“Shit,” he said, out loud and over the open circuit as he ducked the plane off the EB-52’s tail.

“Okay, let’s take a break,” said Major Cheshire.

“Roger that,” he snapped.

They’d been trying for nearly thirty minutes to get the F-119 under the Megafortress’s belly. The vortices and wind sheers coming off the bigger plane’s wings, fuselage, and tail were just too much for the F-119, even with its constantly correcting fly-by-wire controls.

Knife thought the controls themselves might be the problem. In his opinion, having a computer between him and the plane’s control surfaces dampened the edge he needed to put the plane precisely where he wanted. It was like the difference between driving an automatic-shift and a standard-shift car; being able to flutter the clutch or hold the revs above redline without shifting could make all the difference.

But it wasn’t like he could turn the system off. Like other inherently unstable craft such as the F-117, the fly-by-wire system was an integral part of the design, not an enhancement like in the EB-52. The JSF couldn’t fly without it.

What had Bastian called it? A flying bathtub? Have to give Dog his due—he had that nailed.

“Let’s move on to the drogue routine off the left wing,” Knife radioed. “Stay at twenty thousand feet.”

“You sure?” asked Cheshire.

“Look, you guys just follow the script, all right?”

“You okay, Major?” asked Cheshire.

Smith reminded himself the project was being monitored down in the tower.

“Yeah, okay. Let’s go,” said Smith. He began closing in on the Megafortress’s left wing, now nearly a half mile ahead. He came in ever so slowly, drawing even with the tail—then found the plane sheering off to the left into a rapid spin.

His master warning panel freaked. He fell to nearly fifteen thousand feet before he could manage a recovery.

“Playboy, you have visible damage to the leading-edge aileron on the right wing,” said Cheshire. “Copy? Knife, are you okay? Are you with us?”

“Roger that,” he said. The plane’s high-flying position—the pilot sat in what looked like a glass bulb at the top of the plane—gave him a good view of the wings. Finally sure he had it back under control, he twisted back and forth, doing a visual inspection to confirm Cheshire’s warning and the legion of problem codes on the systems screen. The leading-edge surface was bent, and he could see a piece of metal extending out from behind it. He guessed that was part of one of the motors that worked it, which the screen warned had failed. Now he had to admit that the FBW system was useful—it was compensating so smoothly for the damaged wing that he barely noticed it. Undoubtedly the flight-control system had played a big role in helping him regain control of the craft.

Though serious, the damage wasn’t fatal. But his gauges showed the temperature in his right engine had shot up to the redline; there must be a problem there as well.

Stinking F-119. What a way to go out.

Appropriate, though, considering the plane.

“Dream Tower, this is Playboy One. Emergency declared. I have a slight situation with my wing and engine. Looks like it’s time to land,” Mack said, adding his altitude, position, and heading, though they would already be projected by Dreamland’s powerful sensors. He and Fort Two had the sky to themselves; all he had to do was line up, pop his wheels, and land.

“Tower acknowledges, Playboy. Copy your flying emergency.”

“Mack?”

Brenna’s voice seemed to come at him from the clouds, breaking through the outside fuzz of his consciousness as he pushed toward Runway Two. He felt the kiss again, then returned to the matter at hand.

“I’m okay, beautiful,” he told her. “I can’t even tell there’s a problem. But listen, do I get a kiss if I land in one piece?”

COLONEL BASTIAN STOOD BACK FROM THE MONITOR, nudging next to the air-conditioning unit in the cramped quarters of Dreamland’s mobile test tower. He could see Smith’s plane coasting toward the hangars in the distance. Obviously, the damage to the plane had been minimal.

The damage to the idea of using the Megafortress as a tanker, however, was another story.

But he had decided this morning that he definitely wanted to keep the Megafortress project alive. It wasn’t just the fact that he believed in McLanahan’s Air Battleship scenario. Even as a “simple” bomber, the Megafortress made sense. With a few tweaks, it could be as survivable as an F-15E while carrying several times the payload two or three times as far. Get into a low-intensity war in a hot climate—say, the Middle East, as McLanahan had hinted, or Southeast Asia—and a few Megafortresses might just turn the tide. And it would be cheap; the Air Force had literally hundreds of B-52’s available for conversion.

At the moment, though, that was a drawback. There weren’t enough jobs at stake to easily apply political pressure and keep it alive. But attach it to the F-119 as a survivable tanker, and there’d be plenty of pots. A few months of demonstration flights, maybe some careful work with contractors, and they’d have enough political support to revive the battleship concept.

But it was dead now.

Bastian listened as the controller exchanged information with an aircraft conducting a test near Range F.

“What’s going on?” he asked Mickey Colgan, the flight officer coordinating the day’s tests.

“Oh, that’s just a drone taking off,” said the captain. “Unpiloted Green Phantom doing IR testing. Pretty straightforward. It’s got a JSF suit on. It has to catch another drone.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I’m sorry, Colonel. There are two Phantoms. One’s just a stock drone. The other, Green Phantom, has some wing baffles and a few other mods to simulate the F-119’s flight characteristics. They’re controlled out of the Flighthawk hangar. We’re running checks on the nitrogen-cooling system for the gear in the IR’s eye. It has to be kept at a constant temperature or—”

“You think Green Phantom could rendezvous with Fort Two?”

Colgan blinked. “Well, if the F-119 can’t do it, that old Phantom, I mean, it’s at least as bad a flier as the JSF itself.”

“Who’s the pilot?” asked Bastian.

“That would be Major Stockard, sir.” Colgan seemed to bristle a bit. “They, uh, they’re trying to get him back into the swing of things.”

“How good a pilot is he?”

“Sir?”

“I mean with the drone.”

“Well, before his accident, there was no one near as good as him,” said Colgan. “But …”

“But what?”

“I don’t know if he’s back up to speed, Colonel. And he, uh, he’s in a wheelchair.”

“What’s the frequency to the Flighthawk bunker?” said Bastian, moving back to the corn panel.

* * *

TO SAY HE’D FLOWN THE QF-4 DRONE TEN THOUSAND times wasn’t an exaggeration; Zen had learned to control the Flighthawks with the exact airplanes he was flying. He’d gotten so he could work them with his eyes closed before moving up to the much-more-difficult-to-control Flighthawks.

He closed his eyes now in frustration. The gig was simple—all he had to do was fly Green Phantom behind Phantom One-Zero-Mike at fifteen thousand feet with three miles of separation. Piece of cake.

Except his heart was pounding and there was sweat pouring from his wrists, and if it weren’t for the automated flight computer fail-safe, he would have smacked Green Phantom into the ground on takeoff.

Things had gone badly yesterday, but that at least could be attributed to rust; he’d gotten better as the exercises wore on.

He wasn’t sure what to blame this on. Maybe the F-119 mods. JSF wasn’t exactly the world’s most flyable plane, and Green Phantom was a pig’s pig.

It was easier to handle than two Flighthawks at supersonic speed, though. So why was he sweating like a bull being chased by toreadors?

If he couldn’t make this simple intercept, how could he ever control the U/MFs?