Death Dream (25 page)

When she reached the airport she parked the Mustang and walked from the warm Florida sunshine into the air-conditioned chill of the terminal. It was relatively quiet inside. The big Thanksgiving rush had not started yet. She saw that the Washington flight was on time for a change and went to the security gate to wait for Mr. Smith.

Esther Cahan had told her only that Smith was young, ambitious, and bound to move ahead through the jungles of Washington's insider politics. Vickie had spoken to him on the phone twice since Kyle had met with trim in Washington. His voice sounded crisply assured.

"Don't worry about what I look like," he had said. "I'll spot you."

A family of four was struggling through the x-ray inspection with half a dozen garment bags, overnight cases and a set of golf clubs. The father was sunburned bright red and irritable. The mother looked as if she was in the early stages of another pregnancy. The kids couldn't be more than two and three, Vickie thought. She felt glad that she was not saddled with some jerk of a husband whose only idea of manliness was to keep his wife pregnant.

A trickle of arriving passengers was coming down the corridor, she saw. The Washington plane must have landed. Vickie looked the passengers over, trying to figure out which one Smith might be. Most of them were elderly, or at least older than Vickie herself. A few younger people, but mostly couples. Smith would be traveling alone.

Then she saw him and smiled. Kyle said he looked like an FBI agent and here was this square-shouldered guy with his sandy hair cropped down almost to a crewcut striding along the corridor like a toy soldier, one hand clasping a garment bag, free arm swinging as if he's whistling a Sousa march to himself.

She stood unmoving, even turning her gaze further up the corridor, just to see if he really would spot her. At least he's not wearing sunglasses, Vickie said to herself, almost with a giggle.

"Victoria Kessel," said Smith, stopping an arm's length in front of her.

She smiled and nodded. "Quentin Wayne Smith the Third, I presume?"

He stuck out his hand. She took it and noticed that his grip was just right: not too hard, but certainly not flabby.

"Do you have any other luggage?" she asked.

"Nope. Just this."

"I arranged for a rental car to be waiting for you at your hotel," Vickie said, starting for the doors.

"Good. But I want to go to your office first. Somebody can drop me off at the hotel later."

"If that's what you want."

"Right. Let's get started, the sooner the better."

CHAPTER 19

"I still think we ought to go straight to the mission that Jerry flew," said Ralph Martinez. He was pulling on the equipment vest over his g-suit, feeling slightly silly about decking himself out in parachute, survival kit, and even a pistol when he was never going to leave the ground.

But the set of iron-bound regulations that he himself had insisted upon required that all pilots and/or crew members must wear exactly the same equipment for each simulation as they would in an actual flight mission. The only exception was that on this simulation mission Martinez also wore a fine mesh data net of micro-miniaturized medical sensors next to his skin, beneath his flight suit. Without puncturing his skin the sensor net would monitor his physical condition moment by moment throughout his simulated flight: heart beat, respiration rate, skin temperature, blood pressure, even the amount of perspiration he was exuding and the galvanic charge on his skin.

So Lt. Col. Martinez stood in front of Dr Appleton like a twenty-first century knight, clad in flame retardant flight coveralls, a g-suit of rubberized tubes that looked as if it had been taken from the Michelin Man, parachute pack and equipment vest that carried everything from a jungle knife to whoopie bags.

"We need a baseline," Appleton said. "We'll get to the mission Jerry flew in a couple days."

Martinez grunted and headed for the locker room door, trailing dangling wires and tubes that would plug into the cockpit's systems. Appleton followed slightly behind him in his tweed jacket and rumpled slacks.

No smoking was allowed in the hangar, even though there was no aviation fuel or any other flammables stored there. Appleton had not lit his pipe anyway, but now he stuffed it into his jacket's side pocket. Martinez's boots clunked against the concrete floor of the hangar like some Hollywood monster plodding toward its doom.

