CHAPTER
6
Static crackled
on the headset. “Romeo One this is Boxcars One. Request permission
to…” Wentz paused. Why should he care about proper commo protocol
anymore? “Request permission to open this fucker up to the max and
get the fuck out of here.”
A chuckle
through the static. “Permission affirmed, Boxcars One. You are
clear for take-off. When you melt the runway, we’ll send you a
bill.”
“Good luck
making me pay, Romeo One. Adios…”
Taking off on
afterburners was close to impossible—but not for Wentz. You just
had to know how to jink the throttle in tandem with the azimuth.
The $40,000,000 plane didn’t take off as much as it
exploded off T-D Runway 4. Wentz wasn’t fifty feet off the
asphalt when he pulled into a full barrel-spin and was burning
upward at nearly a forty-five-degree line. They were a cockscrew
soaring straight up.
Wentz watched
the heavens revolve in the polycarb canopy: the world was a bright
spinning top. Ashton shrieked like a cat on
fire.
“Stop it! Stop
it! I’m going to—”
Wentz leveled
off with a single quick jerk of the stick. In one second, the plane
was flying flat and smooth, roaring westward, the sun beaming above
the sky.
He could hear
Ashton gasping in his commo set. “You okay, Colonel?”
A few more
gasps, then the otherwise reserved Colonel Ashton shouted, “Look,
I’m not into this fighter-jock macho crap, damn you! Fly the plane
normal!”
“I thought
that’s what I was doing,” Wentz miked back to her. “Tighten your
stomach muscles. I’ll show you normal.” More finesse on the stick,
and the plane’s wings were perpendicular to the earth as he pulled
into a 4-G climb.
“Stop it! Stop
it!” she shrieked. “Please!”
Guess it’s time to stop being a
dickhead, Wentz considered. He leveled off again. “I’m
sorry, Colonel. I just thought you’d want to experience an official
takeoff record. We just climbed to 58,000 feet in one minute.
That’s a record for this aircraft. Now you’ve got something to tell
your grandkids.”
Ashton sat
behind Wentz, in what would otherwise be the Bear’s Seat, or the
EWO seat—electronic warfare officer. This F-15M2-series was a
courier version: minimal AV bay, no ECM pod, no General Electric
M61 gun. It was stripped, in other words, all business. Two seats
sitting on top of two modified Pratt-Whitney dual-shaft turbofans
rated 40,000 pounds of zero-mean thrust apiece. The
fuel-burn-rating was classified, and so was the plane’s top speed:
mach three-point-one. The only thing that struck him as odd was the
paint scheme: flat Khaki paint, solid, like the color of
sand.
“I
almost…peed myself!” Ashton shouted through her mike. “I don’t
care if you’re the best pilot in the world! Don’t do anymore of
that shit!”
Wentz winced at
the word. “Colonel? If I may make a personal observation? Somehow,
hearing the word shit come out of your mouth…well, it doesn’t become
you.”
“Fuck
off!”
Neither does that, Wentz thought. “I apologize, Colonel. I’m just
having a little last-minute fun. After tomorrow, I’ll never be
flying this fast again.”
An exhalation
over the wire somehow sounded coy. “Still don’t think you’ll take
the mission?”
“Positive.
Rainier was playing me for a fool, so I thought I’d return the
favor. Thought I’d take the opportunity to drive an Eagle one more
time, at his expense. Whatever this mission is, I ain’t taking
it.”
The coyness
left her voice. Now she sounded dead serious. “Don’t be too
sure.”
Wentz cut his
afterburners when the temp needle was about to max. “All right,
let’s forget about keeping a jackass in suspense. Tell me the
mission.”
“No way, sir.
You need to see for yourself, just like General Rainier
said.”
“Eee-haw,
eee-haw,” Wentz said. “And by the way, what’s with the funky paint
on the plane?”
“You’ll
see.”
Great answer. “Okay, but if you don’t mind my asking, what’s an…
attractive… woman like you doing in all this super-secret
classified security clearance bullshit?”
“You know
something, General? Even Farrington wasn’t as sexist as
you.”
“Sexist!” Wentz
objected. “Where’d that come from?”
“Most of you
guys? Jesus. Because you’re so maladjusted and unsocialized, you
pull these macho big-stud pilot antics. You think that turns a
woman on. You think women melt when they see a hardline test pilot
in uniform. Well, let me tell you something, General. I’ve met a
lot of pilots in this business, and every single one of them has
been an egotistical self-absorbed high-on-himself
asshole.”
