by T I WADE
“A U.S. Air Force F-16 was hit by a ground-to-air missile a few seconds after take-off from the airfield. A BBC reporter believes that the pilot ejected before the aircraft exploded in midair.”
“One of the most advanced drone aircraft was hit and captured by the Taliban today in northern Pakistan. An American airbase in Afghanistan was attacked by ground missiles early this evening, killing a number of American Marines. Casualty numbers have not yet come out of the Pentagon… the weather looks cold and below normal for Christmas, and Chris, it looks like most of the country could have a white Christmas this year?”
Martie took a quick look as Chris, the weatherman came on smiling, and she watched the long-term weather forecast and then switched off the television.
“Enough good news for one night,” she told Oliver as she got up to take her plate to the kitchen. She put the leftovers in his bowl and loaded the dishwasher. “Good news from the kitchen department, Oliver. I think you had better like corned beef. You could be getting a lot of it soon.”
“Are you crazy?” Martie asked Joe as he drove in early the next morning in one of his rat patrol jeeps. She did not have time for any more words and her mouth hung open as a fully armored tank-type vehicle drove around the corner and into sight.
“Hi. Martie, my love,” shouted Joe as he pulled up next to her. “Don’t worry, that’s my new buddy Israeli David in a Ferret coming to meet Preston. Is he around?” Martie quickly regained her composure and looked Joe straight in the eyes with her hands on her hips menacingly.
“Thanks to you Joe, he nearly died of alcohol poisoning last night. He’s just gotten in the shower and now I’m late for work, also thanks to you.”
“I suppose you had to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to keep him alive,” Joe laughed. “If you get tired of him, my farm is next door.”
“Oh, shut up, you redneck!” Martie laughed back. “Preston will be out in a minute. Oh, my Grandpa said to tell you that he’s looking forward to chatting with you again over Christmas. He wants a ride in one of your jeeps!” Martie smiled as she got into her car, started the engine, and drove around the armored car waving goodbye.
Nobody was allowed to look inside the hangar without Preston’s permission, and the large door was closed anyway, so Joe and David sat in the jeep sipping coffee while they waited for Preston to emerge. Joe gave him ten minutes and then honked his honk as he always did when driving up to the house.
A hung-over Preston emerged from the house, cup of coffee in hand, with Oliver trotting briskly next to him and barking at the visitors.
“Place stinks of corned beef,” moaned Preston to Joe as he walked up. “I can’t stand the stuff! Martie must have cooked some for dinner last night.”
“Hey Preston, this is David—the guy from Israel I told you about.” Preston focused further than Joe’s face, looked at the second man in the front seat, and then his gaze saw the armored car.
“Nice to meet you, David!” he stated, shaking his hand. “I believe an Israeli version, .30-caliber machine gun turret, completely armored top and possible rocket launchers, no?” asked Preston. “How did you get it here? You can’t just drive this thing down NC64 in the right-hand lane!”
“Shalom Preston! I’ve heard a few things about you and your P-38 Lightning. I’ve been dying to get a look at her. My father flew one during and after the war. He died several years ago and I still have a photo of him standing next to his aircraft in Tel Aviv in 1951, I think.”
David motioned to the armored car. “And yes, this is my favorite. Joe told you I have two of them in perfect working order. The rebuilds took me ten years and I have had them under wraps in a large barn in Raleigh for the last several years working on them. They are both British-made Mark 2 Ferret armored cars. I have a trailer and Joe came over yesterday with a tractor and brought them on the trailer over to his farm. I had tarps over them and nobody really gave us a second glance. I was not allowed to bring the rocket launchers into the United States,” explained David.
“Joe said that you had lots of other stuff?” Preston asked.
“That’s right. I’ve always been a collector of World War II machinery, as well as more recent stuff. I just finished a Saracen—a British-made armored troop carrier I purchased from an auction in Israel a couple of years ago. It, too, uses .30-caliber rounds and I started searching for ammo just recently to test it. I did not want to cause any ripples here locally, so I went up to a gun show just outside Richmond to find some. That’s where I met Joe’s brother and he guided me to Joe. I also collect army radios and have a dozen or so working units that were pretty modern stuff in Vietnam.”