The technicians were already at their consoles alongside the F-22 cockpit. Accustomed to easy informality during these simulation missions, they did not quite snap to attention as Martinez and Appleton walked up, but they were all on their feet. Appleton knew that it was not him they were scared of, even though he was director of the simulations division. Martinez wormed on his data gloves and accepted the Agile Eye IV helmet from the female tech.

"This the same helmet Jerry wore?" he asked.

The young tech sergeant looked startled. "No sir," she said. "Uh—his size is a little smaller than yours."

Turning to Appleton, the colonel growled, "I thought everything was supposed to be exactly the same. That means exactly."

Appleton raised one hand placatingly while he unconsciously fished for his pipe with the other. "It's all right for this mission, Ralph. By the time we get to the air-to-air combat we'll have adjusted his old helmet to fit you."

Martinez muttered something under his breath and pulled the helmet on. No one made the slightest smile or even thought about a joke involving head size. To a tech sergeant, lieutenant colonels sometimes seem telepathic.

Ten minutes later Martinez was buckled into the cockpit, oxygen mask covering the bottom half his face, all the electrical and radio and oxygen lines connected properly.

He almost believed that he was really flying. The simulator tilted up and down and slewed around in response to his movements of the side-stick and rudder pedals. There were no noticeable g-forces, of course, although his suit actually did hiss and squeeze when g-forces would have assailed him in a real flight.

This mission was a night bombing raid, using the F-22's speed and stealth to sneak through enemy ground defenses and strike at targets before the enemy even knew an attack was underway. Then the problem was to get out, through all the anti-aircraft fire and surface-to-air missiles the bad guys would throw up. No enemy fighters on this mission, but the ground fire would be intense.

Martinez was going through his fence check, the detailed checkout of all the aircraft's systems just before leaving friendly territory and penetrating into enemy airspace. He smiled grimly when he saw that the programmers had left his wingtip lights on: all the stealth technology in the world wasn't worth a damn if you flew with your lights on.

He turned off the running lights. Inside the cockpit the only lights came from the dimly glowing displays on the control panel. Martinez pulled down the visor of his helmet and for an instant even that dim glow disappeared. Then the visor display lit up and he saw the world around him in the weird greenish glow of the passive infrared display.

The bare rocky desert below rolled by swiftly. The night sky was empty of opposing aircraft. He changed his heading every few seconds, zigzagging toward his target so that even if an enemy radar got a slight glint off his plane it would blink away before they realized they were seeing anything real. Fuel check okay. Bombs armed.

As he neared his first target—a hardened bunker that was supposed to house an enemy communications center—Martinez lifted his visor briefly and manually switched his computer system from navigation mode to weapons delivery mode. Then he pulled his visor down again. That would be the last manual control change he made until he was well back into friendly airspace.

In the stereo display on the visor he saw the bunker, half-buried in sand and camouflaged a desert dun brown. "Target acquisition," he said in a throaty near whisper. The view changed, showing the bunker far off near the horizon and the yellow dotted line of his approach path leading to it.

He licked his lips. It was only his imagination, he knew, but he thought he could feel his heart pulsing against his ribs. As he nosed the plane into its attack attitude he noted that his stereo display showed several radar sites, looking like feeble pinkish eyes glowing against the desert sands.

If any of them locked onto him they would turn fire-engine red and a warning voice would alert him. But the radars remained harmless, tracking randomly.

"Open bomb doors." He heard the electric motor whine. The plane shook slightly in the airstream's buffeting. His infrared sensors were picking up parked trucks next to the bunker and an unpaved road that apparently led to a town off beyond his horizon.

Now his stereo display showed crosshairs in one corner, creeping up on the bunker as he flew toward it. "Automatic release," he said. The brilliant thin red line of a laser beam reached out to the exact center of the bunker's roof. The laser actually emitted an invisible infrared beam, but in Martinez's helmet display it looked like a Christmas light.

When the crosshairs centered on the spot illuminated by the laser, Martinez heard a clunk that represented one bomb being released. The plane's controls bucked in his hands just as they would in a real flight when a two-thousand-pounder is suddenly let go.

