AMERICA ONE (12 page)

The entered the inner security gates for the first time and, in a golf cart, they were driven over the brow where both men looked down at the massive hangar system and complete airfield below them; they could not have realized how big this setup—in the middle of nowhere—was.

“That’s the
Dead Chicken
, all right,” stated Jonesy. “I can see her large, ugly, rear loading ramp from here.”

“How many hours did you spend in the C-5?” Ryan asked.

“About 300 hours over a decade,” replied the pilot. “What are you planning as the rest of the crew? The Air Force always uses a crew of seven to fly her; two pilots, two flight engineers, and three loadmasters.”

“Can you deal with only one flight engineer?” Ryan asked.

“Sure, with one flight engineer, a co-pilot who knows what he’s doing, and me, you can get away with a crew of three. What about the loadmasters?” Jonesy asked.

We are only taking up a second stage shuttle, and inside the shuttle a spacecraft, as high as the aircraft can fly to. On these flights, the rear doors will be removed and at a climbing altitude, the shuttle and space craft, released internally, will roll out of her rear, like the egg you described, drop away, ignite and climb past her into space. She then returns to base, simple and easy.”

“I understand,” replied Jonesy. The Air Force perfected this type of ejection with pallets out of the butts of the C-17s. The C-5 was before this new idea took form, and not many of the earlier ones were refitted for this role. The C-5s take off fully loaded, fly across the world and land fully loaded at their destination. The
Dead Chicken
was the result of the first tests to get the larger C-5 to achieve low-level pallet delivery by parachute from less than 100 feet. Something just didn’t work right. I reported the problem several times; lousy air turbulence behind the aircraft at low speeds, and the C-17 was designed to reduce this problem. They actually got rid of the problem altogether.”

“That’s why I managed to get her on loan,” replied Ryan walking towards the door of the largest aircraft VIN had ever been close to. “The ejection of a large, solid aerodynamic aircraft out of the rear area is best for any air turbulence at a fast forward and climbing speed above 400 knots,” he lectured. “The ejection of the load, hopefully above 50,000 feet at a high speed should allow the shuttle to roll out, fall away, ignite and get out of her way before her nose needs to be lowered to reduce any possibilities of stall. Can you do that, or at least teach your co-pilot to do that, Mr. Jones?”

“Sure!” he replied. Why 50,000 feet? I reckon I could do that at 52,500 feet or higher. Also why is the co-pilot going to be flying the C-5?”

“To answer your first question, every 1,000 feet of altitude saves a half of a percent of fuel needed to get the second stage into space. At nearly twenty million dollars to fill up the tanks of the second stage with a hybrid-type rocket fuel, every 1,000 feet will save me big bucks. Twenty grand, ten percent of your annual pay, Mr. Jones, if you can help us get her to your higher altitude. Secondly, Mr. Jones, you will be flying the second stage.”

“A little too high to be the side-gunner on that one?” suggested VIN, seeing that his partner was suddenly very excited for the first time since he had ever met him.

“I have other plans for you, Mr. Noble. You will be a test for new products we have been designing for a couple of years now and already under manufacture,” replied Ryan simply, and VIN gulped. “Your tests will be done in Hangar Five, but let us first be shown around the
Dead Chicken
by Mr. Jones.

The three men entered the mammoth aircraft and were introduced to the pilots going over flight checks in the cockpit. Ryan wanted to see if his current team knew Mr. Jones. The older one, the chief pilot, did.

“Oh! I remember you, Jones,” stated the senior pilot as they entered the large flight cockpit area made for four working crew. He was going over numbers with a much younger co-pilot, about fuel usage on a long flight. “Were you major, captain or of no rank when I last saw your sorry ass, when you were thrown out of the Air Force?”

“Actually all three, Colonel, and if I remember, you were flying a desk when you signed my discharge papers. Is this young kid trying to teach you how to fly aircraft again?” replied Jonesy in his usual polite manner.

“Ryan, I’m not working with this dead beat of a pilot. He’s dangerous, a loose cannon. If he’s going to be part of my flight crew, I‘m not flying!”

