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  The admiral had done better than any one of them, Memon included, might have hoped, adding aircraft to the air force, tanks to the army, and above all ships to the navy. It thrilled Memon, who wished India to take her rightful place in the world. But of late Skandar had seemed only an old man, talking of abstractions rather than actions.

  “Admiral, the context is before our eyes,” Memon told him. “We are being attacked.”

  “In the next century, who will be the superpowers of Asia? Russia is a shadow of herself. We pick over her bones to build our own forces. The United States? They are preoccupied with Europe, Taiwan, and Japan, spread so thin that they cannot afford to send more than a token force to the Gulf of Aden.”

  “China is our ultimate enemy. I realize that,” said Memon. “But you’re worrying about fifty years from now. I’m worrying about today.”

  “Our actions today will determine what happens in fifty years.” Skandar smiled. “You’re still young. Full of fire. That is admirable.”

  At thirty-eight, Memon did not consider himself particularly young. But since he was half Skandar’s age, the comment was not meant unkindly.

  “What do you think of joining the Shiva?” added Skandar.

  Memon had been instrumental in the conversion of the ship from the Russian, Tiazholyi Avianesushchiy Kreyser, or Heavy Aircraft-Carrying Cruiser, Kiev. To Memon, the Shiva epitomized India’s new aggressiveness, and he would love to be aboard her. Its captain, Admiral Asad Kala, was an old acquaintance.

  But why was Skandar suggesting it? To get him out of New Delhi?

  “I would like nothing better than to join the Shiva,” said Memon warily. “If you can spare me.”

  “Good, then.” Skandar rose. “You should make your plans immediately.”

  Dreamland

  6 January 1998

  1140

  “THIS ISN’T A B-1, CAPTAIN. YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GET UP over that mountain unless you start pulling the stick back now.”

  Jan Stewart clenched her teeth together but did as she was told, jerking the control yoke toward her. The EB-52 Megafortress lifted her nose upward, shrugging off a wave of turbulence as she rose over Glass Mountain at the northern edge of Dreamland’s Test Range 4. As soon as she cleared the jagged peak, Stewart pressed the stick forward, aiming to stay as close to the mountain as possible. But it was no good—though a vast improvement over the B-52H she had been converted from, the Megafortress was still considerably more comfortable cruising in the stratosphere than hugging the earth. Her four P&W power plants strained as Stewart tried to force gravity, momentum, and lift into an equation that would get the plane across the ridge without being seen by the nearby radar sentry, a blimp hovering two miles to the west.

  The computer buzzed a warning:

  DETECTED. BEING TARGETED.

  Stewart sensed her copilot’s smirk. If only it had been Jazz, or anyone other than Breanna Stockard.

  “Defense—evade—ah, shit,” Stewart said, temporarily flustered.

  ENEMY LASER LOCKED.

  “ECMs,” said Stewart, back in control. “Evasive maneuvers. Hold on.”

  “ECMs,” acknowledged Breanna.

  Stewart banked hard and nailed the throttle to the last stop, trying to pirouette away from the laser targeting them. Her efforts were not in vain—the airborne antiaircraft laser fired and missed by about fifty yards. But the respite was brief. The EB-52 couldn’t rebuild momentum quickly enough, and the laser recycled and sent a full blast at the cockpit. Several thousand joules of energy—simulated—struck the ship just aft of the pilots’ station. The blast fused the satellite antenna and blew out the assorted electrical circuits, as well as punching a six-inch-wide hole across the top of the fuselage. The emergency panel in front of the pilots lit up like a Christmas tree, and alarms sounded throughout the aircraft. Ten seconds later a second salvo burned a hole through the metal covering the fuel bag immediately behind the wings. The temperature in the fuel delivery piping increased tenfold in an instant, and an explosion ripped across the plane’s backbone.

  “We’re dead,” said Breanna.

  Stewart leveled off silently, easing back on the thrust as Breanna called the test range coordinator to acknowledge that they’d been wiped out.

  “Roger that,” said the coordinator. “Got you on that second blast. Good work.”