David looked around the airfield and spied Preston’s radio tower. It was atop what Preston called his control tower—a 50-foot forest ranger tower he had purchased many years ago and rebuilt. He called it his air control tower, but it had little use apart from a large spider-looking antenna system that spanned another 30 feet above the tower. “State-wide reception with that aerial?” asked David.
“I have a second aerial on a 250-foot radio tower about 20 miles north of Chapel Hill,” replied Preston, beckoning them to follow him to the hangar. “I have a friend in the national communications business and got the OK to mount another one on the top of that. We have several friends around the country we can talk to and my friend got aerials placed on several cell phone towers across the United States, all powered by solar panels. We needed two to talk to New York and several more to get West Coast communications, and he managed to get permission.”
They toured the hangar for an hour and David impressed Preston. He had been in the Israeli armed forces for several years and knew his stuff.
“David and I have ordered more .30-caliber ammo,” mentioned Joe as they left the hangar. “I hope to store another 10,000 rounds when it arrives later this week.”
“Don’t you have any ammunition?” asked David. “You have 12 beautiful machine guns in there and all are .50-caliber.”
David whistled when Preston opened the door to the old barn on the other side of the runway and pulled one of the tarpaulins off the stored ammunition pallets. “You have the Hispano operational as well?” asked David.
“Between Joe, Martie and I, the U.S. government would have a nervous breakdown if they saw what we have,” nodded Preston. “And now it looks like you are involved, and we have to be a little careful.” Both Joe and David got serious for a few seconds and nodded their heads. “I certainly don’t want anybody else to know what we have here. There are lots of weirdoes out there—civilian, military and others. Even I’m getting a little worried.”
“You have my word,” pledged David.
“And mine,” added Joe.
Preston invited David to the fly-in and told him to bring whatever he wanted to transport. He could store them at Joe’s house, or even better, bring everything over to show off when all the aircraft came in. It would be quite a show. Joe agreed and laughed, knowing what Martie’s grandfather would say.
By the end of the first week in December, Preston and Martie had gone through their long lists of things to do, and the airfield was ready for the fly-in, which was only two weeks away.
***
The Smart family was certainly not prepared for Christmas. Maggie was not speaking to her husband because he refused to join the fly-in, and she had even offered to buy him a return ticket on Southwest for him and the kids, who looked pale when she asked them to fly commercial instead of with her. He was ruining their Christmas vacation plans, and the Smarts would be the only ones not there. Maggie was very close to leaving him at home and taking the kids to North Carolina without him. She was furious, but she loved him, knew about his fear of flying, and fought within herself to try and understand him.
The kids were just as unhappy, but the neighbors were planning to have a big New Year’s Eve party and the whole community of six houses, now all under self-powered electrical systems thanks to the Smart children, was hoping t
he Smarts would stay and join in the festivities. Tons of food and drink had been purchased by the neighbors for the event and Will used this as justification for not going to North Carolina. The seven homes in this rural area covered 30 acres, and apart from a similar group of houses more than a mile away, there weren’t many other occupants in Antelope Acres for several miles. The demise of the building industry in 2010 had stopped any new construction, and even though they were within a hundred miles of the L.A. beaches, it felt more desolate than in areas of Arizona. Everyone loved the peace and serenity at Antelope Acres.
***
Buck McKinnon was busy. In addition to his new love life and teaching Barbara how to fly Baby Huey, he was hard at work in downtown Manhattan, getting the year’s work up-to-date before he left for North Carolina. Barbara was a natural at flying and was about to get her helicopter license. Buck had suggested she fly Baby Huey for the fly-in, and she had worked hard on her new skills.