Wentz chuckled.
“Then I’m glad I haven’t disappointed you, Colonel.”
“Boxcars One,
this is Romeo One. Do you read?”
“Roger,” Wentz
answered. “Is there a problem?”
“No problem,
Boxcars One. We just wanted to let you know that our planar-array
WLR confirms that you just set an official climb record for an
aircraft of your designated thrust-rating.”
“Roger, Romeo
One. Tell me something I don’t already know. Boxcars One, out.”
Wentz smiled. “See?” he miked back to Ashton. “I told
you.”
“I’m not
terribly impressed, General,” Ashton shot back. “And what’s with
the ‘Boxcars?’ Isn’t that a symbol of ill omen?”
“Sure,” Wentz
said. “Every time I land a plane, I expect to die, and I always
pick a call-sign that’s bad luck. Widow-maker, Plane Thirteen,
Lockheed Casket Company, stuff like that. When I flew the Aurora,
my call-sign was Dead Man One. It appeases the fates. It nullifies
bad luck by giving reverence to it—it’s pilot stuff. We call it The
Nix. If you don’t worship The Nix…you’re spam in a can. There won’t
be enough left of you for an E-2 crash technician to scrape out of
the cockpit with a spatula.”
“The Nix,
huh?”
“Yeah.”
Another coy
silence, then Ashton’s voice lowered. “You might need a lot more
than The Nix to save you now.”
“Think so?
We’ll see. I already told you, I’m not taking the mission, whatever
it is.”
Silence.
Then, “Oh,
you’ll take it, General,” Ashton said. “I guarantee you’ll take
it.”
Wentz laughed
out lout in his mask. “Keep dreaming, lady! I’m just here for the
stick time…”
««—»»
Fifteen minutes
later, Wentz keyed his mike. “We’re coming up.”
“All right,
General,” Ashton replied. “Slight change of destination. We’re not
really going to Nellis.”
“What? So where
are we going? Tasty-Freeze?”
“Proceed past
Nellis Main Runway 3 to Papoose Lake, seventy-five miles west,
southwest.”
Alarmed, Wentz
jerked his head around to look at her. “Papoose Lake? That’s a
priority no-fly perimeter! I can’t land there!”
Ashton passed
forward another plastic envelope. Wentz tore it open and removed a
card that read:
4B6: PILOT - (SI) TEKNA/BYMAN/ULTIMA
- COMMAND ORDER -
BYPASS AS INSTRUCTED.
Wentz just
shook his head, adjusting the pitch-trim. “Whatever you say, lady.”
He kept one eye on the E-scope, then he veered the stick and peeled
off toward the new coordinates. The spookshow
continues, he thought. Papoose was a lake that had dried up
hundreds of years ago, and since Wentz’s first day as a pilot, any
aerial passage over the ten-thousand-acre perimeter was strictly
prohibited by the FAA, the Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Air
Force Security Group Activity. No one knew why but it was easy to
guess. A dried-up lake? Thousands of acres of desert? Irradiated
waste disposal, or a chemical/biological dump, Wentz
presumed.
Below him, the
desert stretched endlessly, humped by ridges of sand dunes. “So
where am I going to land?” he asked Ashton. “On the sand
dunes?”
“There’s a
runway. You just can’t see it.”
“What?”
“Switch on your
inertial-navigation director and turn your automatic blue-flight
toggle to ‘alt.’ Set your heading to four-three-one, then activate
auto-pilot.”
Smirking, Wentz
did as instructed.
“Now turn on
your ECM jammer pod—”
“This is a
courier! There’s no ECM on this plane!” Wentz
barked.
“No, but
there’s something else connected to its console.”
Dismayed, Wentz
flipped up the ENABLE switch. Suddenly the sky-toe display snapped
on, and—
What the—
—the aircraft
began to descend, pivot, and maneuver for landing, all without
Wentz doing a thing. Of course, auto-landers existed but were
rarely used, and even when they were, it was always necessary for
the pilot to visually line up a computer mark with the landing
zone.
But, here,
there was no landing zone.
All Wentz could
see below him were the endless hillocks of
sand.
“It’s some kind
of a pulse-navaid, isn’t it?” Wentz asked. “It receives emissions
from a ground-based VOR and terrain-following radar, then feeds it
all into an onboard processor, right?”
