by Mack Maloney
They’d needed every inch of the overgrown runway to get the Persian beast to finally grind itself to a halt, accompanied by a cloud of sand and dust and muck and pieces of weeds being shredded up by the big, wet propellers. It seemed like the screeching would never stop, even when they nosed down into the ditch at the far end of the strip. The front wheel finally collapsed, though — and so did Ryder and Gallant, right over the controls, both exhausted. To their utter dismay, they’d discovered their fellow escapees had dozed during most of the trip. Only the less than gentle landing woke them up.
Recovering from their ordeal, both pilots had looked back at their groggy colleagues in the cargo compartment, yawning and stretching like they’d just got off the couch from a nap.
“They’ll pay for this,” Gallant had grumbled.
All this happened a week ago, and this was Ryder’s first look at the plane since. They’d headed north for D.C. not 30 minutes after landing. (That ironic trip was made mostly by Greyhound bus, a nightmare of cramped conditions and broken air-conditioning that made them all yearn for the Transall.) He’d left something behind on the plane that night, though. He was here now to get it back.
He climbed inside the airplane; the cargo hold smelled of low tide and oil. The flight deck itself was as messy as Li’s house. Finch and his cohorts had been up here trying to steer the beast while pulling it out of the ditch and into the hangar with their small fleet of jeeps and SUVs — all this after first disposing of the bomb. Ryder was glad he missed that little adventure.
He sat down at the controls and looked over the flight panel. He threw a few switches, but nothing would even turn on. He tried the engines, just for the hell of it, but there was little power left inside the plane. There was no way anything was going to start. The Transall appeared dead for good.
Enough of that. He reached up to the sun flap above the pilot’s side window, and there it was: the photograph he’d hidden here. It showed a beautiful woman, in her garden, just turning to smile after being caught unawares by the camera.
It was his wife, Maureen.
The only true love of his life.
Gone now almost four years ….
She’d been aboard Flight 175, the second plane to go into the World Trade Towers. Ryder had taken this picture a few months before that dark day and had carried it with him ever since. Yet he’d left it here, inside the Transall, after landing seven days ago. For some reason, he’d decided not to bring it up to D.C. with him. Perhaps he’d been afraid that if he got caught doing what he was doing they would take it away from him after he was arrested and he’d never see it again. Or maybe it had been something else.
But at last he had it back again — a great relief. He looked at it now, and as always, her eyes looked right back out at him. Blond. Sexy. Sweet. Deep blue beauty with a big smile.
Damn ….
The flap where he’d stashed the picture fell back down suddenly, startling him. Its hinge had been shaken loose in the landing just like everything else aboard the airplane. But there was a small mirror attached to it, and now Ryder was looking right into it. From forehead to chin he didn’t recognize the person in the reflection. Skin burned and creased, hair not cut in months. Nose looking broken, though it wasn’t. Lips cracked, beard erupting. Chin quivering. But it was his eyes — they scared him the most. Red and watery, they looked absolutely insane.
He flipped the mirror back up in its place and pushed it in so it stayed there, cursing the cosmos for this unneeded piece of synchronicity. He already had enough reminders that he was spiraling downward. He didn’t need any more.
He returned to Maureen’s picture, gleaming in the flashlight. If he’d ever had any doubts about what he and the others were about to do, those misgivings were gone now. She’d been his life, and the mass murderers of Al Qaeda had killed her — and in doing so had killed him as well. He was not the same guy he was before her death. Back then, he was a highly paid test pilot for Boeing and the Air Force, this after many years of flying black ops. He was a normal person, or as normal as a test pilot could be. Then, in a blink, she was gone and he knew he would never be normal again. At the bottom of the blackest pit on the blackest days that followed, he’d never got through the last stage of grief: acceptance. Just couldn’t. Instead, he’d jumped right over it to the next emotion: revenge. Get mad; then get even. That’s what he was doing in the secret outfit.
That’s what they were all doing here.
He put the picture in his pocket and wiped his crazy eyes. Someone was approaching.
It was Gallant. He stuck his head in the flight compartment, half a doughnut still hanging out of his mouth.
“You think flying this pig was a lot of fun?” he asked Ryder. “Wait ’til you see what we’re riding in next ….”
* * *
The rest of the team were already standing at the entrance to the fourth hangar when Ryder and Gallant approached. Refueled by the half-gallon of coffee they’d just split between them, the ghosts were jumpy now, anxious to get to the next step.
Master Chief Finch had prepared himself well for this moment. He had a regulation three-ring binder with him and was reading it by flashlight. He was calling out numbers, weights, speed, things like that. But as the two pilots drew near, Ryder heard Fox say to Finch, “You gotta convince these two guys first. They’re the ones who’ll have to fly this thing.” The other team members were staring into the air barn with shared looks of amusement and horror. This was not what any pilot wanted to hear or see.
Ryder and Gallant reached the door of the hangar and finally saw what the others were looking at.
It was a helicopter. A very old helicopter.
“What the fuck is that?” Ryder just moaned.
Finch went back to his three-ring binder again, returning to the first page.
