End Game

‘Yes.’ Vasin rose. ‘Ready to get the ball rolling?’

‘I thought you’d never ask.’

Air Force High Technology Advanced Weapons Center (Dreamland) 1100

Lieutenant Colonel Tecumseh ‘Dog’ Bastian checked his altitude and location, then radioed to the event controller, who was sitting inside a highly modified Boeing RC-135, circling above at forty thousand feet.

‘Dreamland Raptor to Event Command – Jerry, are we firing this missile today?’

‘Event Command to Dreamland Raptor, we’re still hanging on Dreamland Levitow,’ answered the controller, referring to the EB-52 that was to fire the target missile. ‘Colonel, you sound like you’re anxious to get back to your paperwork.’

Not at all, thought Dog, who greatly preferred his present office – the cockpit of Dreamland’s experimental long-range attack version of the F-22 Raptor – to the one with his cherrywood desk twenty thousand feet below. Flying cutting-edge aircraft was undoubtedly the best part of Dreamland.

The F-22 bore only a passing resemblance to the ‘stock’ model. Its wings had been made into long deltas; in the place of a tailfin it had a faceted quadrangle of triangles over the elongated tailpipe. The plane was twenty feet longer than the original, allowing it to accommodate an internal bomb bay that could be filled with a variety of weapons, including the one Dog was waiting to launch. The length also allowed the plane to carry considerably more fuel than a regular F-22.

‘All right, Dreamland Raptor, we’re proceeding,’ said the event controller. ‘Dreamland Levitow is on course. They are firing test missile one.… Test missile has been launched. We are proceeding with our event.’

Test missile one was an AGM-86C whose explosive warhead had been replaced with a set of instruments and a broadcasting device. Also known as an Air Launched Cruise Missile, or ALCM, the AGM-86C was the conventional version of the frontline nuclear-tipped cruise missile developed during the 1980s and placed into storage with the reorganization of the nuclear force in the early 1990s. In this case, the missile was playing the role of a nuclear weapon.

The missile in Dog’s bomb bay was designed to render such weapons obsolete. The EEMWB – the letters stood for Enhanced ElectroMagnetic Warfare Bomb, but were generally pronounced together as ‘em-web’ – created an electronic pulse that disrupted electric devices within a wide radius. Unlike the devices that had been used against power grids in Iraq during the 1992 Gulf War, the EEMWB used terahertz radiation – known as T-Rays or T Waves – to do its damage. Conventional electronic shielding did not protect against them, since until now there had been no need to. Occupying the bandwidth between infrared and microwave radiation, T-Rays were potentially devastating, yet extremely difficult to control and direct. While their potential had long been recognized, their use remained only the wishful daydream of weapons scientists and armchair generals.

Until now. The Dreamland weapons people had found a way to use carefully fabricated metal shards as antennas as the pulse was generated. Computer simulations showed they could design weapons that would fry circuitry at five hundred miles.

There were two likely applications. One was as a weapon to paralyze an enemy’s electronics, a kind of super E bomb that would affect everything from power grids to wristwatches. The other was a defense against nuclear weapons such as the one the AGM-86C simulated. The EEMWB’s pulse went through the shielding in conventional nuclear weapons that protected them from ‘conventional’ electromagnetic shocks. By wiping out the nanoswitches and all other control gear in the weapons, the EEMWB prevented the weapon from going off.

It was possible to shield devices against the T-Rays – both Dreamland Raptor and Dreamland Levitow were proof. But the process was painstaking, especially for anything in the air.

Dog’s EEMWB had a fifty-mile radius. If successful, tests would begin in the South Pacific two weeks from now on the larger, five-hundred-mile-radius designs.

‘Dreamland Raptor, prepare to fire EEMWB,’ said the event controller.

‘Dreamland Raptor acknowledges.’ The EEMWB’s propulsion and guidance units came from AGM-86Cs, and it was fired more like a bomb than an antiair weapon, with the extra step of designating an altitude for an explosion.

