Strike Zone Read online

  Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice

  Dreamland’s latest project is Flighthawk — an unmanned aerial-attacking craft. A radical, high-risk method has been invented to help pilots master the complex remote-flying skills required to control Flighthawk: the implantation, in the pilot’s skull, of a microchip linked to the deadly machine.

  Initially all goes well for the first volunteer, Army Captain Kevin Madrone. But the psychological stress proves too much — and suddenly Madrone disappears, armed with and a part of one of the most powerful weapons in the world. . .

  “Nobody . . . does it better than Brown.”—Kirkus Reviews

  ~

  Dale Brown’s Dreamland: Razor’s Edge (2002)

  Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice

  The weapon is codenamed “Razor” — the brainchild of the brilliant minds at Dreamland. It is a mobile chemical laser system with a range of 600 kilometers. It is capable of downing anything that flies.

  The destruction of an American aircraft over northern Iraq suggests the inexplicable and unthinkable: a vengeful foe now possesses this lethal technology. It is fear that draws a retired warrior back to the battlefield, and sends Dreamland’s best pilots to the skies to determine what the enemy has and to help take it away from him.

  But politics threatens to crush a covert engagement that must be won in the air and on the ground, unleashing a devastating rain offriendly fire that could ultimately annihilate a nation’s champions . . . and perhaps Dreamland itself.

  “The talk makes Brown’s novels authentic. What makes them riveting is the rapid pace and headline urgency of his plots.”—San Francisco Chronicle

  “DEATH OF THE DOGFIGHT”:

  AN INTERVIEW WITH DALE BROWN

  Interviewer: You began your first novel, Flight of the Old Dog, while you were still serving in the U.S. Air Force. What did your colleagues think of this?

  Dale Brown: I never really told anybody what I was doing. Most of them thought I was just playing computer games. The others thought I was wasting my time. I enjoyed proving them wrong!

  Interviewer: To what degree do you plan your novels before starting to write?

  Dale Brown: Probably not as much as I should. When I get an idea, I research it, and if I get some exciting info or background, I’ll write a short outline for my editor, tweak it a little, then get busy.

  Interviewer: Is there such a thing as a typical writing day for you? If so, what form does it take?

  Dale Brown: Most days start at nine a.m. and go to four p.m., then restart at nine p.m. and go to eleven p.m. I usually rewrite in the morning and write new scenes in the afternoon and evenings. But every day is different. Some days the scenes flow like water —the next day it’s as dry as a desert. But the important thing is tobe in the seat with the computer on, ready to go.

  Interviewer: Dreamland is the first novel in a new series you’re co-writing with Jim DeFelice. Can you give us an idea of how the writing process works?

  Dale Brown: It should be bylined “Jim DeFelice with Dale Brown,” by the way. I invented the basic backdrop of the“Dreamland” series — the time, place, circumstances. I help devel- op the plot and the characters, and I review the manuscript. Jim does everything else. He’s an incredibly talented writer and we work well together.

  Interviewer: As well as describing the development of the weapons and their use in combat, Dreamland also details the crucial political background to the military action. Which part do you prefer writing?

  Dale Brown: I prefer describing weapons and technology by far. But the fighting is actually just a tiny fraction of the conflict. The political/diplomatic stuff is not as exciting sometimes, but it’s every bit as important to the story.

  Interviewer: Dreamland’s characters — “Dog” Bastian; his daughter, Bree Stockard; her husband, “Zen”; Mack “Knife” Smith — all face different challenges and all have different goals in mind at the beginning of the novel. To what extent are they based on real people?

  Dale Brown: We all know characters like these — the hot dogs, the dedicated ones, the smart ones, the obsessed ones. So all of mycharacters are based on folks I know. But it’s also true that the characters take on a life of their own. Jim DeFelice and I talk about the characters as if they’re real persons: “Bree wouldn’t do that”; “Mack would say this.”

  Interviewer: The novel depicts certain rivalries among those on the ground and those who take to the air. It’s the latter groupwho get the glory, yes?

