Retribution Read online

  DALE

  BROWN’S

  Dreamland RETRIBUTION

  DALE BROWN and JIM DEFELICE

  Contents

  Dreamland: Duty Roster

  From the Authors: The Story so Far

  Prelude: Annihilation Averted

  I

  Downed Airmen

  II

  Lost and Not Found

  III

  Finders Keepers

  IV

  New Sheriff in Town

  V

  Long Day’s Night

  VI

  Borrowed Time

  VII

  No Chance to Survive

  VIII

  Homecoming

  IX

  Payments Due

  X

  The Long Ride Home

  About the Authors

  Praise

  Other Books in the Dreamland Series

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dreamland: Duty Roster

  Lieutenant Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian

  Dreamland’s commander has been mellowed by the demands of his new command—but he’s still got the meanest bark in the West, and his bite is even worse.

  Major Jeffrey “Zen” Stockard

  A top fighter pi lot until a crash at Dreamland left him a paraplegic, Zen has volunteered for a medical program that may let him use his legs again. Can Dreamland survive with a key member away?

  Captain Breanna “Rap” Stockard

  Zen’s wife has seen him through his injury and rehabilitation. But can she balance her love for her husband with the demands of her career…and ambitions?

  Major Mack “The Knife” Smith

  Mack Smith is the best pi lot in the world—and he’ll tell you so himself. But filling in for Zen on the Flighthawk program may be more than even he can handle.

  Captain Danny Freah

  Danny commands Whiplash—the ground attack team that works with the cutting-edge Dreamland aircraft and high-tech gear.

  Jed Barclay

  The young deputy to the National Security Advisor is Dreamland’s link to the President. Barely old enough to shave, the former science whiz kid now struggles to master the intricacies of world politics.

  Lieutenant Kirk “Starship” Andrews

  A top Flighthawk pi lot, Starship is tasked to help on the Werewolf project, flying robot helicopters that are on the cutting edge of air combat. Adjusting to the aircraft is easy, but can he live with the Navy people who are in charge of it?

  Captain Harold “Storm” Gale, USN

  As a young midshipman at Annapolis, “Storm” Gale got Army’s goat—literally. He and some compatriots stole the West Point mascot just before the annual Army-Navy Game, earning instant acclaim in the Navy. Now he’s applying the same brashness to his role as commander of the Abner Read. An accomplished sailor, the only thing he hates worse than the enemy is the Air Force.

  From the Authors: The Story so Far…

  Two weeks ago tensions began building between Pakistan and India after a series of guerrilla attacks against Indian oil terminals and other assets. The Indians blamed the strikes on Pakistan and threatened to retaliate; the Pakistan government believed that India had staged the attacks as a pretext for making its own raids on Pakistani facilities. With both countries edging toward war, the Chinese sent their new aircraft carrier, the Khan, into the Arabian Sea to protect its ally Pakistan and shipping. Within days the three countries stood at the brink of a nuclear exchange.

  The United States, with friendly relations toward both Pakistan and India, was caught in the middle. Convinced that the acts of sabotage stoking the tensions were being launched by a third party, the President sent the Dreamland team to monitor the situation. And when war seemed inevitable, he came up with a novel idea to stop it—radiation-emitting weapons called “EEMWBs,” whose E wave radiation would paralyze electronic devices for miles and miles, effectively neutering any nuclear bombs or warheads.

  With help from the cutting-edge littoral attack destroyer Abner Read, the Dreamland team discovered that the war was being provoked by a private Iranian force headed by Val Muhammad Ben Sattari. The son of a powerful Iranian general who had clashed with Dreamland some years earlier, Sattari believed that Iran would benefit from a conflict that destroyed its main competitors in the region. But before the Dreamland team could apprehend the Iranians, disaster struck—the Indians launched their nuclear missiles, and the Pakistanis retaliated. Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian immediately ordered his aircraft to intercept the missiles over India. They were successful, knocking out not only the weapons but all electronic devices over a wide swath of the subcontinent. Bastian then led his own suicidal attack on the Chinese aircraft carrier Khan. Out of missiles, he threatened to crash his Megafortress into the Khan’s V-shaped flight deck if it didn’t put its nuclear bomber back in its hangar deck. After ordering his crew to eject, Dog aimed the nose of his plane at the carrier. Bare seconds before he would have crashed, the Khan stood down. Nuclear war had been prevented.

