by Fritz Galt
He thought he could hear a Cuban salsa pulsating in the distance, or perhaps it was only his imagination. Could it be that the American soldiers and seamen were getting into the Cuban groove?
Certainly Lieutenant Colonel Rodriguez had overstepped his bounds, flirting with treasonous acts in a naval base that was meant as a showplace of military might.
But sometimes listening to the tunes of another country and listening to one’s inner voice amounted to the most patriotic acts possible. And Lord knows, Harry had thrown out the rulebook on the assignment and was winging it strictly on personal intuition.
The ferry ride back to the Leeward side of the bay was calm, as the earlier sea breeze had died down, leaving a moonlit crossing on gentle swells.
Sean Cooper was absorbed in his own thoughts for the entire trip, perhaps trying to cope with his radical change in fortune. Harry let him be. If they found and released his family, that would be an emotional milestone Harry was not even sure that he could take. And Harry didn’t even have a family.
As Rodriguez had promised, the leave papers were all in order and he found himself striding across the apron toward an elegant stingray of an aircraft. The B-2’s ground crew was just finishing its fueling and final inspection.
“You jump in,” Harry said. He wanted to check out the plane.
He walked around the sleek flying wing that seemed too aerodynamically unstable to fly, with its weight well aft of the center of lift. Indeed, it was able to keep airborne only by the constant juggling of wing surfaces by onboard computers. A human pilot could never get the thing off the ground.
Harry had to admire the bold shape of the black aircraft, a design that Jack Northrup had conceived of in the early 1940s. Northrup had even built some test planes employing the flying-wing concept. The sleek lines of the aircraft when viewed from the side derived from the fact that it was all curves, but not constant curves. In order not to reflect radar energy toward any one spot, each curve had a continuously changing radius. In fact, there was little distinction between wing and body, as the dorsal hump and engines rose like sand dunes out of the wing, and the belly was a gradual swell originating at the wingtips.
Harry had flown his fair share of B-2 simulator missions at flight school, and the entire process was ridiculously easy. Even easier than trying to fly the F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter jet. Pulling a pickup into traffic was a more difficult and hazardous maneuver than taking off in a B-2.
On the other hand, if things went wrong, there wasn’t much a pilot could do about it, with the exception of bailing out. And that was never fun.
Oh sure, he had flown simulations, but only the best pilots in the military were allowed to do what he was about to do. He ran his fingers over the radar-absorbing carbon-fiber composite skin, walked back and forth beneath the full fifty-two-meter wingspan and finally climbed up into her belly.
He found a nervous-looking co-pilot already standing with Sean in the cramped ten-foot by ten-foot cockpit.
“This civilian tells me you want to fly to China,” the co-pilot said, nervously fingering the helmet by his side.
Harry nodded. “That’s right. And you’re going to help me get there.”
“Not on your life,” the co-pilot croaked, apparently unaccustomed to asserting himself. “I’ll take her as far as Guam, but if you want to sneak her into Communist China, you’re on your own.”
“So you refuse to comply with Lieutenant Colonel Rodriguez’s orders?”
“He never told me that you intended to fly to China,” the man whined. He let his helmet slip from his agitated fingers. Looking around in a panic, he turned to leave.
Sean’s eyes looked pleadingly at Harry.
“Hey, buddy,” Harry said, grabbing the young pilot by his shoulders and turning him around. “You sit down and follow orders, or I’ll make you. Do I make myself clear?”
The man looked fearfully into Harry’s glowering eyes. “I won’t be held responsible—”
Harry slapped him across the face. The man cringed, blood draining rapidly from his face. Then his eyes rolled back and his knees buckled.
Harry caught his slumping form.
“Was that necessary?” Sean asked, visibly upset.
“What did I do?” Harry asked. “The guy fainted on me.” He began to drag the body toward the stairwell.
“You aren’t going to dump him on the tarmac!” Sean exclaimed in shock.