As usual, the days were short at this time of year and already snow was on the ground. Buck had prepared Lady Dandy for the flight and her exterior and interior were clean and ready to show off. Baby Huey had been thoroughly inspected and her engine serviced and ready for the trip south.
Lady Dandy’s original owner, Bob Martin, had had a stroke a few months ago and Buck had gone to see him in Denver. Bob had looked a little rough around the edges, but told him to enjoy the DC-3 while he was recuperating. He asked Buck to look after the DC-3 and keep it in Long Island if he wanted to. Buck could rent space for it for a couple of months keep her on Long Island, fly down to North Carolina for the fly-in, and then return her to Denver. The doctor had suggested to Bob that he not fly any airplanes for at least a year.
***
Carlos Rodríguez was also busy. He had his P-51 at Hill Air Force Base and wanted to service her and have her ready for the 1,800 mile flight to Preston’s airfield. He had permanent extra tanks, called drop-tanks, fitted underneath the wings, but still could not make the entire flight nonstop. Carlos had done the trip several times and found that refueling in Denver was the best way to get across. The first short flight to Denver was just over an hour and he loved this part—flying over the Rockies. Then, in Denver, he would ask the fueling attendant to fill the tanks to the brim, which would give him enough to get into Preston’s field around four hours and 25 minutes after taking off. It was a 1,450 mile flight at a normal cruise speed of 325 miles an hour at 20,000 feet, and he usually had a tail wind going east that could cut down his flight time to four hours dead. Of course, on the way back his longest flight back to Denver had been five hours and on that trip he was down to reserves on fuel.
He had much to do at the NASA observatory before his two-week vacation. There were only three other astronomers stationed at the classified Air Force and NASA observatory in the mountains 20 miles east of Salt Lake City, and it seemed like nobody was expecting to be around for the year end. He wasn’t in charge at the observatory. He still worked for the United States Air Force in a civilian capacity.
He was about to finish his second Ph.D., and had worked hard throughout the year on his papers. He still didn’t know which direction to take once he was done, and he could leave the Air Force at any moment he wished. General Pete Allen, his father’s friend and now his, was Commander of all the Air Force bases and could be Air Force Chief very soon. The General had put Carlos with a team of scientists and they had looked at possible communication possibilities, always using the satellites in space as the main way to get communications anywhere instantaneously. His team had been working on lasers as a form of message delivery, as well as bouncing messages across the solar system. He had tried bouncing messages off the moon, the planets, and even the stars with no luck, but one thing had worked by mistake. He had found an old satellite that must have been demobilized a couple of decades ago high above the United States and bounced a laser signal off into space—not the way he had wanted to go, but for some reason he had received a response from the no-name space craft still in space. He must have hit something with his beam, because the simple DOS computer aboard seemed to buzz awake, giving its name, or its “pseudo random noise (PRN) number,” to Carlos. “USAF Block 1 Navistar P” came up on his screen, and it asked if it should activate itself. He replied no and the satellite went back to sleep. It was weird, and he checked the logs but could not find any information on this satellite ever being there.
For a couple of days, he did some study on the Navistar satellites. Most knew them as the satellites people use with their GPS systems worldwide. The first 11, Block 1 they were called, all went up over a four-to-six year period, and all were still active and had few problems. The more recent ones, Block 2, were more widely used. Deactivating and sending the older ones deep into space or bringing them down to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere had been discussed since early 2011.
Carlos asked General Allen about it, and the General came back a day later saying that it was still pretty classified, but they had lost contact with the prototype satellite in early 1990 and had given up on it as being destroyed. For Carlos, the satellite was not important—there were tons of debris up there, and he logged the information on his daily recording pad and forgot about it.
* * *
Sally Powers was flying. She was always flying these days because her F-16 flight training was in its last week. She was with five others of her wing practicing formation flying at altitude. The six F-16s were 50 miles out to sea, west of San Diego, and their radar controller was watching their formation flying. It had been a grueling week and this was her second-to-last training flight with two scheduled refueling appointments over Hawaii. Her wing of F-16 recruits had worked hard for the past seven months. They had started with 12 recruits but six had left for various reasons and they were down to six. This flight was a long one. They did not have drop tanks and the main training in this flight was mid-air refueling. It took organization to refuel six aircraft, one at a time—hooking-up, getting fed the fuel, and then dropping back into formation.
