by Dale Brown
“What’s that?” the driver asked.
“It happens about once a week,” the disgusted receiving clerk groused. “Someone’s pissed because they’ve been laid off or had their hours reduced, so they pull a fire alarm or call in a bomb threat.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Unfortunately, no,” the clerk said. “Follow me.”
“Why don’t we go out this way?” the driver asked, pointing toward the loading docks.
“Security wants everybody to go out the front so they can be counted and ID’d,” she said. “Did you leave the keys to your truck in the ignition?” The driver nodded. “If it’s the real deal, the fire department will move it.” She looked at her watch. “It was almost time for my cigarette break anyway.” The driver followed the clerk through narrow hallways that led to the main forum, which further branched out into the different departments. No one seemed to be in any great hurry or panic at all. The driver noticed uniformed court bailiffs leading some men out in handcuffs. “I’m going to meet up with my friend in the sheriff’s department,” the clerk said. She pointed toward a wall of glass doors. “Head right out those doors. Someone will tell you where to go next.”
The parking lot was filling with workers gathering together in small knots while at the center of the lot a security officer had formed a checkpoint and was yelling at folks to get in line to show ID. The driver retrieved his company ID card and clipped it to his uniform pocket. No one seemed to want to line up—they obviously expected the alert to expire soon—so the line moved quickly. After just a few minutes’ wait, he was next in line. “Making a delivery?” the security guard asked.
“Yep,” the driver said. The guard glanced at the ID card, then at the driver, and nodded. But something caught his eye, and he ran a finger along the edge of the photo on the badge. With just a tiny bit of effort, the photo started to peel away from the badge!
“Wait a minute—is this your ID badge?” the security guard asked.
The driver shook his head, smiled, and replied, “No, it isn’t”—and at the same moment he lifted a device in his left hand and pressed a button. There was an intense burst of light, followed by an earsplitting explosion that shook the ground. People screamed and scattered in all directions as what seemed like a mile-wide fireball erupted from the back of the administrative building, followed by a huge black cloud of smoke and debris.
Joint Air Base Battle Mountain, Nevada
That same time
Brad McLanahan’s face turned into a mask of sheer disbelief. “Wha-what?” he stammered.
“Time to solo, son,” his father, Patrick, said confidently. “You’re more than ready. Go for it. I’ll be on the portable radio in case you need me.” Patrick was expecting him to be more excited than this. Brad looked completely stunned. “You okay, big guy?”
“S-sure,” Brad said. “Three landings. Got it.” He stepped hesitantly back to the Centurion, looked around inside for a moment, then climbed in. Patrick listened for the entry door to be fully latched and looked for seat belts hanging out. He then waited for the strobes to come on and the starter to start winding up, but Brad just sat there. After a few long moments, Patrick went over to the passenger-side emergency-exit window. Brad reached over and opened it, still wearing that same blank expression. “What, Dad?” he asked in a low voice.
“You okay, Brad?”
“I . . . guess,” Brad said. “I mean . . . the cockpit looks so much bigger with no one else sitting here.”
“You can do it, Brad,” Patrick said. “You’re the pilot in command now. You do everything you just did and you’ll be fine. Remember what I said: when you step near the plane, you put your pilot-in-command brain on until you lock the door to the hangar after you button up the plane. Right?”
Brad nodded, then looked past his father at the others. “Are they all going to watch me?”
“You might as well get used to it: pilots watch other pilots all the time, and everyone’s a critic. Try not to think about it. Fly the plane like I know you can do. Put your pilot-in-command brain on. Have a good one.” Patrick closed the window, stood there to make sure Brad locked it from the inside, and then stepped back.
It took another few long moments, but at last Brad reached up and took the checklist in his hand, and finally his nervousness began to subside. Reading the checklist items and then touching the proper switch, lever, or readout helped to pull him back into the routine of flying, and soon he forgot that it was his first solo flight and he was alone . . .