“Hardly. We’ll need him later. Grab that lounge chair, will you? And set it up out here.”
Sean did as he was told, squeezing past the two men and unfolding the chair that had been stowed on the flight deck. He pushed it into a tight position beside the staircase that was sealed inside the aircraft.
“Close quarters,” he commented.
Harry dropped the limp body onto the chair and closed the cabin door behind him.
“Will he get enough oxygen back there?” Sean asked.
Harry examined the seal around the cabin door. It was loosely fitted on its hinges, unlike the titanium-reinforced doors to the cockpits of commercial airliners. But, like commercial jets, the door was lockable from inside. He flipped the door latch in place, effectively imprisoning the unconscious man.
“He’ll get plenty of air to breath. And he’ll be far more comfortable than I will. He took my bed. Now put on your helmet.”
He stepped over the chemical toilet and pushed past Sean, who was trying to figure out how to fit his helmet over his head. Harry adjusted the padding for him and pounded it on his head. Then he lowered himself reverently beside Sean in the flight commander’s seat.
The CRT displays and amber readouts flickered with nervous energy. It was time to say goodbye to Guantánamo Bay.
He slipped on his helmet with its built-in microphone, earphones and Head-Up Display. He threw a salute to the ground crew and pressed the self-power switch.
Beneath him, the four General Electric engines rumbled to life.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a line of military vehicles barreling toward the tarmac.
Oh, my God. Either Rodriguez had double-crossed them, or the base commander was onto him. The blue lights flashed as they headed onto the airfield from the nearest gate. Harry’s ground crew was calling him off, the signalman motioning for him to turn off his engines.
Like hell he would.
“Hold on tight,” he said into his built-in mike. “We’re going for a ride.”
The multibillion-dollar Pentagon investment in state-of-the-art stealth swung under his gentle touch so that her nose pointed at a right angle to the first runway.
“Request permission to take off,” Harry said over the airwaves to the control tower.
“That would be a negative,” the reply came back. “Please return to your hangar.”
Harry boosted the turbo and felt himself flatten against the back of his seat. The longitudinal accelerometer recorded their rapidly increasing speed.
The trucks and troop carriers were angling toward him, threatening a runway incursion given his current course and velocity.
He extended the control surfaces to reduce speed and swerved the front wheel hard into the line of vehicles. The last blue light swirled under the nose of the jet, as Harry managed to weave his landing gear behind the moving obstacles.
The vehicles swerved in cascading order and pursued him in his new path. Harry headed for the next taxiway turnoff to the runway, some twenty-five yards from the normal threshold. He’d have to use every inch of runway left to get her in the air.
Not to let the aircraft lose momentum, he went to full throttle, felt himself thrown back against his seat, swung the aircraft onto the runway and eased her nose over the centerline of the strip.
Only two vehicles were still able to keep up with him. Heading for the far end of the field, they hoped to meet up with him and catch themselves in his wheels just at the moment of takeoff.
He jabbed in both afterburners and locked in the takeo
ff profile. If he could manhandle the yoke himself, he would pull up her nose before the approaching vehicles. But as she was designed, he had to rely on the Spirit of Kansas’s preprogrammed flight control system to execute the takeoff in its own deliberate way.
This was sheer madness. He could see the vehicles converging on him at far too sharp an angle. They would broadside him before he could get airborne. They were throwing their lives in his path in order to stop him. How could anything be worth paying the ultimate price?
He nudged the nose slightly to the portside, veering off the center of the runway. Perhaps he could angle behind the vehicles and still remain on the runway, taking off before he struck dirt and weeds.
They had the speed for liftoff, but the damn computer was taking its sweet time lowering the six elevons and beavertail assembly for lift. He couldn’t take her any closer to the edge of the runway without the rear wheels striking dirt. The two vehicles, one a Humvee and the other a pickup were straddling the two sides of the centerline. He couldn’t split the difference. The flying wing was about to take a nosedive into the grass.
