“For the uninitiated,” said Bastian, “which included myself until a half hour ago, MEU stands for Marine Ex-peditionary Unit, and SOC means they’re special operations capable. The 24th has been in the area before; they kicked Saddam out during Operation Provide Comfort.

They’re our kind of guys,” added the colonel, “even if they are Marines.”

Everyone laughed except Cheshire, who remained stone-faced as she flipped through a series of satellite photos of the airstrip and surrounding terrain. Zen nudged the keyboard at his console, getting a close-up of the last photo in her sequence.

“Nancy, is this scale right?” he asked. “Six hundred feet?”

“The strip is presently six hundred feet,” she said.

“I can’t even land the Flighthawks there,” said Zen.

“We’re going to make it longer,” she said. “This area here is flat and wide enough, with the exception of this RAZOR’S EDGE

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ridge here. The ridge only stands about eighteen inches high; if we get rid of it, we think we can get it to fifteen hundred. Danny has worked out a plan. Incirlik is our backup, but for security reasons we prefer not to fly the Megafortresses out of there.”

Zen glanced toward Breanna as Cheshire continued.

She’d obviously gone over this earlier, but even so, her lips were pressed tightly together.

“Taking off should be no problem. We can use the Flighthawks and/or the short-field assist packs. Since we’ll have access to the tankers out of Incirlik, we can keep our takeoff weight to a bare minimum fuelwise. And of course we’ll have braking parachutes. They’ll work,”

added Cheshire, apparently seeing some skepticism in the pilots’ faces. Though the chutes had been used in B-52s, they were not exactly standard equipment on the Megafortress.

“So how do we get rid of that ridge?” said Zen, ignoring his receding toothache. “And even if you do that, I see maybe seven hundred feet you can lay mesh over, but what about that hill at the end there?”

“We have something special planned.” There was a note of triumph in Cheshire’s voice. She pressed her remote and the satellite photo morphed into a live feed from one of the Dreamland weapons development labs. A small, white-haired woman frowned in the middle of the screen.

“Dr. Klondike.”

“That would be Mrs. Klondike,” said the weapons scientist testily.

“Hi, Annie,” said Danny.

The old woman squinted at a monitor in the lab.

“Captain.”

“Dr. Klondike,” said Cheshire, “if you could explain—”

“That would be Mrs. Klondike.”

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DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

“Mrs. Klondike, if you could explain about the special application JSOW—”

“Yes. In fact, the configuration of the Joint Standoff Weapons was tried last year and found to be wanting, so we redesigned the delivery vehicle around a standard AGM-86 ALCM frame. But the key was—”

“What Mrs. Klondike is talking about,” said Major Cheshire, losing her patience, “is a controlled explosion to blast the rock into bits. They create a field of explosive powder by exploding very small weapons, focusing the blast in such a way that they can control the shape of the force. I’m told it’s similar to the principle of an air-fuel bomb.”

“That is most inaccurate,” said Klondike on the screen.

“We’ll move a bulldozer in, lay the steel mesh, and land the planes,” continued Cheshire.

“As Jeff pointed out, most of the runway is already there,” said Danny, looking at Zen. “Annie’s bombs will take care of the rest. She knows her stuff.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“We’ll run the ’dozer over it before we pop down the mesh,” said Danny. “Once we’re established, we ought to be able to expand a bit more. Some Pave Lows used the site yesterday or earlier this morning, and the Turks landed helos and light aircraft there in the eighties. I honestly don’t anticipate too much of a problem.”

“You don’t have to try landing a Megafortress on a postage stamp,” said Ferris.

“How long’s this going to take?” asked Major Alou.

“Two days? Three?”

“Two hours,” said Danny. “Maybe four.”

“Two hours?” Alou laughed. “Right.”

“The area will have to be examined before the explosion,” said Mrs. Klondike testily. “And then the detonation points calibrated and adjusted prior to the launch of RAZOR’S EDGE

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the weapons. The captain is, as always, optimistic concerning the timetable.”

“Nah. I have faith in you, Annie.”

“It’s not the weapon I’m referring to.”

“You’re getting a bulldozer in there?” asked Zen.

“That part’s easy,” said Danny. “C-17 slows down and we kick it out the back.”

“Who works it?”

“My equipment guy, Egg Reagan.”

“Oh, the Pave Low pilot,” Zen said, laughing. He’d heard two different versions of the Whiplash team member’s stint as a helicopter pilot the other day. One claimed that he’d almost put the bird into the side of Glass Mountain; the other claimed that he did.

“Don’t worry,” said Danny. “You’ll be pulling operations there twenty-four hours from now. We may use two

’dozers, just to be sure.”

“Even if we take off in thirty minutes,” said Chris, “it’ll take twelve, fifteen hours to get there.”

“Fourteen,” said Breanna. “With refueling. We can push it a little faster. Raven will launch the tactical sats to maintain communication with Dreamland Command.

Quicksilver will take the Flighthawks and the AGMs.”

“I have a question, Colonel,” said Zen, trying to ignore the stab of pain from his tooth as he spoke. “Why the hell is Saddam shooting at us now? What’s his game plan?

Beat up on the Kurds?”

Bastian had been involved in the planning for the air war during the Gulf conflict and had spent considerable time not only in Saudi Arabia but behind the scenes in D.C. That didn’t make him an expert on Saddam Hussein—in Zen’s opinion the dictator was certifiably in-sane—but if anyone on the base would have a good handle on the conflict there, it was the colonel.

Dog got up and walked toward the front. He began 90

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

slowly, deliberately, but as he came down the steps to the center of the semicircular room, his movements sped up.

An ominous majesty seemed to descend over him even before he spoke.

“I don’t know why the Iraqis are trying to provoke us.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s irrelevant.” He was standing erect as he spoke, yet somehow seemed to draw himself even taller and straighter before continuing. “Getting to the Gulf is not going to be a picnic, and neither are the missions. But we’ve just lost three planes, and unofficially it doesn’t look good for two of the men. That toll may increase by the time you get there. This is precisely the sort of job we were created to handle. We’re going to do it, and do it well. Questions?”

Dreamland

1522

AN HOUR AFTER COLONEL BASTIAN’S SPEECH, HIS DAUGHter sat in the pilot’s seat of Quicksilver, going through her final preflight checks.

“Check, check, double-check, green, green, green, chartreuse, green,” sang Chris Ferris, her copilot.

“Chartreuse?” asked Breanna.

“Did you know that chartreuse is green?”

“Well, duh.”

“I never knew that. Honest to God. I thought it was pink or something. Red.”

“Any more colors on your chart today?”

“Negative. Ready to take off, Captain. Good to have you back.”

“Good to be back, Chris.” Breanna hunched her shoulders forward against her seat restraints, unlocking her muscles. She remembered Merce Alou’s preflight prayer.

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What the hell, she thought. Then she laughed, realizing it wasn’t exactly righteous to be using the word hell in connection to prayer, even in her mind.