  But things were hardly finished for the Dreamland team. Indian antiaircraft missiles had seriously damaged the plane containing Bastian’s daughter, Captain Breanna “Rap” Stockard, and her husband, Major Jeffrey “Zen” Stockard. Breanna managed to get the plane over the ocean, where most of the crew parachuted into the sea below. Then she and her paraplegic husband prepared to bail out together as the plane augured in.

  War may have been prevented, but with the sun coming up, more than two dozen nuclear weapons were scattered around the Indian subcontinent, and a host of Dreamlanders were in the ocean, hoping to be rescued…

  Prelude:

  Annihilation Averted

  White House Situation Room,

  Washington, D.C.

  2125, 14 January 1998

  (0725, 15 January, Karachi)

  THE V-SHAPED DECK OF THE CHINESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER Khan grew in the screen as the plane approached, its color fading from dark black to gunmetal as the focus sharpened. There was an aircraft at the catapult launcher on the right side of the screen; on the left, an antiair missile foamed and flew out of the frame. The deck continued to get closer and closer, until the shadow of the approaching aircraft, an American EB-52 Megafortress bomber, appeared directly below. The early morning sun rode almost on the plane’s back, and the shadow engulfed the aircraft carrier’s deck, as if the plane were swallowing the ship, not the other way around.

  Red, computer-generated letters flashed at the bottom of the image.

  COLLISION IMMINENT.

  COLLISION IMM

  The image went black.

  “Is that real time?” shouted Jeffrey Hartman, who’d just entered the room.

  “No, Mr. Secretary,” said Jed Barclay, the National Security Council deputy responsible for liaisoning with Dreamland during Whiplash missions. “It’s three minutes old.”

  “Jesus. Did the plane crash or what?”

  “Um, it made it, sir. The video cut out as a latent effect from the, uh, T-Rays. S-S-Scientists say it’s kinda like a sunspot effect. This is the airplane over here.”

  Barclay pointed to the smaller screen at the front of the situation room. Centered on the Arabian Sea, the screen mapped the waters off the coast of India and southwestern Pakistan. A bright red blip headed southward; this was the Megafortress that had just narrowly avoided diving into the Chinese aircraft carrier. The time flashed at the bottom, indicating Washington, D.C., and the time in Karachi, Pakistan—an arbitrary point selected as a reference for the operation, which was taking place across several time zones.

  “The Chinese stood down?” said the Secretary of State. “They didn’t launch their nuke?”

  “Yes, sir. The President managed
to convince the government, and Dog must’ve gotten through to the captain of the carrier. They sent the nuke plane back into the hangar.”

  “Dog?”

  “Um, that would be Lieutenant Colonel Bastian, Mr. Secretary.”

  “Oh, yeah, the Dreamland flyboy.”

  President Kevin Martindale, who’d stripped off his jacket and tie, looked up from the secure communications console at the far end of the room. He’d just finished a conversation with the Russian prime minister, explaining that the U.S. had intervened in a three-way conflict between Pakistan, India, and China, arresting a nuclear exchange with the help of newly developed terahertz radiation weapons called EEMWBs—Enhanced ElectroMagnetic Warfare Bombs, generally pronounced as “em-web.” The missiles—the word bomb in the title was a misnomer—the “T-Rays” fried most electronic devices within a five hundred mile radius of the explosion.

  “About time you got back, State,” said Martindale.

  “The Pakistanis were quite difficult and—”

  “Never mind. Get over here. I need you to talk to the Indian prime minister.”

  “On my way.”

  Hartman turned to Jed. In a whisper he asked if they’d gotten them all.

