9 January, 1405

THE HELICOPTERS KEPT GETTING IN THE WAY. ZEN barely kept his U/MF-3 from colliding with a Blackhawk, mashing his control stick left and flailing away at the last possible instant. He was so close to the helicopter’s blades that the wash whipped his wings into a nearly uncontrollable spin, despite the computer’s efforts to help him steady the plane.

Before he could fully recover, he found himself in the middle of a stream of lead, thrown by the two ZSU-23 antiaircraft guns he was assigned to hit. Fortunately, the guns were being sighted manually and the gunners couldn’t keep up with Zen’s hard zag back to the right. But the sharp maneuvers made it impossible for him to lock on his target. Zen pressed the trigger as the four-barreled mobile antiaircraft unit on the left slid through his targeting pipper, while he simultaneously tried to walk his Flighthawk back into the target by sticking his rudder with a quick jerk left. That might have worked—might have—in a plane like an A- 10A Thunderbolt, built for low-speed, low-level target-thrashing. But the U/MF-3 Flighthawk was a different beast altogether, originally designed for high-altitude, high-Mach encounters.

Not that she couldn’t fly down here in the mud. Just that she didn’t necessarily appreciate it. Zen found himself fighting for control as the small craft jerked herself right and left, shells bursting from beneath her belly as she tried to follow his commands. The spin had taken him too low, and his cannon fire had slowed him down. The unmanned aircraft was in serious danger of turning into a brick.

Stubbornly, Zen ignored the computerized voice that warned of an impending stall. He goosed off enough slugs to nail the flak-dealer, then tossed off a few prayers to get the Flighthawk’s nose pointing skyward. The antiaircraft gun exploded with a brilliant crimson glow just as the assault leader announced that the helos were on the ground.

But before Zen could draw a breath to relax, the radar-warning receiver in the lead Flighthawk went berserk, screaming that an enemy fighter had somehow gotten close enough to launch AMRAAM air-to-air missiles at the helicopters Zen was supposed to be protecting.

MAJOR MACK “KNIFE” SMITH GRINNED AS HE POPPED his F-16 up over the mountains he’d been using to mask his approach. He’d snuck in behind the two fighters tasked to keep him at bay; the four helicopters carrying the enemy assault force floated naked in front of him. Four helicopters, four missiles, four turkeys ready to be gassed.

A quartet of AMRAAMS slid off his wings in quick succession. Preset for the encounter, the missiles turned on their active seekers, each homing in on their targets as their solid-fuel rockets burst them forward at speeds approaching Mach 4. It was overkill really—the helicopters were less than five miles away; the missiles barely lit their wicks before nailing their targets. The helos were history before their pilots even realized they were targeted.

Mack didn’t have time to gloat. One of the helicopters’ escorts flashed for his tail. Its pilot—Jeff Stockard—had been caught with his pants down, and now he wanted revenge.

Of course, the fact that he didn’t have time to gloat did not actually mean that Knife wouldn’t gloat. On the contrary—he flicked on his mike and gave a roar of laughter as he took his Viper into a nearly ninety-degree turn, pulling close to thirteen g’s. The “stock” plane would quite possibly have rattled apart; Knife most certainly would have blacked out from the force of gravity pelting his body. But nothing at the Air Force High Technology Advanced Weapons Center—aka “Dreamland”—was stock. The F-16’s forward canards and reshaped delta wings were fashioned from an experimental titanium-carbon combination that made them several times stronger than the ones the factory had first outfitted her with. Mack’s flight suit was designed to keep blood flowing evenly throughout his body at fifteen g’s, negative as well as positive.

It couldn’t keep his heart from double-pumping as he took the turn and managed to get his pursuer in his sights. He got off a half-second slap shot as the enemy zigged downward. The odds against hitting the small, nimble U/MF fighter were at least a hundred to one, but he got close enough to force the SOB to break downward, keeping it an easy target for the F-16. Knife laughed so loud his helmet almost came off—he hadn’t had this much fun in months.

ZEN WORKED HARD NOW. HIS BREATH GREW SHORT and the muscles in his shoulders hardened into cannonballs as he tried desperately to break his airplane out of the low-energy scissors he’d been tricked into.

Not tricked exactly. He’d blundered into it, failing to use his airplane properly. Failing to use his head—truth was, he’d been surprised twice in the space of ninety seconds. He was stuck now in a three-dimensional game of follow-the-leader where being the leader meant you had a fifty- or sixty-percent chance of landing in the other guy’s gunsight.

The pursuer had to be careful not to be sucked into a turn or even a loop that would send his plane shooting ahead, effectively changing places. This was a real danger since the U/MF could turn tighter than even the high-maneuverability F-16 Knife was flying. Mack was no sucker, nor a fool, hanging back just far enough to stay with him, but still close enough to cut off any fancy stuff with gunfire.

Zen had three other Flighthawks hurrying to his rescue. Eventually, they’d force Mack to break off, turning the tables on the hunter. But eventually seemed to be taking forever.

The problem was, he couldn’t control four of the robot planes at one time, not easily anyway. It was especially hard when they were tasked with different missions in different places. Changing mental gears wasn’t bad enough—the U/ MFs’ control gear took forever to cycle into the right plane. Forever being ten nanoseconds.

Three months ago, Jeff had saved Mack’s sorry butt and oversized ego with a near-impossible foray into Libya. Shot down and captured while taking part in a covert operation, Smith had been headed to Iran to have his head chopped off when Dreamland’s Spec Ops team, “Whiplash,” intervened. Controlling the still-experimental U/MF-3 Flighthawks from a hastily modified weapons bay of an EB-52 Megafortress, Zen had found Smith and his captor in a small plane over the Mediterranean. When Smith was finally rescued, he was more grateful than a groom on his wedding night.

For about thirty seconds. Now they were back in their usual places, clawing each other at the nation’s top center for weapons development. It didn’t matter that this fight was being played out in a massive computer, projected on a series of screens in a high-tech hangar. Both men went at it like boxers competing for a ten-million-dollar winner-take-all purse.

At the end of the day, both men would go home with the knowledge that they’d helped test and perfect the next generation of front-line weapons for the country. More importantly—as far as they were concerned, at least—one would go home the winner, the other the loser.

Or, as Mack would put it if he won, “the peahead loser.”

Tracers flared over Jeff’s Flighthawk, arcing to his left. The burst of red ignited an idea in Zen’s brain—he yanked hard on the stick, pointing his nose straight up, directly into Mack’s path.

KEVIN MADRONE EDGED WHAT WAS LEFT OF HIS thumbnail against his tooth, watching the bird’s-eye view of the dogfight on the large display screen. The Army captain could see that Mack had the advantage, but it wasn’t quite enough to nail Zen. Their dogfight was incidental to the overall exercise, but he couldn’t help watching. They were like old-fashioned gladiators, flailing at each other in the Colosseum, willing to go to any lengths to beat their opponents. There was something irresistible in their single-mindedness, something attractive in the danger they faced.