The pickup suddenly began to fishtail. In an instant, Harry saw why. They were all about to ram into the fence at the end of the runway.
The truck’s rear wheels slid right, giving Harry just enough room to squeeze by on the left.
Did the computer realize that they were at the end of the airstrip? Even a weak takeoff might leave them crashing into the nearby range of mountains in Cuba. Wouldn’t a $2.1 billion B-2 Stealth Bomber be a prize for the Cubans!
Up, up, he tried to will the nose into the air. Both vehicles disappeared beneath his starboard wing, unable to screech to a halt before ramming into the chain link fence in a ball of fire.
A grinding sound came from the trailing edge of the flying wing. Slowly, the elevons began moving into position. And not a moment too soon. Grudgingly, the front landing gear released its grip on the tarmac. The nose popped up into the air.
Could the rear wheels get off the ground in time to clear the fence? Harry pressed the button to retract the landing gear, then sat back and watched with horrified fascination. More grumbled roaring of engines to either side of the aircraft. Undercarriage grinding their way up into the fuselage. Stealth, bah. This was the loudest rumbling, vibrating takeoff he had ever experienced.
They were sinking lower!
Then he caught smoke rising from behind the port wing. His eyes flashed to the console. No blinking red on the temperature indicators.
The flight surfaces pulled the aircraft higher. Finally, reluctantly, the rear wheels let go of the earth and the smoke instantly stopped.
He hadn’t even cleared the ground and he had retracted the landing gear! What a dope! The wing wasn’t on fire. Harry had steered off the runway and the rear wheels were kicking up dust!
He could no longer see the runway lights or the fence ahead, only the black sky above. The jet climbed steadily. There was no crash of debris in the rear.
They had broken free of Guantánamo, but the sheer sides of a mountain range loomed in the wraparound cockpit window. Harry had to take back control of the jet, the takeoff having cycled through its program.
He checked the afterburners. Still on full. Forcing the controls hard to port, he kicked the two drag rudders into a tight spinout midair. The jet didn’t like that, the wing shuddering under the maneuver.
But Harry didn’t want to be shot down by the Cubans, much less crash and burn in their mountains. The aerodynamically dubious craft sheered to the starboard, but found traction again and banked as necessary to brake the forward motion into Cuba.
Harry glanced beyond Sean out his starboard window. A long illuminated stretch of fence ran parallel to his flight path. He was flying on the American base’s border with Cuba. At any moment, anti-aircraft fire might spray up from either side below. He hugged the fence, trying to ease further back into the base. Then bam! The illuminated fence was gone.
Had he drifted into Cuban airspace? Where had the fence veered?
There were no ground lights on either side of the cockpit. He checked the bearing indicator projected inside his helmet. He was heading due south. Then he realized where he was.
He was over the Caribbean Sea. He had broken free.
He spoke into his helmet microphone, “Are you still with me, Sean?”
“Ugh,” came a weak response.
Harry smiled. Sean had survived. The rest of the flight would be a dream compared with the takeoff.
Just then he heard a knocking noise coming from behind him. Was there a loose part or some kind of mechanical glitch? He couldn’t identify the source of the sound and pulled off his helmet to hear better.
It was rhythmic, growing louder.
He checked his cockpit display. There were no emergency indicators flashing. Had he clipped one of the military vehicles that had given chase?
Then he heard a muffled cry. “Let me out of here!”
It was the hapless co-pilot in the stairwell. Harry smiled grimly as he donned his helmet once more. He would need the guy later to fly the bird out of China. Having the co-pilot take over for him when he grew tired during the long flight would be an asset, but given the man’s questionable attitude, he might pose a hazard on the flight deck.
“What was that?” Sean was asking over the helmet microphone.
“Just our passenger making a fuss.”
Sean sat back and looked out the windscreen contemplatively. “What if the military tries to shoot us down?” he asked, looking warily out the window at the moonlit sky.