“This is a Sikorsky Super S-58,” he announced. “They used to call it the ‘Sky Horse.’ Big engine. Lots of power. Lots of range. New tires. Ain’t it a beauty?”
Well, that was in the eye of the beholder, Ryder thought. This thing looked like something from a bad fifties war movie. It was big — nearly 55 feet long. And bulky — at least 15 feet off the ground, probably more. And Sky Horse? It looked more like a huge insect. The nose was bulbous and thick, the cockpit stuck on top of it almost as an afterthought. It had a gigantic four-bladed rotor, the tips of which drooped so much, they nearly touched the hangar floor. This made the thing look not only ancient but very sad as well. And it got worse. Most advanced choppers these days needed little or no tail rotor for stabilization. Microprocessors did much of the work. The tail rotor on this craft, however, was about the size of one of the propellers on the Transall-2. This meant the copter would be very hard to keep stabilized in the air, and that would make for very bumpy riding.
“We can’t go in this thing,” Gallant said now; he was the team’s lead copter pilot, so he would know. “It’s too big, too ugly. Too old.”
Finch just shrugged. “It’s also all we got.”
Gallant went up and touched the helicopter on its nose, as if he had to convince himself that it was real. “But … when was the last time its engines were even turned over?”
“Last night,” Finch told him simply. “Those old boys who shared their doughnuts with you? They put this thing together in six days. From scraps out back, and stuff they stole, and stuff they’ve had here in storage since I was a recruit, and, of course, stuff from Radio Shack.”
Everyone’s jaw dropped.
“Those old guys built this for us — from Radio Shack parts?”
“Rebuilt it, yes,” Finch replied. “Mostly in the cockpit.”
Gallant was almost speechless. They all were.
“But have they flown it?” Gallant pressed him.
Finch just shook his head. “If they say it will fly … then believe me, it will fly.”
Exasperation now filled the air. Gallant just looked at Fox and then walked away. On cue, the rest of the
team members left, too. It would be up to the DSA officer to explain the situation to Finch.
“Look, Eddie,” Fox began. “We realize these are difficult times. And we’re all taking a great amount of risk here, with what we are doing, especially you. But my friends and I have a long way to go, and a lot of things to do when we get there. We were expecting something a little more … well, up-to-date.”
Finch just shrugged again. “Besides finding you a place to land, ‘our mutual friend’ also asked me to provide you with something to get you where you needed to go.” he said. “Something untraceable. Something with long range and power. And he gave me exactly two weeks to get it done. This is what I came up with.”
Fox shifted nervously. “Well, I appreciate that,” he began again, stumbling a bit. “But it’s just that your friends look, well, very retired, let’s say. And my friends here are used to having real sharp tacks working on their things.”
Finch just looked back at him — and then laughed. He handed Fox the three-ring binder.
“Believe me, Major,” he said. “If those guys say it will fly, it will fly.”
With that, he walked away.
* * *
The team reassembled and discussed the situation amid a storm of windblown cigarette smoke.
They were under the gun. They had to get moving. They had a timetable to meet, and if they were just a few minutes late, it might mean disaster. As unappealing as the Sky Horse seemed, it was obviously the only ride in town. Where they were going they couldn’t walk. Or take a bus. Or Li’s little Toyota. The S-58 would have to do.
Ryder and Gallant climbed up into the old chopper’s cockpit. At first it seemed to have so many levers and dials, it was like they were seeing double. It made the Transall-2 look like the space shuttle. But while everything original was very old, they were surprised to see the control panel had three laptops connected to it by cable wires and modem strips — a shoestring adaptation of a modern flight computer. There was also a GPS device hooked up for navigation, a heads-up display for both pilots, and a bank of TV monitors carrying video transmissions from small cameras placed strategically around the old copter. It looked ancient, but some very high-tech additions had been made inside the S-58.
But still there was the question of flying it. Finch’s three-ring binder helped them locate most of the crucial controls: the power systems, steering, and so on. They’d both learned how to fly an enormous Kai seaplane during their last operation in the Philippines. But the Kai was a relatively new design. The Sky Horse had been built approximately the same year Gallant had been born. It would take the best of pilots days, if not weeks, to learn how to fly the copter properly.
Trouble was, Ryder and Gallant had less than a half hour to accomplish the same thing.
* * *
Meanwhile, down below, Fox, Puglisi, and Bates were helping install some even more unusual additions to the old copter. Finch had wheeled in a large wooden box wrapped in red metal strapping. His weed clippers broke this binding to reveal three .50-caliber M-2 machine guns inside, huge weapons still used by many militaries around the world today.
The three team members helped Finch set up one of these guns in the helicopter’s nose, bolting it to a rigid brace set in a hole cored out right below the elevated flight deck. The two other enormous guns were then put on swivel mounts attached to either end of the left-side cargo door. The swivels gave both guns nearly 180-degree fields of fire, but they could be taken off quickly, for hand-held use too. Their attached ammo belts seemed to go on for miles.
Fox asked, “Where did you ever get these?”
Finch smiled slyly. “Let’s just say ‘our mutual friend’ told me they might smell like shamrocks.”