‘Launch at will,’ said the event coordinator.

‘Launching.’

Jan Stewart glanced at the screen at the left side of the control panel on her EB-52, checking the sitrep screen for her position and the location of the Dreamland landing area, now about fifteen miles away and due south. If the shielding failed when the EEMWB exploded, she would have to fly Dreamland Levitow back to base by dead reckoning on manual control – not a prospect she relished.

Actually, Captain Stewart didn’t relish flying the Levitow, or any Megafortress, much at all. She’d been a B-1 jock and had come to Dreamland to work in a project designed to test the B-1 for conversion similar to the EB-52 Megafortress. A week after she arrived, the project’s funding was cut and she was pressed into the Megafortress program as a copilot. She outranked a lot of the other copilots and even pilots in the program, but because she was a low-timer in the aircraft, she’d been relegated to second seat by the program’s temporary head, Captain Breanna Stockard. Worse, Breanna had made Stewart her copilot.

Bad enough to fly what was still essentially a B-52 after the hotter-than-fire B-1B. Worse – much, much worse – to be second officer after running the show.

Today, though, Stewart was boss. Her nemesis had been scrubbed at the last minute due to a snowstorm in Chicago.

‘EEMWB detonation in twenty seconds,’ said Lieutenant Sergio ‘Jazz’ Jackson, who was serving as her copilot.

‘Yup.’

A tone sounded in her headphones, indicating that the weapon had detonated. Stewart hot-keyed her communications unit to tell the event commander, but got no response.

She pulled back on the stick slightly, but the airplane failed to move.

Had the shielding failed?

Only partially – her configurable control panel was still lit.

She’d go to manual control right away.

Interphone working?

‘Prepare for manual control,’ she said.

‘Manual?’ said Jazz.

Immediately, Stewart realized what had happened – she’d turned the aircraft over to the flight control computer for the missile launch as part of the test protocol, and neglected to take it back.

It was a boneheaded mistake that would cost her at least two rounds of beers. Thank God the Iron Bitch hadn’t been here to see it.

‘I mean, taking over control from the computer,’ Stewart told Jazz lamely.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said the copilot.

‘Dreamland Levitow,’ said the event controller. ‘Please repeat your transmission. I’m sorry – we were caught up in something here.’

I’ll bet, thought Stewart, not entirely convinced that Breanna hadn’t somehow conspired with them to make her look bad.

Dr Ray Rubeo, Dreamland’s head scientist, was waiting for Colonel Bastian as he unfolded himself from the Raptor’s cockpit.

‘So how’d we do, Doc?’ Dog asked, coming down the ladder. Techies were already swarming over the Raptor, preparing it for a complete overhaul. Besides thoroughly analyzing the shielding and systems for signs of damage from the T-Rays, the engineering team was planning a number of improvements to the plane, including a new wing structure that would lower its unfueled weight by five percent.

‘It’s premature to speculate,’ said Rubeo.

‘Do it anyway.’

Rubeo frowned. ‘I’m sure that when the results are analyzed, the models predicting the impact of the weapon will be shown to be quite correct. All of the test instruments reported full hits. And,’ he paused dramatically, ‘one of the ground technicians forgot to remove his watch, and now finds that it no longer functions.’

Dog laughed. The scientist touched his earring – a habit, the colonel knew, that meant he was planning to say something he considered unpleasant. Dog decided to head him off at the pass.

‘Ray, if the full-sized weapons won’t be ready for testing –’

‘Bah. They’re sitting in the bunker, all eight of them. Though the tests are unnecessary.’

Then obviously I’m about to get harangued for more money, thought Dog, starting toward the Jimmy SUV waiting to take him over to the hangar area where he could change. Sure enough, Rubeo fell in alongside him and made the pitch.

‘If you are going to proceed with the project, Colonel, I need several more technicians to assist while the team is away.’

‘Can’t do it, Ray. You’ve seen the budget.’