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Dog acknowledged. Groundhog was Da
The Megafortress had two large air-to-ground missiles on its rotating bomb rack, but it was unlikely these would be used; even though they were very precise, there was too much chance of collateral damage. The Flighthawks, however, could provide close air support with their ca
The focus of the mission was to provide intelligence: The Megafortress would use its J-STAR-like ground radar to follow troop movements or even vehicles, while the Flighthawks would provide real-time video of the area where the troops were operating. Though the Whiplash people could use their smart helmets to receive the video instantly, security concerns and numbers meant the Romanian troops would have to use special laptop units instead.
Dog worried about their ability to receive the streaming video under battlefield conditions, but that was just one of the many things they’d have to work out as the deployment progressed.
With the Flighthawks away, he checked with his radar operators to see how they were doing. The men sat behind him on the flight deck, each facing a console arranged against the hull of the plane. On the right side, Technical Sergeant Thomas Rager ma
“Not too much traffic down there for rush hour, Colonel,”
said Spiff. “We have six cars in a five mile stretch.”
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DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
“You sound disappointed,” said Dog.
“Colonel, where I come from, we can get six cars in ten feet,” answered the sergeant.
“And they’re all stolen,” said Sullivan.
“Generally.” Spiff was a New Yorker. From da Bronx.
“Groundhog’s on the line,” said Sullivan, his voice suddenly all business. “Right on time.”
On the ground in northeastern Romania
1630
DANNY FREAH ADJUSTED THE VOLUME ON THE SMART
helmet’s radio, listening as the Romanian lieutenant completed the exchange of recognition codes with the Be
“OK,” said Da
The unma
As pla
Rather than firing his ca
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147
The Romanian soldiers cheered.
I must be getting old, Da
Aboard the Be
above northeastern Romania
1700
ZEN PUSHED THE FLIGHTHAWK THROUGH ANOTHER TURN, then dipped its wing to fall into another mock attack. The hardest part of the whole exercise was understanding the Romanians’ English.
They weren’t very good yet at estimating distances, but since he could use the actual GPS coordinates from the laptops as well as the Flighthawks’ sensor to orient himself, finding the target wasn’t particularly difficult.
After what he’d had to go through on his last mission, though, what was?
What do you do for an encore after saving the world? he mused.
It was an arrogant, self-aggrandizing thought—and yet it was true, or at least more true than false. Their last mission had stopped a nuclear war; you couldn’t top that.
But life went on. There were still enemies to fight, conflicts to solve. Whether they seemed mundane or not.
There were also problems to solve and a
“old” chute. It felt bulkier around his shoulders—not enough to interfere with flying the Flighthawks, but enough that he would have to get used to it.
The Romanian ground controller called for a reco
DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
overhead, low and slow. The houses, built of prefab concrete panels, looked like the condo development he lived in back home.
They made him think of Brea
Switching on his mike, Zen described what he saw, four-sided roofs atop sugar-cube houses aligned in eight L’s around the crest of a hill. He described two cars he saw moving into the complex, the row of parked compacts at the far end of the lot. He saw two people moving on the lawn below the easternmost house: kids kicking a soccer ball around.
“Very much detail,” replied the ground controller.
“Thanks,” he said. “Next.”
UP ON THE MEGAFORTRESS’S FLIGHT DECK, DOG TURNED
the controls over to his copilot and got up to stretch. In remaking the plane so that it had a sleek nose rather than the blunt chin the B-52 had been born with, the flight deck had been extended nearly twenty feet. Calling it spacious would have been an exaggeration, but the crews had considerably more elbow room than in the original.
Dog walked to the small galley behind the two radar operators, poured himself a coffee from the zero-gravity coffeemaker—one of the Dreamland engineers’ most cher-ished and appreciated inventions—then took a seat next to the ground radar operator to see what things looked like from his perspective.
“Place looks pretty peaceful,” Spiff told him. “You sure they have a revolution going on here?”
“Don’t let that fool you,” replied Dog.
“No, I won’t, Colonel. But we could be looking at the Vegas suburbs here. Minus the traffic. Kind of makes you wonder why these people want to fight.”
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Dog went across the aisle to check on Rager, who was monitoring airborne traffic around them. The rebels weren’t known to have aircraft; Dog’s main concern was that a civilian plane might blunder into their path inadvertently. The commercial flight paths to and from Iasi lay to the north and east of where they were operating.
“Here’s something interesting on the long-range scan,”
said Rager, flipping his screen display to show Dog. “These two bad boys just came into the edge of our coverage area.”
Two yellow triangles appeared in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. Rager hit another switch, and the ghost of a ground map appeared under the display, showing that the planes were south of Odessa over the Black Sea, 273 miles away.
“Just sitting there,” said Rager. “Doing a racetrack pattern.”
“Ukrainian?”
“No. Russian. Computer, ID contacts Alpha Gamma six-eight and Alpha Gamma six-nine.”