Alpha Kat

by William H. Lovejoy

  Kimball was getting anxious.

  “You mind if we take a look at the radar, General?”

  “Not at all.”

  Haraz came out of his chair as if he’d been waiting for the excuse, determined to have Kimball make the request.

  The crowd made way for them and they stood near the set and watched.

  The sweep left eleven blips behind as it rotated. Ten blips in two flights were closing on a single target, some thirty miles to the northeast.

  “General Haraz,” McEntire said, “your defenders are concentrating on the AWACS. You don’t want them to forget there are six more aggressors out there.”

  “Whose side are you on?” Kimball asked him.

  The general smiled, spoke to the colonel, and some message went out to the fighter pilots.

  Almost immediately, the blips on the screen began to separate.

  “They’re setting up a search pattern,” McEntire observed.

  Then the target blip disappeared as Connie Billingsly stopped radiating emissions.

  The Mirages circled, climbed, dove. The screen looked like a random kaleidoscope.

  It remained empty of all but scrambling Mirages for nearly four minutes.

  Abruptly, without warning, a heavy thump sounded out in the desert ahead of them.

  Everyone whirled toward it.

  Another thump.

  “Bet that truck’s got a dented hood,” McEntire said. “Those five hundred pound dummies don’t make a lot of noise, but they make a big dent.”

  Thump.

  Thump, thump.

  And then, like bats from a darkened cave, the Alpha Kats shot overhead in trail, one after the other, at less than three hundred feet. They were throttled back, almost silent, and they were just shadows against the stars as they went by.

  Almost everyone under the canopy scrambled outside to get a better look, Haraz included.

  But they were gone.

  All five of them.

  Five thumps, five shadows.

  Kimball swore under his breath and raised the portable radio to call Soames, but McEntire grabbed his arm.

  “Let it be for now, Kim.”

  Eleven

  Hanging around at the demonstration site rasped heavily on Kimball’s nerves, even after Soames radioed the message that the aircraft had been recovered and that the Alpha Kat pilots were claiming four Mirage kills. Out of earshot of their hosts, Sam Eddy kept telling him that, if some tragedy had occurred, Soames would have called it in.

  Kimball wasn’t so sure. The frequency used by the portable radio wasn’t secure, and A.J. might not have wanted to broadcast an accident to the world.

  His mind kept replaying five shadows when there should have been six.

  Kimball’s fingers worried at the transmit stud on the radio, but he managed to restrain himself as they loaded aboard the trucks and drove out to the target.

  Two of the dummy bombs had missed the target by fifteen or twenty yards, but three of the five-hundred-pounders had nearly obliterated the sheet metal of the junked bus.

  The two Americans followed General Haraz around to the SAM units and listened to the interrogations of the crews without understanding a word. It was clear to Kimball, however, that none of the SAM radars had ever detected an intruder.

  The Mirage pilots reporting in by radio insisted that none of them had been shot down, but none of them would claim a kill of an Alpha Kat. For any one of them to do so, they would have had to identify the symbol emplaced on each of the Alpha Kats with white tape: cross, diamond, circle, square, rectangle, or octagon.

  After an hour of collecting information, General Haraz said, “I think we have most of what we need, Mr. Kimball. We shall go back now, and then debrief in the morning.”

  “That’ll be fine with us, General. We’re looking forward to it.”

  The helicopter ride back to N’Djamena took forever, and the Aerospatiale landed next to the headquarters building at eleven o’clock.

  As soon as they deplaned and performed their glad-handing with the dignitaries, Kimball and McEntire began the long walk back to their ramp. Except for a few floodlights near the hangars, it was dark, and neither of them had anything to say to the other. Kimball figured Sam Eddy was just as worried as he was.

  Closing on the aircraft park, Kimball counted the silhouettes in the front row. There were only five.

  The Kappa Kat was lined up next to the Starlifters, and there seemed to be a lot of light emitting from the space between the C-141s, but his view was blocked.

  McEntire stopped to squat down.

  “We’ve got six,” he said. The relief in his voice was evident.

