Revolution

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

came onto his tail, he pushed his nose down, outaccelerating it before Starship could fire.

Then he banked hard, flattened the plane out, and turned the tables on the Flighthawk as it started to recover.

“Fire,” he told Sleek Top calmly.

“Can’t get a lock—he’s jinking and jiving too much.”

“Stay on him,” said Dog. His own hard g maneuvers were part of the problem, as his free-form flight path made it hard for the laser to get a bead on its enemy. Dog put his nose straight down, trying to turn into Hawk Two and give Sleek Top a better shot. But before he could get his nose where he wanted it, the other Flighthawk started its own attack run, and Dog found himself between both of them. He pushed hard left, felt the aircraft starting to invert—then got an idea and pushed her hard in the other direction. Boomer wob-bled slightly, fierce vortexes of wind buffeting her wings, but it held together and followed his commands. Dog jammed his hand on the throttle, accelerating and turning his belly toward Hawk One.

“Locked!” said Sleek Top.

“Fire!” answered Dog. “Don’t wait for me.”

The computer gurgled something in his ear—a warning saying that flight parameters were being exceeded. Dog ignored the warning, rolling Boomer’s wings perpendicular to the earth. For two or three seconds his belly was exposed to Hawk Two.

Two or three seconds was all the computer needed.

“Splash Hawk Two, ” shouted Sleek Top, his normally placid voice alive with the excitement of the contest.

“Where’s Hawk One?”

“Still tracking. Our left. Parallel.”

The laser had not been able to stay with Starship’s evasive maneuvers, and now Dog found himself in trouble. The B-1 had used up much of its flight energy, and to prevent itself from becoming merely a falling brick, had to spread its wings. That was a dead giveaway to Starship that his adver-

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sary was weak, and the fighter jock did what all fighter jocks are bred from birth to do—he went for the jugular. He pulled Hawk One onto Dog’s tail, aiming the ca

While he managed to keep Hawk One from getting a clean shot, he couldn’t set one up for himself either. The Flighthawk kept closing, angling to stay above the laser’s angle of fire. Finally, there was only one way to extricate himself: Dog reached for the throttle and lit his afterburners, outaccelerating the smaller craft.

Or ru

“I’d say that’s a draw,” said Starship over the radio.

“Draw my foot,” answered Sleek Top. “We got one of yours.”

“I kept you from accomplishing your mission,” said Starship smugly.

“Our mission was to shoot you down.”

Dog laughed. He was going to miss these guys when he left Dreamland.

Northwestern Moldova,

near the Romanian border

2345

STONER PUT HIS HEAD DOWN AND HELD HIS BREATH AS THE

truck passed a few yards away. There was a hole in its muffler, and the engine coughed every fifth or sixth revolution, chuttering and sending smoke out from the side. The noise drowned out the sound from the second truck, and was so loud Stoner wasn’t sure there were any others behind them.

He waited a few seconds, then raised his head cautiously.

There were no other vehicles.

“Smugglers,” said Deniz, the Romanian army corporal.

“What are they taking across?”

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“This way, nothing. They can come back from our country with anything. Food. Medicine.” He paused and smiled.

“Women.”

Stoner couldn’t tell whether that was meant to be a joke.

“How do they pass the checkpoints?”

“Twenty euros. I tell you, we could have driven.”

Stoner got up from behind the stone wall. Deniz whistled to Kyiv, the other Romanian soldier, who came out from behind the tree where he’d been hiding. The three men resumed their walk along the dirt road. It had taken nearly three hours for them to cover five kilometers, largely because Stoner was being overly cautious, stopping even when he heard aircraft passing overhead. Being late, he knew, was not as big a problem as not arriving at all.

The long trek had given him more time to judge his guides. As soldiers, they were more competent than he’d thought at first, good at spotting possible ambush points and wary enough to plot escape routes before moving through fields they weren’t already thoroughly familiar with. He trusted them, to a point, but knew that if they were captured by guerrillas, it wouldn’t take much for them to give him away.

Deniz said something to Kyiv and the two men laughed.

Stoner frowned, figuring it was probably some sort of joke at his expense.

“We are almost there. We stay on the road unless we hear something,” said Deniz, gesturing. “Two hundred meters.”

Stoner grunted, thinking, watching. He had a pair of night vision goggles in his pack, but there was more than enough light from the moon to see along the road and well into the nearby fields. The steeple of a church stood up on the right, marking a hamlet. Two houses sat near a bend in the road ahead. Otherwise, the way was clear.

Even though there were no lights shining in the windows or smoke coming from the chimneys, Stoner had Kyiv lead them into a field opposite the two houses so they could pass REVOLUTION

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without taking any risks. The field co

Stoner put his night vision glasses on as he walked, growing warier as the shadows in the distance multiplied. But nothing was stirring.

The detours cost them another fifteen minutes. Finally, he saw the ramshackle barn where he was supposed to meet his contact. It stood above the field on the opposite side of the road, its foundation built into the crest of the hill.

He sca

“So?” asked Deniz.

“I don’t see anyone.”

“No?”

Stoner turned his view to the nearby field. It too was empty.

The Romanians watched him silently. They weren’t joking any more, nor whispering. For most of the night they’d left their rifles slung lazily over their shoulders. Now they held the guns with both hands, ready.

Stoner began moving to his right, keeping the barn in sight. The dirt and dead grass had heaved up with the evening frost, and it crunched as he walked. After he’d gone about thirty yards, he stopped and once again carefully examined the barn and nearby fields.

No one.

Slowly, he made his way up the hill, the two Romanian soldiers trailing behind him. About five yards from the barn, Stoner saw a shadow on the ground in front of it. He froze, steadied his gun.

“Champagne,” he said loudly.

The shadow moved, revealing itself as a man with a rifle.

“Champagne,” repeated Stoner. He curled his finger against the AK’s trigger, slowly starting to apply pressure.

“Parlez-vous français?” said the shadow. Do you speak French?

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DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

That wasn’t the agreed upon phrase, and the accent was so un-French that Stoner had trouble understanding it.

“Champagne,” he said again.

“Vin blanc,” answered the shadow. White wine.

That was the right answer, but the delay made Stoner wary.

Had it been just a human mistake, or a giveaway that something was wrong?

“I don’t speak French,” said Stoner in very slow Russian.

“Anglaise?” responded the man.

Was it a trick? The contact would surely expect him to speak English.