  Dale Brown: No one likes to admit it, because it doesn’t fit in with the “whole force” politically-correct concept, but the pilot is and will always be king of the U.S. Air Force. Only seventeen percent of USAF personnel are pilots, but they make up most of the unit commanders. Even if in ten to fifteen years most USAF combat aircraft will be unmanned, the pilot will still be king.

  Interviewer: Life in a secret establishment such as Dreamland — or even on a “normal” military base — must be hard enough without the staff having relationships. In your experience, do these relationships lead to difficult situations?

  Dale Brown: All the time — that’s why we authors put them in our stories! We are always looking for conflict. It’s another complication in wartime.

  Interviewer: Since the end of the Cold War, threats to “our way of life” are not so neatly geographically placed. Nor, aside from Saddam Hussein and various terrorist groups, is it clear where we should place our military priorities.

  Dale Brown: There are plenty of bad guys out there — but it sometimes takes more background to explain why they are the bad guys. Fifteen years ago, everyone understood why we were fighting the Soviets. But if you set a war story in Ukraine or Lithuania or the Philippines, you need to take some time and explain why we’re fighting there.

  Interviewer: What effect has the advent of improved technology had on the art of being a fighter pilot?

  Dale Brown: It has changed it completely. The “dogfight” — two pilots, two planes — is all but dead. Life and death takes placein split-second battles that happen across dozens of miles, usually without either adversary ever seeing the other. Pilots are more systems operators than fliers nowadays. Sooner than most folks think, our fighters won’t even have pilots in them!

  This interview was first published, in a slightly different form, at www.fireandwater.com, the website of HarperCollins UK.

  I

  Ghost Clone

  * * *

  Bright Memorial Hospital, Honolulu

  3 September 1997

  0302 (all times local)

  IT LOOKED LIKE an arrow as she turned to get away from it. Breanna pushed hard on her control stick, but the plane barely responded. Caught with little forward momentum, the Megafortress waddled in the air, finally managing to jerk its nose back to the right just in time to avoid the missile.

  A second and third homed in. Breanna Stockard put her hand on the throttle slide, desperate to get more speed from the power plants.

  It was too late. She could see one of the missiles coming at her right wing, riding the air like a hawk. Bree had ECMs, flares, tinsel—every defensive measure the experienced Megafortress pilot could muster was in play, and still the hawk came on, talons out.

  And then, just as it was about to strike the fuselage in front of the starboard wing root, it changed. The slim body of the Russian-designed Alamo missile thickened. Wings grew from the middle, and the steering fins at the rear changed shape. Breanna was being tracked by an American Flighthawk, not a missile. For a moment, she felt relief.

  Then the robot plane slammed into the wing.

  BREANNA SHOOK HERSELF awake. the pale green light of the hospital room threw ghost shadows across her face; she could hear the machine monitoring her heartbeat stuttering.

  “Damn drugs,” she said.

  They’d given her a sedative to help her sleep, fearful that her injuries would keep her from resting for yet another night. Breanna had bruised ribs, a concussion, a sprained kne
e, and a twisted neck; she was also suffering from dehydration and the effects of more than twelve hours exposure to a bitter Pacific storm. But the physical injuries paled beside what really ached inside her—the loss of four members of her crew, including her longtime copilot Chris Ferris and Dreamland’s number two Flighthawk pilot, Kevin Fentress.

  Breanna rolled onto her back and shoved her elbows under her to sit up in the bed. She was angry with herself for not flying better, for not avoiding the Chinese missile that had taken her down. The fact that she had sacrificed her plane to rescue others was besides the point. The fact that the Piranha mission had been a stunning success, averting war between China and India, mattered nothing to her, at least not now, not in the room lit only by hospital monitors.

  She should’ve saved her people.

  Her father would have. Her husband would have.

  She ached to have them both here with her. But her father, Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian, and her husband, Major Jeff “Zen” Stockard, had been called back to Dreamland, to deal with problems brewing there. She was sentenced to sit in this bed until her injuries healed.

  “Damn drugs,” she muttered again, reaching for the control at the side of the bed to raise it.

  What the hell had that stupid dream been about? She’d been taken down by a missile, not a Flighthawk. The Flighthawks were U.S. weapons, not Chinese.

  But as they were going down, before she gave the order to abandon ship, Torbin Dolk had said something about a Flighthawk. What the hell had he said?