. . . until he was ready to taxi. He was so accustomed to leaning forward to look around his father to see out the right window, and when he did so again he realized he didn’t have to do that, and he remembered he was alone. He had to wipe his sweaty palms on his jeans.
“Centurion Two-Niner Bravo Mike, Battle Mountain Ground.”
Brad couldn’t find the mike button for a few moments, but he finally managed to key the button: “Niner Bravo Mike, go ahead.”
“Message from Sierra Alpha Seven: Taxi on out or park it.”
Brad looked out the window and saw his dad waving his cellular phone at him. The others with him had smiles on their faces but were looking a little concerned—all except Ralph, who gave Brad a big excited smile and two thumbs-up.
“I can do this, damn it,” he said aloud to himself. “I know what I’m doing, I know what I’m doing.” He took a deep breath, then keyed the mike again: “Roger, Ground, Centurion Two-Niner Bravo Mike ready to taxi from the south hangars with information Tango.”
“Niner Bravo Mike, information Uniform is current, winds three-two-zero at eight, altimeter three-zero-one-zero,” the ground controller reported—Brad had forgotten to get the current Automatic Terminal Information System data. “Two-Niner Bravo Mike cleared to taxi to Runway three-zero.”
“R-roger,” Brad responded nervously. “Taxi to Runway three-zero, Niner Bravo Mike.” Wiping his sweaty palms on his pant legs again, he turned on the taxi light, released the parking brake, and started rolling.
It was a long and lonely ride to the runway, even though he had done this dozens of times. Brad had to consciously remind himself to use beta and low power settings to avoid tapping the brakes. Everything seemed louder, and every bounce or sway was cause for alarm. What was that vibration? Was that rattling from the nose gear normal? He found himself checking every millimeter of the electronic displays, looking for some indication of a problem, and then he found himself swerving too much across the taxi line.
“Get it together, shithead,” he said aloud to himself. “You’re the damned pilot. Be the pilot, or park it. When you’re taxiing, you concentrate on taxiing, not on looking around the cockpit. Be the pilot, or park it.”
He taxied to the run-up area and completed the “BEFORE TAKEOFF” checklist. He couldn’t believe how nervous he was: he actually forgot what to do next! The checklist jumped to the “AFTER TAKEOFF” items, but what was he supposed to do now? Maybe I’m really not ready to . . .
. . . and at that moment he was startled from a blur of motion in front of him. It was an XS-19A Midnight single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, coming in for a landing at Battle Mountain! In all his confusion about what to do next, he had never even noticed the radio transmissions between it and the control tower!
The Midnight was the most incredible aircraft in the world: it could take off and land from almost any airport in the world, but once it refueled after takeoff, it could launch itself into Earth orbit. It could take passengers or supplies to and from Armstrong Space Station, fly around the planet in just a couple hours, retrieve and deploy satellites in orbit, and even launch antisatellite and antiballistic-missile interceptors or ground-attack weapons.
That’s what I want to do, Brad told himself: I want to fly a spaceplane. I want to go on missions to the space stations, orbit Earth hundreds of miles up, fly around the planet in less than two hours, and defend America with weapons fired from space . . .
; . . . and the first step to doing all that: make three takeoffs and three landings solo in this little air-breathing Cessna Centurion.
And like that, everything came together. He switched radio frequencies on the right multifunction display like he always did and spoke: “Battle Mountain tower, Centurion Two-Niner Bravo Mike, ready for takeoff Runway three-zero, staying in the pattern.” When cleared, Brad released the parking brake, cleared the approach end of the runway, taxied out, and made his first solo takeoff.
The three landings and takeoffs were over before he knew it, and he taxied the Centurion back to the hangar, after acknowledging a “Good job, new solo pilot,” from the tower controller. After shutting down and securing the plane, his father and the others greeted him to applause. As soon as he stepped away from the plane, the others ran up and doused him with water from plastic bottles, and his father ripped half of the back of his shirt off. “Gotta have someplace to write about your first solo,” he said. “Every new pilot-in-command gives it up. Congratulations, Brad.”
