Strike Zone

The meeting would be the first of many.

Chen Lee was determined not to let it take place. He was willing, in fact, to spend his entire fortune to stop it.

He was willing to go further. He would give his own life so that his grandchildren’s children might once more live freely in their homeland.

Was he willing to give their lives as well?

The Scotch burned the sides of his tongue.

He was willing to let them die, yes. Even his favorite grandchild, Chen Lo Fa

Would he give up the lives of his great-grandchildren, the sweet little ones?

As he asked the question, he saw the faces of the little ones, whose ages ranged from two to ten.

No, he would not wish any harm to them, boy or girl. That was why he must act immediately.

The Americans had interfered, preventing what should have been a war between the communists and India—a war he had clandestinely encouraged.

Chen Lee took another sip of his drink. He had to encourage a wider war, one that would involve all of South Asia and the mongrels. Even if the war did not lead to conquest of the stolen provinces, it would at least halt the present slide toward accommodation.

It might yet yield conquest, thanks to the weapons he had developed and secreted away. But he felt he could not share them with the present government, headed as it was by traitors. He would have to follow his own path.

Chen Lee was bitterly disappointed in the Americans, whose ill-considered attempts at imposing peace merely made the world safe for the mongrel usurpers. During the course of his life, Chen Lee had had many dealings with Americans; he admired them in many ways. But ultimately, he found them weak and undisciplined.

Page 4

He knew too that their aims were not his aims. They protected the Republic of China only when it suited them.

So be it. If the Americans intervened again, their blood would flow.

Air Force High Technology Center/Whiplash Complex (aka Dreamland) 4 September 1997

0700

JENNIFERGLEASON PUSHEDback a strand of her long hair and leaned forward, her nose nearly against the large flat panel of the computer display, as if close proximity to the line of code might reveal more detail.

The line itself was abstract and seemingly meaningless:

aaa488570c6633cd2222222222bcd354777

But to the computer expert, the gibberish told an ominous tale. She picked up the pencil she had laid on the desk nearby, twirling it in her finger before copying the line on a yellow pad nearby.

“Pad and pencil—never a good sign,” said an acerbic voice behind her.

“Hi, Ray,” she said before double-checking her copy against the screen.

“Well?” Dreamland’s senior scientist Ray Rubeo stood over her, squinting down at the screen.

“Our compression algorithm.”

“Yes,” said Rubeo.

“It doesn’t prove anything. The algorithm itself could have come from a bunch of places.”

Instead of answering, Rubeo stooped to the workstation next to her, quickly tapping a pair of keys and bringing up a small snippet of video. A gray shadow of an aircraft banked and turned away in the screen.

The image had been built from a fleeting radar contact made several days before in the South China Sea, during a bloody battle between the Chinese and Indian navies. A Dreamland Megafortress called Quicksilver had tried to stop the conflict, and in the process had been shot down. Four of the six crew members aboard had died.

Quicksilver, with the help of other Dreamland air and ground assets known collectively as Whiplash, had forestalled a nuclear confrontation between the two Asian powers and saved millions of lives. Four lives for a million. Most people would think that a worthwhile trade-off.

The equation was difficult when it involved people you knew. Je

Je

to the opposite corner of the screen. The simulation multiplied real time by a factor of twenty, so that the blob stayed on screen for an entire minute, rather than the three seconds it had appeared on the original radar.

Those three seconds, along with the five seconds’ worth of radio transmission Je

And not just an ordinary “robot,” or unma

Designing and building a small aircraft—its wingspan appeared to be under ten feet—was certainly difficult, but the real achievement was controlling the robot. To make it fly and maneuver in real time took considerable skill, skill that until now had resided only at Dreamland. While there was a variety of UAVs around, most flew preprogrammed courses or went relatively slowly. Only the U/MF-3 Flighthawks developed at Dreamland were capable of high-speed maneuvers and aerial combat.

Imitation might be the highest form of flattery, but in this case it could also be deadly. Properly handled, the U/MF-3s were almost impervious to American defenses. If the ghost clone—one of the techies had named it that while reviewing the radar and telemetry intercepts—was armed, no part of the country would be safe.

“So whose is it?” asked Rubeo, voicing the question of the hour.

“Could be a Russian project,” offered Je

“Yes,” murmured Rubeo. “It’s possible.”

“And they stole it two years ago.”

“The intelligence assessments would have shown this,” said Rubeo. Dreamland had been rocked two years earlier when a deeply planted Russian spy was exposed. He had compromised some of the facility’s top projects, and in many ways Dreamland had never been the same. But he had no access to the Flighthawk project, as an extensive investigation had proven.

So if the technology had been stolen, someone else had done it.

Someone still working at the base.

Rubeo stood back from the screen.

“Our code or not?”

“Very close,” said Je

“So what does it mean?”

Page 6

Je

“Still think it’s a coincidence?” Rubeo asked her.

“Mmm,” she said. “It could be.”

“The memorial service is in half an hour,” he told her. Then he walked from the room.

COLONELTECUMSEH “DOG”Bastian looked out at the apron in front of Dreamland Hangar Two. A half-dozen temporary bleachers had been erected in front of the building; augmented by a sea of folding chairs, they held a good portion of the men and women he oversaw at the high-tech developmental base in the wastelands near Glass Mountain, Nevada. In front of the bleachers was a podium; off to the side, a short row of folding chairs. In a few minutes, an honor guard would appear from the building for a ceremony commemorating a recently concluded operation in the Pacific. Some of the people back at the Pentagon called the action “the Piranha Incident” because of the undersea surveillance weapon Dreamland had used during it; to Dog, the nickname was appropriate for its bloody co