  “I have a U/MF at long range.”

  Those were his words, but they had to be wrong. Their own Flighthawks had been lost, and there were no other Megafortresses with their robot scout fighters nearby.

  What the hell did he say? Had she got it wrong?

  The confusion and static and storm of the shootdown returned. She closed her eyes, wishing she hadn’t failed.

  “Damn drugs,” she said, playing with the bed control in a fruitless effort to make herself more comfortable.

  Outside Taipei, Taiwan

  1700

  CHEN LEE WAITED until the chime of the antique grandfather clock at the far end of his office ended, then rose slowly from his desk, following a ritual he had started many years before. His movements were weighted by eighty years of exertion, and so it took longer for him to cross the large office than it once had, but the familiarity of the afternoon ritual filled him with pleasure. He had long ago realized that, no matter how much wealth one had—and he had a great deal—the more important things, the things that gave life meaning and value, were less tangible: family affection and respect, dreams and ambitions, ritual.

  Chen Lee went to the chest at the right side of his large office and took the bottle from the top, carefully pouring two fingers’ worth of Scotch in the glass tumbler. He had developed a taste for single-malt Scotch as a young man during the last days of the war with the communists when he’d been sent to London as part of a delegation working to persuade the Western allies that Mao must be stopped at all costs. The mission had been a failure; worn out by the World War, the British couldn’t stop their own empire from slipping through their fingers, let alone send an army to help Chiang Kai-shek and the rightful rulers of the great Chinese nation. Not even the Americans were willing to help them until the communist treachery was made obvious in Korea. Even then, the only assistance they would begrudgingly afford was to prevent the invasion of Taiwan by the mongrel bastards who had marched among the peasants, pretending moral superiority when all along practicing opportunism.

  The tingle of Scotch as he took his first sip reminded Chen Lee of his bitterness, and he welcomed it wholeheartedly. For it was only by acknowledging the past that he could look toward the future.

  Much had changed in the nearly fifty years that had passed since his stay in London. Chen Lee had left the government to become a man of business; he had started humbly, as little more than a junk man. He took discarded items, first from the Japanese, then from Europe and the U.S., and turned them into useful materials. Metals first, then gradually electronics and chemicals and even, eventually, nuclear materials. He had made a fortune, and then lost much of it—a loss he blamed on the treachery of the Japanese he was forced to deal with in the early 1980s. But this loss had tempered him; he would not willingly wish it upon anyone else, but he had managed to overcome it, and applied its lessons well.

  His assets now totaled close to a billion dollars U.S.; he owned pieces large and small of businesses throughout the world as well as the Republic of China—Taiwan to the outside world. In fact, his wealth was so extensive he needed two of his three grandsons—his only son had died more than a decade before—to manage it. They were given relatively free hands, as long as they did not break his cardinal rules: no investment in Japan, and no dealings with the communist mongrels under any circumstances.

  Others on the island were not so fastidious, and in their eagerness to enrich themselves had prepared the nation for the ultimate treachery—surrender to the communists.

  It was coming. Several months before, the provinces had clashed. At first, the Americans had seemed to help them; Mainland bases were bombed in a spectacular campaign referred to by the media as “Fatal Terrain.” Had the war proceeded then, reunification might have been possible. But the Americans had proven themselves interested only in preserving the status quo. Worse, the government on Taiwan—the rightful representatives of all China, in Chen Lee’s view—lost face and gave way to a group of men who could only be called appeasers. In a matter of weeks, the president was due to fly to Beijing for talks with the mongrels who had usurped the homeland.

  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 Fann. Indeed, Fann had volunteered to do so many times already.

  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.

  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

  JENNIFER GLEASON PUSHED back 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. Jennifer, one of the top scientists at the facility, knew all of them very well. She was thankful at least that the pilot, Breanna Stockard, had been spared. Bree was her lover’s daughter, and while the two women had never gotten along particularly well themselves, Jennifer could not have borne the hurt Bree’s death would have caused the colonel.

  Jennifer watched as the three-dimensional blob reappeared in the right-hand corner of Rubeo’s screen, commanded to reappear by Dreamland’s senior scientist. It twisted and jerked left, then down and over 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.