“Sounds like you are right on the money, Colonel,” replied Ryan smiling. “Please head over to Gate One; Corporal Smith is already outside waiting for you by my golf cart. Captain Pitt, please escort the Colonel out of the aircraft immediately, and once he drives off with the Corporal please return to the cockpit.” Without another word, the angry Air Force pilot left the cockpit and headed to the aft area of the aircraft.

“How come you got that ass of a pilot to fly your plane?” Jonesy asked.

“He came with the loan and so did the captain; I’m sure the Air Force will send somebody else to replace him,” Ryan replied.

“The Air Force certainly doesn’t like you very much, sending you that quality of pilot!” exclaimed Jonesy.

“Yes, I couldn’t figure out their motive, except maybe to have somebody to keep an eye on my progress here and send back reports.”

“That sounds more logical. What about the captain?” Jonesy asked.

“He’s good. I assume their logic was to send me a “mole” and somebody who could actually fly this thing.” The captain returned, as Jonesy slipped into the left seat, a seat he had spent 300 hours in, and scanned the hundreds of dials and instruments with his eyes.

“What about him telling the Air Force about stuff you don’t want them to know?” VIN asked, surprised at how simple the dials on his R8 instrument panel looked compared to this monster. Now he knew why Jonesy hadn’t asked to drive.

“You mean ninety-nine percent of what we are doing here? No problem. He and the captain here, and the several mechanics and a few others, don’t see what is in the hangars, other than in Hangar Three where this aircraft is kept. They know absolutely nothing about the rest of the project. Your colonel friend has been apprehended twice by security for, as he said, taking walks where he shouldn’t have been. That’s why he knows he’s out of here. I asked Dover Air Force Base for a real pilot as a replacement over a week ago.”

“I’m happy to fly for you now, Mr. Richmond, now that you got rid of the colonel,” interjected Captain Pitt.

“I was hoping you would say that, Captain,” replied Ryan. “You can leave now; your day is done and we’ll talk tomorrow.”

“So we arrived at the right time?” VIN added as the captain left.

“Precisely,” replied Ryan. “I will have to take a replacement pilot from the Air Force, but I’m glad to have somebody in my own employ who, shall I say, will be more trustworthy than the chief pilot they give me. Plus, I think the younger captain has his heart in what he has seen here. I will offer him a bonus if he keeps any information he learns here secret. As the saying goes, ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’, and hopefully he will tell the Air Force the information I want him to. The same is going to happen with the guy heading out of here. He has been primed to tell them what we chose to allow him to know, and I’m sure he will proudly relay the false information, wherever he spits it out. All I want is for the Pentagon to not take more than necessary notice of my operation. I’m sure they look down at us from above, from space, but my control tower can tell if there is an aircraft, or even an unmanned drone within fifty miles of our tower. As yet they haven’t sent anything, except a small civilian Cessna a week ago, which came low overhead, and we gave the aircraft a small shock.”

“A small shock?” asked Jonesy.

Yes, in the tower I have a modern Russian-made system, a “Choking Device” they call it if you turn the name of it into direct English. Much like a small intermittent sort of mini-EMP burst, a pulse goes out every three seconds and causes havoc with any aircraft’s electronic instruments, which interrupts the smooth flow of all electrics aboard any aircraft within a five-mile radius of the airfield. Much like an engine coughing, all electrically controlled engines, dials, radar systems, radios, everything a pilot needs to fly the aircraft sort of goes on and off every few seconds. Very scary for anybody up there taking a peek at us when all their controls start acting up. That guy in the Cessna was out of here and aiming for Lida airstrip within seconds.”

For the next hour, as the night closed in and the airport’s lights came on, Jonesy started the four massive engines of the aircraft, so he could listen to them. He brought them up to power and taxied the aircraft slowly to the end of the runway; he used the C-5’s specially designed system to turn the massive beast 180 degrees around on the wide, freshly-surfaced 10,000-foot runway and returned the aircraft to its hangar position where it was to be turned and towed in by a large tractor for the night.

“I bet you don’t know that these four engines have the same thrust as the current Air Force One.” Ryan indicated that he didn’t know. “Yep! Fifty-six thousand pounds of thrust each instead of the usual 46,000 pounds most of the more modern C-5Ms have, and they sound as sweet as they ever did.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” replied Ryan to Jonesy.