Brad hugged his father tightly as the others continued their applause. “I wasn’t sure if I could do it,” he admitted. “I couldn’t even remember what to do after I finished the checklist. But I saw the Midnight come in, right in front of me, and it all came back.”
“Good for you, son,” Patrick said. “You’ll be flying a Midnight before you know it. Your uncle John is going to kick in with us for the rest of your flight training, right up to your check ride. By the time you get your cross-country flights, night flights, and instrument time, you’ll have enough hours to do the check. And since I just got my authorization as an FAA designated examiner in the turbine P210, I’ll be giving you your check ride.”
“Awesome!”
“I’ll be ten times worse than any other check pilot,” Patrick said with a smile, “but I know you can do it. You’ll be a licensed pilot before you know it. Now, you’re in charge of putting the plane away, because I need to run over to the other side of the base and find out why the Midnight is in. Congratulations again, son.” He hated to leave the celebration, but the sudden appearance of the XS-19 was unexpected.
“Sierra Alpha Seven, Alpha,” he heard on his secure subcutaneous transceiver. The transceiver was a leftover from his days with the top-secret High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center at Elliott Air Force Base; although it was capable of global two-way communications, it was mostly used for regular UHF and VHF radio transmissions these days. “Alpha” was the base commander of Joint Air Base Battle Mountain, Air Force Brigadier-General Kurt “Buzz” Givens, a former bomber navigator and operations officer when Patrick commanded the base.
“Go ahead, Alpha,” Patrick responded.
“I’m going to put ‘it’ in Uniform.” Both men knew exactly where “it” was.
“Roger,” Patrick responded. “I’d like to meet up with it and the crew.”
“Approved.” There were six secure aircraft hangars aboveground, but the Uniform secure area was sixty feet underground. The belowground aircraft storage and servicing area—big enough for several B52 Stratofortress bombers—was a leftover from Battle Mountain’s Cold War days.
Patrick drove over to the secure aircraft parking hangar. The XS-19 Midnight spaceplane had just been directed to park inside a large aircraft shelter, and Patrick followed it in and parked beside it. A few aircraft handlers and maintenance officers were standing ready and waiting to assist the crew, but no one could get near the ship for several more minutes because the skin was still too hot to touch—just minutes earlier it had been reentering Earth’s atmosphere, flying thousands of miles an hour, and even the ultracold upper-air molecules acted like billions of keys being scraped against a sidewalk, turning the carbon-carbon composite skin red-hot.
The floor of the aircraft shelter was actually a giant elevator. As soon as it was safe to do so, the Midnight spaceplane was secured with chains, and the ship, Patrick’s Wrangler, and the handlers were lowered underground. It took twelve minutes to go six stories—part of the security of the underground facility were ultraslow elevators that allowed security forces to get into position to repel attackers—but finally they reached the floor.
“Hey, General!” Patrick heard a voice shout. The entry hatch to the spaceplane’s cockpit had opened, and Hunter “Boomer” Noble, the vice president of engineering for Sky Masters, Inc., appeared in the opening. Not quite thirty years old, roguish good looks, a bit taller than most astronauts, and always with an above-average air of excitement and humor about him, Boomer was one of a generation of young, idealistic, limitless creative dreamers whom Jon Masters liked to surround himself with at Sky Masters. He was wearing one of the newer Electronic Elastomeric Activity Suits, or EEAS, a tight-fitting garment that used electronically controlled filaments to apply pressure on the body instead of a traditional bulky space suit, which used breathing air under pressure. “I heard you were here at BAM again! How are you, sir?”
“Doing okay, Boomer, doing okay,” Patrick replied. They had to talk at a distance because the spaceplane was still too warm to put up a boarding ladder. “How was the flight?”
“Excellent—except for the finish.”
“What happened?”
“You haven’t heard? It just happened about twenty, thirty minutes ago.”
“I was out flying with Bradley. He soloed today.”
“Little Bradley? Congrats to him. But you haven’t heard what happened?”
“No.” Patrick felt a sudden pang of loss—he was getting very, very tired of being out of the loop.