  Kimball bent over and looked. Sighting beneath the Kappa Kat and the first Starlifter, he saw the tires and oleo struts of the sixth fighter.

  They both stood up and started to trot.

  Light spilled from the cargo bays of both transports, illuminating the lowered ramps. Quite a few men seemed to be moving around the planes.

  As he rounded the Kappa Kat, Kimball saw that the sixth Alpha Kat was parked between the two C-141s, enclosed by canvas windscreens stretched on ten-foot-tall aluminum frames. Seven floodlights were mounted on top of the frames, lighting the enclosed space.

  He slowed to a walk and slipped through a gap into the makeshift work area.

  The entire aft fuselage skin had been removed from the Alpha Kat, and at the moment he entered, the massive turbofan engine was being lifted from its mounts by the portable crane. The crane’s engine groaned with the load; it hadn’t been designed for lifting that amount of weight. Four men stood on the back end of the crane’s squat body, attempting to keep it from tipping over. It had four small tires, and the two front tires appeared to be almost squashed flat.

  Everyone had turned out to help. Technicians and pilots both were manning tools and diagnostic equipment. Three men stood on top of the wing, guiding the engine as it rose from its bed.

  Tex Brabham was standing next to the crane, helping the operator, Elliot Stott, with a long series of colorful and innovative invectives.

  A.J. Soames spotted him, slapped Tom Keeper on the arm, and led him over to Kimball and McEntire. Keeper was limping a little. He had an arthritic knee, which was why the Navy medicos had suggested another line of work for him.

  “What the hell, A.J.?”

  Keeper responded. “She cranked up just fine, Kim. But when I ran it up to full power, I got a hell of a vibration, so I shut it down right away.”

  The ex-Navy aviator was also an aeronautics engineer, and he had completed a duty tour at the Patuxent Naval Air Test Center. His “hell of a vibration” was magnified by his sensitivity to potential design or operational problems.

  “I only sent five on the mission,” Soames said. “And I didn’t want to broadcast the fact that we had a malfunction.”

  “I think it’s okay,” Sam Eddy said. “We never told them how many we were sending. If they couldn’t see them, they couldn’t count them.”

  Kimball was both relieved and concerned. He didn’t want to hide problems if it meant the safety of a pilot. If a fighter had gone down on the mission, he wanted rescue units dispatched as soon as possible.

  Soames read his mind. “If somebody’d plowed ground, Kim, you’d have heard my yell without the radio.”

  “All right, good. I should know that. What’s with the engine?”

  “The end of one turbine blade snapped off,” Soames said. “There wasn’t a hell of a lot of vibration, but I’m damned glad Tom caught it. In the air, at Mach One, the whole unit might have started coming apart.”

  “Shit!” McEntire said. “It can’t happen.”

  He headed for Tex Brabham.

  The turbine fan assembly was McEntire’s design. Kimball knew how he felt.

  “What do you think, A.J.?” he asked.

  “I’ve been hassling with the alternatives, Kim. If it’s a design flaw, we don’t have a choice but to ground the airplanes.
Right in the middle of the demo tour, that’ll kill us.”

  “It won’t be a design problem,” Kimball said with conviction. “How about a casting flaw?”

  “Yeah, that’s my best scenario. We’ve got nine engines with us, counting the spare. There’s always that slim chance that one of the nine got a bad set of blades.”

  “Jesus! We checked and double-checked everything,” Kimball said.

  One of the canvas panels was lifted and shunted aside, and eight men shoved the dolly with the spare engine inside the enclosure.

  “We put the windscreens up to protect us from prying eyes more than anything,” Soames said. “As far as anyone out in that desert knows, we’re running routine maintenance.”

  The engine at the end of the crane’s cables came free of the airframe mounts, the airplane rose on its oleo struts, and the crane backed the turbofan away from between the rudders. Brabham barked orders. Mechanics scrambled to place four-by-fours on the ground to receive the engine as the crane’s boom swung to the side.

  “Tex is going to disassemble it as soon as we can get it aboard the Starlifter,” Keeper said. “Warren’s in there now, setting up the portable X-ray unit.”

