking down a bottle of vodka from one of the kitchen cabinets. “That was during the guerrilla problems. Your friend was in the Romanian army?”
“He was an American,” said Danny. “He was an advisor. Helping them.”
“We are very close to Romania,” said the chief. “But separate countries, no? Like brothers.”
“Like brothers.”
“And brothers with America.”
“I hope so, yes.”
“Allies, dad,” said the boy. “Friends.”
“Allies, brothers—whatever words.”
The chief took out three glasses. He filled two to the brim; the third, for his son, contained just a sip of the liquor.
“Drink!” translated his son as the glasses were handed around. “To your health!”
The chief smiled. The vodka was raw and very strong. Danny couldn’t finish the entire shot in one gulp. This amused the chief, who refilled his glass.
“I was a young officer then,” he told Danny, leading him over to a pair of overstuffed chairs in the living room. His son came, too, standing by his father’s side and translating. “Fresh on the force. The state police. We were arranged differently—my supervisor was from another region. I came to the crash. It was a bog. Two miles from here.”
“I see.”
“A terrible tragedy. Many soldiers.”
“Was the aircraft on fire?” asked Danny.
“On fire? No. By that time, any fire would have been out. This was in the afternoon—it had crashed earlier in the day. The morning.”
“I see.”
“I don’t think there were any survivors.”
“Would you know where they were taken?”
“The bodies? Buried.”
“They didn’t take them back to Romania? A few months later?”
“One was. But the others stayed.”
“Why?” asked Danny.
The chief shook his head. Danny knew from the records MY-PID had found that three Romanian soldiers’ bodies had been repatriated within months of the end of the coup. But a combination of politics, ancestry—at least one of the soldiers’ families had come from this part of Moldova during the 1960s—and the difficulty of working with distant relatives had prevented all from being repatriated. The records were vague, but there were at least two soldiers still buried in Moldova.
“I’d like to visit the crash site as well as the cemetery,” said Danny. “Could you give me directions?”
“I’ll take you myself!” said the chief. He looked over at his wife, who was signaling that dinner was ready. “Here, we will have another vodka before eating.”
I
t was dark by the time they were finished dinner. The police chief offered to let Danny stay at his house, but it was clear he would be displacing someone, probably the son. Danny begged off, and the chief recommended a small guest house run by a widow on the other side of town. As the town consisted of only six blocks, it was easy to reach, and Danny was sleeping by eight.
He got up before dawn, expecting to run a bit before breakfast. The police chief and his son were already in his squad car outside, waiting.
The chief insisted on running his blue emergency lights as they drove out to the swamp where the helicopter had crashed. It took less than ten minutes, a bumpy ride up and down a medium-sized hill into a narrow valley parted almost exactly in the middle by a meandering creek.
According to the police chief, not much had changed in fifteen years—the trees were bigger and the ground a little drier, but not much. He pointed out the area where the helicopter had lain, at the edge of a pool of water. The general location agreed with what MY-PID had displayed earlier.
“It went straight in, on its belly,” said the son, boiling down the chief’s elaborate description to a few words.
Danny stared at the area. He’d seen a number of helicopter crashes during his stints with Air Force special operations and Dreamland. He saw them all now, flickering through his head like ghosts combining into a single image: a Marine Whiskey Cobra merging with a mangled Blackhawk, half morphed into a Comanche test bed whose rotor was the only surviving part. Beneath them all were the pancaked remains of a flattened Chinook, the wounded passengers still crying for help.
Danny looked at the nearby woods and trees. The helo would have come in low, skimmed down when it was shot—the report said the chopper pilot was trying to attract the interceptors’ attention to help the others get away.
If it lay the way the chief said it did, it must have banked slightly before going in. Maybe that would have lessened the impact, at least for someone on the other side of the fuselage.
Would that make it survivable?
He could stare at the scene all morning and not come to any real conclusions, he thought.
“So where did they take the bodies?” he asked.
The police chief described the process—they’d moved two flatboats in, but the ground proved solid enough to walk on. One body was out of the helicopter, but the others were inside. Three men in the back. And the two pilots.
“Three?” asked Danny, making sure he understood. “Only three people?”