  “All of the nukes both the Indians and the Pakistanis fired were neutralized,” said Jed.

  “Good work.”

  Hartman patted Jed’s shoulder, as if Jed had personally knocked all of the missiles down.

  Jed pulled over a chair and dropped down into it. The Dreamland force had averted a nuclear war. But at what cost? Power failures were cascading across the subcontinent; it was likely that power would be disrupted throughout Pakistan and in India at least as far south as Hyderabad. It would take weeks, perhaps even months, to restore it all.

  Meanwhile, all but one American spy satellite in the area had been disabled. And contact had been lost with two of the Dreamland aircraft, one of which was almost certainly shot down.

  That aircraft happened to contain Jed’s cousin, Jeffrey “Zen” Stockard, the head of Dreamland’s Flighthawk program.

  “Young Jed,” said the President, “get over here and help me again with these projections.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jed, getting up from his console. Then, glancing again at the frozen main screen, he whispered a prayer. “I hope you’re OK, Jeff. Jesus, I just hope you’re OK.”

  I

  Downed Airmen

  Aboard the Wisconsin,

  over the northern Arabian Sea

  0725

  WIND WHIPPED THROUGH THE MEGAFORTRESS COCKPIT AS Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian leaned the plane as gently as he could onto her left wing, aiming to take a slow circle north of the Chinese aircraft carrier Khan and its escorts. He’d ordered his five crew members to eject when it looked as if he’d have to crash the Megafortress into the Khan to prevent it from launching its nuke-laden bomber against the Indians’ capital. Now that the Chinese had stood down, he turned his attention to his people in the water.

  Ordinarily, the Megafortress’s flight computer would have recorded the plane’s position when the crew bailed, and then computed their likely landing area. Slapped into Search and Rescue mode, the computer would have projected a likely search area on the windscreen, along with convenient markers showing Dog where to look. He could have switched the Megafortress’s sensor inputs over to infrared and in a few moments picked out the bobbing bodies of his crew.

  That wasn’t going to work now. Pressed into service to prevent a world war, Wisconsin had not been shielded against the T-Rays. Its brains had been fried over northern India; the only electronic device still working was a satellite radio that had been kept in a shielded box until after the explosions. Dog knew he would have to find them the old-fashioned way, with a pair of Mark 1 human eyeballs, now seriously derated due to fatigue.

  Flying the EB-52 without a copilot was generally not difficult, but flying it without its computer was an entirely different story. Add the fact that his joystick, pedals and throttle were now connected to hydraulic backups, and the plane demanded every bit of his considerable piloting skills. The fuselage, ordinarily a slick, carefully streamlined airfoil, had five holes in it where the ejection seats had gone out. Dog had to alternately wrestle and baby the aircraft to get it to do what he wanted.

  He found a patch of air around 2,500 feet that the Megafortress seemed to like, and rode it around in an elongated circle, looking for the orange life rafts that should have inflated as his crew descended.

  “Dreamland EB-52 Wisconsin to crew—Mack, Dish, Cantor, where are you guys?” he asked over the shielded radio.

  There was no answer. The survival radios the crew members carried had been in cases shielded against the T-Rays, but the otherwise stock devices had relatively limited ranges, and it was likely they were having trouble picking up Wisconsin’s transmission.

  At least Dog hoped that was the case. He didn’t like the alternatives.

  He pushed the plane lower and slower, trying for a better view. Displeased, the Wisconsin responded by literally flapping its wings—the flexible carbon-composite extensions at the very ends of the slicked-back wings began to oscillate.

  The effect felt like a stutter in the stick. After a few hairy seconds, Dog realized that the shudder wasn’t a prelude to a nose dive; the Wisconsin chugged away at a hair under 200 knots, level as a laser beam and precisely 753 feet over the waves, according to the old-style analog altimeter.

  A test pilot undoubtedly would have made a note of the phenomenon so he could discuss it with the engineers when he got home. Dog, a fighter pilot by training and inclination, did what most fast-jet jocks would do—he pushed the plane another notch, taking her down to five hundred feet and slowing her to 160 knots.