  “You want another run?”

  “Negative. We’ve got plenty of data. Thank you very much.”

  “Pleasure is ours,” said Breanna.

  Stewart ground her back molars together, stifling a scream. She took the Megafortress up through eight thousand feet, circling at the eastern end of the range before contacting the control tower for permission to land.

  “Tower to EB-52 Test Run, you’re cleared to land. What’s wrong? Didn’t you have your Wheaties today?”

  “Test Run,” snapped Stewart, acknowledging the clearance but not the sarcasm. The controller chortled as he gave her information about the wind, rubbing in the fact that she’d just had her clock cleaned by a pair of robots in a blimp and an ancient C-130.

  “YOU’RE GETTING BETTER,” SAID BREANNA AS STEWART rolled toward the hangar bunker.

  “Don’t give me that, Stockard. I really don’t need a pep talk from you. I got toasted.”

  “The purpose of the exercise was to get toasted. We’re just guinea pigs.”

  “I could have made it past the ridge if you hadn’t made me pull up,” said Stewart angrily. “I had plenty of clearance.”

  “The computer would have taken over for you if you hadn’t pulled back on the stick.”

  “The safety protocols are too conservative.”

  “Why are you so touchy? It’s only a test. Nobody’s keeping score. If we’d gotten through on that pass we would have had to take another run anyway.”

  “I could have made it,” insisted Stewart, powering down at the signal from the crewman outside.

  Breanna sighed, and pretended to busy herself with the postflight checklist. She’d had Stewart fly as pilot to give her more experience behind the stick, not to show her up. Stewart had the qualifications to be a lead pilot, but so far she just wasn’t hacking it. Hopefully it would come in time.

  If her personality let it.

  “Hey, Bree, Dog’s looking for you,” said Danny Freah, sticking his head up at the rear of the cockpit area.

  “What’s up?”

  “We’re moving out. You’ll never guess where.”

  “Mars.”

  “I wish. Going back to the Gulf of Aden. We’re going to work with Xray Pop and the infamous Captain Storm. Hey, Stewart, you’re invited too. Looks like your first Whiplash deployment is about to begin.”

  “Great,” said Stewart, her tone suggesting the opposite.

  “Newbies buy.”

  “Screw yourself, Captain.”

  “What’s buggin’ her?” said Danny after the pilot left the plane.

  “Doesn’t like to buy,” said Breanna.

  BY THE TIME BREANNA AND DANNY GOT TO CONFERENCE Room 2 in the Taj Mahal, Colonel Bastian had started the briefing. A large map at the front of the room showed northeastern Africa, the Gulf of Aden, and part of the nearby Indian Ocean. Somalia sat like a large, misshapen 7 wrapped around the northern and eastern shores of the continent. During its last deployment, the Dreamland Whiplash team and the Megafortresses supporting it had seen action on land and above the sea at the north, where the Gulf of Aden separated Africa from the Saudi peninsula. Today, the eastern shore of the war-torn country was highlighted, with a large X near the town of Hando on the Indian Ocean.

  “I’m going to start by giving you all some background on political situation here,” said the colonel. “As many of you already know, pirates have been roaming the Gulf of Aden for nearly a year. They’ve been taking advantage of trouble elsewhere—specifically in the Balkans, in the Philippines, Japan, and Taiwan—to prey on oil tankers and other merchant ships traveling through the gulf.�
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  “While the cat’s away, the mice do play,” said Major Mack Smith down in front. He turned around, smiling for everyone behind him, as if he were in junior high and had just made the most clever statement in the world.

  “The Navy sent a small warship called the Abner Read into the gulf a few months ago,” continued Dog, ignoring Smith. “Some of us supported them. We won a major victory against the strongest group of pirates two months ago. Things have been relatively calm since, with some sporadic attacks but nothing on the order of what we’d seen before. Yesterday, however, there was a major attack on Port Somalia, an oil terminal that has just been opened by the Indians. The Indians are blaming Pakistan and are threatening to retaliate. That’s not sitting too well with the Pakistanis, who say they had nothing to do with this attack. Both countries have nuclear weapons. Our satellites have detected preparations at the major Indian ballistic missile launching area and at its Pakistani counterpart.”

