End Game. Dale Brown
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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.’
‘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,