“Do you see any
radar antennas or VOR dishes, General?”
Wentz strained
his eyes. He saw nothing but sand.
“Besides,”
Ashton added over the commo line, “a half-hour from now, you’re not
even going to care.”
“Still think
I’m taking the mission, huh?”
“Yes,
sir.”
Her
presumptuousness continued to amuse him to no end, but as the
plane’s altitude began to drop, Wentz’s concern rose. She’d said
something about a runway that couldn’t be seen. But where? The
dunes?
“Where are we
going anyway?”
“A base,”
Ashton answered.
Wentz stared
down. Only sand dunes.
“I don’t see
any damn base—”
Then the
landing gear began to lower on its own. The flaps dropped, and
power began to retard.
“Relax,
General,” Ashton said.
Wentz was not
relaxed. He began to fidget. After all these years, he’d forgotten
how to be afraid.
But now he was
remembering again.
When the
altimeter read ninety feet, he did something he hadn’t done in
decades: he panicked.
“Something’s
wrong! The INS must’ve blown its boards!”
“Relax,
General,” Ashton calmly repeated.
“We can’t land
in sand! I’m going to punch us out—”
“Do NOT eject!”
Ashton shouted. “The runway is camouflaged! Do NOT
eject!”
Camou— Wentz grit his teeth, staring at the desertscape
before him. The tires chirped when the plane touched down. Wentz
expected the nose to pitch; he expected an explosion and summary
death…
But the plane
landed normally in what appeared to be…sand.
Smooth as silk, he thought. “What, the runway—”
“The runway is
made of a sand-colored composite,” Ashton said.
“Yeah, but…you
can’t see it.”
“That’s the
idea.”
Power dwindled
to normal taxi speed.
“Disable your
ECM switch and take over,” Ashton instructed. “Taxi ahead at
zero-forward degrees and keep your eyes peeled for the ground
guide.”
Wentz felt
stupid, maladroit. Back at the controls, he peered ahead and
eventually spotted a man in sand-colored fatigues beckoning them
forward with his hands. “I can barely see the guy!”
“Yes, General,
and now it’s probably all starting to make some sense.”
A completely subterranean air base?
he wondered.
Impossible…
The ground
guide shoved out his palms—Stop—then made a cut-throat gesture. Wentz braked and shut
down the engines.
“What happens
now?” he complained to his passenger. “We go play in the dunes?
Build a big sand castle?”
The ground
began to shake beneath a deep sonorous hum. Wentz remained
dumbfounded. Then the ground beneath them, in a long rectangle,
began to lower.
A flight elevator, he realized. Like on a carrier, only this was in the
desert, part of the desert.
“An underground
site,” he said over his mike.
“Yep.
Impossible to detect. A lot of those sand dunes are hangar exits.
The base has twelve aircraft lifts, all virtually
invisible.”
Wentz had seen
a lot of military trickery in his time—rubber submarines in Groton,
Connecticut; “pseudopod” LF radar generators that cost $100,000,000
per unit; an entire communications complex in Lincoln, Nebraska,
whose sole purpose was to manufacture counterfeit radio traffic—but
this took it all. The elevator platform lowered the plane some
twenty feet, after which a taxi crew zipped forward from out of the
dark. Within thirty seconds, a Cushman electric goat pulled the
plane backward, then the elevator rose again and sealed shut.
Immediately afterward, another crew of men drove mobile vacuums
over the platform grid, sucking up sand.
“Now you see
the reason for the khaki paint job?” Ashton
asked.
But Wentz was
rocked. He popped the canopy, gazing out in questioning belief…or
disbelief.
An entire
installation beneath the earth. Wentz pulled off his flight helmet
and air-mask, disconnected his CVC lines. Unconsciously, he
unfastened his safety harness. His eyes felt sewn open as he looked
around.
Hooded lights
lit corridors of metal and cement which stretched further than he
could see.
Droves of Air
Force techs in white jumpsuits and white hardhats milled about like
ants each with a separate duty.
“Fuckin’-A,”
Wentz muttered.
“Come on,
General,” Ashton prodded. Techs pushed a wheeled ladder to the
cockpit. Wentz and Ashton climbed out and down.
“Group! Heads
up!” one of the rankless techs shouted. “Officers on the
floorwall!”
Another more
authoritative voice bellowed, “Snap to, shit-heads! This ain’t the
fuckin’ Army! This is the Air Force!