They finished bolting the third gun to its movable stand. “This is a lot of firepower,” Finch told them. “No one will expect you to have anything more than a squirt gun aboard this chopper, if that. You’ll surprise a lot of people, if you have to.”
Fox examined the M-2s and just shook his head. “If they catch us, we’ll get life in prison just for these guns alone ….”
No one disagreed with him.
* * *
It was about 1:00 A.M. when they finally pushed the old chopper out onto the cracked, weed-strewn airstrip. Things had moved quickly. The copter was fueled up. The machine guns were cleaned and readied. What little gear the team had of their own was stored onboard. But they were still at least two hours behind schedule.
After a few false starts, Ryder and Gallant finally managed to get the aircraft’s prestart systems running. Fuel pressure up. Engine oil heated to proper temperature. Batteries holding even. Gyro in place and balanced.
Gallant pushed the starter — and the engine behind them burst to life. No rattle, no roll. Barely a noise. Both pilots watched in amazement as the control indicator needles all climbed in unison, almost like an orchestra timed to the engine’s increasing RPMs. Once engaged, those four droopy blades straightened right out and started spinning with a controlled frenzy. Incredibly, they were almost silent, too.
The attached laptops lit up with a myriad of colors now, showing them readouts on just about everything onboard. These visual displays helped identify more newly added equipment around them. A high-powered radio receiver promised to let the pilots monitor all sorts of communications from miles away. A FLIR set would allow them to see very far in the dark. The onboard video monitors would allow them to see above, below, in front of, and behind the copter. They had a weapons panel that would allow the pilots to fire the .50-caliber gun in the nose. They had flare dispensers, hard-points to attach bombs, even large inflatable pontoons attached to the landing gear struts that would allow them to set down on water if they had to.
Ryder and Gallant were simply amazed. But even bigger surprises were about to come.
The computers automatically raised the power up to takeoff speed. Their improvised flight computer screen flashed a message indicating that one push of the key enter button would lift them off. Ryder and Gallant just shrugged and Gallant hit the magic button.
Suddenly they were airborne.
* * *
To those on the ground, it was an astonishing sight.
One moment, the big chopper was idling quietly, the huge rotor blades creating a mighty downwash. In the next, the aircraft literally jumped into the air. The power was startling, yet the helicopter itself remained amazingly quiet.
They watched as the copter translated to forward flight. Suddenly it shot forward almost as if it were jet powered. It went over their heads, turned right, and soared way out over the ocean in just a matter of seconds. It continued a wide bank, circling back over the base once before streaking out toward the water again.
Then the helicopter began a very steep, very fast climb. It went up not unlike a Harrier jet, all power and exhaust. It climbed so high, so fast, those on the ground quickly lost sight of it as it disappeared into the clouds. They waited. Five seconds, ten seconds, twenty …
Suddenly they were besieged by a great whoosh of wind and spray. An instant later the huge chopper went right over their heads no more than 30 feet off the ground. It had come at them from behind, but they hadn’t seen it or heard it until it was practically on top of them. The ghosts hit the deck; that’s how sudden the copter’s appearance had been.
The aircraft then banked sharp left, back out over the ocean, and, incredibly, nearly went completely over, showing an agility matched only by the latest supercopters of the day, like the Apache, the Commanche, or the Euro-copter Tiger. It soon righted itself, turning the corner sharply, and began to climb again.
This time, though, it swooped up to about two thousand feet and then went into a sudden hover. It turned 360 degrees on its axis, displaying amazing agility, before coming back down again and pointing its nose out toward the open sea. Suddenly there was a huge flash of light. For an anxious moment or two, those on the ground thought something had gone wrong. But no — Ryder and Gallant ha
d simply engaged the big .50-caliber machine gun in the nose. The resulting pyrotechnics lit up the sky like fireworks.
It went on like this for the next ten minutes. It was almost dreamlike, the big chopper flashing all over the sky like some futuristic flying machine. Finally, it came in for a landing, touching down in front of the small crowd of observers with barely a thump, the only noise being the remaining weeds getting stirred up by the huge rotors.
The pilots shut everything down and climbed out to meet the small contingent of elderly men — now forever known as the “Doughnut Boys”—who’d been watching along with the ghosts.
“Who are you guys?” Gallant exclaimed to them.
Finch was also there. He replied for the group. “They are simply good Americans,” he said. “Just like we were told you were.”
Gallant was still shocked, though. “But how were you able to get that piece of—”
“Running like a top?” one of the men finished Gallant’s sentence for him. The others just laughed. The joke certainly was on the two pilots.
Finally one of the group stepped forward, took a picture from his wallet, and showed it to the pilots. It was a photograph of an X-15. One of the most advanced aircraft ever built, it was a rocket plane that could actually fly to the edge of space.
“I just helped rebuild one of these,” the old guy told him. “For NASA. They’re going to start flying it again to test parts for the new shuttle design. But that’s just a hobby. I worked for Lockheed Special Projects for years.”
He turned to his colleagues and started pointing. “And this guy helped design the F-117 Stealth plane. This guy worked on the F-22 Raptor. This guy helped design the Apollo capsule. This guy worked on the Osprey.”