  He trimmed the control surfaces like a yachtsman tacking into the final leg of the America’s Cup. The plane bucked, but then smoothed out as he reached five hundred feet. He found he had to keep a good deal of pressure on the stick to keep the nose up, but the plane felt stable. The ocean spread out before him like a smooth blue carpet, with the faint pattern of dark blue seashells arrayed shoulder-to-shoulder, uninterrupted as far as the eye could sight.

  Not what he wanted to see.

  He broadcast again on the emergency channel.

  Still nothing.

  He reached across the console, inadvertently changing his pressure on the stick. Immediately the Megafortress dipped to its left. He quickly added power and began to climb.

  Something glinted to his left as he went to back the throttle off.

  “Dreamland Wisconsin to crew—Mack? Anybody?”

  “We’re all here, Colonel,” answered Major Mack Smith.

  “What’s your situation?”

  “Treading water.”

  “Where are your life rafts?”

  Mack explained that the men had purposely sunk their chutes and rafts to make it harder for the Chinese to find them. They had two backup, uninflated rafts in reserve.

  “The Chinese stood down,” said Dog. “They’re not going to use their nuke.”

  “We’d still rather not be eating dinner with chopsticks tonight, Colonel,” said Mack.

  “Go ahead and inflate the rafts,” Dog told him. “I’ll get the Abner Read to come north to pick you up.”

  The Abner Read, an American littoral destroyer, had been shadowing the Chinese fleet during the conflict. They were roughly fifty miles away when Dog last checked; it might take them two hours or more to get there.

  “You sure the Chinese aren’t going to interfere?” Mack asked.

  “They took several hits during the conflict. It looks like they’re spending all their energy just keeping the ship afloat,” said Dog. “If the Abner Read can’t come, I’ll ask the Pakistanis to send one of their ships. They have some patrol vessels to the northeast.”

  “No way—they’ll just hand us over to the Chinese.”

  “They’re our allies,” said Dog, though he wasn’t sure how far to trust
them—the Pakistanis were allied with the Chinese as well, and during the conflict the two forces had worked together against the Indians.

  “I still think I’d rather swim,” said Mack.

  “Careful what you wish for, Major.”

  Northern Arabian Sea

  0730

  “COLONEL SAYS THE PAKISTANIS MAY RESCUE US,” MACK told the others.

  “The Paks?” said Sergeant Peter “Dish” Mallack. “Fuck that. They were just trying to blow us out of the air.”

  “They’ll turn us over to the Chinese,” said Technical Sergeant Thomas “T-Bone” Boone. “I ain’t wearing no Asian pajamas for the rest of my life.”

  “Yeah, I’m with you there,” said Mack.

  Dish and T-Bone were radar systems operators; aboard the Wisconsin they’d kept track of hundreds of contacts—Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and American—as war threatened. Now they were just swimmers, and not particularly good ones.

  Two other men had gone out with Mack—Lieutenant Sergio “Jazz” Jackson, the Megafortress’s copilot, and Lieutenant Evan Cantor, who along with Mack had been piloting the Flighthawk remote control aircraft from the Megafortress’s lower deck. Cantor had hit something on the way out of the aircraft and broken his arm; his face was deeply bruised and he seemed to have a concussion. Dish, the best swimmer of the bunch, had lashed himself to the lieutenant, helping to keep the younger man awake. Fortunately, all of their horseshoe-style life preservers had inflated; Mack couldn’t imagine staying afloat without them.

  Mack turned to look to the south. He could see the mast of one of the Khan’s escort vessels, a destroyer, he thought, though he was far from an expert on ships. Behind it two thick curlicues of black smoke jutted from the water. The smoke came from ships damaged by the Indians; the Khan was farther east, marked on the horizon by a plume of white smoke—mostly water vapor rising from the hoses the crew was spraying on the parts of the ship damaged by missiles.