He pulled the plane's nose up sharply and banked hard to the right, the safety harness straps cutting into his shoulders. His visor display continued to show the bunker. The smart bomb, guided to the laser-lit spot, smashed directly into the center of the bunker's roof.

For an instant nothing happened, then Martinez saw the bunker's doors blow off. Smoke billowed out. The roof fell in and the entire area was smothered with heavy boiling smoke.

Martinez pushed the throttles forward and felt the plane surge higher into the sky. The radars were skewing about wildly now and a volcano of anti-aircraft tracers lit up the night. He was quickly above the small-arms fire, but now there were large-caliber cannon pumping shells up at random, blindly seeking him.

He could feel his blood thundering in his ears now. In the bright helmet display he had to remind himself that for the enemy it was midnight-black out there. They could not see him. They could not even find him with radar. He saw the whooshing flash of a trio of SAMs lighting off. No active radars on them, or at least none that his display revealed.
Probably guided by infrared sensors, looking for the heat from my engines.
The stealth design reduced the F-22's infrared signature, but if those missiles were advanced enough to have IR-guided upper stages one of them might find him in the dark and fly right up his stovepipe.

But they failed to track him. Martinez banked-away from the frenzied defenders and their destroyed comm bunker, heading for his next target. This time the defense would know there was a bogie sneaking through their airspace. They'd be firing at a fucking bat if it happened to flap by.

Suddenly his helmet display went black. Martinez felt his breath catch in his throat. Then he heard in his earphones,

"MISSION ABORTED. SIMULATION ENDED."

He sank back in his seat and realized he was soaked with sweat.
Fucking simulation got me so clanked up I might as well have pissed myself
, he snarled inwardly as he slid his visor up. He banged the switch that raised the canopy and was starting to unbuckle his harness when the two junior techs clambered up and began to help him.

"Who the hell aborted the simulation?" Martinez yelled at the chief tech, down by the console. His voice echoed across the big hangar like a roar of doom.

Appleton was still there, standing beside the chief technician. "The program is set to abort automatically, Ralph," he called back, his voice maddeningly calm, "When the pilot's pulse rate hits one-forty."

"That's a goddamned crock of shit!" Martinez pulled himself free of the loosened harness and clambered out of the cockpit past the two young techs.

"It's part of our safety regulations," said Appleton, moving between the colonel and the chief technician.

"Since when?"

Appleton gave him a disappointed look. "Since you insisted on flying the simulation yourself. I don't want you popping an artery in there."

Martinez glared pure fury. "A pilot's pulse rate always goes way up during a mission, dammit! What the hell do think they're doing in there, playing hopscotch?"

"Ralph, it's for your own protection."

"Goddammit, let me worry about my own protection! I don't want any artificial cutoffs on the simulation! Understand me?"

Technically, Appleton was the man in charge of all simulations. But he was a civilian and Martinez was a lieutenant colonel who was enraged at anything that might prevent him from being promoted—or from feeling like a man.

Putting a hand on Martinez's stocky shoulder, Appleton suggested mildly, "Let's take a break, Ralph. It's almost dinner time. We ought to discuss this calmly and—"

"No break," Martinez snapped. "And no automatic cutoffs. Got that?" He turned on the chief technician. "Crank it up again. And take that stupid pulse-rate cutoff out of the loop."

The chief technician was a civilian. His two assistants were Air Force noncoms. The chief looked to Appleton. Reluctantly, Appleton said, "Set it up for the same mission profile—without the medical subroutine." Then he turned back to the colonel. "But let's take a break anyway, Ralph. You need to cool down and they need some time to refigure the program."

CHAPTER 20

It was at the end of the normal working day when Muncrief phoned Dan to tell him that "this guy from Washington" was here. Dan put aside his work on the stuttering program and headed for Muncrief's office, his mind in a turmoil, wondering what this special job was all about and why he was going to have to spend his nights and weekends working on it when he should be putting every moment into the stuttering program.

And in the back of his mind he still felt that he was letting Dr Appleton down.
I should have at least phoned him
, he thought.