  “Saber rattling,” said Mack.

  “Our immediate mission is to beef up Xray Pop, the task force that the Abner Read heads. We’re going to help it figure out who’s behind the attack. We’re also going there to show both sides just how serious a matter this is.”

  “Blessed are the peacemakers—” said Mack.

  “Thank you, Major, but I can do without the running commentary,” said Dog. “We will be under the operational command of Xray Pop’s commander, Captain ‘Storm’ Gale. A lovely fellow.”

  Everyone who had been on the last deployment snickered.

  Dog turned to the projection behind him, using a laser pointer to highlight an X on the eastern coast of Somalia at the north.

  “This is Port Somalia. It’s an oil terminal, the end point for a pipeline the Indians have paid to be built to deliver oil from northern Somalia and the Gulf of Aden. It’s part of an ambitious network that they are constructing that will give them access to oil from the entire Horn of Africa, all the way back to the Sudan. A second port is planned to open farther south later this year.”

  The colonel clicked the remote control he had in his left hand and a new map appeared on the screen behind him. India sat at the right, Somalia on the left. The Arabian Sea, an arm of the Indian Ocean, sat between them. Above Somalia was the Saudi peninsula, with Yemen at the coast. Iran and Pakistan were at the northern shores of the sea, separating India from the Middle East.

  “To give you some idea of the distances involved here,” said Dog, “it’s roughly fifteen hundred miles from Port Somalia to Mumbai, also known as Bombay, on the coast of India, not quite halfway down the Indian subcontinent. Three hours flying time, give or take, for a Megafortress, a little less if Lightning Chu is at the controls.”

  The pilots at the back laughed. Captain Tommy Chu had earned his new nickname during recent power-plant tests by averaging Mach 1.1 around the test course, defying the engineers’ predictions that the EB-52 could not be flown faster than the speed of sound for a sustained period in level flight.

  “Timewise, we are eleven hours behind. When it is noon here, it is 2300 hours in Port Somalia, same time as Mogadishu. Problem, Cantor?”

  Lieutenant Evan Cantor, one of the new Flighthawk jocks recently cleared for active combat missions, jerked upright in the second row. “Uh, no sir. Just figuring out days. They’re a half day ahead. Just about.”

  “Just about, Lieutenant. But don’t do the math yet. We’ll be based at Drigh Road, the Pakistani naval air base near Karachi. We’ll use Karachi time for reference. That’s thirteen hours ahead. A section of the base has already been cordoned off for us. Problem, Lieutenant Chu?”

  “Just trying to figure out how many watches to wear,” said Chu.

  “Why Karachi?” said Breanna.

  “Mostly because they won’t object, and they’re relatively close,” said Dog. “But we’ll have to be very, very aware that we’re in an Islamic country, and that our presence may be controversial to some.”

  Controversial was putting it mildly. Stirred up by local radicals, civilians near the air base the Dreamland team had used in Saudi Arabia during their last deployment had come close to rioting before the Megafortresses relocated to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

  “We’ll have four Megafortresses: the Wisconsin, our old veteran; and three newcomers, the Levitow, the Fisher, and the Bennett.”

  The choice of the planes was not haphazard; all were radar surveillance planes, with both air and sea capabilities. Information from the Megafortresses’s radars would be supplied to the Abner Read via a link developed by Dreamland’s computer scientists, giving the small littoral warrior a far-reaching picture of the air and oceans around it. Additionally, an underwater robot probe called Piranha could be controlled from one Flighthawk station on each plane, and special racks and other gear allowed the Megafortresses to drop and use sonar buoys.

  “We’ll rotate through twelve-hour shifts, with overlapping patrols, so there are always at least two aircraft on station at any one time,” continued Colonel Bastian. “Lieutenant Chu has worked up some of the patrol details, and I’ll let him go into the specifics. We’re to be in the air as soon as possible; no later than 1600.”