“That’s why she’ll climb over the 50,000 foot altitude barrier. From 1986 to 89, they were designing the VC-25 model engines for the new VC-25 model Air Force One at Boeing, the two current Air Force model 747s. General Electric designed sixteen of these VC-25 engines for testing, and it was the final engine accepted for the new presidential aircraft. Actually they made twenty, just in case; the Air Force heard about the extra set of four, and got them placed here on the
Dead Chicken
. She sure can’t out-fly Air Force One, but she can climb like her. One of the major characteristics of the engines to be chosen for VC-25 was rate of climb and altitude flight. The faster the engines could climb the president out of trouble, for example taking off from Kabul or Baghdad, the more chance the manufacturer had to clinch the deal.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jones; you have just earned your first flight pay. How many Air Force people know this information?” Ryan asked.

“I think me and a couple of other test pilots, her current, and a long list of teams of mechanics, the guys who designed her upgrades, and a few at General Electric; I reckon eighty percent of all of them, including me, are now retired. Not many.”

For the rest of the early hours of Monday night, Ryan and Jonesy discussed the
Dead Chicken
. Captain Pitt was asked to return to the aircraft, the aircraft’s outside security guard bringing him back. Pitt was asked to sign a new document of secrecy, which he did, and was also sworn to secrecy by Jonesy, who offered to teach him to fly as well as he could, and the second member of the flight crew became part of the inner circle; he and VIN sat around in the flight engineer chairs and listened to the conversation from the pilot’s seats.

During this time the aircraft was turned around by the tractor, pushed into the hangar, the doors closed, and they were left alone in the cockpit still discussing flying.

The rest of the tour was put off until the next morning. The men hadn’t even been told where they were sleeping; but they would get used to Ryan Richmond, he worked like this every day.

Training and Deployment

At 6:15 a.m. Tuesday, the next morning, the two men were awakened in their new rooms in the three-story hotel by a buzzer going through the whole building. They had been shown to their rooms by security just after midnight, when they had ended the aircraft cockpit meeting.

Ryan had not discussed any more of the mission apart from the atmospheric flight procedures. Most of the time Ryan and Jonesy talked while VIN and Michael Pitt, the co-pilot, listened. Dinner and soft drinks were brought into the aircraft by a soldier at about nine and the hungry group devoured the burgers and fries and drank the several cans of juice.

Their single apartments were much like long-term hotel rooms, each with a bedroom with a double bed, a bathroom and a small open-plan lounge and kitchen. The refrigerator was stocked with everything but alcohol. Their bags and clothes from the car had been neatly placed on the beds, but the bottles of beer had disappeared. Something VIN thought would not go down well with his older partner.

He still didn’t know what he had been employed for, but he was sure that it had to do with the extremely pretty blonde he had noticed in the wheelchair. He bet himself that he would know her name by the end of the day. VIN was excited to be in such a weird, but important, and puzzling project.

To VIN, Ryan seemed far ahead in his attempt to be the first private company into space, after what he had seen and read in the newspapers about the race. Few papers had mentioned this newest company’s entrance.

On the way to their rooms they were told breakfast was a buffet system downstairs; dinner was in their refrigerators, but breakfast and lunch would be in the foyer, just like a hotel.

VIN was shocked to see that dozens of mothers and children were also eating breakfast, and the kids even had school backpacks, and looked like they were really going to school.

“I wonder if there is a yellow school bus outside,” VIN asked, getting no response from Jonesy.

They ate quickly and heard their names called out by a security person as they drank coffee, mistakenly thinking that they could sit there and relax for a while.

They were escorted to just inside the small side entrance of the first hangar and were asked not to move. They stood around and examined the space. Jonesy realized and told VIN that this hangar was doubled-sided, much like a hangar within a hangar. Having noticed the weird looking engines or electronic motors being put together in the hangar, he understood the construction was to prevent spying by any external military apparatus.

“Good morning, Mr. Jones, Mr. Noble. Let’s continue our tour,” a smiling Ryan greeted them, looking fresh and wide-awake as he walked up and shook their hands. “Slept well, I hope, and ready to fill your brains with matter? These are ion thrusters, a form of space propulsion Mr. Jones. You, Mr. Noble, and our complete pilot crew once we have them all together, will learn how to operate all our new craft in the flight simulators being erected and completed over there,” he stated pointing to half a dozen military-type flight simulators along the side wall.