I want you turds standing
tall! Colonel Ashton’s
just brought a general
in here. Show him how it’s
done!”
“Group Level
One! Atteeeeeention!”
Heels snapped
in a single echoic CLAP! when the droves of white-suited “ants” came to
attention and offered perfect salutes. In similarly perfect unison
they shouted, “Good afternoon, sir!”
“What is this,
the boys’ fucking choir!” the voice belted out. “This man’s a hero!
He’s won medals! He’s risked his life for us! He was taking enemy
flak when you all were all playing grab-ass and jerking off in high
school! You will show him respect! Now sound off like you’re in the
Air Force, not the National Guard!”
“GOOD
AFTERNOON, SIR!”
The vocal
report resounded like a canon shot. Wentz tremored, lifted an inch
off his heels. He just stared at them all with his jaw
hanging.
“General?”
Ashton reminded.
“Oh…yeah.” He
and Ashton returned the salutes.
Wentz, in a
stunned moment, held the age-old military gesture. For as far as he
could see, men in white jumpsuits stood straight as chess pieces,
holding their salutes in dead silence.
“Sir?” Ashton
whispered. “Drop your salute and offer a counter
salutation.”Oh…yeah. Wentz dropped his right hand and droned, “Uh, carry on
men.”
“You heard the
General!” returned the bellow. “What the fuck is this, a Navy lunch
break? You gonna eat quiche with a napkin in your laps? You gonna
sip espresso and talk about art? Back to fuckin’ work, ladies,
or I’ll send you all out
into the fuckin’ desert and the last trace of
all your sorry asses will be little pieces of
fingernails in buzzard shit!”
Jeeze, Wentz thought. These guys are hardcore, they’re
worse than the Marines. The men instantly returned to their nameless
duties as a maintenance crew taxied the plane further away into a
service cove.
Wentz’s awe sat
on his shoulder like a pet parrot as he followed Ashton down what
appeared to be the main access passage for this veritable
underground terminal. Luminous taxi lanes branched out from various
angles, each ending at its own elevator
platform.
“Where are the
hangars?” Wentz asked
“Deeper, much
deeper.” Ashton’s flight boots clicked on a floor that looked like
seamless steel plate, painted glossy black. “Three of them, in
fact, are six hundred feet deep, built into layered bunkers that
will withstand a fifty-megaton subsurface detonation.”
“This place
must’ve cost billions.”
“Nintey-five
billion to be exact—”
Wentz gaped.
“That almost one-third of the annual defense budget!”
“This is all
black money, General. Uncle Sam has ways that would surprise you.
The facility consumes nearly ten billion a year just in maintenance
and operating costs. This is Level One, obviously the
surface-access level—this is just the top of the cake.”
“Experimental
aircraft is what we’re talking about here, right?”
“That’s right.
Things even you have never flown, sir. Mostly the newer variant
EM-Crafts.”
“EM-Crafts?”
Wentz grew mildly jealous. He thought he’d flown it all. “What the
hell is an EM—”
“Northrop makes
them in Pennsylvania. You’ve heard of rail guns?”
“Sure, but its
only theory.”
Ashton smiled.
“Don’t believe everything you read in
Popular
Science, General. We have operational SDI rail guns in
orbit right now.”
“Isn’t that,
like, an horrendous violation of the latest ABM treaty?”
“Yep. Anyway,
the EM-Craft is a rail gun in reverse. A graduated chain of
electromagnetic-pulse energy provides thrust for the plane. Top
speed is 7000 knots.”
“Get out of
here,” Wentz said. “Even the Aurora doesn’t go that
fast.”
Ashton smiled
at his objection. “General, compared to the aircraft in this
facility, the Aurora is a Sopwith Camel. We’ve got three different
nuclear ramjets, none of which you’ve flown, we’ve got F-18s refit
with liquid-oxygen-stream propulsion systems, and we’ve got a new
wingless stealth fighter—”
“Not wingless,”
Wentz interrupted, “you mean a flying wing, like the
B-2.”
“I
mean wingless, General. It’s
eleven meters long and looks like a black pencil. No wings, no
tail, no flaps. It’s a flying tube.”
Wentz was
getting ticked. “But that defies all the standard laws of
aeronautics!”
“No, it
doesn’t,” Ashton sniped back.
“Then how can
it possibly maneuver in the air?”
“Vector vents
in the rear, gyroscopes in the nose.”
