Dreamland

Maybe.

Maybe he didn’t trust it because of the accident. And maybe she was right—maybe he was worried it would take his job, leave him with nothing to do but sit in a corner and gather dust all day.

Wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t a fucking cripple, legs be damned.

“Zero-ten to Delta,” said Cheshire, a

“Flighthawks acknowledge,” he told her, pulling the visor back on. “Zero-ten to Delta.”

“Scopes are clean, everything is looking very good,” said Cheshire. “Flighthawks are doing a slam-dunk job, Zen.”

“Yeah.”

“I know it’s needle-in-a-haystack country down here,” she added. “But the Navy planes have the most likely territory. Nothing lives down here except sand.”

Zen got ready for the new turn. Cheshire was right—the ground they were covering hadn’t seen rain in eons. Devoid of water, there were only a few sparse settlements, and no nomads to speak of.

Except for the ones they’d seen a short while before, who’d been parked in the middle of sand.

Grazing animals over sand?

“Bobby, do me a favor, would you?” he asked the navigator. “Look at where our nomads were. They over a water hole?”

The navigator took a few minutes to get back to him. “Not on the map, but maybe those guys know where the water is.”

“Yeah. We got a satellite map that detects underground water sources?”

“What do you think this is, the library?” said the navigator with a laugh.

“Just checking.”

“There’s got to be water there,” said Bobby. “The cattle have been there for at least two days.”

“Two days?”

“More. They’re on the U-2 photo and the satellite image Madcap Magician gave us, which is at least three or four.”

Stationary nomads over a dry patch of land.

“Computer, hold Hawk One on the preset course,” said Zen. “Hawk Two, power to ninety percent.”

“What’s up, Zen?” asked Major Cheshire, who’d heard his conversation with Bobby.

“Stationary nomads—sounds odd to me,” Jeff told her. “I think I can just skirt close enough to them on your programmed course.”

“I’ll shift two degrees and it’ll be easy.”

“Make it one and I can keep Hawk One where it is.”

“I told the computer to plot a new one,” said Je

“Input it,” Zen told her.

“I-Band interceptor-type airborne radar detected, active, source beyond range,” yelped Bobby over the aircraft’s interphone. The Megafortress’s passive detectors had picked up two MiG-25’s at nearly fifty thousand feet. “These babies are ru

The Soviet-era active radars on the MiGs had a detection range of roughly fifty miles. But with its stealthy profile, it was likely—though not certain—that the MiGs wouldn’t pick up the Megafortress until they were less than ten miles away.

Which would happen in two minutes at present course and speed. The Flighthawks, on the other hand, were too low and too small to be detected. Their own threat screens, powered by less capable sensors, were blank; they hadn’t picked up the MiGs.

The I-band radars used by early models of the Soviet-era MiG-25 had been compromised years before; Raven’s ECM gear would have no problem defeating them. But that would alert not only the MiGs, but potentially the people they were looking for, that they were in the air. It was better to try to pass undetected.

“Prepare for evasive maneuvers,” ordered Cheshire. “We’ll hold on to our ECMs and missiles until they’re necessary. Bobby, watch their detection envelope for us.”

“Bandits are positively ID’d as MiG-25’s, probably with Acrid AA-6’s,” he reported. “They’ll be in range to see us—let’s call it ninety seconds. Ducking them’s a crapshoot, Major.”

“Hawk Leader?”

“I say duck them,” Zen said. “Get down in the ground clutter and odds are they’ll go right by. Even if they catch a sniff, it’ll take them time to find us, let alone lock. In the meantime, I can check that camp.”

“I agree. We’ll chance it. Hang tight,” said Cheshire, rolling the Megafortress. “Way down.”

Zen told Hawk One to double back and initiate one of its preset routines, closing on Raven to fall into a trail off the mother plane’s right wing. Then he concentrated on Hawk Two.

Nothing but desert showed in the FLIR screen. His body started to shove sideways with the Megafortress’s evasive maneuvers; it felt odd with the Flighthawk flying level. His bearings started to slide out of whack, his equilibrium upset.

Zen fought the creeping dizziness, pushing the nose of the Flighthawk down. As he dropped below three thousand feet, voices began shouting above and behind him—Cheshire and the crew barking instructions back and forth, the MiGs coming on. The UM/F’s threat screen plotted the I-band radar’s detection envelope as a wavy line of yellow floating above it.

An ocean of hot orange appeared in front of him, the cattle or whatever in the camp moving around. The shadows moved like silent eddies.

A trio of tents sat to one side. Something else, relatively hot, was half buried in the sand, or maybe behind the sand.

Or sandbags with a tarp.

Optics. Nada.

Back to FLIR. A truck motor maybe?

He was past it. One of the MiGs was almost directly overhead. The threat screen went completely red, then blank.

He could pop up behind the SOB and nail him. The Libyan would never know what hit him.

“Alert—approaching maximum operational range,” warned the computer.

Zen pitched the Flighthawk back toward the Megafortress. He lost sight of the camp.

“They’re turning. They’re behind us,” Bobby warned. “They may know we’re here. We were close. Suggest we break and run.”

“Negative,” said Cheshire calmly. “Staying on course.”

Zen pushed the others away, pushed himself back into his own cockpit—he banked hard in the direction of his target.

Nothing. The FLIR blanked with interference—sand or something, a fog of some type, was being kicked up, and that was all he could see.

An aircraft?

“Zen!”

Something edged out of the sandstorm, lumbering into the air.

He pushed to follow. He was the Flighthawk now, not its pilot—his body moved with the plane, his head, his eyes, his hands, even his dead legs.

“Alert—approaching maximum operational range,” warned the computer.

“Radar to scan and search, low-altitude, maximum aperture,” demanded Zen. “Synthetic radar view.”

“ Disco