Operator B Page 6

  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.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Dressed in white fatigues, Wentz and Ashton stood in an empty darkened warehouse hundreds of feet long.

  “Area S-4, huh?” Wentz commented. “What’s it stand for.”

  “Just a designation. It’s actually a federal land grid. And there’s no tagline for this facility—no Groom, no Dreamland, no Skunkworks. ”

  Wentz looked down at his attire, frowning. “Well, so far I’m impressed, but I’m not exactly digging the white fatigues. Makes me feel like a house painter. And what are we just standing around for?”

  “We’re waiting for someone…”

  Hard footsteps clapped in the distance, growing closer. Who’s this dweeb? Wentz wondered. He looks like Wally Cleaver.

  A young collegiate-looking officer eventually appeared, wearing an Air Force Class-A uniform and major’s blossoms. No name plate.