  “Do we even want to install the new engine?” Kimball asked. “At least, until we know?”

  “Tex thinks so,” Soames said, “for two reasons. He needs the dolly for the bad engine, and he’s like you. He doesn’t think it’s a design flaw.”

  It took nearly an hour to get the new engine settled correctly into the mounts and bolted in place. While a dozen men swarmed over the plane, connecting wire bundles, fuel lines, and control systems, Kimball and McEntire helped Brabham raise the damaged engine from the timbers with the crane and get it on the dolly. It took sixteen of them to shove it far enough onto the ramp of the transport so that the ramp could be raised and the engine slid into the cargo bay.

  It was nearly four in the morning before Brabham had the turbine wheel out of the engine casing and X-ray photos of the offending blade printed.

  Kimball, McEntire and two mechanics stood around a worktable while Brabham went over the photo with a magnifying glass. All of them knew better than to interfere with the expert when he was at work.

  He finally stood up straight and stretched his back. He shoved his cowboy hat back on his head.

  “Not our fault,” he said.

  McEntire grabbed the magnifying glass and bent over the photograph.

  “No flaw marks at all in the casting,” Brabham went on. “Take a close look at the break, Sam Eddy, near the right-side outer edge of the blade. There’s a chip there, kind of rounded. Then, too, the break is too jagged. A flaw would likely have broken along cleaner lines.”

  McEntire handed the magnifying glass to Kimball, and he took his own look.

  “Couldn’t have picked up a rock,” McEntire said.

  “A rock wouldn’t have had the velocity,” Kimball agreed. “The fragment wasn’t in the engine?”

  “Naw, it’d have gone right out the back, the minute the turbine started to turn. The magnets — which attracted metal shavings and dust to provide evidence of bearing wear — didn’t have much on them, and certainly wouldn’t have caught a rock. We’re not going to find it in the dark.”

  “When it started to turn … you’re right, Tex!” Kimball said.

  McEntire whipped the magnifying glass out of Kimball’s hand and bent over the photo again.

  “Son of a bitch!” he said.

  “If that engine had been turning,” Brabham said, “three or four blades would show some damage. That blade there got hit when it was stationary.”

  No one wanted to say anything for a while. Kimball crossed to a canvas seat and sat down. One of the mechanics, Mark Westergood, turned the tap on an iced water vat and filled a paper cup.

  “Bullet?” McEntire finally asked.

  “Heavy slug, I’d say,” Brabham said.

  “That’s sabotage,” Kimball told them. “That’s damned scary.”

  The cargo bay lights suddenly seemed too bright. Kimball looked out the back of the plane, but saw only the line of Alpha Kats and the lights of the passenger terminal on the far side of the lighted runways.

  McEntire turned around and leaned against the worktable.

  “Okay, boss man, where do we go from here?”

  “Tex?” Kimball asked.

  “We’ve got a couple spare turbine wheels with us. Mark and Darrell, here, are going to get one of them and rebuild this engine so we’ve got a spare. They’re also going to make damned sure that slug didn’t cause any damage to the casing. Me, I’m going outside and keep a close watch on the heavy-handed people out there while they put two-seven back together right. I want the fuselage back in place before daylight so the Chadians don’t know we’ve done a full engine swap. Then, we’ll need a couple, three hours to run it in. I don’t know what you guys are going to do.”

  Kimball rubbed his fingers over the whiskers on his jaw. “Sam Eddy and I have a debriefing at nine. We’ll go back to the hotel and get cleaned up.”

  “And get a couple hours sleep,” McEntire said. “Our audience will expect cheery.”

  “And ship about thirty breakfasts out to us,” Brabham said. “I’m not eating MREs.”

  “And call Mr. Washington,” Sam Eddy said. “Right?”

  “Right,” Kimball told him.

  *

  Jimmy Gander kept thinking of the word, “broast.”

  He didn’t know what it meant, though he thought he recalled seeing “broasted chicken” on a menu once.

  He thought he was being broasted.

  Slowly, to retain the flavor.