Wentz didn’t
believe it, but then what else could he believe when he looked around at this immense
place? Suddenly, excitement pumped through him. EM-Crafts,
new-series ramjets, wingless fighter
prototypes?
“So that’s what they want me for,” Wentz presumed, following
Ashton to what appeared to be the end of the terminal. “To fly this
new stuff.”
“Nope,” Ashton
said.
“What do you
mean nope?”
Wentz complained. Her response sounded like an insult. “That weirdo
captain and crackpot old four-star back in Maryland just verified
that I’m the best pilot in the damn world. Why can’t
I fly this stuff?”
“You’re far too
valuable,” she oddly answered. “There are dozens of excellent
pilots here. The Air Force would be crazy to let a man of your
skill fly the planes we’ve got here.”
“Why?” Wentz
nearly whined.
“Too dangerous.
The planes here are highly experimental. This facility averages ten
pilot-deaths per year due to crashes. You only get to fly the
planes that have been perfected and deemed safe. The Air Force has
too much money and training time invested to let you die in a
crash.”
The comment
disheartened him. “So the initial pilots are fodder…until the
engineers can work out all the bugs.”
“It sounds
cold, but, yes. You don’t want to know how many pilots died in
Aurora prototypes before it could be improved enough to let you fly
the first official test runs.”
Wentz swallowed
dryly. I’m walking on men’s graves. Every time I got behind a new
stick…I was sitting in a ghost’s seat…
“I
wouldn’t dwell on it, sir,” Ashton offered. “Like General Rainier
said. It’s all about service, it’s all about duty. You were too
valuable to the country to risk in a plane that hadn’t been
sufficiently tested. That’s the bottom line.”
“Yeah, well I
don’t like the bottom line. The bottom line eats
sh—”
Two guards in
unmarked black fatigues stood before a shiny personnel elevator,
each brandishing M249 rifles with 200-round box drums. They eyed
Wentz coldly, then parted when they noticed Ashton. A disturbing
sign was mounted above the doors:
THIS ELEVATOR DE-POWERS
AT DEFCON ONE.
DO NOT USE IN THE EVENT OF FIRE
OR IMMINENT NUCLEAR
STRIKE.
The elevator
opened only after both sentries simultaneously inserted code cards
into slots and pressed their right index fingers on an optical
pad.
“This joint is
serious business,” Wentz remarked once inside the
elevator.
“Yes, it
is.”
“But how come
the guards didn’t ID me?”
“Because you’re
with me.”
Wentz took the
speculation further. “Well suppose I was holding you hostage,
suppose I had dynamite under my flight suit and I’d ordered you to
act normal or I’d set it off?”
“One of the
screws in that warning sign was actually a digital lens connected
to a cadmium thermograph. If it detected any heat fluctuations on
my face—distress—an alarm would’ve sounded.”
“What
then?”
“The guards
would’ve machine-gunned you without hesitation.”
“Like I said,”
Wentz repeated with raised brows. “This joint is serious business.”
Then he noted no floor-indicator on the elevator, no floor buttons.
“How do we know where we’re going?”
“It’s already
been preprogrammed, but for your information, we’re going to the
facility’s deepest level. I think you’ll like it: Level
Thirteen.”
Wentz praised
The Nix. “All right, Colonel, so what’s the rest of the scoop?
Papoose is a total fake? They always said it was a toxic waste dump
or something.”
“Yes, that’s
the cover story we planted years ago.”
“I learn
something new every day.” He stole a glance at her; she looked puny
in the flight suit, preposterously young. “Now tell me something
else. How’s a twenty-year-old manage to make full
colonel?”
“Very funny,
General. I’m twenty-nine, not that it’s any of your business. I’m
just an admin officer.”
Wentz couldn’t
help the chuckle. “Right, just an admin officer…with instant access
to a black test site and a security clearance higher than the
Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
The elevator
doors hissed open, leading them out into a white, antiseptic
corridor. “Ready to find out why you’re taking the mission?” Ashton
asked. She stopped next to a pair of white doors which read
DRESSING UNITS - MALE - FEMALE.
“I’m not taking
the mission,” Wentz assured her. “But I sure as shit want to find
out what it is.”
“Then get into
your fatigues and I’ll show you.” Ashton paused. “Oh, I almost
forgot.”
“What’s that?”
Wentz asked.
“Welcome to
Area S-4, sir.”