  The trip would have been long enough if they’d been able to fly in a straight line—somewhere over nine thousand miles. But political considerations forced them to skirt Iran and Russia, adding to the journey.

  “I believe everyone knows everyone else on the deployment. The one exception may be Major Mack Smith, who’s back with us after a working vacation in the Pacific. Mack has been pinch-hitting for Major Stockard while he’s on medical leave for a few weeks, and he’ll continue to head the Flighthawk squadron during the deployment.”

  Mack, ever the showoff, turned and gave a wave to the pilots behind him.

  Though he’d helped develop the Flighthawks, he had extremely little time flying them. That wasn’t a serious deficiency handling the odd piece of paperwork at Dreamland, where Zen was only a phone call away; it remained to be seen what would happen in the field.

  “One question, Colonel,” said Danny Freah, whose Whiplash team would provide security at the base. “How long are we going to be there?”

  Dog’s mouth tightened at the corners—a sign, Breanna knew, that he was about to say something unpopular. “As long as it takes.”

  Las Vegas University of Medicine,

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  1200

  “I’LL JUST SAY I CAN’T GO.”

  “No way. You can’t do that.”

  “Sure I can do that. You’re my husband.”

  “Yeah, I do seem to remember a ceremony somewhere.” Zen laughed. The two nurses at the other end of the room looked over and gave him embarrassed smiles.

  “Jeff—”

  “No, listen Bree, it’s fine. Things are going great here. I still can’t eat anything, but other than that, I’m in great shape. I may even go for a walk later.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “I’m not joking. It was a figure of speech.” Zen pulled his gown primly closer to his legs. When the phone call was finished, he’d go back facedown on the bed butt naked, but somehow it felt important to preserve what modesty he could.

  “The operation was OK?”

  “Bing-bing-bing. Didn’t feel anything. Laser looked pretty cool. The nurse are great,” he added. “I won’t describe them or you’ll get jealous.”

  The women—neither of whom was under fifty—blushed.

  “I love you, Jeff.”

  “I love you too, Bree. Take care of yourself, all right?”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Shit yeah.”

  “I’ll call.”

  “Call when you can.”

  “Jeff?”

  “Yup?”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  Southeastern Iran,

  near the coast

  8 January 1998

  1312

  CAPTAIN SATTARI’S KNEE
, BRUISED IN THE RECENT ACTION AT Port Somalia, started to give way as he climbed from the back of the Mercedes. He grabbed hold of the door to steady himself, pretending to admire the splendor of the private villa three miles east of Chah Bahar on Iran’s southern coast. Being thirty-nine meant the little tweaks and twists took longer to get over.

  The villa was something to admire; its white marble pillars harked back to the greatness of the Persian past, and its proud, colorful red tower stood in marked contrast to the dullness that had descended over much of the land in the wake of the mullahs’ extreme puritanism. Jaamsheed Pevars had bought the house before he became the country’s oil minister. He was one of new upper class, a man who had earned his money under the black robes and thus owed them some allegiance. A decade before the small company he owned had won a contract to inspect oil tankers for safety violations before they entered Iranian waters. Inspection was mandatory, as was the thousand dollar fee, only half of which went to the government.

  “Captain?” asked Sergeant Ibn, getting out from the other side.

  “Impressive view.”

  Sattari shrugged off his knee’s complaints, and the men walked up the stone-chipped path that led to the front door. A servant met them, bowing with the proper respect before leading them through the portico out into a garden where his host was waiting.

  “Captain Sattari,” said Jaamsheed Pevars, rising as they entered. “I greet you on your great success.”

  As Sattari started to take his hand, he saw Pevars was not alone. The captain immediately stiffened; visitors generally meant trouble, usually from the imams who were constantly demanding more progress. But the man with his back to him was not one of the black robes. As he turned, Sattari was startled to see it was his father. Smiling broadly, General Mansour Sattari clasped the younger man to his chest.

  “Congratulations on your success,” said the general.