“And the one about there, two meters from the helicopter,” said the chief. “Ejected.”
There had been a full squad of men aboard the helicopter, but Danny didn’t correct the police chief. He said that tents had been set up near the road. They were brought in under the pretense of being an aid station to help the wounded, though it was far too late for that.
“Then what happened?” asked Danny.
“To the cemetery.”
Danny nodded. “Can we go there?”
“Yes,” said the chief somberly. “It is time for you to pay the respects for your friend.”
T
he cemetery was about three-quarters of a mile away, an old church plot used sporadically as a kind of overflow from the main churchyard in town. The southeastern end was marked by foundation stones overgrown with weeds and moss; according to the police chief, these were the remains of an Orthodox church that had fallen down sometime in the eighteenth century after being replaced by the slightly larger one where the town now sat.
There were three dozen headstones, most pockmarked with centuries of wear. The bodies of the men found in the helicopter were together at the side, three marked by wooden crosses and one by a stone that lay flat against the ground.
“Once they were white,” said the chief, referring to the worn wood. “But given their age, they have done well.”
Standing over the graves, Danny felt the urge to say a prayer. He knelt and bowed his head, wishing the dead men peace.
“I hope you’re here, Mark,” he whispered to himself.
He stopped himself. It felt funny, praying that someone was dead.
Brown Lake Test Area, Dreamland
I
t was a coincidence that Captain Turk Mako’s last name meant shark. But it was a chance occurrence that he liked to play up in casual conversation.
“The Shark flies the shark—gotta happen,” he’d say when telling people what he did.
Not that he told many people. The aircraft wasn’t actually top secret, but most of what it was used for was.
In a sense, Turk’s name wasn’t actually Mako. It had been shortened and Americanized, kind of, from Makolowejeski by his great-great-grandfather, who’d come from Poland in the 1930s, escaping the war. He’d been dead some years when Turk was born, but he’d left a set of taped recordings about his adventures, a revelation and inspiration to the young man when he discovered them in high school.
Most pilots are at least a little superstitious, even if ultimately they know it’s bunk. Turk, who had a lucky coin he kept in his pocket every flight, viewed the name change as something of a good omen. Great-great had been looking after him even before he was born.
The Shark that Turk Mako flew was the F–40 Tigershark II, the experimental aircraft owned by the Pentagon’s Technology Office, now being equipped with the Medusa control unit to work with the Sabre UAVs. It was the latest in a long line of experimental aircraft, a cutting-edge plane that would have looked right at home on the flight deck of the Starship
Enterprise
.
Technically, two previous aircraft had been called the Tigershark. The first was actually an informal name applied by the British to their versions of the P–40 Warhawk, after squadrons began painting sharks’ mouths on the nose. Fighting against the Japanese in China, Claire Lee Chenault’s Flying Tigers saw how good the paint looked and added teeth to their versions, helping to make the look famous.
Tigershark II’s direct namesake was the F–20, a lightweight, multirole aircraft developed by Northrop in the 1970s and early 1980s from the basic blueprint of the F–5E. It was incredibly nimble, capable of hitting Mach 2 and climbing to over 54,000 feet. It could take off in only 1,600 feet, a relatively short distance for a jet of that era, and the simplicity of its design made it easy to maintain—an important consideration for its intended target consumers, friendly American allies who might not have or want to spend the money for more expensive aircraft.
Though an excellent aircraft, the F–20 eventually succumbed to the realities of international weapons purchasing, where politics often overshadowed other considerations.
Like its predecessor, the new Tigershark was light, small, and fast. Very, very fast.
The airframe had essentially been built around the engine, a combination hypersonic pulse and ramjet that could take the sleek, needle-nosed plane to Mach 5. The engine also allowed it to operate around 135,000 feet. The wings came out in a triangular wedge, with faceted and angled fins on both sides.
The engine’s quad air scoop was located directly under the cabin area of the fuselage; rail guns were mounted on either side. The rail guns were directed energy weapons, firing small bursts of plasma at high speed. The bursts were roughly the equivalent of a 50-millimeter machine-gun bullet. Devastating to another aircraft, the weapon had several advantages over conventional machine guns, starting with the fact that its projectile, though as potent as missiles, were the size of 25mm bullets. Its effective range was just over twenty miles—well before the aircraft would be seen on radar.