  The heat rose off the tarmac in waves that made him think his vision had gone bad. Carl Dent had measured the temperature in the Kappa Kat’s cockpit at noon and had reported a dysfunctional thermometer or an actual reading of 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

  A passenger airliner had taken off forty minutes before, but that was the only activity he had seen. No one was moving around on the ramp or in the planes.

  Gander was sprawled on top of a couple of parachutes, leaning back against a missile crate. Tex Brabham was next to him, his hat tilted over his eyes, sound asleep. He snored like an underpowered McCullough chain saw attacking a giant redwood. Gander and Brabham stuck together since they were the only two who wore, and respected, Stetson hats.

  The temperature inside the cargo bay of the transport was well over 110, and movement from one point to another was akin to heavy exercise. About half of the crew were curled into one corner or another, trying to sleep, but only Brabham seemed to be having any success. Added to the aromas of Cosmoline and lubricants was the body odor of the great unwashed.

  Jay Halek was on his fourth unlit cigar of the day, rolling it back and forth in his teeth. Mel Vrdlicka had a water-soaked rag draped over his eyes. Conrad Billingsly had suggested a game of bridge and had been speared with pears and Mandarin oranges left over from breakfast.

  Outside, the Alpha Kats were ready to go. They were “clean,” the dummy missiles not used the night before removed and repacked. Chunks of white canvas were draped from the opened canopies in the attempt to keep the cockpits cool. Or at least cooler. Two-seven had been ground-tested for several hours in the early morning, and Brabham had declared it one hundred percent operational.

  Gander heard a car pull up next to the plane, but he didn’t have the ambition to get up and go see who it was. No one else did, either. If it was a terrorist, they were all going to be blown to hell.

  A car door slammed, the engine revved up, and then died away as it drove off. A minute later, Soames climbed the ramp into the bay.

  “I want to know,” Soames said soberly, “who it was that forgot to bring the fans.”

  “Who needs fans?” Speedy Contrarez asked. “I was dreaming of this very tall bottle of Carta Blanca. It’s so cold that the beads of moisture on the outside have turned to ice. You pick it up and —”

  �
��Jesus Christ! Shut him up, Papa,” Alex Hamilton said.

  “You’re dreaming of donuts, right, Alex?”

  “No, but it’s a good thought.”

  “Kim and Sam Eddy aren’t back yet?” Soames asked.

  “Not yet,” Gander said, trying to sit up without disturbing Brabham.

  He got off the parachutes and went to get himself a cup of iced tea, When Soames raised a finger, he filled two from the vat and carried one over to where Soames had collapsed on a canvas seat.

  “You get us checked out of the hotel, A.J.?”

  “Yeah. Probably maxed out the company Visa card. I didn’t check the rooms, so if anyone left anything behind, he can come back and get it on his own.”

  Gander took a small sip of his tea and held the cool liquid in his mouth for a minute. He felt like he was dehydrating rapidly.

  “How come this seems so much like the USAF?” Hamilton asked.

  “Hurry up and wait. Get in line. Wait.”

  “We wanted you to feel at home, compadre,” Contrarez told him.

  Gander was about to sit down next to Soames when he heard more car doors slamming. Kimball and McEntire walked up the ramp, and Sam Eddy headed straight for the water can.

  Soames asked, “Well, Kim?”

  “Seemed to go all right, A.J. They kept us for about three more hours than we’d figured on. Lots of questions, and lots of them were good ones. I think we handled it.”

  “They’re interested?”

  “Interested!” McEntire said. “They were drooling. Or maybe it was just the heat.”

  “We ran our tapes, and we listened to a few of the audio tapes from the Mirages,” Kimball said. “Not that we understood the language, mind you. But I think we reached consensus on the fact that no Alpha Kat was spotted. We agreed that at least two Mirages would have been our trophies.”

  “They had some gun camera video,” McEntire said. “But there was never a target on the film.”

  “They ever get close to the Kappa Kat?” Soames asked.

  “They swear they did, but they don’t have video, audio, or a visual sighting of the taped double cross symbol to prove it.”

  “So they’re going to buy five squadrons?” Gander asked.