“How can they see us?” Harry said. “We’re invisible to radar and infrared, difficult to detect by eye or ear and we leave reduced smoke and contrail. Besides, they wouldn’t begin to contemplate shooting down one of these babies, considering how expensive she is.”
“Unless they thought we were terrorists…”
Harry swallowed hard. That was a possibility. He didn’t want to think of what terrorists could accomplish with one of these birds.
He consulted his computerized world map and punched in a set of coordinates.
“We’re heading for Guam,” he said. “I suggest you sit back and try to relax.”
“Won’t they try to stop us in Guam, too?” Sean asked.
Harry closed his eyes. Of course they would. The military would be alerted and waiting to stop them the moment they landed at the naval base in Guam.
They were aloft with nowhere to land.
Chapter 31
Badger McGlade was a high-tech kind of guy. And any kind of high-tech kind of guy was bound to love Shanghai’s Magnetic Levitation train that zipped passengers from the far-flung Shanghai Pudong International Airport downtown in a mere seven minutes and twenty seconds.
He had three men and Carmen with him as he stepped onto the open train car and placed himself in one of the individual blue seats, much like a padded airplane seat.
Catching a magnetic wave, the train elevated a few inches and began a quiet, continuous forward acceleration. Soon they were racing alongside a highway. The train banked and he found himself looking straight down at cars and trucks that seemed to be standing still. He checked the speedometer on the wall. It wavered between 430 and 431 kilometers per hour and maintained that speed. Calculating swiftly in his mind, he yelled out, “Folks, we’re going 270 miles an hour!”
Zipping by at ground level, it felt like they were taking off and landing in an airplane, only faster and quieter.
After a few minutes of fields, canals, water towns and greenhouses, the modern skyline of Shanghai’s Pudong district came into sharp relief. Badger’s heart beat even faster. What a futuristic kind of place!
He led the others out of the Longyang Road Metro Station and took a short taxi ride to the riverfront in Pudong. There they alighted, surrounded by high-rise office buildings of every conceivable shape. Several looked like rocket ships attached to launch pad towers. Others had windows that reflected in diffe
rent colors and directions. One place resembled a pink needle not unlike the Eiffel Tower updated to the 21st Century.
Modern cars obeyed traffic laws and were dwarfed by the wide boulevards and immense skyscrapers. But Badger felt grandiose. He was walking through an entirely man-made environment that seemed to be the product of a single imagination.
He summoned the team around him. “Here’s where we earn our pay,” he said. From his briefcase, he pulled a photo of Merle Stevens and passed it around for the team to submit to memory. “Our mission is to find Stevens and get him to tell us where Sean Cooper’ family has been hidden away here in China.”
“What’s our plan of action?” a tall young man asked. Skilled in several Oriental languages at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Boris Vukic had been their resident translator.
“I’ll call the Consulate and set up a meeting with Merle,” Badger explained. “From that moment on, we’ll monitor his movements. So first, we have to get to the Consulate.”
He handed around pocket maps of Shanghai, each with the Consulate’s location marked with a red dot. He continued, “My hope is that he’ll meet me for lunch and we can question him there. Remember that he’s not likely to give us the information without some form of coercion. At this point, I’d stop at nothing to get him to spill the beans.”
The others nodded, like a team in a huddle.
“Now you wait here,” Badger said, “and I’ll make the call.”
He wandered away from the others and found a concrete bench on which to sit. He had done his preparation the night before and was armed with as much information as his contacts at the Agency could supply him. Briefly, Shanghai was on the vanguard of change in China. Its industry, infrastructure, policies and economy were on the cutting edge. Like the days of old, anything was possible in Shanghai, as long as one didn’t cross the line politically. So the American Consulate followed suit. Its mission was chiefly to foster change, openness and strong interrelations between Chinese and American institutions such as businesses, universities and the like.