The weapon did have some limitations. Only a dozen charges could be fired before it had to cool down and recycle, a process that took two minutes under ideal conditions. And with each firing, the gun literally tried to pull itself apart. Maintaining it in working order was, so far at least, very expensive.
Turk counted another negative to the weapon, though this was never mentioned by its builders. Great precision was needed to target a moving adversary, and the forces created as the weapon was fired made the Tigershark hard to control at all but top speed. These facts combined to dictate that the aircraft be flown entirely by the computer during the combat sequence. In other words, he had to hand the stick over to the silicon to take his shot.
He didn’t particularly like that. No computer was ever going to be as good as he was at flying. Ever.
Turk had joined the Air Force to fly. He was good at it—very good, he liked to think. He’d flown everything the service had given him—from F–16s to Flighthawks. In his not too humble opinion, he was the best. It irked him to give up the stick, even if he wasn’t literally standing back out of the way. But that was the way it was.
In a very real sense, he knew he was lucky to have a job where his seat was actually in a cockpit. All of the good young jocks were headed toward UAV programs now, a dramatic switch from just a few years ago. Unmanned planes were the Air Force’s future.
That sucked. There was nothing like the smell of rapidly evaporating jet fuel to get you moving in the morning, he thought. He took one last whiff and plugged up, snugging the Tigershark’s cockpit.
Time to rock and roll.
“Control to Tiger One, Tiger One, you read?” prompted the control tower.
“Copy, Control, strong read.”
“Status?”
Part of Turk wanted to give a real wise guy answer—maybe something like, “I feel like I gotta pee.” But the flight control computer at Dreamland that was talking to him had
no
sense of humor. In fact, the only thing in the universe that had
less
of a sense of humor was the flight control computer’s human boss, Major Samantha “Killjoy” Combs, who had promised to write him up if he goofed on the computer again. His joking around had frozen the system, grounding flights for over two hours.
Or so she claimed.
“Write me up?” he’d laughed. “I just discovered a flaw in your stupid computer program.”
“You caused two flight ranges to shut down.”
“Better we found the problem now rather than in battle,” said Turk.
“Captain.”
“Hey, make yourself happy. What are you gonna do, give me a parking ticket?”
Twenty minutes later his boss, Breanna Stockard, had called from D.C., telling him that if the three-star general commanding Dreamland complained about him again, he was going to be reassigned to clean toilets in the coldest part of Alaska.
So Turk was very straight today when dealing with the computer controller.
“Status is green,” said the pilot. “Awaiting clearance to take off.”
“Tiger One you are cleared to proceed on the filed flight plan. You are cleared for takeoff.”
The computer continued, giving him a rundown of the weather conditions. They were basically the same as they always were at Brown Lake: clear skies, unlimited visibility.
“Engines, military power,” said Turk, powering up from soft idle. The power plants—there were actually four of them, though they worked as an integrated unit—came on with a soft thud. The aircraft immediately began to shake. Turk worked his control surfaces quickly, getting green status lights on the right side of his visor. He could choose to use the LED screens on the aircraft—there was no glass canopy—but generally left that as a backup. His smart helmet could do everything the computer-controlled screen could, and was connected directly to the plane.
Turk checked through his instruments for his last takeoff checklist, meticulously looking at each indicator even though the computer would have alerted him if anything was out of spec. Then he took a long, deep breath, slowly emptying his lungs.
“Let’s go,” he told the plane, simultaneously reaching for the throttle.
And they were off.
A
ll airplanes are built to fly. Engines on full and left completely on their own, their wings would gladly propel themselves through the air, straight and level, forever. Or at least until their fuel ran out.
The Tigershark didn’t
just
love to fly. It loved to
accelerate
. Its engines supplied more lift per pound than any other aircraft in the American inventory, which meant any other aircraft in the world. If the Tigershark were a person, it would be an Olympic-class sprinter—the Carl Lewis of the skies.
Speed is lift. Turk’s job was basically to manage that lift, using it to get from Point A to Point B and back again. To do that in the Tigershark, he had to think not just of Point A and B and all the subpoints in between, but Point C and D, and a little bit of E and F on either side of the wings. Because living at Mach 2.3, the aircraft’s normal cruise speed, entailed certain responsibilities.