“There was another terrorist attack on a government office in Nevada,” Boomer said. “The Nye County administrative office in Pahrump was attacked with a truck bomb.” Patrick’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “Twenty-one people were killed. All flights in and out of Las Vegas, Nellis, Henderson, and as far away as Riverside were diverted. That’s why I’m here.”
Patrick was thunderstruck. “Did they detect radioactive materials?” he asked.
“Yes,” Boomer said. “I don’t know what it was, but it’s apparently a lot nastier than the stuff used in Reno.”
Patrick’s transceiver beeped. “Sierra Alpha Seven,” he responded.
“This is Alpha,” Kurt Givens radioed. “Gizmo and Nutcracker want the airspace cleared and want immediate launch authority.” “Gizmo” was Jon Masters’s call sign, and “Nutcracker” was Special Agent Chastain’s, picked by Patrick himself—both appropriate call signs, if he did say so himself. “Is ‘it’ secure?”
“Affirmative,” Patrick replied.
“Roger. Make sure the Centurion knows his airspace access is terminated. Alpha out.”
Patrick put in a call to Bradley’s cell phone to make sure the plane was put away—it was, and Brad was already back at the Civil Air Patrol squadron, in utility uniform, awaiting a briefing on the new terrorist attack—then turned to Boomer, who had finally joined him on the deck. “Jon and the FBI have full control of the Class-C airspace, and they’re going to close it, so you’re our guest for the immediate future,” he said.
“Fine with me,” Boomer said. He motioned to a young woman standing beside him. “You remember Gonzo, don’t you?”
“You mean Major Faulkner? Of course,” Patrick said, extending a hand. Jessica Faulkner was one of the more experienced astronauts in the U.S. Space Defense Force. A Marine Corps F-35 Lightning II fighter pilot before the program was canceled, the petite red-haired, green-eyed woman was also wearing an EEAS, which accentuated her curves very, very well indeed. She shook hands. “How are you, Major? Or is it Colonel by now?”
“I took an early retirement a few months ago, sir,” Jessica said. “I’m with Sky Masters, Inc., now. They’re practically the only ones flying the spaceplanes.”
“Well, congratulations on your retirement and new employment,” Patrick said. “Boy, Boomer, is there anyone from the Space Defense Force that Jon hasn’t hired lately?”
“Just you, sir,” Boo
mer said. “Do you know why they’ve closed the Class-C airspace, General?”
“No, but I guess I don’t have a need to know,” Patrick said. “I assume it has to do with whatever Jon brought in the Skytrain.”
“The only reason it’s a secret is because the FBI is involved—if it was up to me, we’d be telling the world,” Boomer said. “The White House gave the FBI a couple of Jon’s newest unmanned surveillance aircraft and two CIDs to search for bad guys.” He looked at Patrick and added, “The most qualified guy to deploy UAVs and CIDs is standing right beside me, sir. Why aren’t you assigned to this?”
“I’ll tell you when it’s safe to tell you,” Patrick said.
“So there’s a reason other than you decided to move to Nowhere, Nevada, and babysit what’s left of the Space Defense Force?”
“Keep it to yourself,” Patrick said. He nodded at the XS-19 Midnight spaceplane. “Anything fun in the jet?”
“Boy, you really are unplugged out here, aren’t you, sir?” Boomer remarked. He turned to Jessica. “Hey, Gonzo, how about getting out of the EEAS and we’ll meet up with you in a few.”
“Sure, Boomer,” Jessica said. She understood: Go away, because the grown-ups want to talk. “Nice to see you again, sir.” She gave Boomer a warning glare but said nothing as she turned and walked out of earshot.
“She’s a cutie,” Patrick said.
“Jon only hires the cute ones,” Boomer said. His expression started to turn much more serious. “Jon doesn’t keep you informed of what’s going on in the company, does he, sir? You still have a top-secret clearance, don’t you?”
“I do, but if I don’t have a need to know, I’m not entitled to a briefing,” Patrick said.
