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Dog acknowledged. Groundhog was Danny Freah, who was introducing one of the Romanian units to the procedures required to interface with the planes. They planned on splitting their time this afternoon between two different units, going over the rudiments of working with the aircraft.

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 cannons if called in by the ground soldiers.

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 manned the airborne radar, which was tracking flights within 250 miles. On the left, Technical Sergeant Jerry “Spiff” Spilani worked the ground radar. Rager had flown with Dog before; Spiff was new to the crew, though not to the job.

“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 Bennett. In person, the lieutenant’s pronunciation was nearly perfect, but the radio equipment made it sound garbled. The lieutenant repeated himself twice before Dreamland Bennett acknowledged.

“OK,” said Danny. “Let’s get some data from the Flighthawk.”

The unmanned aircraft streaked a thousand feet overhead, riding parallel to the nearby highway. Danny listened to the Romanian and Zen trade information. The Romanian lieutenant had trouble understanding Zen’s light midwestern drawl, but he was able to see the video from the small plane on his laptop without any problem.

As planned, the lieutenant asked Zen to check out a road a mile south of them; they did that without a problem. Then the Romanians called in a mock air attack on a telephone substation about a hundred meters from the field they were standing in. This too went off without a hitch. The Flighthawk dipped down above the Romanian position, straightened its wings, then zoomed on the cement building, which had been abandoned some years before.

Rather than firing his cannon, Zen pickled off a flare. It flashed red in the fading twilight directly over the building.

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The Romanian soldiers cheered.

I must be getting old, Danny thought. They all look like kids.

Aboard the Bennett,

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 annoyances to overcome. Zen had decided to wear the MESSKIT instead of the

“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 reconnaissance flight over a nearby village. Zen located it on the Megafortress’s ground radar plot. A cluster of suburban-type houses sat south of the main road, the center of town marked by a fire station and a small park. He wheeled the Flighthawk 148

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 Breanna. He shut down that part of his mind and became a machine, focused on his job.

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.”