Things happened relatively fast at that speed—more than twice as fast as they happened in most fighters. Turk had advanced radar and avionics systems that helped show him what else was around and likely to happen on any given vector, but as good as the computer was, it couldn’t really predict the future.
Not that he could, of course. But he did have a certain feel for it.
It wasn’t that the Tigershark couldn’t fly below the speed of sound. But the high-speed maneuvers it was capable of—the aircraft was designed to withstand over 18 g’s, a force that would crush its pilot in an old-style g-suit—required enormous flight energy.
It was a trade: the Tigershark gave the god of flight velocity and lift, and in return the god of flight let it make a 150-degree turn in the space a Piper would have used at something like a hundredth of the speed.
But the god of flight did not take IOUs—if the Tigershark was a few knots short, she was severely punished. High-speed stalls and spins were a fact of life in the Tigershark. Even after a year’s worth of flying it, Turk was required to practice dealing with them in a flight simulator twice a week.
The sessions were far more grueling than anything he encountered in the air, which was the point. He was good: he could deal with even the most unusual flight blip—his term—nearly as quickly as the plane’s flight command computer. But he still found the workouts taxing.
Today’s flight, by contrast, was a piece of cake. All he had to do was practice a few loops and rolls for the dog and pony show they were hosting in a few days.
Low pass on the runway. Zip-zip. Climb. Turn at the top. Dive and recover.
Enter Sabres, stage right.
Though they looked nothing alike, in many ways the Sabres were smaller versions of the Tigershark, capable of making very sharp maneuvers at high rates of speed. They didn’t have anywhere near the Tigershark’s top end, however; they would accelerate to roughly Mach 3, but used a great deal of fuel getting there. What they could do better than the Tigershark was fly slowly, all the way down to 100 knots at their service ceiling, which was roughly 68,000 feet. The secret was their wings, which could be extended—rolled out was a more descriptive and accurate term—turning them into high-altitude gliders. With solar cells embedded in their skin, the aircraft could power down their engines and loiter over an area for hours.
There were trade-offs. For one, the extended wings made it easy for properly configured radar to spot them. But all things considered, the Sabres were the most capable unmanned air vehicles or UAVs ever produced. They bore the same relationship to the Flighthawks—their immediate predecessors—as their namesake, the F–86 Sabre, bore to the P–38 Lightning.
Turk rocked the Tigershark through the opening maneuvers of his display routine, cranking the plane straight up as four Sabres rocked in from opposite directions. The little planes came up around him, crisscrossing as he climbed. It was very impressive from the ground—the planes looked as if they were a reverse fountain of water. In the cockpit, it was more than a little on the boring side: all Turk did was fly straight up, putting the nose of the aircraft through a blue guide circle on his screen supplied by Medusa, which was interfacing with the Tigershark’s flight computer.
An indicator in the right-hand corner of his screen began counting down his next maneuver. When it hit zero, he pushed right, diving between two of the Sabres. As he sliced downward, the little planes followed, crisscrossing as they flew.
A few more acrobatics and it was on to the simulated missile run. The Sabres dropped precision-guided bombs—small warheads of high explosive. These were 38 and 67- pound bombs, designed to destroy targets without causing a lot of collateral damage. They could blow up anything smaller than a main battle tank without a problem—as they demonstrated on a helpless Bradley.
Mission complete, it was back to the runway for a coordinated landing.
“Ground to Tigershark One, you’re looking very good,” said Colonel Harvey “Rocks” Johnson, coming on the radio just as Turk was about to tell control he was ready to land. “What’s your situation?”
“Tigershark is about to head back to the barn, Colonel.”
“I wonder if you could take that crisscross over the review stand again. The Sabres were a little sluggish.”
The colonel phrased it as a request, but Turk knew that Rocks would make his life difficult if he didn’t burp precisely on command.
“Tigershark weighed fuel out pretty carefully, Colonel.”
“My gauge says you have enough for a pass.”
Turk checked. The Tigershark’s instruments were duplicated on the ground. There was enough for a pass—but only just.