They had taken off from Yuma with little fuel, but heavy with dummy bombs and rockets, and needed refueling when they arrived over the coast ten minutes later. One-by-one, they hitched themselves up behind the Boeing 707 Air Force tanker. Sally was second in line and the hardest part of the refueling would be getting her exact speed to two miles per hour faster than the approaching boom 20 feet below the forward aircraft and then bonding her aircraft to the mother ship. It was the most exciting and demanding flying she had ever done.
This refueling schedule was completed more quickly than normal because the six aircraft only received enough jet fuel for two hours of cruise time at 50,000 feet.
The flight was just over 2,600 miles, and their aircraft would only need refueling once if they had drop tanks attached, but they didn’t and 90 minutes later, cruising at a little under 700 miles an hour, they slowed as the radar blip of the second tanker out of Hawaii showed up a hundred miles in front of them. Again, refueling took less than 40 minutes for all six aircraft, and by the time they left the tanker far behind them, they only had another hour of flight time to the islands. They stayed overnight and did the exact same routine back to Vincent Air Force Base.
Sally got a shock when she climbed out of her F-16, wiped her brow, and noticed an Air Force car close by. Her flight commander walked up and asked her to get into the rear seat. She was being given a ride back to the OPS room. The commander took her helmet, something that was not normally done after a flight, and told her that her visitor was important enough to break protocol. She did as she was told and slid into the rear seat of the Ford.
“Good afternoon, Captain Powers,” stated the four-star general from the rear seat next to her. “I’m General Pete Allen. I’m sorry to interrupt your training and I’ll keep this short and sweet. I remember being pretty tired when I did refueling training back and forth to Hawaii. I did it in F-4s many years ago.”
Sally was surprised to see who was in t
he vehicle with her, but she held her tongue as she waited to hear what he had to say.
“My job in the Air Force is to make sure all the bases run according to Air Force protocol, and I was coming today to do an inspection at Vincent,” continued the general. “Yesterday, on my way here, I stayed in Salt Lake City. Hill Air Force Base is commandeered by a good friend of mine, Colonel Peter Wilkes. Colonel Wilkes and I go back as far as high school together. Another old friend of mine joined us—a friend of yours I found out—and he wanted me to give you a ‘hello’ when he found out I was coming down here today.”
“It could only be Carlos Rodriquez, sir,” answered Sally. “I knew he had family friends in high places, but I didn’t realize it included four-star generals.” General Allen laughed.
“His father is a good friend of mine and Carlos has done some extremely good work for the Air Force. He sort of hinted to me that he would really like it if you could transfer to Hill after your training. It wasn’t too hard a mission to complete, since Hill does need a few new pilots, and I thought of suggesting the transfer myself. Captain, I am just the messenger and Carlos put me up to this, so don’t shoot the messenger.”
“May I assume, sir, that I have time to think it over?” Sally asked.
“The rest of your career,” laughed the General. “But I looked at your flight record late last night, and we need you and your wing person, Captain Jennifer Watkins, for a flight mission over Christmas sometime. You both transferred from C-130s and at Hill we have two old girls who need transfers. Both have just been repainted in their original colors with the 314th Troop Carrier Wing insignia. They are the two oldest C-130s the Air Force has and they go back all the way to the beginning in 1956. They are nicknamed ‘Tom’ and ‘Jerry,’ and I trained on Jerry in the early 1960s. Both are being mothballed and put on display, one at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, and the other at Pope Field, just down the road from Seymour at Fort Bragg. We are extremely short on pilots and I would like you two to complete the transfer for me. Carlos told me that you were heading that way anyway and I will get authorization for you to fly the girls—one pilot per aircraft instead of the mandatory two.”
